- Fallout Among Imperialist Thieves:
Bush Trips Over Europe's Bosses' Flirtation with China - The $4.6 Trillion Swindle: War Budget Is Killing Social Security
- Bush Energy Czar Serves Big Oil
- U.S. Rulers' Nuclear Arms Deadly for GI's, Iraqi Civilians
- Rally Against Fascist Frame-Up of Lynne Stewart
- Boeing Boss's Nationalist BS Falls Flat
- Jailing of Boeing Swindler Won't Help Workers
- Fight Airport Bosses' Racist Attack on Immigrant Workers
- Roxbury Students, Faculty Back Vets Opposing Iraq War
- Stroger Hospital Workers Fight for Anti-Racist Contract
- Sailor Brings History of U.S. Racism to Navy Buddies
- LA Elections: Democrats Line Up Behind Racist Warmakers
- Racism Over Cop Murder of LA Youth Mirrors U.S. Slaveowners
- Liberal Democrats Grease Path for Slimeball Negroponte
- Building PLP in El Salvador
- Iraqi Oil Workers Oppose Occupation's Anti-Union Attacks
- Robots Won't Solve U.S. Bosses' `Vietnam Syndrome'
- Nazi Concentration Camps:
Model For Capitalist Factories - LETTERS
- Condemn Killings of Iraqi Unionists
- Nazis Bolstered Argentine Fascism
- Workers Agree: Rebellions Looming
- FIght Stewart Verdict As `Legal' Fascism
- Building Worker-GI-Student Alliance
- Anti-Communists Spread Lies About Stalin
- CHALLENGE's Jab At `Million Dollar Baby' Missed Target
- More Million Dollar Baby
- RED EYE ON THE NEWS
- Violence vs. recruiters grow in US
- `Democracy' blocks workers' will
- Chinese die of fever cured by Reds
- One reason TV is replacing reading
- Making a joke of the next war
- How to save Medicare: Die Sooner
- New East Europe: Profits, poverty
- Money talks in danger-drug vote
- `Liberated' by US, Afghans suffer
Fallout Among Imperialist Thieves:
Bush Trips Over Europe's Bosses' Flirtation with China
Europe's disputes with the U.S. over China and Iran point to the future shape of grand alliances, as competition among the world's imperialists sharpens. Bush's trip to Europe highlighted two quarrels. Despite U.S. objections, the European Union (EU) will lift its ban on selling arms to China. And the EU will offer diplomatic bribes and business deals to a nuke-bent Iran, while the U.S. threatens armed force. It appears that China, Europe (essentially France and Germany) and Iran envision a long-term strategic partnership directly opposed to the U.S. The other major players are Russia and India. Bush's talks with Putin failed to dampen Russia's nuclear aid to Iran or its plans to keep Europe beholden to a nationalized Russian oil and gas industry. Energy-hungry India will side with the power that can guarantee it decades of supplies, most likely the Russia-Iran camp.
Oil and gas lie at the heart of the imperialists' struggle. But the stakes go beyond energy. What's looming is a re-division of the world like the one Lenin described in "Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism," on the eve of World War I. China desperately needs fuel for its rapidly growing economy. Last year it signed a $100-billion 25-year deal with Iran for liquefied natural gas. And for China to control the sea lanes that supply it, "intelligence projections [indicate] that the size of the Chinese fleet could surpass that of the United States Navy within a decade." (New York Times, (2/18)
For European rulers, ending the arms ban represents far more than a business deal. The CIA fears, "A China armed with weapons technologies from Europe facing American forces in the South China Sea could forever change the post-cold war geopolitical order. Growing links with China could eventually shift EU allegiance away from the 60-year-old transatlantic status quo: An EU-China alliance, though still unlikely, is no longer unthinkable." (London Financial Times, 2/10) A nuclear Iran, friendly to the EU and China, would further weaken U.S. rulers' grip on Saudi Arabia and Iraq. U.S. rulers have proved willing to spill barrels of workers' blood to retain these treasures.
The imperialists slaughtered hundreds of millions of workers in the 20th Century, carving up the globe into spheres of influence. This murder for profit will continue until a mass, international PLP leads a communist revolution. For now, the capitalists have the upper hand, and aligning their forces for inter-imperialist battle is the order of the day.
Irwin Seltzer of the Hudson Institute warns, "We are witnessing nothing less than the geo-politicalization of the world's oil and gas industry. Governments rather than traditional commercial enterprises are taking control. And those governments have interests hostile to America's. China is forging closer economic and political ties in the Middle East, and not only because it needs more oil. Its rapidly increasing trade with Iran is not the ordinary buying and selling of profit-driven companies....A new supply of oil and a chance to thumb its nose at the American embargo are an irresistible combination for this emerging superpower."
The Hudson Institute speaks mainly for Wall Street investors worried about dwindling U.S influence in Europe. Seltzer continues, "Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has been developing a new policy instrument to reassert Russian power, Russian gas and oil-exporting companies that already all but dominate Europe's energy. According to the International Energy Agency, by 2020 natural gas will account for 62% of Europe's energy consumption, and Russia will supply two-thirds of that gas. This has more than commercial consequences. When Gerhard Schroder told a television audience that Putin was a `dyed-in-the-wool democrat,' the German chancellor was indicating he was not prepared to bite the hand that controlled the valves of the pipelines that warmed his country. Germany already gets 35% of its oil and 40% of its gas from Russia, figures that will increase as it pursues its policy of winding down its nuclear power industry." (London Sunday Times, 1/30)
India, predicted to soon surpass China in population, has long been allied politically with Russia. Energy requirements are leading India, like China, into direct competition with the U.S. for cheap Middle East oil. Chevron Texaco's CEO David O'Reilly said in a February 15 speech in Houston, "We're seeing the beginning of alliances between Asian entities and Middle East entities for the long term. It's very important that our government recognize that." By "government" O'Reilly means Bush, the Pentagon, and the entire U.S. war machine.
The working class also has its marching orders: build a mass international revolutionary party -- the communist PLP. Then workers, soldiers and students worldwide can marshal their forces to turn the endless wars leading to another imperialist world war and the plague of capitalism into a revolutionary war for communism. It's a long hard road, but every step we take helps. Marching on May Day and increasing CHALLENGE circulation will shorten that road.
The $4.6 Trillion Swindle: War Budget Is Killing Social Security
The debate over Social Security masks a trillion-dollar swindle that's been pulled off for nearly four decades by every Democratic and Republican president who has occupied the White House. The crisis is not of Social Security, but of U.S. capitalism, mired in a multi-trillion dollar debt resulting from 40 years of military spending for imperialist wars in Vietnam, Grenada, Central America, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Colombia, Afghanistan, Iraq and more, that has stolen at least $2 trillion from the Social Security Trust Fund. The forecast is that it will steal another $2.6 trillion over the next ten years.
In 1968, the Johnson Administration's spending on the U.S. invasion of Vietnam was spinning the Federal budget into bottomless debt. The Social Security Trust Fund's income from payroll taxes was exceeding the amount paid out to retirees. So the Johnson gang figured out a way to "balance the budget" by "folding" what was then a few billion dollars in Social Security surplus into what would now be called the Unified Federal Budget, even though it was illegal to take money from the Trust Fund and spend it for purposes other than Social Security.
By this sleight of hand, Johnson was able to announce a "surplus," masking the federal deficit generated by the enormous expenses of the Vietnam War. To avoid the appearance of stealing the Trust Fund's surplus, the government gave the Fund Treasury notes equal to what it "borrowed," and promised to pay it back with interest. This scheme laid the basis for what is now a $2 trillion debt owed to Social Security.
By the early 1980's, Reagan's military budget was running wild and the federal deficit was soaring. The Unified Federal Budget meant that any surplus from Social Security could be used "to pay for everything from jet fighters to thumb tacks." (NY Times, 1/21/90)
Reagan set up a commission, headed by current Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which proposed -- and the Democratic-controlled Congress passed -- an increase in Social Security taxes to 12.4% (6.2% of wages combined with 6.2% of the payroll contributed by employers) so the Baby Boomer generation would be able to collect Social Security when it started retiring. The share paid by employers is actually the workers' money since our labor produced it.
The Greenspan Commission pulled off a neat trick. The Reagan Administration was cutting the income tax rates for the rich -- down from 70% to 28%. While corporate income taxes fell by 23%, Social Security taxes rose 23%. "The burden of taxation was shifted from the income tax to the Social Security tax...[75%] of all Americans now pay more in Social Security taxes than they do in income taxes. [Therefore]...the expenses of government are financed more by a tax on the poor and the middle class and less by a tax on the wealthy." (NY Times, 1/21/90)
The Social Security surplus grew sharply and is now running at $200 billion a year. These surpluses, as part of the "Unified" Federal Budget, help pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and make the federal deficit appear smaller than it really is.
"Since 1983, American workers havebeen paying more into Social Security than it has paid out in benefits, $1.8 trillion more...So what has happened to that $1.8 trillion? The...payments have all been spent." (NY Times, 2/20/04) Another $200 billion of surplus was gobbled up in 2004. According to Bush's 2004 Social Security "reform" proposal, "Surpluses in the Social Security Trust Funds will total $2.6 trillion over the next ten years."(A Blue print For New Beginnings,
whitehouse.gov/news/usbudget/blueprint/bud04)
That means by 2015 the Federal government will owe the Trust Fund $4.6 trillion in accumulated surpluses.
Now Bush & Co. want to push Social Security further into the hole by setting up private accounts, swelling the coffers of the Wall Street investment houses who'll handle these accounts. This will require either an older retirement age, benefit cuts for future retirees or both, to make up for the shortages this "reform" will create. Bush even had the gall to tell black community and religious leaders they should support his "reform" because black people have a shorter life span than whites, and therefore many never even collect Social Security. These "leaders" didn't even protest Bush's use of U.S. capitalism's racism -- the cause of these shortened lives -- as a "positive" aspect of his "reform" proposal. (See CHALLENGE, 2/16.)
The Democrats are crying "foul," but it was Johnson, Carter and Clinton, just as much as Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes, who spent trillions of Social Security surpluses on wars and corporate welfare instead of preserving them for future retirees who paid for their retirement with the tax increases passed 20 years ago.
Capitalism will always try to solve its crises on the backs of the workers, who produce all value in society. This will continue until the working class, led by its revolutionary communist party, destroys the bosses' state power and establishes a communist society here retired workers will be provided for by the social value produced by our entire class. Profits and imperialist wars will not be part of that picture.
Bush Energy Czar Serves Big Oil
Samuel Bodman, Bush's new energy secretary, has loyally served the Eastern Establishment wing of U.S. imperialism all his adult life. Fresh out of MIT in 1965, Bodman joined American Research & Development as technical director. ARD channeled Boston bosses' venture capital into high-tech start-ups making products with military applications. ARD launched computer pioneer Digital.
At ARD, Bodman trained under General Georges Doriot. Starting in 1940, Doriot helped plan U.S. industrial mobilization for World War II as deputy director of R&D for the War Department. Bodman later became president of Boston's blueblood Fidelity, the world's largest mutual fund. Mutual funds concentrate scattered wealth into the hands of a few finance capitalists, who in turn, put it to uses -- like imperialist war -- that serve the capitalist class as a whole. After Fidelity, Bodman took the helm of the Cabot Corporation, a chemical and energy company owned by a family synonymous with U.S. imperialism. The first famous Henry Cabot Lodge championed the U.S. invasion of Spanish territories in 1898. The next one helped the U.S. carry out genocide in Vietnam.
Bodman will put the war needs of imperialist giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron Texaco ahead of the interests of the U.S. coal companies and small oil drillers that his predecessor Spencer Abraham tried to serve. Chevron boss David O'Reilly was speaking directly to Bodman when he said, "we need alignment of energy policy with other policies central to our national interest -- environmental, economic, trade, and national security." (Houston speech, 2/15)
U.S. Rulers' Nuclear Arms Deadly for GI's, Iraqi Civilians
There's a nuclear war raging, and it's in Iraq. Considering the tons of depleted uranium (DU) used by the U.S. military, "The Iraq war can truly be called a nuclear war." (S.F. Bay View, 2/2/05).
"The long-term effects have revealed that DU (uranium oxide) is a virtual death sentence," according to Arthur Bernklau, executive director of Veterans for Constitutional Law. "Of the 580,000 soldiers who served in...the first Gulf War,...11,000 are now dead! By...2000, there were 325,000 on Permanent Medical Disability," reports Bernklau. "This astounding number of `Disabled Vets' means that a decade later, 56% of these soldiers who served have some form of permanent medical problems!" Disability rates in 20th century wars were 5%. In Vietnam it was 10%.
Marion Fulk, a nuclear chemist who retired from the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab and worked on the Manhattan Project that constructed the first atomic bomb, says the new and rapid malignancies in soldiers in the current Iraq war is "spectacular." Bernklau reports that, "This malady [Gulf War Syndrome] from uranium munitions, that thousands...have suffered and died from, has finally been identified as the cause of this sickness." (Preventive Psychiatry E-Newsletter No. 169)
A special report published by scientist Leuren Moret ("Depleted uranium: Dirty bombs, dirty missiles, dirty bullets. A death sentence here and abroad") named DU as the definitive cause of the Gulf War Syndrome.
Of course, these figures of DU-caused deaths of U.S. soldiers in the first Gulf War, the bombing of Iraq throughout the 1990's and the current Iraq war -- put in "harm's way" by the administrations of Bush, Sr., Clinton and Bush, Jr. -- does not include hundreds of thousands of deaths of Iraqi civilians. They will be affected for decades by the DU embedded in the ground from bombs rained down on the country.
When asked if the main purpose of using DU was for "destroying things and people,"Fulk was specific: "I would say it's the perfect weapon for killing lots of people!"
Rally Against Fascist Frame-Up of Lynne Stewart
NEW YORK CITY, Feb. 17 -- Tonight about 500 people attended a rally in a community church here as part of a "national day of outrage" protesting the conviction of defense attorney Lynne Stewart. PLP members sold over 100 CHALLENGEs. The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee and the National Lawyers Guild organized the event. Following a panel of speakers, there was a speak-out from the audience.
Several speakers, including Stewart, said this case marks a leap forward in fascist moves by the ruling class. The whole post-9/11 atmosphere was used in the trial to "persuade" the jury to railroad Stewart. Prosecutors charged that Stewart's act of issuing a press release on behalf of her client, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, made her and one of her co-defendants guilty of "supporting terrorism." No violence resulted from the release of this statement. Stewart was really convicted because the prosecution highlighted her anti-U.S. government politics. This verdict is an attack on anyone and everyone who militantly opposes imperialism, racism, and other attacks on the working class.
However, the political outlook of the meeting's organizers is a defensive strategy for fighting back. Although developments in the U.S. were compared to those in Nazi Germany, there was no real attempt to show the historical role of the working class, particularly under communist leadership, in defeating fascism. And growing U.S. fascism was not placed in the context of the worldwide conflicts that give rise to it. So, without such an alternative approach, we're left with liberal outrage and demands for the return of stolen civil liberties.
At least two speakers did point out the connection between this case and U.S. rulers' imperialist war plans. One said the Hart-Rudman report, written before 9/11, devised the concept of "homeland security." He said the bosses need a national security police state in order to mobilize the population to support Mid-East oil wars. Stewart's conviction reflects how the capitalists' control of state power is being used to further these goals. The only real alternative to the police state and endless wars of capitalism is to build a mass communist-led movement to fight for a system without any bosses: communism.
The Stewart case provides a great opportunity -- and responsibility --for PLP'ers to point out to our friends the role of the state under capitalism, and other communist ideas. We should raise this case in all the organizations we belong to and activate many workers and students to participate in the fight back. We can organize Party forums to discuss the case, and all political questions linked to it. We should also try to bring out as many people as possible to a rally outside the U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan on the day of Stewart's sentencing this September.
Boeing Boss's Nationalist BS Falls Flat
"Don't you want to be number one?" asked the big boss at a general meeting of hundreds of Boeing workers, pleading with us to shout back our approval. He had just finished detailing how Europe's Airbus was "beating" Boeing. We've never had a presentation like this before, but the biggest shock was our answer: dead silence, a silence that spoke volumes.
"We need a little more enthusiasm!" he prodded. Now we were getting angry so he dropped the whole subject and sent us back to work.
This presentation was slick, professional and computerized, indicating it was prepared at the corporate level. No doubt all Boeing workers are being subjected to this nationalist "pep-talk."
Workers Ponder Propaganda Change
The next day a group of us pondered what all this meant. "This has nothing to do with us," said one Machinist, "It's all about Boeing and Airbus corporate [biggest bosses]."
"I was going to say something about those figures," said another, referring to how Airbus reinvests twice as much as Boeing in airplane manufacture.
"Yeah, but maybe that silence was the best answer!" offered a third, to laughs all around.
Usually, the bosses' propaganda focuses on production metrics, promising that our security lies in meeting production goals. This was the most overt attempt ever to whip us up against a foreign rival.
This nationalist appeal fell flat with this group. But have no illusions; the bosses and their labor lieutenants haven't given up. In fact, as reported in the last CHALLENGE, the union leadership plans a big nationalist campaign during the contract fight.
We must increase the circulation of our paper to answer this company/union propaganda. We plan to rebuild our CHALLENGE networks during the contract fight, the summer project and over the next year -- equaling the level we had preceding the recent layoffs. We have our own metrics: CHALLENGE sales indicate internationalist, communist politics are being considered as an alternative.
(Next issue: "How the fight against racism dovetails with the fight against nationalism," and "War reorganization marches on with the sale of the huge Wichita plant.")
Jailing of Boeing Swindler Won't Help Workers
Michael Sears, former Boeing Co. chief financial officer, was sentenced to four months in prison February 18 for illegally hiring an Air Force official, who was simultaneously awarding the company an aerial tankers contract worth billions. The scandal-ridden deal has since been withdrawn.
"Four months at the country club," was the cynical response of workers at our plant. Even if just four months in the worst dungeon, we should have no illusions that this sentence was motivated by the desire to seek justice.
The bosses have embroiled us in a "stunningly expensive war in Iraq." They've tried to substitute high-tech weapons for larger numbers of committed troops, which, apparently, the bosses don't have and can't recruit any time soon. The ruling class intends to pay for these weapons by mainly attacking the working class, but they're also disciplining their own.
As Paul McNulty, U.S. attorney in Alexandria and leading member of the Procurement Fraud Working Group, sees it, "the government has been pouring enormous sums of money into contracting [for war]." (Washington Post, 2/19)
"Mr. Sears had a clear choice," McNulty said. "Instead of respecting the integrity of the government's procurement system, he chose the financial interests of his company over the best interest of America." (Our emphasis -- Ed.)
We workers can't fall for this "national interest" garbage. The "national interest" is the interest of the biggest bosses. Sears ran afoul of the needs of imperialism. Good riddance to bad rubbish, but let's have no illusions that this represents anything other than more trouble for the working class.
Fight Airport Bosses' Racist Attack on Immigrant Workers
The class struggle has sharpened at the airport where we work. We had a spirited union meeting at work organized by the workers and their shop steward who is a PLP member. Workers distributed fliers inviting their co-workers. We're trying to fight management's racist attacks on immigrant workers, both part-timers and full-timers. During the meeting, one manager tried walking by but quickly left the area after the workers spotted him.
In the short term, we need multi-racial unity and internationalism. In the long run we need all this plus communist revolution. This struggle has produced three more CHALLENGE readers.
During the meeting we drafted a letter for the union to give to the bosses accusing them of institutional racism by deliberately hiring Latin workers for full-time positions and Africans and Asians for part-time work. This color-coding of job categories divides the workers and allows the bosses to reap racist super-profits.
Also, full-time Latin immigrant workers are having their immigration status questioned. Some are being fired, even though they received letters from the Immigration Service giving them a grace period until September to put their papers in order. The bosses want to replace them with more part-timers, to pay lower wages without benefits, which is an attack on all workers.
We want an apology from the company to workers who had their immigration status questioned, and we want all workers who were fired for this to be rehired. One woman was not only fired over her immigration status but was also sexually harassed by her supervisor. We want an end to color-coding of jobs and more full-time jobs. If nothing changes, we'll broaden the struggle and invite others to look at the company's racist hiring and promotion practices.
Airport Red
Roxbury Students, Faculty Back Vets Opposing Iraq War
BOSTON, MA, Feb. 4 -- "You are not a murderer. You're one of the heroes of our generation."
So commented a member of an audience of over 50 students and faculty at Roxbury Community College (RCC) to Michael Hoffman, Iraq War veteran and co-founder of Iraq Veterans Against the War. Michael explained that he joined the Marines because his friends joined, that his brainwashed mindset was to stay alive and get back home, and that he felt remorseful for having participated in Operation Shock and Awe, the initial invasion of Baghdad.
As soon as he finished, someone in the audience called him a murderer, setting off an intense discussion about the choices soldiers face and the role they play. Michael responded by accepting his guilt but also condemning the guilt of the U.S. ruling class that sent him and other young working-class men and women to kill and maim innocent Iraqis and be killed and maimed for oil.
Owning up to his participation in a genocidal war was the first step toward dedicating his life to building the anti-war movement. A psychology professor further defended Michael, explaining that soldiers must be normal to be accepted into the military, but then the military brutalizes them, making them psychologically abnormal.
Two RCC students who helped organize the event presented a class analysis of the war. One student exposed the real reason for the war as not just for oil for use and profit, but also the strategic power it gives the U.S. ruling class over its imperialist rivals. He said the recent elections in Iraq were a farce, which the U.S. orchestrated to legitimize a layer of Iraqi elite, "a lot of little Saddams," with whom they can wheel and deal.
Another student urged the audience to take a stand against the war by confronting military recruiters who go after "people who look like me." He spoke persuasively for a new kind of anti-war movement that does more than organize marches, but also aims to damage the war machine. He announced a plan to oppose military recruitment and many students signed on.
An RCC faculty member recalled the tens of thousands of soldiers in Vietnam who resisted and rebelled against racism and imperialism, hastening the U.S. defeat and the end of the war. Back then, students were targeting their own colleges' active support of the war, striking, shutting down ROTC programs, chasing military recruiters off campuses. She pointed out that today military recruiters are walking around freely right here at RCC.
The growth of the anti-war movement among soldiers and vets is a big step forward in the fight against U.S. imperialism. PLP is playing an important role in bringing anti-imperialist war consciousness to RCC; its influence is growing modestly here.
A group of students who know from their own life experience that capitalism is a fatally flawed system is now gaining an historical perspective. They're being exposed to a real alternative -- communist revolution. As budding student organizers, they're sharpening the struggle among many other students to see working-class politics as the key to liberation.
Stroger Hospital Workers Fight for Anti-Racist Contract
CHICAGO, IL, Feb. 22 -- About a dozen Stroger Hospital (formerly called Cook County Hospital) workers attended the monthly meeting of SEIU Local 20 tonight to call for a demonstration to mobilize workers around our contract fight and demand an end to racist firings. While the local leadership was able to sidestep the resolution for these demands this time, still Stroger workers are getting valuable experience in the class struggle, and a new fighting anti-racist leadership is emerging throughout the hospital.
Dozens of workers have been fired since the new "reform" union leadership took office two years ago, with three times as many firings as the rest of the County Health System combined! Racist Food Service boss Anjad Ali has fired one-third of these. Just as the union has no plan to answer the County's rejection of almost every contract proposal, it also has had no response to the racist firings except to file grievances. Stroger workers proposed that re-hiring all fired and suspended workers should be a principal contract demand, instead of fighting each individual case one at a time. We should strike to end this reign of racist terror against workers and patients.
In December, Stroger workers led the fight to defeat Local 20's "New Vision" dues increase. Hundreds signed petitions asking to delay the vote until after the new contract is resolved. Instead, the SEIU leadership tried to gift-wrap the dues hike as a "strike fund," even though they aren't fighting anybody! They held special meetings and had their staffers working overtime, distributing expensive, glossy literature pushing the dues hike. They organized rides to the polling places for "Yes" votes, while 40 Stroger workers stood in the lobby waiting for a ride that never came. But the workers had another "vision," and the leadership was defeated.
Last spring, we fought and saved the jobs of 10 black respiratory therapists threatened with mass racist firing. The union's initial response then was that they had no choice but to honor a bad agreement made by the previous leadership. If we have learned nothing else from these struggles, it's that our political understanding and organizational strength determine our ability to fight back.
The bosses are trying to terrorize us so they can force us to pay even more for their imperialist war in Iraq and fascist Homeland Security police state. Bush's new federal budget gives more than $750 billion to the Pentagon and Homeland Security while cutting everything from food stamps to day-care to literacy programs. County President Stroger and the County Commissioners, almost all Democrats, just voted unanimously to cut tens of millions from the new budget.
We will have to fight like hell to hold on to what we can, and to get our fired brothers and sisters back. But the long-term victory is in building a mass PLP and winning many Stroger workers to participate in May Day! That's what we fight for, today and every day.
Sailor Brings History of U.S. Racism to Navy Buddies
I invited several of my Navy buddies to attend our local Amnesty International group meeting at a local university. Four came, three from my shop and one from boot camp on another ship. Our senior comrade brought a goodly college contingent.
The topic was Racial Profiling/Police Brutality. I was asked to make the presentation as an African American. I reviewed police brutality against African Americans back to the kidnapping and sale of indigenous Africans into chattel slavery as a criminal act and extreme form of brutality. I covered the Underground Railroad, the catching of runaway slaves, mob violence, the Ku Klux Klan instilling fear and perpetuating racism on behalf of the ruling class, and the complicity of the capitalist state in this brutality. (In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson showed Birth of A Nation at the White House; it portrayed the Klan as heroes, not terrorists.)
I also touched on the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's and all the violent police brutality against protestors in Alabama -- the terror bombing of homes, unleashing vicious dogs on defenseless Civil Rights workers and the Alabama National Guard's attack on 600 protestors on Selma, Alabama's "Bloody Sunday." And I included recent cases, from the killings of Amadou Diallo and Archie Elliott to the rebellions both in Los Angeles and Cincinnati.
My friends enjoyed the discussion. My white buddy from boot camp said he was profiled for entering black neighborhoods and attending parties with friends there. A black friend stressed the need to actively organize. While posing liberal solutions -- voting and lobbying politicians -- it's good he wants to get involved. Through this process, we hope to sharpen the contradictions, demonstrating the uselessness of reform and the ultimate need for working-class revolution.
My buddies are looking forward to the next meeting. We're working to involve more sailors.
My most important points were: police brutality is an extension of ruling-class violence against our class, the workers, in order to discipline us to serve in the rulers' wars and profit machines; that racism is economic super-exploitation of black and Latino workers, plus the ideology to justify it. Police brutality ultimately is used against all workers, especially those who fight racism and class exploitation. No constitutional amendments, no civil rights laws and no liberal politician can change this. Only a mass movement establishing a dictatorship over the bosses will end police violence against workers.
I hope my buddies will one day (after much struggle) join the Party and devote their lives to our class.
Navy Red
LA Elections: Democrats Line Up Behind Racist Warmakers
LOS ANGELES, March 1 -- The relentless march towards militarization, war, cuts in wages and benefits, and racist police repression is reflected in U.S. cities. Los Angeles is no exception. The country's second largest city is a Democratic Party stronghold. Multi-million dollar fund-raisers hosted by limousine liberals from the entertainment and real estate industries help fund national Democratic candidates.
City government here is almost entirely run by local Democratic Party politicians. Mayor James Hahn is a Democrat, as is nearly every City Council member. Los Angeles is a "blue city."
The Democrats are just as much servants of the ruling class (big-time bosses) as Bush: more cops and jails, tax breaks for the rich, regressive taxes on the working class, cutbacks in health care and other public programs, wage and benefit cuts for public employees and police attacks on black and Latino youth. In recent months:
* The LA City Council passed an enormous tax cut for local businesses, costing the city over $100,000,000. Its rationale: give the entertainment industry a boost.
* The City Council gave tax breaks, also worth over $100,000,000, to a billionaire, Phillip Anschutz, to build a downtown hotel / luxury condominium complex.
* To offset this loss of income and long-term budget reductions due to Federal and State government siphoning of funds for imperialist war, many City Council members want a half-cent sales tax increase to hire more cops. In addition, they're regularly piling on increased fees for basic municipal services, such as garbage collection and water.
* They have also stuck it to most City employees. With union leaders' tacit approval, the Mayor and Council have denied City workers a cost-of-living adjustment this year, while the cost of their benefits, like health insurance, creep up every year. Hirings and promotions have been frozen for most of the past 15 years.
Even when pressed, none of these Democrats ever link the cutbacks in local government (which they implemented) to the Iraq war or the mammoth budgets of the Pentagon and the spy agencies to fight the "War on Terror."
The best example is Antonio Villaraigosa, a former teachers' union organizer, Speaker of the California State Assembly, current Council member, and Mayor Hahn's strongest opponent in the election. Villaraigosa is the liberal charmer favored by local "progressives" who remember his union days, but not what he's saying currently. Now he's championing tax cuts for business and more racist cops, paid for by workers, as well as pseudo-progressive talk of "reviving local communities" through powerless community councils. These councils are part of a hidden agenda to build support for community policing and patriotism to support U.S. rulers' military plans.
Villaraigosa's approach, almost word-for-word, comes straight from the liberal ruling class think-tank, the Brookings Institute, in its book "United We Stand." It advances strategies for reviving a military draft that relies heavily on Harvard political scientist, Robert Putnam. His book "Bowling Alone" calls for neighborhood councils to revive a sense of community. They want to persuade local communities in large multi-ethnic cities like LA to believe they have a stake in the system and will accept cutbacks and military service as part of their "civic duty."
This electoral process is a dangerous trap perpetuating the bosses' capitalist system while spreading the illusion we can "reform" it. We shouldn't fall for this or other lies advanced by politicians like Villaraigosa, Parks and Hahn. Their pretense to defend our interests is only a smokescreen to more efficiently implement the bosses' plans for war and fascism. We must win our class to fight for workers' power by injecting our communist analysis into struggles against the bosses, large and small.
Racism Over Cop Murder of LA Youth Mirrors U.S. Slaveowners
I'm very angry about the media depiction of Devin Brown, the 13-year-old who was shot dead by the LAPD. (See CHALLENGE, 3/2) They're smearing him as a supposed "gang member" or a "kid who went bad" -- as if that would somehow justify what the cops did.
One of my friends has a niece who attends Audubon Middle School, where Devin went. She says teachers there remember him as a respectful and well-behaved student, even though he cut classes a lot. These teachers got mad at the reporters swarming all over the school trying to dig up some dirt on Devin after he died. When the reporters tried to talk to students without their parents' permission, some teachers tried to chase them away. Also, teachers and students took up a collection for Devin's mother to show their sympathy and help out a little.
The media are pointing fingers everywhere except at the problem. Besides demonizing Devin, they're blaming his mother, the school and his whole community. The truth is Devin's mom (who lost her husband not long ago) works two jobs trying to keep her family together. She's the kind of mom who's always at the school, checking on her kids. People at the school were talking to Devin and trying to help him get to his classes and deal with the loss of his dad.
Fingers should be pointed at the cops who shot this little boy. The papers are getting more upset about a tiger on the loose that was killed in the Valley this week than they ever were about Devin.
They say that in this black working-class community there's not enough "supervision" so kids "run wild." To me this sounds like an excuse to turn even more cops loose to terrorize black youths. It sounds like former slave-owners saying free black people "needed to be enslaved" to "keep them from running wild."
There's an after-school program at Audubon that's also district-wide. A military officer runs it and has the kids saluting, doing push-ups and all that stuff. They're trying to get the students used to the idea of being in the Army. Remember the Super Bowl commercial with the soldiers marching by and people clapping? "Be a hero, join the military." Every other billboard in the neighborhood has the same thing. Maybe they let the cops get away with killing and terrorizing kids here to try to make sure these future soldiers won't step out of line.
I really liked the CHALLENGE article about Devin's case. I'm making copies for some friends.
LA Reader
Liberal Democrats Grease Path for Slimeball Negroponte
In appointing John Negroponte to be the first National Intelligence Director -- overseeing a $100 billion spy operation with a secret budget -- Bush picked a veteran CIA operative responsible for some of the worst crimes of murder and torture in Central America. And the liberal Democrats just love him.
While Negroponte has the Republicans in his hip pocket, the Democrats gushed all over him at Senate hearings approving his present post as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, and therefore the real chief of the U.S. occupation there. This, after compiling the following record:
* As U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte played a key role in organizing the military repression in that country, and deliberately falsified State Department "Human Rights" reports, covering up death squad horrors.
* The New York Times credited Negroponte with "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinista government in Nicaragua," despite being banned by Congress; this included the trading of guns for drugs on CIA aircraft (which used a special airfield operation in Arkansas set up by Clinton when he was that state's governor in the 1980's).
* According to the Maryknoll Order of Catholic nuns, Negroponte oversaw the notorious CIA-trained Honduran death squads of the so-called Battalion 3-16 who murdered many U.S. church missionaries and religious activists in the early 1980's.
Yet at the Senate hearings on his appointment as U.S. ambassador to Iraq, the Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee asked not one question about his role in promoting death squads and covering up murderous abuses. Delaware's Joseph Biden slobbered all over him and Connecticut's Christopher Dodd said, "I happen to feel he's a very fine Foreign Service officer and has done a tremendous job in many places."
Off of their support for his ambassadorship, liberal Democrats like West Virginia's Jay Rockefeller, Indiana's Evan Bayh and California's Diane Feinstein will no doubt be rubber-stamping him as National Intelligence Director. Both parties will be endorsing him as the point man to spread his death-squad specialty around the world in support of U.S. imperialism's wars for control of oil.
Building PLP in El Salvador
EL SALVADOR -- Last December, CHALLENGE readers and PLP members met to discuss the struggle to organize workers here into the revolutionary, international communist Progressive Labor Party and the measures that the government of Tony Saca has implemented against the working class. Forming clubs, as well as political, ideological schools are part of this work. We made a plan to march on May Day and committed ourselves to recruit new workers to study groups where we read CHALLENGE.
A comrade asked if the FMLN could become the government just by having street marches. The response was that even if the government is changed, the capitalist bosses will never hand over power to the workers through elections. Workers' power can only be achieved by organizing a mass base for PLP to smash the bosses who exploit us and destroy capitalism with communist revolution.
A comrade from another part of the country participated and helped strengthen this fight. Another comrade said we can't keep putting up with unemployment, price increases for goods, electricity and telephones, or with threats to workers who denounce the atrocities the bosses commit.
They continue their crimes -- like the war in Iraq, bombing workers and their families -- all a product of capitalism's drive for profits. We should support the brave soldiers who've resisted and refused to follow the orders of their officers, lackeys of the murderers who run the wars, the U.S. Pentagon.
With capitalism in power in El Salvador, children lack medicine, food, and education, like those worldwide. Under communism the working class will produce and distribute according to need so that we can all live decent lives.
Iraqi Oil Workers Oppose Occupation's Anti-Union Attacks
Iraq's industrial workers have been relatively absent -- temporarily -- from the struggle against the U.S./UK occupation. The situation calls for building a revolutionary communist leadership among these workers. In the fight against British colonialism and the King in the first half of the 20th century, oil workers, led by the old Communist Party, were crucial to ousting both.
After World War 2, many industrial workers who had had jobs supplying the British Army fighting the Nazis were laid off. Protest strikes erupted. The CP had an industrial working-class leadership and led many unions, on the railroads, the docks and in the oil fields. In April 1946, workers struck the Iraqi Oil Petroleum Co. (owned by BP, Shell and French interests) combining demands for 25% to 40% wage hikes with political demands against the monarchy and British colonialism. Concentrating on picketing the K3 pumping station around the clock, 3,000 well-organized strikers halted oil production completely. One strike leader declared, "The dictatorship of the proletariat was established at K3."
When the bosses cut off the water and food supply to the station, located in the middle of the desert, the workers marched over 150 miles before being stopped and suffering many arrests. This militant action inspired many more struggles among all workers, peasants and students.
In 1948 a massive urban uprising broke out, uniting students and workers, and forcing the fall of the minister who had leased air bases to the British Royal Air Force. Many were killed, and communists were executed, but the struggle continued until the fall of the monarchy and the end of British control a few years later.
Today, oil workers are beginning to play an active role against the imperialists, but they need more than just militant trade union leaders. A revolutionary leadership is necessary, not only to fight the occupation forces and their stooges but also to take control of the insurgency away from former Saddam soldiers, Baathist Arab nationalists, assorted jihadists and religious fundamentalists.
Eleven days after the fall of Baghdad, workers in Iraq's southern oil fields formed the Southern Oil Company Union, which today has 23,000 members in ten oil and gas companies in Basra, Amara, Nassiriya and up to Anbar province. They organized in the face of the U.S. military's maintenance of Saddam Hussein's repressive 1987 ban on basic union rights and the right to strike.
The union defied the attempt by Vice-President Dick Cheney's Halliburton,subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root's use of occupation troops to seize their workplaces. It forced the troops to leave and compelled the Kuwaiti subcontractor to hire 1,000 Iraqi workers, replacing the ones they brought with them.
Then they struck against U.S. viceroy Paul Bremer's edict establishing a $35 monthly minimum "wage" for public sector workers while paying up to $1,000 a day to thousands of foreign mercenaries. The August 2003 three-day walkout shut down all oil production and forced a 217% increase in the workers' minimum wage.
The union is independent of all political parties and opposes all privatization as a neo-colonialist attempt to follow the military occupation with a permanent economic occupation.
In a Feb. 18 article in the British Guardian, the union's General Secretary, Hassam Juma'a Awad, says, "The media do not show even a fraction of the devastation that has engulfed Iraq." He declares that, "From the beginning, we were left with no doubt that the US and its allies had come to take control of our oil resources....When the occupation troops...allowed Basra's hospitals, universities and public services to be burned and looted, while they defended only the oil ministry and oilfields, we knew we were dealing with a brutal force prepared to impose its will without regard for human suffering." Iraq's unemployment rate is 70%.
Awad says that, "Saddam's secret police used to creep over the roofs into our homes at night; occupation troops now break down our doors in broad daylight." He charges that, "Our communities have been attacked with chemicals and cluster bombs, and our people tortured, raped and killed in our homes."
Awad also writes that, "The occupation has deliberately fomented a sectarian division of Sunni and Shia.... Before our families intermarried, we lived and worked together....Today we are resisting this brutal occupation together, from Falluja to Najef to Sadr City."
The union sees itself "as a necessary part of this resistance," fighting "using our industrial power, our collective strength as a union" to defeat both still-powerful Saddamist[s]...and the foreign occupation."
The union is calling for the withdrawal of all occupation forces and their military bases, and says any timetable "is a stalling tactic." The oil workers believe that "those who voted in [the] elections...are as hostile to the occupation as those who boycotted them.... Those who claim to represent the Iraqi working class while calling for the occupation to stay a bit longer...are...speaking only for themselves and the minority...whose interests are dependent on the occupation."
CHALLENGE calls on all workers to support these Iraqi oil workers in their struggle against U.S. imperialism. We believe that the workers of Iraq must be won to organizing a true communist party, not one which allies with nationalist bosses -- nor the phony one now part of the U.S.-authorized Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. Its president is deputy leader of the U.S.-imposed Prime Minister Allawi's party. Iraq's workers can link their long history of struggle against all previous dictatorial regimes to communist ideas, to truly emancipate the working class from all domination by imperialists and local religious fundamentalists who want to wrest control of Iraq's oil and resources for their own class interests.
Robots Won't Solve U.S. Bosses' `Vietnam Syndrome'
Conceding the political problems of fielding an imperialist army, the U.S. military hopes to replace human soldiers with robots. The "advantages"? "They don't get hungry. They're not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has just been shot." (NY Times, Feb. 16).
Obviously the military is having all these problems and more with today's army. As one junior officer recently wrote to a right-wing web site, "The brass has become so fearful of casualties in Iraq that the military has stopped actively patrolling in many of the areas where the insurgents are strongest."
In another doomed attempt to solve a political problem with technology, the military plans to spend $127 billion on a project called Future Combat Systems of which robots are a crucial part.
Today, after many years of development, robots play a small role as bomb disposal tools. Assuming this massive expense doesn't go the way of the Patriot anti-missile system and Star War initiative as complete duds, the military's dream of a soldier that won't rebel ignores the primary lesson of Iraq, as well as Vietnam. While technology can be useful, in war politics trumps it every time.
The Vietnamese were able to beat the far superior U.S. military by winning the masses' commitment to anti-imperialism. In Iraq, a small -- and even somewhat isolated -- nationalist/fundamentalist insurgency has been able to gain some popular support and fight the U.S. to a standstill by exploiting the destruction wrought by the U.S. military over the last 15 years.
The U.S. military has a big problem: they are hated. This erodes their ability to rule Iraq, as well as the commitment of U.S. soldiers for the war. Sticking the stars and stripes on another killing machine won't make the U.S. more popular. Nor will it make U.S. soldiers feel better about what they're doing. The Nazis, and the U.S. in Vietnam, far out-killed their opponents. And in Italy, the saying went that Mussolini killed and killed the communists until there were two million of them.
History's greatest military victories were achieved by people exhibiting extraordinary heroism out of a vast political commitment. Robots never could have defeated the Nazis at Stalingrad, never could have driven the U.S. out of Southeast Asia, and robots will never defeat the working class's quest for a decent life.
Nazi Concentration Camps:
Model For Capitalist Factories
(Fourth of a series.)
On Jan. 27, 1945, the Red Army reached Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration/death camp. There were few survivors. Those who hadn't been murdered in the gas chambers were forced to walk to other Nazi camps. The holocaust ended only when the Red Army reached Berlin and raised the Red Flag over the Reichstag on May 5, 1945.
Auschwitz and many other Nazi concentration camps were not only death camps, but also were ideal capitalist operations from which hundreds of companies could use their slave labor to make super-profits. Since millions of German workers were being sent to fight a losing battle against the Red Army and the red-led partisan movement on the Eastern Front, German bosses demanded manpower from the Nazi government to maintain production. So some 12 million slave workers were sent from the Eastern Front to labor in the concentration camps for German -- and U.S. -- companies.
Friburg University history professor Ulrich Herbert says it wasn't the Nazi regime which forced those millions of workers into slave labor, but German companies like Blohm und Voss, Scheering, Deutsche Reichsbahn, Thyssen. Mannesmaann, etc. (Michael Marek writing for DW-World, web page of the German news agency Deutsche Welle, 1/25/05.)
Dietrich Eichholz, another German historian, said that German industrial wealth rose by 17 times from 1939 till 1945 due to the super-profits extracted from those slave workers. He adds that the Nazi regime lost the war, but German industry definitely came out winning. Their profits came from Jewish slave labor, who received no wages, Polish and Soviet prisoners of war who were paid very low wages, and prisoners of war from Western Europe who received the same wages as German workers whose wages were already severely cut when the Nazi regime took power in 1933.
Although the Allies broke up some of those German companies after the war, many still operate today, and very few are compensating the 1.5 million slave laborers or their relatives who are still alive. Any who are paying are doling out only a fraction of their war profits. (The German government itself is contributing to that indemnization fund).
As pointed out in previous articles, U.S. companies also benefited from the death camps. Soviet-era documents made public in the late 1990's showed that -- in addition to hundreds of German companies using Auschwitz inmates -- the Ford plant in Cologne was among 400 industrial enterprises exploiting this vast pool of slave labor the Nazis made available (www.jta.org/aug99/22-ford-htm). Ford officials deny this, saying the documents show only that vehicles produced by Ford were used at Auschwitz and that the company did not control its European operations in Nazi-occupied areas. But the fact remains that Ford did receive profits from Nazi Germany during the war through Swiss banks, as did GM's Opel company and IBM, whose keypunch system was used in the concentration camps. After all, Henry Ford and the Führer ran a mutual admiration society. Ford was the international distributor of the Protocols of Zion, a virulent anti-Semitic forgery created in the early 20th century by the Tsar's secret police.
Thus, Nazism was not just a creation of the evil minds of Hitler & Co. It grew directly from German capitalism, with the help of bosses worldwide who first saw Hitler as a tool to crush the Soviet Union, which had freed 1/6 of the world's surface from the profit system.
(Next: concentration camps did not begin, and have not ended, with the Nazi era.)
LETTERS
Condemn Killings of Iraqi Unionists
The following anti-imperialist letter of solidarity was sent to our brother and sister workers of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions upon hearing of the assassination of their International Secretary Hadi Salih. On January 4, he was bound hand and foot, tortured, strangled and shot at home, murdered in front of his family. In the past few months there have been a string of attacks on union activists in Iraq, including striking textile workers being shot, the transit workers union hall being shelled, and many arrests. These attacks have come from the U.S. military, the Iraqi government and the insurgents. Please reprint this for our CHALLENGE readers as PLP encourages internationalism, builds for May Day and fights for communism.
"We the members of [this union] send this letter of international solidarity to our brothers and sisters of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions over the brutal murder of your International Secretary Hadi Salih.
We understand that Salih, who opposed the fascist dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, may have been assassinated by right-wing forces with connections to U.S. intelligence.
We understand that many nations like Iraq have U.S.-backed death squads that assassinate union activists and others so that workers can be better exploited by U.S. multi-national corporations. This explains the rash of political assassinations of many trade union activists in Iraq who oppose the U.S. invasion/occupation.
Our local union is integrated and has workers from many different nations. Many of these workers came to the U.S. seeking a better life only to be super-exploited by institutional racism. From here to Baghdad, we have the same enemy, same fight. You have our sympathy and support."
A Reader
Nazis Bolstered Argentine Fascism
The series on the Nazis and their post-World War II CIA connections has been very useful. But Nazi-like murderous activities did not stop with the end of the war. On Feb. 23, a press conference at a Medical College in Buenos Aires by the Commission of Former Workers and Relatives of the Mercedes-Benz Disappeared Ones presented the latest investigations of journalist Ms. Gaby Weber, a German-born writer living in South America, who wrote the book, "The German Connection -- Nazi Money Laundering in Argentina." The conference revealed that the former production manager of Mercedes-Benz (today DaimlerBenz) in Argentina, Juan Ronaldo Tasselkraut, has a son and two nephews he adopted illegally and who could be the children of people disappeared during the dirty war waged by military regime of the late 1970's.
Tasselkraut worked for Mercedes-Benz (MB) until recently. In 1977, he turned in Hector Ratto to the cops. Ratto worked at the MB Gonzalez Catan plant. He was taken to a concentration camp. There, in front of Ratto, Tasselkraut gave the cops the address of another worker, Diego Nuñez. That same night Nuñez was kidnapped by the cops.
It's presumed that Tasselkraut's son was the child of one of those workers murdered during the dictatorship. Tasselkraut later hired Ruben Lavallen as the MB plant security chief. Lavallen was a police officer at the Investigation Bureau, where he was involved in the kidnapping and torture of 15 militant MB workers. In May 1978, a couple was taken to Lavallen's police precinct, and they were never seen again. Lavallen adopted the couple's 22-month-old daughter.
The military dictatorship actually set up a maternity ward at a military hospital in Campo de Mayo base (the biggest military torture center). The babies were given to officers or to those very close to the dictatorship. MB even donated a neonatology device to the maternity center.
Some 30,000 people were murdered during the military dictatorship. Argentina's high-ranking military officers never hid their Nazi sympathies. They even flew swastika flags in their torture centers. Other auto companies, like Ford, helped the military dictatorship carry out its dirty war.
Ms. Weber revealed in her new book that MB and many other Nazi-tainted investments grew tremendously in Argentina beginning in the early 1950's. Adolf Eichmann, who along with Himmler led the holocaust, worked for many years at the Buenos Aires MB plant before being kidnapped by Israeli agents in the early '60s. Once a Nazi always a Nazi.
Red Anti-Nazi
Workers Agree: Rebellions Looming
Some conversations I've had at work reveal great potential in workers' reactions to increasing police terror, cutbacks, war and racism. To murder over 100,000 Iraqis and 1,500 U.S. soldiers, the ruling class must attack the working class and try to coerce us into accepting fascism and their plans for a greater war against their imperialist rivals. They will continue to cut social services and pensions. Simultaneously, they murder the child of a black worker in Los Angeles and tazer a 54-year-old Chicago worker to death. They intend this racist terror to keep workers passive and accept the thin gruel of reform and nationalism. LA police Chief Bratton says if the city doesn't increase the sales tax by a _-cent to pay for hiring more racist cops, "the city would go up in flames."
The LA Times reported that black workers say the police hate them. A study showed that 6 of 10 black workers disliked the LAPD. Bratton and other liberal politicians want to change the policy of shooting into vehicles, a complete turn-around since a year ago, when racist Bratton told parents to "restrain their children" after the cops murdered two Latino youth.
This led me to think about the possibility of another LA rebellion, and how to build PLP at work to prepare for such an uprising. My factory contains primarily Latino contract workers who work long hours with no union. Conversations with them are quite revealing. One worker, a black vet, said the war in Iraq was even worse than Vietnam, with all the deaths and the cutbacks here. He said an uprising was coming. After the murder of Devin Brown, another worker reminded him that even Bratton warned of a possible uprising.
Later a Mexican immigrant worker said Mexico is rife with corruption. An immigrant from India said it wasn't just Mexico -- there's corruption everywhere. Another worker said it's here in the U.S. too. A fourth said the "free market system" guarantees that only a select few have wealth and everyone else is left out. He said the decline of the dollar means worse conditions for us. The vet said, "People are so tired of this, the cutbacks and the war and racism. I think there's going to be a revolution."
The police shooting of Devin Brown and the court decision letting other racist killer cops go free are signs of the times. This terror, the bogus "reform" of the cops and the move for more cops are directed at a whole generation of black and Latin youth who the bosses plan to grind up in their military and industrial machine. These angry young workers represent great revolutionary potential. Our job is to arm them with an internationalist, communist outlook. Then no amount of terror and patriotic reforms will stop them from fighting for power for the working class.
Factory Comrade
FIght Stewart Verdict As `Legal' Fascism
The conviction of defense lawyer Lynne Stewart drew reactions among my friends in the large urban church to which I belong, ranging from shock to recognition of the "legal" fascism we've so often discussed in the three years since Patriot Acts I and II. To paraphrase an old saying, "First they came for the Muslims, then the South Asians, then the immigrants, then the protestors, now the lawyers."
U.S. rulers want to win people to sacrifice themselves in imperialist wars for "freedom," to endorse Homeland Security schemes to militarize U.S. society and to give up programs like Social Security and Medicare for the war effort. But if they can't win us, the Lynne Stewart case shows they will break all their "rules" to silence dissent and directly terrorize, oppress and brutalize the working class and others.
The church's leading congregational body passed a mild statement condemning aspects of Patriot Act I as "excesses" that tread on "our civil liberties and constitutional rights." The church's liberal leaders sermonize about "standing up" to George Bush and the Christian Right but even that mild statement is now being "examined" by church lawyers for possibly violating the church's tax status.
I've framed the struggle against the Patriot Act in terms of U.S. imperialism's strategy for the 21st century and fascism's role in this process. One can't say fascism's "a little bit bad," and that it's possible to defeat it by "legal" means, based on the illusion that the Constitution defends "us," rather than the capitalists who hold state power. The Lynne Stewart case spurs examination of the historical fight against fascism, the role of communists and the need to defeat fascism with revolution by destroying the capitalist system which spawns it.
I've issued the following statement and proposal in my name on the Lynne Stewart verdict to some congregants and to seven church higher-ups. Some friends agreed to help me.
Dear Congregants,
The decision against Lynne Stewart was based on lies, distortions, demagoguery, false patriotism and fear. Despite the actions of many in the U.S. to curb the Patriot Act's attack on civil liberties, Attorney Generals John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales have gotten what they set out to get. This is another significant step down the road to open fascist repression against anyone who would resist, protest and/or defend his or her principles. Now is the time to stand up and speak out. Silence and fear are dangerous! They cannot be options. Proposals: Write a church-wide statement of support for Lynne Stewart; send such statement to local elected officials; organize an event at the church in which Lynne and/or her lawyers can speak to the congregation; prepare the congregation to go en masse to the sentencing on Sept. 23.
I introduced this statement to the church's social justice group to which I belong -- and made a strong political argument for it -- asking the group to endorse it and pass it on to other groups in the church. The majority wanted to "tone down the language," saying the goal should be to get a resolution passed. I said that on principle I had to "speak what I see" and that controversy, debate and exposing the church's institutional position are important parts of the process. The social justice group has re-written the statement, eliminating references to fascism.
I've also met with several other individuals about making Lynne Stewart's case a church-wide issue. Some will help. We plan an April event at which Stewart or her lawyers can explain the case to the congregation. There will be a lot of controversy. Top church leaders will attempt to limit debate, confine it to "patriotism," following the Democratic Party position, and "protect" the church's tax status.
PLP has some support here, including a few CHALLENGE readers. Most congregants support the Democratic Party; some are strongly anti-Bush. Ideological controversy will intensify between PLP's ideas and liberal Democratic ideas among our friends, and within the congregation between liberals and conservatives and between the congregation and the church leadership.
My friends and I have seized the opportunity to speak out and act boldly in the moment, while understanding that our goals to build the PLP and make communist revolution are long-range.
Red Churchgoer
Building Worker-GI-Student Alliance
Recently, I leafleted a nearby military base with a group of students from the organization I belong to at school. We all agreed it was a really good experience. It's led to many productive conversations with my friends about the kind of movement needed to fight imperialism and fascism.
Initially, when our group reported to the rest of the organization about our trip, some students reacted negatively. One argued, "What's the point in talking to these soldiers? They chose to go into the army. They know what they're doing." Another student explained that it's important to reach out to soldiers because most are working-class youth who joined after being promised a stable job or money for a college education, not because they're completely won to the ruling class's imperialist agenda. More importantly, they literally have the power to directly impact imperialism.
Then the first student slightly changed his position, saying, "Well, if we want to organize at the point of production, then we should focus on the workers who build the weapons for war."
The conversation continued, some agreeing that if we're serious about revolution, we need to build a movement based on an alliance among workers, students and soldiers. Other students still weren't convinced.
But the trip to the military base and the conversations about it prompted these students to help organize an anti-imperialist conference that criticizes the passivity of the current anti-war movement and focuses on reaching out to the military and to industrial workers. Soon we'll make another trip the military base.
From this experience, I've learned that students are open to organizing a revolutionary communist movement based on a worker-student-soldier alliance. Mainly we must take the initiative and provide the political leadership that's lacking.
Student Leafleter
Anti-Communists Spread Lies About Stalin
The London Financial Times ran an article (2/26) on Corin Redgrave that said:
"The audience then asked a few questions that allowed Redgrave to say Stalin had Mayakovsky put to death."
Evidently no one bothered to correct this statement. The utter contempt of anti-communists -- in this case, Trotskyists -- for the truth never ceases to amaze!
Corin and Vanessa Redgrave were, and probably still are, leaders of the Workers Revolutionary Party, a Trotskyist cult that imploded a few years ago. This group and its leaders made deals with Libya's Khaddafy and even Saddam in exchange for money., even when leftists were being shot in Iraq.
This lie is all the more amazing, since Mayakovsky is an extremely well-known and celebrated poet. He committed suicide in 1930. NOBODY suggests that Stalin had anything to do with his death. On the contrary: Stalin was a huge fan of Mayakovsky's. Here's a quotation:
"In November 1935 Lidia Brik [Mayakovsky's friend, who took charge of his papers after his suicide] wrote a letter to Stalin in which she brought to his attention the delays and hindrances in publishing Mayakovsky's works and in celebrating his memory. This letter served as the basis for the following note by Stalin to the secretary of the Central Committee: `Comrade Yezhov, I ask you sincerely to pay attention to Brik's letter. Mayakovsky was and remains the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his memory and works is simply a crime. In my opinion, Brik's complaints are correct. Get in touch with her or invite her to Moscow. Please involve Tal' (head of publishing section of the Central Committee -- editors) and Mekhlis [editor of Pravda] and, please, do everything that we have neglected. If you need my help, I'm willing. Greetings, Stalin.'
"Thus did Stalin insert himself into Mayakovsky's fate. This is why one of the main squares of the Sadovoy ring [big circle in center of Moscow] and one of the most beautiful Metro stations carry Mayakovsky's name. On this square a memorial to the poet was published, his museum is set up on the Taganka, and his works began to be published, studied in literature departments, and taught in schools."
http://www.hrono.ru/biograf/mayakov.html
Anti-communist lies abound in discussions of Soviet-era culture. One constantly reads that "Stalin persecuted Mikhail Bulgakov" or "Stalin killed Osip Mandel'shtam." In reality, Stalin HELPED Bulgakov and got him a job at a prestigious theatre. When Boris Pasternak, noted Soviet but anti-communist writer, later author of "Doctor Zhivago," called Stalin about Mandel'shtam, Stalin told him he was not being loyal enough to his friend -- and then got Mandel'shtam a job.
Mayakovsky is better known than either of these figures. How can anybody say this kind of crap, have it printed, and then NOBODY points out the lie?
The moral of this sorry tale is: NEVER believe ANYTHING an anti-communist source says or writes about communism, Stalin, the USSR, etc., until you've checked it out yourself!
history buff
CHALLENGE's Jab At `Million Dollar Baby' Missed Target
The analysis (CHALLENGE, 3/2) of "Million Dollar Baby" as racist is ridiculous. Why is Morgan Freeman an "Uncle Tom?" The author gives no reason, just states it as fact. I didn't find him that way at all -- just an old tired boxer that took a lot of punches and never made it. He could have been any color. He was chosen because he's a fine actor. And the movie would have a "different message" if the German champ had been white and the other opponents black? What caricature does the German champ represent? It certainly is not one of color, just a nasty champion willing to do anything to maintain her championship. That's not a caricature, that's the way it is.
This movie was an indictment of the world of organized boxing. Eastwood plays a trainer who cares about his boxers and probably over-protects them. That's why the black boxer he's training leaves him. Eastwood is over-protecting him and he wants the ring. Interesting that the reviewer ignores the fact that Eastwood protects the black boxer out of love for Morgan Freeman who lost an eye under his tutelage years before.
The characters in "Million Dollar Baby" could have been any color. I thought the film was remarkable and the tension, after Swank is hurt, emotionally gut-wrenching. Was this film revolutionary or anti-racist? No. Did it condemn our racist, capitalist society? No. But the reviewer was really grasping for straws in condemning it as a racist film. And the final paragraph also doesn't hold up anymore: the films called fascist were ones like "Dirty Harry," films that Eastwood starred in, not produced or directed. Many of his films, such as "Unforgiven" and "Mystic River" were not fascist at all, but rather anti-western and anti-detective movie statements respectively. Honestly, I don't think that review should have been printed.
Big Red
More Million Dollar Baby
The review of Million Dollar Baby (see CHALLENGE 3/2) was superficial and incorrect. It gave little evidence to back up the claim that racist images or ideas are strongly portrayed in the movie. Additionally, the reviewer ignores examples of positive black figures (e.g., the first boxer or Freeman's character).
While this movie was not anti-capitalist or revolutionary, it was a great film. It's mainly about self-esteem, courage, forgiveness and love. Swank as Maggie, a poor working-class person, had such low self-esteem that she was willing to subject herself to the incredible brutality of boxing. Being a poor worker meant that she had little hope for her future beyond what she might accomplish as a boxer.
Maggie's struggle is an individualistic one, not one to improve the lives of other workers. This fits well into the "American dream" myth, which is why Hollywood liberals liked it. Additionally, its heart-wrenching portrayal of paralysis and disability will resonate with people whose sons and daughters are soldiers coming back from the war in Iraq paralyzed and injured.
Boston Reader
RED EYE ON THE NEWS
Violence vs. recruiters grow in US
Since the beginning of 2003, there have...been more than a dozen...often violent incidents aimed at military recruiters or property throughout the country....
...On Jan. 20, the day of President Bush's inaugural, several hundred students at Seattle Central Community College surrounded two Army recruiters on campus, shouting insults and hurling water bottles until the recruiters were escorted away by campus security. The protest was covered by The Army Times, and several recruiters said that they feared such situations might become more common. (NYT, 2/21)
`Democracy' blocks workers' will
...A 2003 Pew poll asked people if they favored the government "guaranteeing health insurance for all citizens, even if it means repealing most of the recent tax cuts".
Universal healthcare won, 67 percent to 26 percent.
...Nothing has happened...The profit-grubbing medical lobby of pharmaceuticals, insurance companies and the American Medical Association....continues to thwart the will of the American people. (Boston Globe, 2/7)
Chinese die of fever cured by Reds
...Nationally, nearly 900,000 people have the disease [Snail Fever] and an estimated 30 million are at risk....
What is most frustrating to people like Mr. Guo, whose wife has the disease, is that snail fever was largely eradicated in China during the 1950's as part of the national campaign ordered by Mao Zedong. Mr Guo, 56 recalled regular efforts to sweep the lake of the snails that serve as host bodies for the parasites....People were required to have check-ups and that those infected received free medical care, including drugs that can neutralize the disease.
But the constant attention needed to control the disease has waned, and it gradually returned... because of neglect of the rural health system. (NYT, 2/22)
One reason TV is replacing reading
...New York City...officials say 100 of the 650 elementary schools have certified librarians; 25 percent have no library... (NYT, 2/23)
Making a joke of the next war
...Mr. Bush met with European leaders at the headquarters of the European Union, and ...he did not rule out, as he has not in the past, military action.
"This notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous," he said, then added, to some laughter in the room, "and having said that, all options are on the table." (NYT, 2/23)
How to save Medicare: Die Sooner
Though Social Security's fiscal direction has taken center stage in Washington of late, Medicare's future financing problems are likely to be much worse....
So, how can Medicare's ballooning cost be contained? One idea is to let people die earlier. (NYT 2/27)
New East Europe: Profits, poverty
...GDP in the former communist states fell between 20% and 30% in the decade after 1989....
Only Poland had managed to return to its 1989 level of output by the end of the 20th century. Hungary, considered by many the most "advanced" economy of the region, had to wait until 2002.
While a minority have seen real wages rise, for the vast majority in the countries in question the transition process has witnessed a spectacular fall in living standards....
Inequality has risen sharply...Unemployment is widespread, particularly among the young: in Poland, 39% of under-25s are without a job....
Reformers blame problems on the legacy of 40 years of communism. But could it be that the reform process itself is responsible?...Following the IMF-EU economic prescription has caused hardship for millions. (GW, 2/24)
Money talks in danger-drug vote
Ten of the 32 government drug advisers who last week endorsed continued marketing of the huge-selling pain pills Celebrex, Bextra and Vioxx have consulted in recent years for the drugs' makers, according to disclosures in medical journals and other public records.
If the 10 advisers had not cast their votes, the committee would have voted 12 to 8 that Bextra should be withdrawn and 14 to 8 that Vioxx should not return to the market....
...Studies have shown that, taken as a whole, money does influence scientific judgments... (NYT, 2/25)
`Liberated' by US, Afghans suffer
Average life expectancy for Afghanistan's 28.5 million people is 44.5 years, at least 20 years lower than that of neighboring countries....
...And 20.4 percent of the rural population does not have enough to eat....
Most glaring are the inequalities that affect women and children, still some of the worst social indicators in the world today....
One-fifth of the children die before the age of 5, 80 percent of them from preventable diseases, one of the worst rates in the world. Only 25 percent of the population has access to clean drinking water, and one in eight children die from lack of clean water.
Afghanistan now has the worst education system in the world the reported concluded... (NYT, 2/22)
Lynne Stewart Conviction: Rulers Break Own Laws to Build Fascism
Racist LAPD Terrorists Kill Black 8th Grader
KACHING!!! Cops Rewarded Million$ for Racist Brutality
War Budget Means Social Insecurity for Workers
a href="#Students’ Siege Disrupts Speech by Rulers’ Torturer/Apologist">St"dents’ Siege Disrupts Speech by Rulers’ Torturer/Apologist
Build Community Support to Fight Police Brutality
Buenos Aires: Subway Workers Block Tracks, Win Wage Hikes, Struggle Continues…
Cops, Homeland Security: Big Danger For D.C. Metro Drivers
a href="#Boeing Workers Must Ground Union Hacks’ Pro-Boss Garbage">"oeing Workers Must Ground Union Hacks’ Pro-Boss Garbage
Garment Workers Sew Red Ideas into Class Struggle
a href="#Chicago Cops’ Stun Guns Latest Homeland Security Execution Weapon">"hicago Cops’ Stun Guns Latest Homeland Security Execution Weapon
a href="#‘Million Dollar Baby’ Is No Knockout">‘M"llion Dollar Baby’ Is No Knockout
CIA, Vatican Helped 5,000 Nazi Murderers Escape To Fight in Cold War
Imperialist Holocaust In Congo Massacred Millions
Thousands Protest Lack of Affordable Housing in NYC
LETTERS
Russian Free Market Spawns Nazi Skinheads
Berlin Workers Still Honor Red Army
Opposing Recruiters Is No Game
Building Worker-Soldier-Student Alliance
- US gets noble when there’s oil
- Tyrant? Play ball, you’re OK
- Bosses super-exploit immigrants
- Gov’t outsources torture
- US: Sickness often means mass ruin
- Sell killer as long as you can
- Not so gung-ho on Iraq
- Torture orders came from the top
Lynne Stewart Conviction: Rulers Break Own Laws to Build Fascism
The bosses are moving quickly and ruthlessly to solidify important aspects of the police state they require to launch their next round of wars for world domination. The February 10 conviction of attorney Lynne Stewart for "providing material support to terrorists" and "violating special prison administration rules" provides a case in point. It should be a wake-up call for revolutionaries and militant workers everywhere.
Stewart is a defense lawyer who has taken anti-government stands in representing unpopular clients. During the trial, Stewart denied supporting terrorism, or inciting any violent acts. She was indicted under Clinton’s 1996 Counter-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty law, mainly for issuing a press release to Reuters from Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. He was imprisoned after being convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center — an act PLP denounces, as we do of all terrorists.
Stewart’s clients may or may not have been guilty, but that’s not the point. The main questions here are the rulers’ willingness to violate their own laws and the actions workers and communists must take toward this reality.
Stewart’s conviction was based on recordings the government had made of conversations between her and her client. This is a clear violation of "attorney-client privilege," supposedly one of capitalist democracy’s most "sacred" rights. The Department of "Justice" (DOJ) also violated something called "the right of an accused to have zealous [i.e. enthusiastic — Ed.] counsel represent him." Yet, according to the New York Times, one day after Stewart’s conviction, the legal case against Stewart was feeble: " The government never showed that any violence ever resulted from Mr. Sattar’s calls or from any action by Ms. Stewart or Mr. Yousry; there were no victims in this case.…Ultimately the jury appeared to have been persuaded by the fact that Stewart, a lawyer, had clearly violated the legal letter of the prison rules."
Violating prison administrative rules is a procedural offense, usually subject to fines, not a felony. Stewart now faces 40 years in jail. One co-defendant Mohammed Yousry, the translator was also convicted of five counts, with no proof of guilt except that he translated.
The government’s justification here is the need to "protect" us from terrorists. The DOJ constantly referred to 9/11 in the Stewart case. But the authority to wiretap attorney-client communications existed before 9/11, through something called the "crime-fraud" exception. A set of regulations called "Special Administrative Measures" (SAM) can also be implemented to prevent people in jail from communicating not only with the outside world but also with their legal counsel. The DOJ only has to decide that the subject of conversation lies "beyond the scope" of legal representation.
Hitler took power through legal elections. As CHALLENGE has often warned, fascism will come to the U.S. wrapped in red-white-and-blue legality. So the bosses no longer like attorney-client privilege? Presto! They enact a new law or regulation that abolishes it. Why not? After all, they hold state power.
This is an important lesson for the working class. It is an attack on anyone who seriously challenges capitalism. It is even more proof that the Clinton "Counter-terrorism" law and others, like the Patriot Act, have long since established a national security police state. As Bush and the Democrats rip apart social programs and pour money into their imperialist war plans and homeland security, these laws will be used to crush dissent.
Right now, the government’s image of terrorism is a racist caricature of Arabs and Muslims. As the rulers expand their oil wars, they will continue to use this vile tactic, and, as in the Stewart case, will extend it to anyone who defends Arabs and Muslims accused, rightly or wrongly, of terrorism. This is flagrant hypocrisy coming from the U.S. government, which every day, extends its record as the greatest perpetrator of terrorist murder.
But something else is happening here. For some time, the bosses have enjoyed a low level of class struggle on the home front and have so far managed to avoid Vietnam-type mass rebellions in their military. They can’t maintain this advantage forever. The more far-sighted among them — as indicated by the 2001 Hart-Rudman Commission’s Report on National Security in the 21st Century — understand that they must take steps to squash working-class mass militancy when they’re unable to nip it in the bud. The Lynne Stewart conviction precedes measures the rulers have in store for the leaders of working-class rebellions that will surely erupt as war and fascism sharpen. Today the target may be a lawyer who represents anti-government defendants. However, the strategic enemy for the bosses remains communist revolution. Its specter will haunt them until it eventually destroys them. But they will do a lot of damage along the way, including no-holds-barred police-state terror against PLP and anyone who dares oppose them.
Our Party didn’t do enough to oppose these fascist attacks. Stewart has stated that she opposes fundamentalism and terrorism as a strategy, but her politics of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" led her to mistakenly portray Islamic fundamentalists as freedom fighters. Clearly, PLP has many political disagreements with her. But the prosecution and conviction of Stewart could help suppress the growing fight-back against war and fascism. This trial will be used by the government to brand all revolutionaries and militant workers as "terrorists." It is a deadly error for us to underestimate the potential for the working class to be won to these politics. We should raise resolutions in our mass organizations condemning this verdict, and calling for action to oppose its consequences.
You can’t fight fascism by relying on the courts, because as the Stewart case shows, the rulers own the courts and will use them exclusively in their class interests. Nor can you fight it by uniting with the supposedly "anti-fascist" liberal wing of the ruling class. It doesn’t exist: all bosses are driven to fascism to solve the crises of their system. The only antidote to fascist terror is a mass base for communist revolution among workers, soldiers and students — and the class struggle that will lead to working-class seizure of state power.
Racist LAPD Terrorists Kill Black 8th Grader
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 14 — "Black people fear the police as much as they fear the gangs. In fact, the LAPD is considered the biggest gang in the city," one speaker told the LA City Council after cop Steven Garcia murdered 13-year-old Devin Brown on Feb. 6, firing 10 shots into the car the youth was driving. Devin and a friend had taken a cousin’s car out late at night. If it wasn’t South Central LA., the cops would have stopped the youth, given him a ticket, and taken him home.
The racist murder has sparked vigils, demonstrations and meetings about racist police terror. Meanwhile, the day after the killing, police invaded the area (83rd and Western) with shotguns. PLP members and friends have participated in discussions and rallies, distributing a leaflet exposing the LAPD as racist terrorists serving the capitalist system, calling for actions again the killing and for communist revolution to end this terrorism and its source — capitalism.
There have been several high-profile press conferences in which Police Chief Bratton and other cops "explained" what happened when Devin backed his car into a police car and Garcia fired into Devin’s car and killed him. But Garcia and his partner had exited their car before the youth’s car backed into it. They were in no danger whatsoever. Garcia shot to kill.
Bratton claims the car was stolen, but Devin’s family said it was his cousin’s car. Bratton and the LA Times are trying to push the lie that Devin was a "good kid gone wrong." His family and teachers say the opposite. Most people in the area don’t buy Bratton’s story. They know the cops’ racist record hasn’t changed.
While this killing occurred, Bratton has been lobbying the LA City Council for a new city sales tax to finance more cops. In today’s LA Times, Bratton claims the LAPD needs them to make LA "safer" and to prevent such attacks. In fact, a series of community meetings is intending to push for more cops. The City Council has refused Bratton’s request for now, given the anger at the racist murder of 8th grader Devin.
This killing comes on the heels of several racist decisions exposing the role of the courts in defending and protecting racist police who injure and kill African American men. In January, a jury awarded $2.4 million to two Inglewood police officers who were videotaped striking handcuffed African American teenager Donovan Jackson (see box). And a week ago, the LA County District Attorney said he wouldn’t prosecute the cops involved in the televised beating with flashlights of another African American, Stanley Miller.
Some African American community spokesmen have recently condemned Devon’s killing but called for working more closely with the police to formulate "new rules," like the promised one that police won’t shoot at a moving vehicle "unless they feel threatened." (They always "feel threatened.") This fits in with Bratton’s call for "community policing" in which community leaders become promoters of the LAPD in exchange for tiny "reforms." Bratton’s main "reform" is to add more cops, meaning more racist terror.
U.S. rulers claim to be fighting a "war on terrorism" at home and abroad. They’ve killed 100,000 Iraqis and over 1,450 U.S. troops, wounding tens of thousands more. They’re carrying out that same war on LA streets and throughout the country, directed especially at black and Latino youth.
The City Council is organizing community meetings to "answer questions" about this killing. They could face anger and answers they haven’t bargained for.
We condemn this racist killing and will fight for Garcia to be punished, taking this message to schools, unions, work-places and churches. But there’s no reform of the LAPD that will change its racist nature. That’s why the direction of this fight must lead in the long run to revolution for workers’ power — to destroy the racist terrorist bosses and their system once and for all.
We don’t want cop power, we want workers’ power. Crime and gangs have been created by capitalism. These problems can’t be solved with more cops, but by workers organizing independently of the cops to protect our own class, as we fight to eliminate the #1 criminals — the ruling class.
KACHING!!! Cops Rewarded Million$ for Racist Brutality
LA cops Jerry Morse and his partner Bijan Darvish were caught on video tape punching a handcuffed African American teenager, Donovan Jackson, and slamming him against a patrol car in Inglewood in July 2002. The video was broadcast and provoked outrage throughout LA, especially in Inglewood. But neither cop was ever convicted of a crime. Juries deadlocked twice in the assault case against Morse.
Morse was fired for his attack on the teenager, and Darvish was suspended for ten days for filing a false police report. They sued the city of Inglewood for "discrimination" and in January a jury awarded Morse $1.6 million and Darvish $810,000. The City is considering appealing the decision.
We can't expect justice from these bosses' courts that let racist cops off scot free and then reward them for their racist crimes!
War Budget Means Social Insecurity for Workers
U.S. rulers need to steal more and more from the working class in order to finance their rapidly advancing agenda of war and fascism. Bush’s proposed budget has this deadly goal. "In 2006, defence spending is scheduled to rise by 5% and homeland security spending by 3% while other programmes are to be cut." (The Economist, 2/12)
This racist budget slashes funds for food stamps, child care, public housing and health care to help pay for the extra $81 billion Bush is asking for the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will fall especially heavily on black, Latin and immigrant workers, a higher proportion of whom depend on food stamps, public housing and public health care, reflecting the racist nature of the cuts. While workers and their children suffer, the Pentagon’s total spending will soar over the half-trillion-dollar mark. The "reforms" of Social Security now under debate also represent a massive shift of capital from the working class to the war machine.
As drastic as the cuts are, the main U.S. rulers fault Bush for not being ruthless enough and not providing for further military mobilization. The Concord Coalition, headed by Pete Peterson and Warren Rudman, is the Establishment’s chief watchdog for fiscal policy. In a February 7 statement, it said, "The main problem with this budget is not what’s in it, but what’s left out. It assumes that the upcoming $81 billion supplemental spending request for Iraq and Afghanistan will be the last one."
Key agents of imperialism, Peterson and Rudman have a clear vision of the U.S.’s expanding war needs. Peterson is chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the rulers’ foremost foreign policy factory. The CFR played a leading role in the weapons hoax that "justified" invading Iraq, and it also drew up the occupation plans. The CFR "differed" with the Bush gang, saying that it didn’t use enough troops to carry out the invasion. The CFR is now pondering U.S. options in Iran and North Korea, in which fiscal policy factors heavily. Rudman co-chaired the pre-9/11 Hart-Rudman Commission, whose reports form a blueprint for keeping the U.S. as the world’s top imperialist far into the future. Hart-Rudman demands ever- widening military adventures, establishing a domestic police state, and a massive sacrifice of "blood and treasure" to support both efforts.
The rulers see much of the treasure coming from cuts in Social Security. On the eve of the latest Iraq invasion, the Concord Coalition warned of "an urgent long-lasting demand for new spending on national defense and homeland security." (1/10/03) At that time it only hinted at plundering Social Security. "The nation now faces two history-bending challenges: global terrorism and global aging. Meeting the first may require marshaling new resources far above the extra spending already legislated. We know that meeting the second will test the ability of society to provide a decent standard of living for the old."
The rulers have since let the cat out of the bag. Concord now says, "Ensuring a more sustainable system will require change, meaning that someone is going to have to give up something, either in the form of higher contributions, lower benefits or a combination of both. No Social Security reform will succeed unless this fact is acknowledged up front" (1/9/05). Medicare is next in line for the rulers’ looting, "If we can’t make the hard choices on Social Security we can never hope to tackle the problems of our health care entitlements."
Private accounts are just a smokescreen in the Social Security flap. Reducing workers’ benefits to finance the rulers’ warmaking is the real issue. Bush is luring his conservative base with the bait of privatization. But it turns out that almost all "private" accounts would be managed by the ultra-Establishment State Street and Mellon banks. A member of the Rockefeller Foundation sits on the board of each institution. The capital in such accounts would further U.S. imperialism just as well as under the government scheme.
U.S. rulers have already robbed steel workers of their retirement to put that industry on a war footing. Over the past decade, liberal investor Wilbur Ross formed International Steel by buying up bankrupt companies like Bethlehem and canceling pension plans. Ross has sold International to the Anglo-Indian Mittal group, but his cost-cutting ensures the existence of functioning steel mills on U.S. soil, in case demand for tanks and warships spikes. Thus, the raid on pensions aims at funding current wars and rebuilding infrastructures crucial for future ones.
The profit system is based on capitalists’ systematic theft of wealth from workers, the creators of all wealth. When foreign rivals threaten, the rulers devote vast amounts of these stolen assets to war. A system that steals food from children and the elderly so that it can bankroll mass murder must be smashed.
a name="Students’ Siege Disrupts Speech by Rulers’ Torturer/Apologist"></">St"dents’ Siege Disrupts Speech by Rulers’ Torturer/Apologist
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA—Forceful protests by students and faculty met the arrival of John Yoo on our campus, invited as part of the Chancellor’s "Distinguished Fellows Lecture" series — one that also included the infamous Viet Dinh, co-author of the Patriot Act. As Assistant Deputy Attorney General in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003, Yoo has been called the "principal intellectual author" of the Bush administration’s "torture memos" — interrogation policy directives whose aim was to "increase flexibility for harsh interrogation [and] reduce the risk that Americans could be prosecuted for torture or war crimes." (Hajjar, The Nation, 2/7).
PLP students and friends from other schools joined the protest while building the communist struggle against imperialism, racism and fascism, and the capitalist system that breeds them.
Yoo, a summa cum laude Harvard graduate, is currently a professor at the Boalt School of Law at UC Berkeley. Yoo’s memos have been used to justify the indefinite detention and torture of "enemy combatants" and "terrorists" in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan. Yoo, and others like the current Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, are the prime architects of the fascist policies that led to the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. These policies are meeting with a fight-back.
Two weeks before Yoo’s appearance, professors gathered over 400 signatures on a petition urging the Chancellor to withdraw his invitation as a "Distinguished Fellow." He refused but instead set up a "panel discussion" before the evening lecture where professors could debate Yoo on the "merits" of his legal arguments. This was not enough for the students.
In the afternoon, progressive student clubs rallied outside the Student Center chanting and giving speeches, alerting other students to Yoo’s lecture. Carrying a banner reading, "There Is No Debating Torture," and chanting, "Hitler rose, Hitler fell . . . John Yoo can go to hell," students marched through the Student Center and into the debate room. Holding up pictures of the Abu Ghraib tortures and signs saying, "Imperialism breeds Fascism," the protestors accused Yoo of fascist war crimes before being removed by police.
The students’ actions changed the tone of the "panel discussion," from a civil "academic debate" to a confrontational exchange. One panelist called Yoo a war criminal. Another read a description of the tortures at Guantanamo and asked, "Is this torture? Yes or NO!" The audience joined in demanding, "Yes or No!" People interrupted Yoo, calling him a racist and a fascist, while others stormed out during his talk.
This afternoon protest set the stage for the larger demonstration planned for Yoo’s official "Distinguished Fellows" evening lecture. More than 100 students and faculty members gathered outside the hall where Yoo was to speak. Audience members could see and hear the chanting protestors outside through a glass wall. PL’ers distributed CHALLENGE and a leaflet linking Yoo’s and the U.S. rulers’ fascist policies to those of the Nazis, calling for a worker-student-soldier alliance to end imperialism with communist revolution. Students were open to talking about Yoo and the war in Iraq. Some agreed on the need to smash imperialism and fascism in order to end wars and injustice.
As Yoo took the podium and waved to the protestors outside, students became even more incensed. They chanted, "John Yoo, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!" Other students stood up during his speech and called Yoo a fascist torturer for U.S. imperialism. The demonstrators outside marched into the building chanting. When the police kicked them out, they reconvened outside. In fact, the lecture was cut short because of the demonstration
It’s no surprise that the apologists of endless imperialist wars are appearing on campuses nation-wide. While the rulers are waging their profit wars on the backs of workers and students, cutting jobs and social services, they simultaneously need to convince workers and students of the "justness" of their so-called war on terror. After all, young workers and students won’t be convinced to fight and die in these wars if they know it is for the oil profits of Exxon, Halliburton, etc. The university is a crucial site in this ideological war.
It’s possible the demonstrators underestimated the willingness of the students to stop Yoo. Many students see more clearly now that the University plays an important role in building fascist ideology to support imperialist war. Some people seem to have made a leap in commitment to fight these evils. One person told us, "This was the best thing that happened on this campus in ten years." Another said, "This is the most important thing we’ll do all year." This bodes well for the future growth of PLP.
Build Community Support to Fight Police Brutality
PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY, MD, Feb. 12 — Today over 50 people attended the inaugural showing of a documentary about the 1993 police murder of Archie ("Artie") Elliott III and the ensuing government cover-up. The showing was held at St. Paul’s Baptist Church and organized by Dorothy Copp Elliott, Artie’s mother, who has been a tireless fighter for justice in her son’s case and in the general struggle against racist police brutality.
The Peoples Coalition for Police Accountability plans to show the documentary — along with another short video made at a recent Amnesty International program on racial profiling and police brutality — at several other churches and public libraries. This will help build community awareness of how police kill and brutalize with impunity, and to demonstrate how we fight back.
This campaign demonstrates the importance of building grassroots activity around critical aspects of racism in a wide range of mass organizations. Many participants in these activities learn from these efforts that the capitalist system is determined to use the police as a terrorist force against the working class, especially African Americans, in order to stifle dissent and put a lid on any insurgency against their profit-hungry system. We’re constantly lied to by police, prosecutors, and politicians. The latest example is that "somehow" the darling of the liberals, States Attorney Glenn Ivey, has "lost" the entire file of Artie Elliott’s case! After hitting this brick wall enough times, many activists learn that the brick wall must be destroyed through revolution, and some have already joined Progressive Labor Party to make this happen.
Buenos Aires: Subway Workers Block Tracks, Win Wage Hikes, Struggle Continues . . .
BUENOS AIRES, Feb. 14 — The 1,900 workers operating this city’s Subte (subway system), transporting 800,000 riders daily, have won another victory in their unceasing struggle against the bosses of Metrovias — which has a contract to run the system — the government and the union hacks. Blocking the tracks helped win a 19% pay raise, which, on top of last December’s hike, totals 44% in wage increases. Their fight is important for the world’s workers in these days of endless capitalist wars, repression and economic crisis, with workers mostly on the receiving end of the bosses’ attacks. Overall, Argentine workers’ wages are now 20% below rates of 2001.
These subway workers must remain on constant alert since the bosses and the hacks will continue to try to take away these gains and smash the workers’ unity. The best lasting victory for these workers is turning their struggles into schools for communism.
After a week of striking, in addition to winning the wage hike, workers will also be paid for the days they struck, plus a night-shift differential. The lowest-paid worker’s earnings will rise from 618 pesos ($220) monthly to 910 ($325). The highest category will go up from 1,530 ($546) to 1,910 ($682). In last spring’s militant struggle, the workers won a 6-hour work-day which forced the bosses to hire more workers (although still below the 3,000 total of a few years ago). And very little is being invested in repairs and maintenance, endangering workers and riders. Plus Metrovias wants to introduce automatic ticket machines, which could lead to more job losses.
The workers’ fight began in November. In early February, they stepped up the struggle, initially stopping work for 3 hours each day, then 4, then 5 and finally 24 hours. Nine times the workers went onto the rails, blocking trains from running.
Meanwhile, workers were countering the lies of the bosses and the media, which accused them of being "high-paid" and tried to pit riders against them. They also had to make sure the UTA (Transportation Workers Union) bosses wouldn’t sell them out. The workers exposed the bloated salaries of the Metrovias executives’ as the real ones being overpaid, incomes many times that of the workers. The workers championed their right to a decent living for themselves and their families. Many youth rallied to support the strikers.
Finally, UTA union head Juan Manuel Palacios, after refusing the strikers’ call for other transport workers (like bus drivers) to strike in solidarity, pretended he was still controlling the workers and suddenly announced a 19% wage-hike deal with Metrovias and the government (Metrovias gets 65 million pesos a year in government subsidies). But, the workers’ real leadership — the House of Delegates — first learned about it on TV. At 1:00 AM, the UTA sent copies of the deal to the five subway lines. When agents of the leadership arrived at the Virreyes station, the delegates barred them from the meetings. "Rank-and-file workers, not the UTA, decide if the strike is over," declared a delegate (Pagina12/web, 2/12) Eighteen hours later, after all the shifts had discussed and approved the agreement, the strike ended.
Already the bosses are counterattacking: "During the week-long conflict, the company tried to run emergency services using supervisors, but workers went onto the tracks to stop the trains. Metrovias tried to get injunctions against the blockade. It will now pursue these demands since the deal doesn’t call for the dropping of the legal demands." (Pagina12)
So, the workers must not lower their guard; the struggle must continue.
Cops, Homeland Security: Big Danger For D.C. Metro Drivers
WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb. 15 — About 70 workers picketed Metro headquarters on Feb. 10 around the issue of safety on the buses after a number of drivers had been attacked. The situation is complicated because the knee-jerk reaction of many people is to demand more cops. Some drivers want a cop on every bus!
But PLP member and ATU Local 689 President Mike Golash fought for a communist outlook, calling on his local to take the lead in fighting racism and poverty. He also got the local to refuse an offer from the D.C. police to give mace to every driver. (Some workers want every bus to carry a notice containing that section of the Homeland Security law making attacks on transit workers a federal crime. This would draw workers into collaboration with a fascist law that would, among other things, bust their union. More on this in a future issue.)
More than anything, today’s rally was a step in what could be a series of pickets and job actions to prepare workers for a possible strike this summer. Talks began on February 14 for a three-year contract, and workers would have to be politically and organizationally ready to wage a struggle that would be illegal under the fascist Department of Homeland Security. And during any possible walkout, the true role of the cops will be clear, not to "protect" the workers but to smash their strike!
CHALLENGE sales are slowly increasing, as is the potential for growing. The old right-wing union leadership is downloading Metro CHALLENGE articles from the web and distributing them, to "prove" that Mike wants to build a revolutionary movement to smash racism, poverty and imperialist war. They think this will discredit him! As May Day approaches and the war in Iraq deteriorates, as the contract fight unfolds and workers defend their red leadership from attack, a significant story is developing here.
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The contract with Boeing’s largest union, the International Association of Machinists, expires September 1. Large is a relative word: membership has sunk from over 44,000 to slightly over 16,000 due to layoffs and outsourcing. The union leaders’ answer to these cutbacks is to try to sell themselves to management. These class traitors’ chief selling point is the union’s ability to blunt class consciousness, to persuade union members to view their future in the narrowest economic terms and in the "national interest." In the run-up to the contract, our Party and friends will expose this path to ruin, particularly during our summer project. Building the road to revolution will measure our success.
District 751 President Mark Blondin let the cat out of the bag during an interview with the Tacoma News-Tribune in January. After mouthing the patently absurd assessment that "things are looking better than they did the last time around," he got to the meat of the matter.
The union helped Boeing win more business. "We were a major part of the team that helped recruit the [new 787 Dreamliner] to Washington," he pleaded. Never mind that he led the racist charge to cut the state’s poorest workers off unemployment insurance to help finance the state’s $3.2 billion giveaway to the company of our hard-earn tax dollars. Latin farmworkers were particularly hard hit. "We’re [also] backing Boeing 100 percent [in lobbying and dirty tricks to rescue the scandal-ridden 767 air force tanker contract]."
When asked why Airbus is "outselling and out-producing Boeing," he declined to expose the company’s frittering away of more than $15 billion of our labor to speculate with company stock. Instead, he attacked European governments for creating an "unfair advantage" with "launch aid," parroting his master, CEO Harry Stonecipher.
Essentially, he argues that after all this loyal service to Boeing in the name of US capitalism, why not throw us [the union leadership] a bone so we can have something to show the workforce. Don’t hold your breath!
The Handwriting Is On the Wall
The only thing Boeing plans to throw is retirees off medical coverage. "Boeing is using Southern California as a proving ground in its effort to reduce the amount it must pay in health benefits to retirees." (Los Angeles Business Journal, 2/8) "On Jan 1, the provisions of a recently negotiated contract with the United Aerospace Workers’ Long Beach-based Local 148 denies health benefits to any new hires once they retire. The move follows a deal struck last year with two other UAW locals, Paramount-based Local 887 and Santa Susana-based Local 1519, that call for no health coverage upon retirement for members hired after May 15, 2003."
"The bosses are trying to pit young workers against old!" is the way one friend saw this before suggesting we offer a series on anti-racist, revolutionary and class struggle history in the industry to counter the bosses divide-and-conquer strategy.
We Have To See Past Our Noses
No matter what form the sellout takes in September, the most dangerous development would be allowing the union misleaders to win us to the bosses’ nationalism. Politically, this rotten ideology leads us to support their endless oil wars and war reorganization of industry. We intend to enlist Boeing workers, families and friends to help organize military personnel and industrial subcontractor and temporary workers, up and down the coast. CHALLENGE can be the tool to win these two groups of young workers to pave the way to smashing the bosses’ oil wars and war economy with communist revolution.
Garment Workers Sew Red Ideas into Class Struggle
(This concludes the series contained in the last three CHALLENGES describing the fight in a garment factory over the cutting of the lunch half-hour, slashing wages and defending a militant worker — Tomas — who was threatened with firing.)
After lunch, the boss ordered everyone to the cutting area, saying, "Someone from the company wants to talk to you." The workers gathered and the boss came in with a man who looked like a racist cop. This guy asked the boss to leave and presented himself as a "representative of the Lucky Brand company." He said he was a lawyer, had worked with the National Labor Relations Board and knew the law.
With arrogance and contempt, he said, "I’ve come to resolve a problem." Referring to a paper Tomas had given to a co-worker the day before, he said, "To stop production is against the law. This is the last day that the person who wrote this will work in this factory." The bosses’ supporters applauded.
After allowing some workers’ questions, he said it was necessary to form a committee to deal with these problems, and that he would name its members. He told Tomas to go to the office. The boss’s step-son gave Tomas two checks and then fired him. Knowing this was "illegal" according to the bosses’ labor laws, the company "lawyer" drew the boss’s step-son aside and came back to tell Tomas to return to work, and that he wanted him to be on the workers’ committee.
Everything seemed to be back to normal but work became "slow" so Tomas and his co-worker were laid off for several days. Tomas returned several times to the factory but the boss insisted there still wasn’t enough work, that he would call him. Meanwhile, his co-worker was rehired. The boss insists that Tomas has not been fired.
During this period, the co-worker visited Tomas’ apartment at home with his family to pass the time and discuss events in the factory as well as the general problems of capitalism. They’ve kept in close touch with the workers who told them the boss had ordered several workers to do Tomas’ job. When they refused, they were sent home. Since then there have been discussions with other workers in their homes about CHALLENGE, the war, fascism, the nature of capitalism, and the need for them to join a PLP study group.
The struggle continues on many levels. Losing one reform struggle is not losing the war against the bosses. Win or lose, the workers learn many things. Many have shown solidarity with and respect for Tomas, his ideas and leadership. When CHALLENGE is sold outside the factory, the lunch tables are covered with it. At lunch time, the workers sit reading it. Discussions continue about the war in Iraq, racism, the wage system and production for need.
This whole struggle has inspired us to redouble our revolutionary efforts. The workers are being won not only to fight the company but also the capitalist system itself. They will continue to receive CHALLENGE and leaflets, which they will also help write and distribute. Bringing communist ideas into the heart and soul of the working class is the key fight, even more so given the increasing attacks on the working class to pay for imperialist war.
Regardless of how able we become in fighting over reform issues, the bosses will always win as long as they hold state power. We must win ourselves and our co-workers to understand that the only lasting victory for our class is how many workers join study groups, read and distribute CHALLENGE and are recruited to PLP. This, and only this, will put our class on the path to its final liberation, communist revolution.
a name="Chicago Cops’ Stun Guns Latest Homeland Security Execution Weapon">">"hicago Cops’ Stun Guns Latest Homeland Security Execution Weapon
CHICAGO, IL, Feb. 11 — A 54-year-old man was killed today when the police used a Taser stun gun to subdue him. He had refused to leave the hallway on the 26th floor of an apartment building where he had been invited. His "capital offense" was screaming at the police, "If you come near me, I will give you HIV," and threatening to bite them.
A few days earlier, a 14-year-old ward of the state went into cardiac arrest after a police sergeant shot him with a stun gun at a residential group home. Cook County Public Guardian Robert Harris said he believed the boy was sitting on a couch when police arrived and was no longer violent. The boy is recovering.
Chicago police have been using Tasers on a trial basis since April. Top cop Philip Cline said he would continue using the 200 Tasers the department has now, but temporarily halted plans to distribute more. About 6,000 police agencies use Taser stun guns, made by Taser International Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz.
In November, Amnesty International reported 74 Taser-related deaths since 2001 and concluded the devices were "contributing to widespread human rights abuses." Last year in Miami, a 6-year-old boy was shocked in a school office, and a 75-year-old woman was shot with a stun gun in a nursing home in Rock Hill, S.C. An Air Force study found that multiple shocks from a Taser led to heart damage in pigs.
A stun gun fires two wires with electrified tips that send up to 50,000 volts into their target, shocking and immobilizing the person.
On the same day as the electrocution, the city announced plans to create a 1,000 mile-long Homeland Security fiber-optic grid with cameras and biochemical sensors to "fight terrorism and crime."
Last September, racist Mayor Daley said the city would add 250 cameras to more than 2,000 already in use, making it the largest video surveillance system of its kind in the world. The new Homeland Security Grid will add even more cameras, made possible by a $53 million settlement with the RCN cable company who will provide 388 miles of fiber-optic cable. Cook County and the city will add another $40 million in federal homeland security grants. Thirty-two miles of lakefront from Evanston to Chicago's South Side, including Lake Shore Drive, parks, water filtration plants and public venues like Navy Pier will be wired into the new system. The grid will be monitored at the city’s 911 center.
This is the future the bosses have in store for us while retired steel workers lose their pensions and healthcare; Cook County hospital workers prepare to strike for their health care and to keep their jobs; City College students face tuition hikes and other racist cutbacks; and the City prepares to close schools, lay off workers and open more military academy high schools. The only answer to war and fascism is communist revolution. As we build a fighting PLP, we have to keep our eyes on a bigger May Day, recruiting new members and spreading CHALLENGE.
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("Million Dollar Baby has been hailed as a "great movie" by liberals while right-wingers like Rush Limbaugh and Debbie Schlussel have attacked it as "left-wing diatribe" because of its message on euthanasia, implying that director Clint Eastwood is a "commie." Below is what a CHALLENGE contributor from the "Frozen North" writes about the movie.)
Everybody you talk to says "Million Dollar Baby" is terrific. While "Baby’s" not exactly a "feel-good film," it’s been nominated for seven Academy Awards — merely Hollywood’s way of patting itself on the back and drumming up more business. Merit means little.
"Baby" is a generally well-made and well-acted movie (especially Hillary Swank’s Maggie). The dialogue of the male characters is mechanically "cute." I won’t discuss all the plot’s twists, which, honestly, I didn’t see coming. Still, it’s worth analyzing why the movie is so awful politically.
For openers, it’s doubly racist.
Hillary Swank plays Maggie an all but impoverished, uneducated white working-class waitress who wants to become a boxer. The movie starts in a gym where an older man Frankie, played by Clint Eastwood, is training a young black man who shows promise of becoming champion. Morgan Freeman plays the gym’s black custodian and former boxer.
Maggie wants to make some mark in life. She has a lot of heart but little talent. She tries to get Frankie to manage her, but he refuses, calling "girl boxing" a freak show. Predictably, first Morgan Freeman’s character and eventually Frankie get won over to her dream.
A local black fighter sadistically taunts both Maggie and an untalented and mentally retarded young white fighter nicked-named Danger. (Danger is first seen making "innocent" racist remarks to Freeman, who takes the comments with no complaint or observations, and eventually encourages him to keep getting his head punched in.)
Maggie’s first opponents are semi-talented white women, who she always beats in the first round. Maggie wheedles Frankie into getting her better fights. The better fighters are black or Latin. Becoming a major draw, now Maggie can get a title shot with the champion, who is black, from Germany. and famous for fighting dirty. For various reasons, Frankie holds out on signing the fight.
If the nasty fighter had been white, or her opponents black, the message here might have been different. As it stands, not only this one fighter but the female champion are terrible caricatures.
Here in the movie Morgan Freeman’s role is that of the "Uncle Tom," character, dramatically necessary here to cover up the movie’s inherent racist messages. Boxing’s no picnic, but the two black fighters, the young man and the female champion, are vicious almost beyond belief. And why is she black? She’s from Germany; it would be reasonable to have a blonde woman play her. But Eastwood & Co. chose a vicious black person for us to focus on.
A second aspect of the movie’s intentional anti-working class outlook is Maggie’s family background. Call them "rednecks" or "white trash," they’re mean, rotten people who seek to get as much from their daughter’s fighting as they can, while openly laughing at her. It might be argued they must be that bad to justify Maggie’s desperate need to succeed in a foul profession. Just remember, writers and directors choose how they portray bad guys. These aren’t real people we see on the street. So how about this alternative interpretation:
What if the family had been thrown into poverty by the millions of jobs destroyed by capitalism’s unlimited greed? If they had the same bad attitudes but also had some basis for them, wouldn’t they at the least be more interesting people? Instead, they are simply contemptible dirt.
Why should we see any relation between white and black poverty? Don’t expect rich Hollywood to make any basic criticisms of capitalism.
(B. Traven, in his classic book "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," portrayed nasty Mexican bandits — then spent page after page giving the reader the economic reasons for their manner. But when Hollywood made the book into the movie, they saw no need for us to understand these people as the victims they were. But capitalist culture seems to be able to scratch up sympathy for murderous exploiting rich characters.)
For years Eastwood and his movies have been called fascist, a charge he laughs at. A realistic examination of "Million Dollar Baby" should tell us fascism is no laughing matter.
CIA, Vatican Helped 5,000 Nazi Murderers Escape To Fight in Cold War
(Part III —The previous article showed how Nazi scientists under SS Major Wernher von Braun were recruited by U.S. rulers to work in their space program, leading to astronaut Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon.)
One of the most precious prizes obtained by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, predecessor of the CIA) was Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, one of Hitler’s chief intelligence officers. Five years after World War II had ended, Gehlen was still on the job. From a walled-in compound in Bavaria, he oversaw a vast network of intelligence agents spying on Russia. His top aides were among the most notorious Nazi war criminals. Gehlen and his SS unit were hired as CIA agents when they revealed their massive records on the Soviet Union to the U.S.
Gehlen derived much of his information from his role in one of the war’s most terrible atrocities: the interrogation, torture and murder by starvation of some four million Soviet prisoners. Prisoners who refused to cooperate were often tortured or summarily executed. Many were executed even after having given information, while others were simply left to starve to death. The Gehlen group members, knowing that if they were seized by the Red Army they would be summarily executed, maneuvered near the end of the war to be captured by advancing U.S. troops.
In 1945, two months before Germany surrendered, Gehlen and a small group of his most senior officers carefully microfilmed their vast holdings on the USSR, packed the film in watertight steel drums and secretly buried them in a remote mountain meadow in the Austrian Alps.
General William Donovan and Allen Dulles of the CIA were tipped off about Gehlen’s surrender and his offer of Russian intelligence in exchange for a job. The CIA was soon jockeying with military intelligence for authority over Gehlen’s microfilmed records—and control of the German spymaster. Dulles arranged for the establishment of a private intelligence facility in West Germany, naming it the Gehlen Organization.
Gehlen promised not to hire any former SS, SD, or Gestapo members, but he hired them anyway, and the CIA didn’t stop him. Two of Gehlen’s early recruits were Emil Augsburg and Dr. Franz Six, who had been part of mobile killing squads, which executed Jews, intellectuals and Soviet partisans wherever they were found. Other early recruits included Willi Krichbaum, senior Gestapo leader for southeastern Europe, and the Gestapo chiefs of Paris and Kiel, Germany.
With CIA encouragement, Gehlen’s group set up "rat lines" to evacuate Nazi war criminals from Europe to avoid prosecution. By establishing transit camps and issuing phony passports, the Gehlen group enabled more than 5,000 Nazis to relocate around the world, especially in South and Central America. There, mass murderers like Klaus Barbie (the butcher of Lyons, France) helped governments organize death squads in Chile, Argentina, El Salvador and elsewhere.
While the U.S. participated in the war crime tribunals of key Nazi officials and maintained an alliance with the Communist Soviet Union, secretly the U.S. was launching the cold war and needed the Nazis’ help in that eventual struggle.
The Nazis escaped justice for their war crimes not only with help from the OSS-CIA, but also from the Vatican through Lucio Gelli, a member of the fascist P2 Masonic Lodge. He was responsible for the murder and torture of hundreds of Yugoslav partisans. Gelli's agreement with U.S. intelligence to spy on the communists after the war helped save his life.
(Source: V2Rocket.com. Next: The concentration camps as death camps for surplus labor, and also as high-profit operations eventually operated by German companies while also reaping millions for Ford, GM, IBM, etc.)
| The CIA has finally begun talks about handing over documents to a Congressional panel on the recruitment of Nazi war criminals by the OSS/CIA. The panel has been trying since 1998 to obtain these documents. But even this doesn’t mean the CIA will turn over all of them. |
Imperialist Holocaust In Congo Massacred Millions
A statue of Belgian King Leopold II, erected in the heart of Congo’s capital city of Kinshasa, mysteriously disappeared the day after it appeared early this month, removed by the same workers who had installed it. Perhaps the anger of the city’s inhabitants over the fact that Leopold was responsible for the slaughter of ten to fifteen million men, women and children had something to do with it.
Leopold’s enslavement, kidnapping, rape and murder of half the country’s population, one of history’s most horrible holocausts, is perhaps the world’s least known examples of genocide. When the novelist Joseph Conrad journeyed up the Congo River, he described what he saw as "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." It all stemmed from the genocidal, exploitative nature of capitalism and imperialism.
In 1884, Leopold maneuvered to seize the Congo and make it his personal fiefdom, creating an immensely profitable business. In 1890, the demand for inflatable rubber tires for automobiles and bicycles created a huge market for natural rubber. It grew wild in the Congo. Retrieving it necessitated climbing high trees, cutting vines, collecting the sap and bringing it back to a central location. Workers had to be forced to stay in the forests "for days at a time to do work that was…arduous — and physically painful." ("King Leopold’s Ghost," by Adam Hochschild, 1999)
Leopold’s "solution"? A militarized system of terror, taking women and children as hostages, releasing them only if men brought back their quotas of wild rubber. Resisters had their hands, ears, noses, breasts, and heads chopped off, killing them along with their families. Leopold established a slave labor regime: if a village failed to meet its quota of rubber, all adult males, women and children were executed.
From 1897 to 1900, 3,000 Congolese soldiers revolted, uniting across all ethnic lines to fight the colonialists (who had organized a Congolese army to enforce Leopold’s "laws").
A worldwide movement developed protesting Leopold’s holocaust. Mark Twain was a leader of its U.S. branch. He charged that Leopold was the slayer of 15 million Congolese, labeling him "greedy, grasping, avaricious, cynical, bloodthirsty…"
An Englishman, E. D. Morel, organized the Congo Reform Association, backed by Liverpool businessmen who opposed Leopold because he had kept British capitalists out of his Belgian colony.
Once the Belgians had exhausted wild rubber supplies, they began cultivating it on plantations, using forced labor. Copper, gold and tin mining were developed. Miners were routinely whipped. "Safety conditions in the mines were abysmal." (Hochschild) Thousands of workers died every year. "More than 80 percent of the uranium in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki [atomic] bombs came from the heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkilobwe."
Eventually exposure of the holocaust forced Leopold out — but only after he had amassed a huge personal fortune. He died in 1909. During his rule, Congo’s population declined from 20 to 30 million to nine million. Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes stories, labeled it "the greatest crime in all history." Soon the U.S. and Britain developed vast investments there, in copper, cobalt, diamonds, gold, tin, manganese and zinc, sucking huge profits from this super-exploitation. In 1960, Belgium was forced to grant independence to the Congo. An anti-colonialist — Patrice Lumumba — was elected the country’s first president, hoping to reduce this imperialist carnage. Nearly immediately the U.S. had him assassinated. When Hochschild was visiting the Congo as a student, "A drunken CIA agent was boasting how they had organized the murder of Patrice Lumumba." (London Financial Times, 4/4/99) They then installed a loyal puppet, Joseph Mobutu, who had served in the Belgian’s colonial army. He ruled on behalf of U.S. imperialists for 35 years, amassing a fortune of $4 billion while poverty ravages the population. When the Cold War ended, the U.S. interest in Mobutu waned, but the French developed ties with him. Since then U.S. and French capitalists have vied for control of the Congo, supporting one or another of neighboring African rulers’ armies that have been warring over the country’s rich natural resources. The UN reports 3 to 3.5 million people have died since 1998 because of the conflict in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Global capitalism/imperialism is the source of racist genocide and exploitation in Africa. It cannot be reformed because the drive for maximum profits, the intense competition for control over raw materials, markets, and cheap labor is inherent in the capitalist system. The working class of Africa is paying for the absence of a communist movement to organize a fight against all imperialists and their local henchmen. Join PLP to build a new revolutionary international communist movement and end this imperialist hell.
Thousands Protest Lack of Affordable Housing in NYC
NEW YORK CITY, Feb. 2 —Today this city saw its largest demonstration for public and low-income housing in decades, encompassing a multi-racial, multi-generational crowd of around 8,000 people. Many were angry over the city’s inadequate supply of public housing; no new housing projects have been constructed in years. A large section of the protestors marched across the Brooklyn Bridge and joined others at the City Hall rallying point.
The demonstration differed with past actions in its demands and grassroots character. It included block associations and neighborhood, tenant and ethnic groups, with an especially large Asian participation as well as large black, Latino and white contingents, rather than primarily people affiliated with tenant organizations. Their average age was much younger than in previous protests.
Even though the speakers were controlled by right-wing union leaders, the protesters were not. They didn’t limit their demands to merely strengthening existing regulations — greatly weakened over the past ten years — but called for changes in the whole course of the city’s housing construction and renovation, advocating a primary emphasis on increasing affordable housing for working people, opposing the erection of just luxury housing.
Not surprisingly, many of the reformist union leaders and community activists who addressed the crowd did little to link the crisis of affordable housing to either racism or to the war in Iraq that costs tens of billions. Firstly, this crisis has a very racist character, since black, Latin and Asian workers’ wages are the lowest in the population; therefore, a greater proportion of their earnings is spent on rent. Secondly, the war budget has increasingly affected this city — reducing federal monies to the State and City — forcing cutbacks in public education, rising tuition in the public colleges (CUNY) and attacks on professors’ contracts.
Still, speakers advocated voting their way out of society’s problems, showing their loyalty to the Democrats. Yet Democrats in Washington have consistently voted for Bush’s war budget.
However, the Progressive Labor Party spread the view that elections can’t fix capitalism, a system that has always created wars for profit, and will always use the working class to pay for and fight such wars. One young woman who took a copy of CHALLENGE responded, "Hell, yeah, we need revolution! Communism sounds good to me." A system based on the needs of the working class, where not only housing but education, healthcare and power itself are guaranteed to all, is something many think is worth fighting for.
LETTERS
Russian Free Market Spawns Nazi Skinheads
The CHALLENGE article (2/16) on the Red Army liberation of Auschwitz 60 years ago contrasts sadly with the rise of neo-Nazis in Russia. There have been many racist attacks there by skinhead gangs. On Feb. 6, 2004, skinheads armed with knives and bats murdered a nine-year-old Tajik girl in St Petersburg. She was stabbed 11 times. Shortly afterwards, an Afghan man died in a Moscow hospital, a week after being beaten by a gang of skinheads. Abdul Wasi was attacked with bottles and metal bars as he walked home. Mr Abdul, who leaves a three-month-old daughter and a Russian wife, remained in a coma for a week before dying of a brain hemorrhage.
The attacks are continuing. Skinheads severely beat a pregnant woman from India in the Arbat district. She lost her baby. Skinheads also beat a black U.S. Marine assigned to the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Forty-four people were killed in Russia in 2004 in racist incidents.
There are up to 80,000 skinheads throughout Russia, almost as many as in the U.S., Britain and Germany. Many are linked to fascist parties like the Russian National Alliance or the Freedom Party. Many skinheads also have their own gangs, like The Russian Fist of St. Petersburg, with some 400 members. They’re also being trained by KKK members from the U.S. or Nazis from Germany, who enter Russia.
Why do such groups flourish in the land that suffered so much from the Nazis during World War 2? There were fascists and racists in the former Soviet Union, but they were kept in check. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, these groups emerged.
Vladimir Simonov (of the RIA NOVOSTI news agency) wrote the following (reprinted in ARGENPRESS.info, 2/8/2005):
"The sudden change from a centralized to a market economy…caused a serious economic recession, and millions lost their jobs.…Four million children and teenagers were left homeless, just 30% less than during the years of the bloody civil war of 1918-21.
"These ‘children of the reforms’ were left confused, open to any primitive calls to violence. Youth gangs were formed fearing anything ‘foreign,’ particularly people of different skin color. Meanwhile, the new free market theorists in essence rehabilitated Nazism. Textbooks were written without mentioning the great victory of the Red Army, even saying this victory ‘put a brake to the economic progress of Russia’ and allowed the Soviets to ‘subjugate the peoples of Eastern Europe.’ If the Red Army had been defeated, Russians would have tasted Bavarian beer decades before, according to the teachings of the free marketers. Cheap copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Mussolini’s Doctrine of Fascism were sold openly in the streets, while anti-fascist books were hardly available, considered too ‘leftist.’ According to sociologist Alexander Tarasov, an expert on youth problems, including the skinheads, these textbooks are a basic source of information for students, so a good number of them have reached the conclusion that ‘Hitler was better than Stalin,’ and that ‘Hitler was right.’"
PLP is more than correct when it says the collapse of the old communist movement was a huge defeat for workers worldwide. It’s time we redouble our efforts to build a new international revolutionary movement, avoiding the mistakes of the old one, to free humanity once and for all from the scourge of fascism and its creator, capitalism.
Red Anti-Nazi
P.S.: The new "social reforms" imposed by Putin, cutting many services (like free public transportation) for retirees, have been met by a wave of protests across Russia. They’re the first mass working-class protests since the miners took to the streets in 1998. Retirees are angry because the "reform’s" monetary compensation — covering only 18 trips a month — falls far short of what they’ve had. Many retirees must work to supplement lousy pensions. These 18 trips only cover nine days.
These kinds of protests need left political leadership, not the kind offered by the old totally pro-capitalist CP, but a real communist one. That’s the only way to counter the growth of fascist skinheads and massive government cut-backs.
Berlin Workers Still Honor Red Army
On a recent trip to Germany heading to Berlin, some local revolutionary activists kindly showed me some important historical sites. Despite what I thought I knew about history, what I saw surprised me. The U.S. media and schools spread the lie that the Soviet socialist revolution was a total failure that supposedly oppressed the people of Europe. But it’s clear that many working-class people there understand and appreciate the revolution’s valuable accomplishments despite its ultimate collapse. This is true even in Berlin, where the Berlin Wall supposedly "proved that communism is bad."
There’s a plaza in the center of the city dedicated to Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels. In addition to statues, there are beautiful metal pillars with etched-in scenes showing workers in struggle, including the Vietnamese defeat of the U.S. invasion.
Elsewhere there’s a large beautiful park, the same one where earlier communist revolutionaries such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Leibknecht gave speeches 90 years ago. After World War II, the park was re-dedicated in honor and appreciation of the Soviet Red Army for its role in freeing Germany, and the rest of Europe from the Nazis. At one end is a beautiful, huge statue of a Soviet soldier with a child on one arm and a sword in the other, smashing a Nazi. At its base is a small room with a mural depicting scenes from the war. There’s an almost identical statue in Russia, solidifying the ties of friendship expressed after the war between the German and Soviet working classes. Outside are twenty large monuments, ten on each side, each one displaying a picture and a quote from Stalin about the war, discussing the tasks and the progress of the struggle to smash the Nazis. Ten of the monuments have quotes in German, the other ten, with matching pictures, have quotes in Russian.
Now it’s true that German capitalists and so-called moderate "socialists" would like to hide the accomplishments of the communist movement, but as one activist told me: "The feelings among the working class are so strong that the government would not DARE to close down or even neglect these parks!"
Most importantly I gained a deeper understanding of the spectacular successes of the Soviet Revolution, despite its ultimate demise. Even after 50 years of Cold War, millions of Europeans understand the significance of the Soviet Revolution and the struggle against capitalism. Tens of thousands, including thousands of Turkish immigrants, marched on May Day in Berlin, and hundreds of thousands marched around the world.
One important way capitalism controls our minds is by limiting our information and therefore our vision of an anti-capitalist, pro-communist understanding of the world. Schools in the U.S. and worldwide, intentionally hide this knowledge, creating cynicism and defeatism within the working class. Many young workers and students are angry at capitalism’s abuses — economic hardship, intense racist oppression and war.
But it’s not enough to just feel anger. We, especially our young workers and students, must study and learn the lessons of the past, not simply because they’re good stories, but because they open our minds to the realities of the power of the working class and the possibilities of creating a new communist world.
Red Traveler
Opposing Recruiters Is No Game
Ben, a teacher friend and member of my church, was talking to me about military recruiters at his high school. He said students there seemed barely aware of them. Then he related an interesting story.
Four years ago, Scott (who Ben says is a communist), came to Ben’s school to do research for his graduate thesis. He got to know the students pretty well. One of them, Clyde, had recently spoken to the recruiters and was about to enlist in the Marines. The only thing left was signing the papers. Scott had been a Marine himself for six years, serving a tour in Vietnam. He wished he’d never joined. He and Ben tried hard to persuade Clyde not to enlist.
Finally, after failing to convince him, Scott and Ben challenged Clyde and his buddy to a "2-on-2" basketball game to settle it. If Ben and Scott won, Clyde would agree not to sign up. But if Clyde and his friend won, he wouldn’t hear any more static about not joining.
The next day, they were out on the court. All four played as if it were a matter of life and death. It came down to the final point, see-sawing back and forth for what seemed like forever. Finally, Clyde sank one from the far corner — a three-pointer. It was all over. There would be no more static. Clyde signed his papers a few days later, and shortly afterwards left for training camp.
For over a year Ben heard nothing from Clyde. Then, around last Christmas Ben heard from Clyde, calling from a Marine base somewhere in the U.S. Clyde told Ben joining the Marines had been a big mistake. "You know, Mr. Lewis," Clyde said, "I think about that game every day. If only I’d missed that shot ….."
Ben said that Clyde hasn’t been to Iraq yet. But we’re wondering how long it’ll be before he ships out. Meanwhile, the recruiters are still in the school, and there’s been no effort yet to get them out. We’re discussing it. We need to ask people at the church; they may have some ideas.
Old-time Red
Building Worker-Soldier-Student Alliance
After several weeks of pushing for the need to build a student-worker-soldier alliance, my campus group agreed to support a trip to a local factory and reach out to workers there. So several weeks ago, six of us arose at 5:00 a.m. on a Saturday and traveled to the plant to talk to the workers. We distributed a leaflet containing workers’ letters describing conditions they face as well as their frustration with having relatives in the military fighting a war that’s obviously not in their interest — actually an imperialist war for control of Iraqi oil.
Afterwards we talked over breakfast about the significance of building an anti-imperialist, anti-fascist movement, how the only serious way to do this is by uniting workers, students and soldiers. We also discussed why PLP fights for communism.
One student asked, "Do you guys really think communism works?" Another replied, "The reason it’s so hard to envision a communist society is because we have grown up and been educated in a selfish, capitalist society."
One young woman was so enthusiastic about that morning’s experience, she asked me to speak about it at an anti-war rally she was helping to organize the following week. I agreed and invited a friend from my campus group to work with me on a speech calling for a worker-student-soldier alliance and for communism.
At the rally the crowd applauded our conviction that the only way to end imperialism and fascism was to fight for communism. But the organizers didn’t seem too happy about that. However, several days later my friend who helped organize the rally told me she really respected the Party for taking a strong stance against imperialism and calling for communism. She also asked when the next factory trip would take place.
This recent series of events have shown me that students and the working class in general are increasingly tired of war and fascism and more open to PLP’s revolutionary communist ideas. Furthermore, it has become increasingly clear that the anti-war movement’s reformist leadership is incapable of truly explaining the nature of war and fascism and how to fight it.
The ball is in our court; it’s time to take the offensive, and fight for the Party’s line. We must be bold and assertive; we can only grow, and where we fail, learn how to grow.
West coast college youth
PLP Classic Songs on One CD
The 1970’s PLP LP’s "Power to the Workers" and "A World to Win" are now available on one CD. It includes songs by the PLP Singers — in English and Spanish — such as: "Unemployment Blues"; "Challenge, the Communist Paper"; "Bella Ciao"; "Se�or Inversionista"; "Every Time I see a Cop, I think of Clifford Glover"; "The Song of the Deportees"; "The Internationale" and many more.
Rekindle old memories and live new ones. Send $10 payable to Challenge Periodicals,
Rand mail to PLP, Box 808, GPO, Brooklyn, NY 11202
RED EYE ON THE NEWS
US gets noble when there’s oil
…No nation is capable of sustaining a long war on the basis of idealism. War is so costly, both in resources and lives, that it can only be sustained when a nation’s direct interest… is at stake….
It’s no accident, for example, that our government’s interest is bringing democracy to other countries seems to rise in direct proportion to how much oil lies beneath their territory. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 1/27)
Tyrant? Play ball, you’re OK
Rice offered a little more information naming six countries as "outposts of tyranny"…Cuba, Myanmar, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Zimbabwe….She could just as easily have snapped off the names of six of our allies — Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia, Kuwait, Uzbekistan and Egypt….
The fact is, however, that when totalitarian nations…play ball with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. (Creators Syndicate, 1/20)
Bosses super-exploit immigrants
…Because the basic job of the line is cutting flesh — hard, manual labor — the dangers are very high for meat workers….Meatpackers, driven by the brutal economies of the industry, always try to hire the cheapest labor they can find. That increasingly means immigrants whose language difficulties compound the risks of the job. The result, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch, is "extraordinarily high rates of injury" in conditions that systematically violate human rights.
In fact, the report finds, some major players in the American meat industry prey upon a large population of immigrant workers who are either ignorant of their fundamental rights or are undocumented aliens who are afraid of calling attention to themselves. As a result, those workers often receive little or no compensation for injuries, and any attempt to organize is met with hostility.
The industry has little incentive to improve conditions… (NYT, 2/6)
Gov’t outsources torture
The title of Ms. Mayer’s [New Yorker] article is "Outsourcing torture." It’s a detailed account of the frightening and extremely secretive U.S. program known as "extraordinary rendition."
.…Extraordinary rendition is the name that’s been given to the policy of seizing individuals without even the semblance of due process and sending them off to be interrogated by regimes known to practice torture. In terms of bad behavior, it stands side by side with contract killings.
Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are torturing terror suspects at behest of…the United States…. (NYT, 2/11)
New era betrays Iraqi women
…This is supposed to be one in a series of pioneering public meetings to address the growing inequalities of women in the new Iraq. A year ago, in the weeks after the invasion, hundreds of women marched in the streets outside this hotel in central Baghdad. The women were optimistic, most walked without veils and they made forceful speeches in front of the TV cameras.
Those days of mass protest are over. Today there are barely a dozen women present. Half are veiled and most have come with male relatives or colleagues for protection. It is a quiet indictment of the occupation and underscores the astonishing collapse in security, particularly for women, that it has brought.
The few women there describe how things have changed for them since the fall of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent rise in Islamic parties. Many more cover their hair now, sometimes in belief, often through peer-group pressure or simply to protect themselves in anonymity. (GW, 2/10)
US: Sickness often means mass ruin
Hundreds of thousands of Americans file for personal bankruptcy each year because of medical bills — even though they have health insurance….
Many lost their jobs — and their insurance — because they got sick, while others faced thousands of dollars in co-payments and deductibles and for services not covered by their insurance.
…One….respondent to the survey was able to pay for hospital stays for lung surgery and a heart attack but could not return to his old job. When he found a new job, he was denied coverage because of his pre-existing conditions….
…The high cost of continuing coverage under Cobra, the federal rule that allows former employees to stay on health plans for a time if they pay the entire cost, "is a cruel joke to these people,"….
"If you’re sick enough long enough, you’re in deep trouble in our society"… (NYT, 2/2)
Sell killer as long as you can
Celebrex, the popular arthritis and pain medicine from Pfizer, sustained another blow yesterday when the company acknowledged that a 1999 clinical trial found that elderly patients taking the drug were far more likely to suffer heart problems than patients taking a placebo….
…The study was never published… (NYT, 2/1)
Not so gung-ho on Iraq
Cadets don’t have to study the opinion polls to know they’re heading off to an unpopular war. Applications to the military academies are down substantially. (NYT, 2/9)
Torture orders came from the top
…At Abu Ghraib prison…the….problem was confined,…the Bush administration has asserted, to a few soldiers acting on their own.
"The Torture Papers," the new compendium of government memos and reports chronicling the road to Abu Ghraib and its aftermath, definitively blows such arguments to pieces…[A]damning paper trail … reveals…the roots that those terrible images has in decisions made at the highest levels… (NYT, 2/8)
Elections Will Not End Imperialist Butchery
PLP Youth Bring Communist Politics To Counter-Inauguration Protest
a href="#NYC and Newark: Demonstrate Against War, Back Defiant GI’s">"YC and Newark: Demonstrate Against War, Back Defiant GI’s
Remember the 1967 Vietnam Election?
a href="#No Such Thing As ‘Humanitarian’ Imperialist War Machine">No"Such Thing As ‘Humanitarian’ Imperialist War Machine
a href="#International Unity Needed to Fight Ford’s Wage-Cutting">"nternational Unity Needed to Fight Ford’s Wage-Cutting
a href="#Colombia Teachers Confront Fascist Uribe Gov’t, Harvard Union-Busters">"olombia Teachers Confront Fascist Uribe Gov’t, Harvard Union-Busters
a href="#Airline-Court-Banker Gang-up Squeezes United’s Workers">"irline-Court-Banker Gang-up Squeezes United’s Workers
Garment Workers Gear Up for Stoppage to Defend Fired Militant
Hospital Workers Confront Bosses Over Low-Wage Hires
Bush & Co. Use Racism to Push Social Security Privatization
Liberal Politicians Are Also Warmakers
a href="#Harvard President’s Sexist ‘Theory’">Harv"rd President’s Sexist ‘Theory’
Nazi Death Camp Experiments Led to U. S. Space Program
From Ford to Jim Crow to Auschwitz
LETTERS
Opposing U.S. Death Squad Base
a href="#HiP HOP: Imperialist Weapon in Paraguay""HiP HOP: Imperialist Weapon in Paraguay
Editorial Needs More Specific Facts
Challenge And PLP Need Your Support
- US brought ‘tsunami’ to Iraq
- Civilian deaths make vet rebel
- GIs quiet, but want to go home
- US Prison abuse ‘everywhere’
- Wonderful democratic choices!
- Nazis best pals for CIA
- India: women rebel against rape
- Democrats: doormat for fascism
- No freedom for Al-Jazeera TV
U.S. Bosses View Iraq As A Military Base With A Very Large Oil Reserve:
Elections Will Not End Imperialist Butchery
The January 30th Iraq elections have been hailed as a "victory" for the U.S. war strategy. We’re shown entire Iraqi families voting "to defy terrorism." Well, indeed, many Iraqis did vote — mainly Shiites ordered by their religious leaders and Kurds wishing some kind of autonomy and control of Kirkuk’s oil fields on their territory (possibly provoking a Turkish incursion) . But the fact remains that capitalist elections are a farce in general. In Iraq, they’re even more of a farce, occurring amid an insurgency, occupation and daily U.S./UK air bombardments more devastating than those during Operation Shock and Awe.
U.S. bosses want these elections to justify their war and occupation of Iraq but, "Despite the exhilaration, the election may do little to win international support, assure a friendly government in Baghdad or prevent the spread of civil strife…." says the LA Times (1/31). "Even with international blessings, the balloting is unlikely to persuade balky European and Arab powers to do much more on the ground to support the U.S. effort, diplomats said…. On the eve of the vote, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin reiterated France’s support for the removal of all foreign troops from Iraq, and two former British foreign ministers, Douglas Hurd and Robin Cook, urged withdrawals of U.S. and British forces. Last week, Sen. Edward Kennedy said U.S. troops should begin an immediate, phased withdrawal."
Many Shiites voted not only because of orders from Al-Sistani, their religious leader, but also for ending the occupation and the strife affecting their daily lives. The best interest of the Iraqi people is not what the U.S. bosses have in mind: "…the U.S. project in Iraq has never been about democracy. It’s been about getting control of Iraq’s vast, virtually untouched oil reserves, and extending Washington’s military reach over the region. ‘Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath; you can’t ask for better than that,’ Wall Street oil analyst Fadel Gheit told" the Toronto Star’s Linda McQuaig (1/30).
To control that oil, U.S. bosses are spilling tons of blood, including over 1,400 U.S. soldiers’ deaths, as well as thousands of Iraqis, many of them innocent civilians. Under pressure, BBC’s Panorama program retracted a January 30th report that in the last six months more than 2,000 civilians were killed outright by the occupation forces and their Iraqi stooges, while the insurgents accounted for 1,200 deaths. The figures, collected from public hospitals, exclude deaths of insurgents.However, the real totals are far worse, as reported by the British medical society’s magazine "Lancet"which estimated that since the beginning of the war civilian deaths could be as high as 100, 000, considering the complete breakdown of Iraq’s medical system and resulting spread of disease.
In a January 30 speech, New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh reported that the U.S. is "systematically bombing [Iraq]….There’s no air defense. It’s simply a turkey shoot…. To carry out an election…bombing is key…. Iraq is being turned into a "Free-Fire Zone…. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner….
"I called him…and he picked up the phone and he said, ‘Welcome to Stalingrad.’"
The hype by U.S. rulers and the embedded U.S. media about the elections being a "turning point" recalls the same stuff when Saddam’s statue was toppled (staged by the Army Psy-Op branch); when Bush landed on the Lincoln aircraft carrier, proclaiming in a banner "Mission Accomplished"; and when Saddam was captured. The war will continue and may spread to Iran if the Iranian rulers use their influence over Iraq’s Shiites to become the real winners of the January 30th farce.
Sixty years ago Iraqi workers and youth were united in the fight against the king and British imperialism. The old Communist Party was one of the largest political forces in the ‘40s and ‘50s,including Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Turkomans, Moslems, Christians and Jews. On May Day 1959, one million people marched under the red flags of the Iraqi CP. But the old communist movement’s error of uniting with "progressive bosses" (like the Baath Party) led to the defeat of the working class. Today, the ICP is part of the U.S.-led Provisional Government. Workers and their allies in Iraq need a new communist movement, to fight all the bosses, fundamentalist reactionaries and imperialism.
PLP Youth Bring Communist Politics To Counter-Inauguration Protest
WASHINGTON, D.C., Jan. 20 — Armed with revolutionary communist politics a group of young PLP’ers and friends, mostly in our early and mid-twenties, gathered with thousands of students and workers to protest the 2nd Bush inauguration. Our presence was important, given that many people we knew seem disorientated after the election, having put all their hopes into defeating Bush.
At the pre-march rally we sold several hundred CHALLENGES and our popular "It’s-not-just-Bush-it’s-Capitalism" buttons. Our main banner, "We Need Communist Revolution, Not Liberal Politicians" and our poster containing the Bertolt Brecht poem telling the general, "man has one defect: he can think," attracted many people searching for a different analysis than the "anybody-but-Bush" line they’ve been hearing. We noticed many people at the march wearing our buttons and responding positively to our chants denouncing imperialism, Democrats, Republicans and the whole capitalist system. Some of our friends who led militant chants were pleased at the positive reception from the marchers.
Approaching the White House — with no one really chanting — the march resembled some sort of parade. The anger present at the first inauguration march was missing. Our contingent took a break to discuss this mood and then re-joined the protesters at the White House rally. Barricades, armed guards and visible snipers, plus a booming announcer from a nearby loudspeaker recalled a Nazi armed camp. Getting a spot on the parade route required waiting in long lines and passing numerous security checks. Scuffles erupted between protestors and fur-clad Bush supporters as they passed by in their cowboy hats. Given this less-than-ideal atmosphere at the White House, and seeing the lack of "real people" there, we encouraged some people around us to rally in a working-class neighborhood. A group of teenagers left with us.
Though the neighborhood wasn’t busy at that time, we did sell CHALLENGE and had meaningful conversations with workers. One friend contrasted the reception of the protestors during the march and that of these workers, remarking, "In the community…people were even more receptive to our revolutionary communist ideas." We heard that a transit worker and regular CHALLENGE reader later told a comrade he was happy to see us in the neighborhood as he drove his bus on his route that afternoon.
‘Not left enough to be right…’
Later we gathered at one comrade’s house for dinner and an evaluation of the day’s activities, provoking some important struggle and understanding, especially for the friends we had brought. Some were disappointed in the march’s size: "I thought there would be more people [protesting]. This is Washington, D.C., right?" Another friend complained that the rally lacked unity. We explained that we were offering workers and students a real political program to unite around. Ultimately he agreed. "There were a lot of leftists there, but they weren’t left enough to be right!....It’s important to fight capitalism."
The only way to prepare for this fight is to build PLP, the revolutionary communist organization of the world’s workers. That means developing close ties to workers and youth and reaching out to masses of workers both through agitation and participation in their mass organizations.
Marches like this one enabled our base to help deliver our message to the workers of Washington by leading chants, selling CHALLENGE and offering suggestions for our plan for the day. They moved closer to PLP as they realized they were helping build awareness of an alternative road for humanity besides capitalism — communism!
We will develop closer ties with our new friends through a bi-weekly study group and more political struggle among the masses. Our first priority will be a trip to an armory to talk to soldiers about the pivotal role they can play in defeating U.S imperialism.
a name="NYC and Newark: Demonstrate Against War, Back Defiant GI’s">">"YC and Newark: Demonstrate Against War, Back Defiant GI’s
NEW YORK CITY, Jan. 20 — A coalition of neighborhood and church groups, including teachers and students, held a spirited counter-inauguration demonstration today in Union Square. With signs and chants, we called for U.S. imperialism to get out of Iraq and for support of soldiers who refused the brass’s orders in Iraq. Despite the bitter cold, many people joined our chants, engaged in conversations and gave their names for future events. Although participants felt the event was positive, in discussing it afterward we agreed that we should have struggled harder to get more people out.
NEWARK, NJ, Jan. 20 — On this inauguration day, one local peace group and the Green Party announced that an anti-war motorcade would travel through towns in the Newark area, ending with a mass rally at the federal building here. Although the motorcade took place, the organizers didn’t hold the rally.
Despite this, and the cold weather, about 20 strong-willed people carrying signs picketed for about an hour. Chants of "1-2-3-4, We won’t fight your oil war; 5-6-7-8, We don’t want your fascist state"; and, "Support soldiers who resist, U.S. out of Iraq" were picked up by the crowd. These and other militant chants competed with pacifist songs sung by a few of the marchers. A number of the young people who participated were very open to the politics behind our ideas.
Remember the 1967 Vietnam Election?
In 1967, the White House and the media hailed the South Vietnam elections as a turning point in that war, just like they are doing in Iraq. The Vietnam War continued until 1975 when the U.S. was militarily defeated.
(From The New York Times, Sept. 4, 1967)
‘U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote’
"United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election…. According to reports from Saigon, 83 percent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong….
"A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.
"The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays…."
a name="No Such Thing As ‘Humanitarian’ Imperialist War Machine"></">No"Such Thing As ‘Humanitarian’ Imperialist War Machine
In December, the Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. imperialism’s top think-tank, appointed Columbia University professor Robert Shapiro "to research the social and political attitudes of soldiers and officers in the U.S. Army." This move reflects the rulers’ ongoing effort to win military cadre to their liberal, imperialist ideology.
The ruling class has long worried that an increasingly conservative officer corps might someday not follow its masters. In 1992, Colin Powell, then the Establishment’s darling, awarded first prize in the National Defense University’s strategic essay competition to Lt. Col. Charles Dunlap for his "Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012." The rulers’ media renewed the warning following the growth of right-wing militias and the anti-government Oklahoma bombing by ex-GI’s.
In 1997, Wall Street Journal reporter Thomas Ricks’ book, "Making the Corps," depicted the U.S. Marines "veering so far to the political Right and nursing such a deep contempt for American society that one military analyst concludes, ‘The next real war we fight is likely to be on American soil.’" (Chicago Tribune, 12/14/97) Newsday columnist Robert Reno (11/23/97) added, "It’s not just the Marines who reflect a far-right culture. If present trends in all the services continue, we will have an all-Republican officer corps by 2005."
The rulers have tried mightily to thwart these prophecies. Throughout the ’90s, they replaced the heads of the main officer training academies with liberals, who hypocritically championed women’s rights. In 1991, Gen. Howard Graves became superintendent at West Point. Graves had been Powell’s personal assistant and a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Fresh from heading the Army’s War College, where he instructed future invaders of Iraq in the arts of mass murder, Graves punished some West Point football players for harassing female cadets. Graves later headed Texas A&M, home to the nation’s biggest ROTC contingent. He steered its 3,000 cadets on an imperialist course, establishing a joint research program with the CIA.
In 1996, Gen. Josiah Bunting, oversaw the Supreme Court-mandated admission of women to the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), another major supplier of young officers. Bunting has an impeccable Establishment pedigree. (He once ran the posh Lawrenceville School near Princeton.) Bunting helped transform VMI into a private institution governed by a board of ruling-class trustees. It had long been part of the state university system, under the thumb of a provincial Virginia legislature. In his 1998 book, "An Education for Our Time," Bunting, calling for "enlightened warriors," urged that private, liberal colleges take over the bulk of officer training from the traditional military schools.
But memories of campus rebellions in the ’60s and ’70s, led largely by PLP, make universities balk at fully adopting the rulers’ militarist agenda. Liberal scribe E.J. Dionne, who writes for the Washington Post and is Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution (another Establishment policy foundry), recently blasted colleges’ demands for the right to bar the military. "The idea of keeping recruiters away from elite universities is a large mistake — for the military, for our country and for liberalism itself. The growing separation between the military and many parts of our society, especially its most liberal and elite parts, is a huge problem. Closing that divide should be one of liberalism’s highest priorities. It should be a high priority for the military, too." (WP, 12/4/04) Dionne stresses the need for liberal ideology in the officer class. "Liberals especially should be worried about the growing divide between the armed forces and many parts of our society. They should acknowledge that if liberals stay out of the military, their chances of influencing the military culture are reduced to close to zero."
The rulers need liberal officers who can convince troops that U.S. imperialism "betters humanity" as it kills for capitalists’ profits. PLP has always stood for GI’s organizing for communism and rebelling against all the brass, whether they’re Klansmen or Ivy Leaguers.
a name="International Unity Needed to Fight Ford’s Wage-Cutting">">"nternational Unity Needed to Fight Ford’s Wage-Cutting
MEXICO CITY, Jan. 28 — Ford is planning to close its Wixom, Michigan, assembly plant, sacking hundreds of workers, while simultaneously opening a new line in its Hermosillo plant here. The latter will build Ford’s Fusion, competing with Toyota’s Camry sedan, the best-selling car in the U.S. market. Hermosillo’s Ford workers make $4 an hour, which can’t feed a family of four in this locale. Michigan Ford workers earn six times that.
Ford is trying to re-gain its No. 2 spot among the world’s automakers (taken over by Toyota). This plan includes lowering its labor cost. In its Cuautitlan plant near here, Ford replaced 3,000 workers earning $5 an hour with subcontracted workers earning $2 an hour. Bosses destroy the standard of living of workers from Michigan to Cuautitlan.
Ford claims that to compete with Toyota, its only alternative is to lower labor costs. All auto bosses are doing the same. This need to constantly slash workers’ wages is built into capitalism. It directly opposes the need of workers on both sides of the border to fight for a decent life.
Ford’s Board of Directors controls the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers in Mexico, Brazil, the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia, forcing workers in these plants to compete against each other for jobs. On January 2 in Dearborn, Michigan, UAW hacks led a "protest" against Ford moving more production to Mexico. These hacks are pushing workers to support nationalism and Ford’s plan for workers to fight other workers. This divides and weakens all Ford workers. Union misleaders have proven again to be the bosses’ best servants in getting workers to accept this onslaught.
Contrary to these nationalist divisions, communists organize for the international unity of all workers, including a worldwide strike, to fight plant closings, mass layoffs and all bosses’ attacks. Amid another round of fascism and endless wars, capitalism worldwide wants workers to pay with our lives and jobs for their crisis. Workers must not see ourselves as Ford, GM or Toyota or as Mexican, U.S., Brazilian, Canadian, South African or British employees. We are one international working class fighting a common enemy. Only by following that idea can we defeat these attacks and move to eliminate all auto bosses in a fight for workers’ power — for a society based on production for need, not for a few profiteers.
a name="Colombia Teachers Confront Fascist Uribe Gov’t, Harvard Union-Busters">">"olombia Teachers Confront Fascist Uribe Gov’t, Harvard Union-Busters
BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — On Jan. 15-16, President Uribe’s right-wing government and his minister of Education Maria Velez held exams to hire new teachers. The teachers union (FECODE) organized protests in several cities opposing these exams because they aim to replace union teachers. Anti-riot cops brutally attacked the demonstrators with tear gas and rubber bullets, killing one and injuring many more; 130 were arrested.
Undercover cops took pictures for use against those arrested, and to threaten teachers daring to mount future protests. The cops even exploded pipe bombs and blamed the teachers.
In 2000, Alberto Alasina, linked to Harvard Univ., proposed an "education reform," basically to break FECODE. Teachers and public employees in Colombia are among the better paid in Latin America. The Harvard-linked report proposed eliminating national wage standards, having each city set them. The government is also demanding that teachers pay 100% towards their pensions, four times their current contribution.
The Uribe government wants to use this plan — backed by the IMF and World Bank — to lower wages, making workers pay for capitalism’s crisis and for the war Colombia’s bosses are waging against the guerrilla movement here. While claiming these exams are to hire new teachers, Uribe has promised to cut 105,000 teaching jobs, claiming there are "too many teachers" (meaning unionized and better-paid). In fact, more teachers are needed; just look at the TV news showing how many parents and other non-teachers are volunteering in the countryside and poor neighborhoods to teach children to read and write.
FECODE is Colombia’s only remaining large union. From the 1960s to the ’80s, it was very active and militant. Teachers were jailed and killed while fighting for and winning many reforms. Today, they’re fighting for their union’s survival, facing the government and death squads. But FECODE’s executive board has limited the struggle in Bogota to pacifist marches and rallies to hear anti-Uribe capitalist politicians. FECODE has become increasingly an electoral front for liberal and fake-leftist politicians (Duzan, Avellaneda, Robledo, Borja, Navarro). They offer no real answer to the attacks of a capitalist system immersed in wars and fascism.
PLP members are actively involved in these struggles, along with students in many neighborhood schools, and their parents. We’ve participated in the FECODE marches, bringing our communist politics to workers and students.
Workers must learn from what happened to unions like Telecom, Bavaria Brewery, BCH and others whose leaders followed an electoral-legal-pacifist road: today they don’t exist as unions. Electoral politics are the most dangerous because workers are squeezed into following the bosses’ game plan, a lose-lose proposition. PLP is fighting to become a real revolutionary alternative to this dead-end road, using CHALLENGE-DESAFIO as our political road map.
a name="Airline-Court-Banker Gang-up Squeezes United’s Workers">">"irline-Court-Banker Gang-up Squeezes United’s Workers
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 2 — "A lot of people are saying enough is enough. We’re ready to strike," declared Richard Turk of the mechanics/cleaners union Local 6 here, reacting to United Airlines’ latest effort seeking give-backs of $1.364 billion annually, or a total of nearly $7 billion over the next five years.
Understanding that their rejection of the company’s proposals could lead to liquidation of the airline, Turk said, "We have been beat up for so long, people are just fed up."
As we go to press, the bankruptcy court judge has imposed a temporary 10% wage-cut on the mechanics and cleaners starting today and lasting until May 11, which will give $21 million back to the company. Meanwhile, he has approved wage- and benefit-cutting contracts involving the pilots (12%) and flight attendants (9.5%), all of which will save United $311 million a year, meaning 1½ billion dollars over the 5-year contract. He then used these give-back contracts to justify his order for temporary cuts of the mechanics/cleaners, saying they were necessary "because a period of turmoil for the airline required sacrifice from the workers" as well as "to maintain good relations with unions that had approved concessions." (NY Times, 2/1) Talk about divide and conquer!
This gang-up of United, the bankers and the courts would turn the so-called "American dream" into a nightmare for the airlines’ 120,000 active and retired workers. But this scenario is built into the way capitalism operates.
United says it needs to comply "with the terms of the loan keeping it aloft in bankruptcy court protection" and make it "more competitive in a brutal environment" marking today’s airline industry rat race. (All quotes and information from Wall Street Journal, 1/31) So, to comply with the bankers’ terms, the judge could then void the union contract and allow United clear sailing in lowering wages and benefits, as well as terminating pensions for all working and retired employees, all to "stay afloat."
This dog-eat-dog nature of the capitalist system impels the bosses to toss workers’ lives to the four winds in their drive to extract maximum profits off workers’ backs or face corporate extinction. Amid today’s war economy and U.S. imperialism’s drive for world domination through control of oil profits and resources, those ruling-class needs work against investing in shaky situations like the one besetting the airline industry. The only "concession" offered to companies like United is transporting troops and equipment to Mid-East war zones, but that will probably be insufficient to save the company. Meanwhile, this dependence on war kills the children of airline workers and over 100,000 Iraqi workers and their families.
The 7,000 mechanics and cleaners, members of the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA), rejected concessions agreed to by their union leaders by a 57% margin and voted 85% in favor of striking if the judge voids their current contract. United is demanding nearly a half billion in give-backs from the AMFA alone over the next five years, via a 5% pay cut for mechanics and double that, 10%, for cleaners — a racist demand of these many black and Latino workers — plus increased outsourcing, and cuts in overtime, vacations and sick leave.
This would come on top of the $5 billion in concessions over the last two years — a $4.50 hourly wage reduction and outsourcing of all heavy maintenance which slashed over 3,000 jobs. It was that 2002 sellout contract that caused the mechanics and cleaners to dump the Machinists’ union (IAM) in favor of the AMFA. But since unions operating under capitalism defend the system at all costs, now the AMFA leadership turns around and repeats the betrayals of the IAM in order to "save the company." United — encouraged by the fascist Homeland Insecurity police state atmosphere — says a strike would be illegal. It remains to be seen whether the workers are "fed up enough" to defy such an attack. Of course, if the labor movement as a whole was ready to back the United workers and shut down the entire airline industry — a move they refused to do when Reagan fired 11,300 air controllers in 1981 — it would give the workers a fighting chance.
But don’t hold your breath. The way the AFL-CIO operates today, it’s becoming virtually irrelevant. Only communist leadership ready to defy the bosses’ laws and state power would launch such a general strike, which would raise the ante to a level that would expose the whole system. This could win workers to see that rejection of the profit system entirely via communist revolution — not merely one sellout contract after another — would end their nightmare and gain them a decent life.
Garment Workers Gear Up for Stoppage to Defend Fired Militant
(Previously — see CHALLENGE, 2/5— four garment workers aired the shop’s grievances to the boss: about the new time clock system robbing workers of part of their lunch time; a demand to fire the Hitler-like forelady; and a demand for an end to the boss’s scam enabling him to undercut the minimum wage. Strike possibilities were discussed amid an agreement that the boss face the entire shop on the results of the meeting.)
At the afternoon break, the workers slowly left their machines. Waiting for them to gather, the boss spoke on the microphone near the time clock. Suddenly, about 20 shipping department workers marched in. Everyone thought they’d come to join the struggle but, as it turned out, they were organized by the area supervisor to support the boss.
Most of the 60 workers in that department hadn’t received the leaflets or revolutionary literature because at that time production and shipping were located in separate buildings. The production workers had decided not to distribute a leaflet to the shipping department about the plan so as not to alert the boss. Thus, the shipping workers were not a party to the plans.
"We want to work," said one shipping worker. "We have no problem and support the boss."
"We have nothing against you," responded a tall worker amid a group of his co-workers. "We’re all workers."
"We all work in the same factory," said another shipping worker, "and you didn’t take us into account. We’re isolated; we know nothing about this."
Contradictions sharpened and tempers flared amidst a verbal struggle between the two groups. Some workers calmed the situation and gradually everyone returned to their machines. A work stoppage hadn’t materialized. Someone probably had alerted the boss and he prepared, while we hadn’t organized the shipping workers.
Due to insufficient work, Tomas didn’t return to the shop for several days. "Hi, how are you?" asked Ana. "How did things go on Monday? It’s a shame that I couldn’t come to work that day."
"I’m writing the story of what happened," replied Tomas. "This is part of it. Read it and tell me what you think," he said as he handed it to her.
The paper ended up in the boss’s hands. The worker said that someone in the shipping department saw it and told the boss, who came to her machine yelling and demanding to see it. Another worker asked Tomas, "What did you do for that woman that put you in such a bad light with the boss? She says you gave her a paper."
Nobody had to wait for the boss’s answer. He went in a fury to Tomas and ordered him to come to the office. Tomas shot back, "I’m not going anywhere. If you have something to say to me, say it here."
"You’re bad," said the boss. "There’s no more work for you. Just finish today’s work."
Tomas asked for his check and a signed paper explaining why he was being fired. The boss refused and left in a rage.
Soon he returned and said angrily, "Just finish what you’re doing and come to the office for your checks."
"I’m not going, and you’re not going to fire me so easily," Tomas responded loudly.
Tomas called over a quality inspector about a "problem" with the job and asked him to "tell the others that they’re firing me; they need to know what’s happening."
Tomas slowed everything down for the remaining hour before lunch when he would be able to speak to the other workers. During that hour he explained to another worker who was active in the struggle that the boss had fired him. She told him firmly, "Don’t leave and don’t move from your machine."
By 12:30 pm, word had spread and the general proposal was: "Don’t leave. Return to your machines." Without Tomas’ knowledge, a group of workers had a plan to halt production the moment the boss tried to force Tomas to leave. Surmising what the workers were up to, the boss decided to change tactics and terminate Tomas while avoiding the anger of the rest of the workers. (To be concluded next issue.)
Hospital Workers Confront Bosses Over Low-Wage Hires
BROOKLYN, NY, JAN. 21 — On December 16, a group of health care workers representing both day and evening shifts went to a Brooklyn hospital’s Human Resources department to demand that the nursing department abandon its plan to bring in agency workers at $7 an hour (with no benefits) instead of hiring more unionized nursing techs at $16 to $17 an hour.
The Local 1199 union delegates were given short notice about the plan. One worker wrote a petition which many signed, but the short notice limited the number of workers marching to the department office.
At the meeting, one worker reported that the union hall is filled with laid-off workers whom the hospital should hire for these positions. Nursing management stated that agency workers’ duties would be to sit at the patients’ bedsides and inform nurses about the patients’ needs.
Until recently, nursing techs performed this job. However, due to short staffing, nursing techs are spread thin and can no longer spend extended amounts of time at patients’ bedsides.
In winter more patients are being admitted to the hospital. Surely this plan is to increase hospital bosses’ profits. While management claims these workers will only sit at patients’ bedsides and inform nurses about their needs, not one health care worker present involved with direct patient care believed a word of that. Before long, these agency workers will most likely be doing other jobs in the hospital as well.
So far, after one month, the hospital bosses haven’t hired any agency workers, but they will go to any length to maximize their profits. From communists who participate in such actions, workers can learn that the fight is against capitalism, the real root of our problems.
The hospital bosses know that competition in the health care industry impels hospitals to minimize the number of workers they employ, while forcing small hospitals in poor neighborhoods to close. Thus, capitalist competition creates a huge pool of unemployed workers from which these lower-paid workers can be hired and increase hospital profits.
The 1199/SEIU leadership is collaborating with the hospital bosses and the politicians, allowing the hiring of hundreds of per diem and agency workers, skilled and unskilled. These workers receive no benefits, sick time or paid vacations and must pay for their own health insurance, saving more millions for the bosses.
While they squeeze workers here, especially reducing or eliminating their health care, the ruling class — in its drive to control oil resources — spends a billion dollars a week in Iraq, where health care is virtually non-existent.
Making the fight against capitalism is essential in developing a mass base for communist ideas. In a communist society, these ideas will determine that health care will exist not for profit but to improve the quality of life for all.
Bush & Co. Use Racism to Push Social Security Privatization
Racism knows no bounds for U.S. rulers. Its effects have now become the latest "reason" why the Bush administration is urging black workers to support his scheme to privatize Social Security. The New York Times (1/26) reported that, in a meeting with black "religious and community leaders," Bush encouraged them "to support…personal investment accounts to Social Security, which White House officials say could benefit blacks because they have a shorter average life span than whites and end up putting more money into the retirement system than they take out."
Bush’s press secretary, Scott McClellan, told reporters that black men "have had a shorter life span than other sectors of America," and therefore privatization "will enable them to build a nest egg…to pass…on to their survivors." (NYT)
This is the height of hypocrisy. First these rulers use racism — in employment, wages, housing and health care — to "shorten the life span" of black working people and now turn around to try to use that attack on their living standards to convince black workers that it’s a benefit and they’d be "better off" building up private accounts so, as racism continues, they can leave these "nest eggs" to their families!
Forget about the fact that, (1) because of lower wages (69% of white workers’ family incomes), double unemployment rates and greater numbers without health insurance, millions of black workers can hardly escape poverty, much less build up any "nest eggs"; (2) this alleged "advantage" — a shorter life span — is dependent on continuing these racist conditions; and (3) it exposes one more effect of racism: that for 70 years millions of black workers have been "putting more money into the retirement system than they have taken out."
The "logic" here is that if racism gets worse, and shortens their life spans even further, it will be a "boon" to building up even greater private accounts. Now there’s a future to look forward to.
Of course, it somehow didn’t occur to Bush nor, it seems, to these black "leaders" that without racism (an impossibility under capitalism which is dependent on it for super-profits) black workers — and all workers — would lead better lives.
The punch line here is that there was not one peep out of any of these black "leaders" about smashing racism, the cause of the shorter life span in the first place, nor did any of them challenge Bush’s "logic." As CHALLENGE reported recently, nearly 900,000 black people died in the 1990’s solely because of inferior health and health care, all because of the above racist conditions.
The answer: shorten capitalism’s life span! The sooner we bury it, the sooner will all workers live longer and more productive, poverty-free lives.
Liberal Politicians Are Also Warmakers
"Bring the troops home now!" Last summer, Democratic Party liberals rejected that slogan as "too radical" and advocated the line "Stop Bush." Now many of these same people are pushing this very same "radical slogan," calling the Iraq war a "tragic mistake" because part of the U.S. ruling class is seeking a deal with the European Union and other capitalist powers. Why? They realize the U.S. is losing the war.
The real tragedy would be for anti-war activists to follow the misleadership of liberal anti-communist gurus like Tom Hayden, George Lakoff and Naomi Klein, continuing to support the imperialist Democratic Party after the defeat of its pro-war candidate John Kerry. Leaders of major anti-war groups are supporting Hayden’s program to "end the war in Iraq." Hayden wants us to believe that "public opinion — if strategically focused — can end this war." He correctly states that U.S. plans for Iraq include "American military bases, a privatized market economy, ready access to oil, [and] a prime target for... proselytizing in the region" [winning recruits].
Hayden does not question the U.S. imperialist goal of "dominance," let alone its capitalist roots. Like Kerry, he questions the unilateralist policy of the Bush administration. He wants us to believe that the Democrats can be pressured into becoming an "anti-war party."
Investment opportunities in the "market economy" and "access to oil" in the Persian Gulf region are critical to the continued dominance of U.S. imperialism in the face of challenges from rival imperialists, and U.S. military bases are essential to this plan. In suggesting that "public opinion" can change this, Hayden obscures the fact that the only way to end wars for profit is with workers’ revolution to destroy capitalism and its imperialist wars.
Hayden promotes the lie that the U.S. is a "democracy" rather than a capitalist dictatorship. "When trapped between imperial elites and their own insistent constituents," he asserts, "members of Congress will tend to side with their voters." Don’t hold your breath. He claims "that is how the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia were ended in 1975." But U.S. forces were driven out of Southeast Asia by "national liberation" armies that — unlike most U.S. troops — had a real commitment to their cause. Also, massive rebellions in the U.S. armed forces helped end the wars.
Hayden builds nationalism. "We" Americans, he says, must change "our priorities" and restore "our respect in the world." Hayden wants to "send the clearest possible message to mainstream public opinion" in order to build an alliance with the likes of Coble, Pat Buchanan and William F. Buckley, Jr. This racist populism is the opposite of the worker-student alliance we need to fight imperialism and racism.
Hayden urges solidarity with dissident veterans, soldiers, and their families, but his solution is to help those who refuse to serve to run away to Canada. This reflects the fact that many people want to reach out to the soldiers. He talks about supporting soldiers’ grievances (lack of armor, extended tours of duty) but never suggests trying to organize against imperialist war inside the military.
Finally, Hayden’s idea of international solidarity is to use Global Exchange to organize a "peace coalition" that will protest when U.S. officials speak in Europe and elsewhere. His program would use the energy of anti-war activists to promote an imperialist strategy where closer relations to European imperialists might place U.S. imperialists in a better position to confront the rising challenge of Asian imperialism. It will take a long-term fight to end the capitalist system and its inevitable bloody wars for profit.
Hayden’s SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) began in the 1950’s as the youth wing of an anti-communist "social-democratic" movement tied to the United Auto Workers. Then in December 1964 — still small, and with little influence — it called for a spring protest against U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Members of the newly-formed Progressive Labor Party joined SDS as well as this mass protest. By the end of 1965, SDS had dropped its official anti-communism in response to a growing and increasingly radical youth movement inspired by worldwide anti-imperialist struggles. In 1969, the majority of the delegates to the SDS national convention voted to follow PLP leadership and build a worker-student alliance against the war, against racism and against the capitalist system behind them.
Apparently Hayden learned a lesson. Instead of calling for a new mass organization, he now tells activists to join and work within the Democratic Party itself. But while times are different, PLP is alive and well, fighting on the campuses and within the working class to lead actions against racism and imperialism and to show many students and workers the potential and need to fight to eliminate imperialist war with communist revolution.
a name="Harvard President’s Sexist ‘Theory’"></a>"arvard President’s Sexist ‘Theory’
Spawned by EugenicistsYou can bet something bad is brewing for workers when Harvard’s president makes outrageous comments suggesting that "innate sex differences" between men and women explain why so few women have become professors of mathematics or science.
This nonsense spewed out recently by Lawrence Summers has generated a firestorm of protest from liberals and feminists. They’re right — as far as they go — to condemn Summers, but only a communist analysis can explain the full danger of his apparently off-hand remarks.
Summers’s assertion is based on the genetic "theory" of intelligence, behavior and society, a lie that’s been around for a long time. It started at the end of the 18th century, with the beginnings of industrial capitalism, when a British pseudo-scientist named Thomas Malthus explained that the best social policy toward improving conditions for the working class was to do nothing — because workers were innately "inferior" and therefore could not gain anything from improvements in education, housing or sanitation. Malthus advised letting workers die of starvation or disease after they had outlived their ability to work and reproduce themselves.
Malthusianism was later renamed "Social Darwinism," a crude distortion of Charles Darwin’s theory about the evolution of species. Social Darwinism provided a crass, self-serving justification of the profit system’s class structure and horrible inequalities. About 100 years ago, some U.S. "scientists," many from Harvard, founded the "Eugenics" movement, which refined and codified this nonsense. They claimed intelligence was in the genes, that rich people were "biologically programmed" to be smart and poor workers to be dumb, criminal or both.
Harvard eugenicists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard contributed to the racist deaths of millions of U.S. workers during the first half of the 20th century. Their "theory" — that the dread disease pellagra afflicted only the "unfit," who supposedly got it by eating each other’s feces — convinced enough Washington policymakers to prevent the government from seriously studying the disease’s cause.
By 1915, a heroic doctor named Goldberger discovered that a vitamin deficiency caused pellagra. We’ll never know how many Southern agricultural workers — black and white — died of pellagra before Roosevelt’s New Dealers realized that these workers would be needed for the military in World War II and figured out that giving them vitamin supplements might be in the bosses’ interest.
The U.S. Eugenics movement served as the key inspiration for Hitler & Co. The Nazi eugenics courts, sterilization programs and, by extension, the pseudo-science that led to the gas chambers, all owe a huge debt to U.S. Eugenics, a debt the Nazis happily recognized.
In the modern period, Harvard scribblers have continued to spread these lies and resurrect them whenever needed:
In 1969, when the Nixon White House was looking to justify racist violence and economic attacks against black workers, Arthur Jensen, a professor of educational psychology at Stanford, published a rant in the Harvard Review of Education "explaining" that the government was wasting money on trying to improve education for black children because black people had fewer "intelligence genes" than white people. Within weeks, Jensen’s garbage was getting front-page play in major publications and hailed in Washington and academia as a "scientific breakthrough."
Edward Banfield, another Harvard "genius", wrote in "The Unheavenly City" that "lower class individuals," as he called black workers, actually liked slum conditions and didn’t want to change them. No need for housing and education reform here.
In 1973, when Nixon was freezing wages, Richard Herrnstein, a Harvard Psychology Department professor, began publishing drivel about the direct link between genes and "socioeconomic status." For 20 years, Herrnstein published a mountain of vicious foolishness related to this racist crap (including "The Bell Curve"), some of it jointly with Charles Murray, another Harvard "expert". Herrnstein has since died, but Murray’s still around. Last January 23, the New York Times, which has widely published these genetic determinist racists, printed a Murray column justifying Summers’s BS about women in math and science.
The mid-1970s witnessed the crowning glory of Harvard genetic racism, when Harvard professor E.O. Wilson, trotted out "Sociobiology," a masterpiece of verbal diarrhea, which "explained" that all of society and all social behavior can trace their causes to genes. Somehow, Wilson’s accomplishments as an ant expert qualified him to make this claim. He became a media darling, won a Pulitzer prize and now reigns as Harvard’s resident sage.
Lately, one Steven Pinker, also at Harvard, and whom Summers admires, has carried the ball and seems to have motivated Summers’s statement about women.
Summers is no dummy. He served as Clinton’s Treasury-Secretary and helped implement Clinton’s notoriously racist forced-labor, union-busting scheme known as "Workfare." It’s hard to believe that Summers tossed out his ridiculous comment about women in math and science with no forethought. Harvard is the rulers’ major university. It’s a center and magnet for science, politics and ideology. Ideas coming from Harvard exert huge influence on educational, public, and foreign policy. In various forms, racist genetic determinism has stood at the center of the bosses’ pseudo-science since the dawn of the 20th century. A ruling class hell-bent on a fascist police state and widening wars needs this venom more than ever, just as the Nazis did.
That, in CHALLENGE’s view, is the underlying reason behind Summers’s comment about women. He was floating a straw in the wind. We can expect much more of this in the period ahead. Genetic determinism — about women, workers, Arabs or anyone whom the bosses need to oppress, exploit, or conquer — is here to stay.
Exposing and destroying this venom remain key tasks for PLP and the working class. We’ve carried out many past struggles against it, but we can’t stop now. Racist, sexist, anti-worker genetic determinism will live as long as the profit system rules. The struggle to smash it is inseparable from the struggle for revolution, communism and workers’.
Nazi Death Camp Experiments Led to U. S. Space Program
(Part II: how U.S. rulers hired hundreds of Nazis scientists and other war criminals to build the U.S. space program and launch the Cold War.)
January 27 marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Red Army. In mid-February of 1945, as the Red Army rolled the Nazi war machine back towards Berlin, SS Major Wernher von Braun and his team fled to southern Germany in a vain attempt to regroup their rocket and jet propulsion operations. But it was too late. By early May, the Red Flag flew over the Nazi Reichstag in Berlin. Von Braun and his gang moved to the Austrian border and surrendered to the U.S. Army’s 44th Infantry Division.
This was the beginning of von Braun’s love affair with U.S. imperialism. As reported last issue, the secret Army-OSS "Operation Paperclip" (the OSS later became the CIA), "cleansed" von Braun and hundreds of Nazi scientists of their war crimes and brought them to the U.S., circumventing a Roosevelt-Truman ban on hiring hardcore Nazis.
The Nazi scientists were moved to New Mexico, where hundreds of captured Nazi V2 rockets were tested. Then in 1950, von Braun’s gang was transferred to the Redstone Arsenal, in Huntsville, Alabama to develop tactical ballistic missiles, from which the Saturn rocket was developed to compete with the Soviet Union in the space race.
Meanwhile, von Braun’s image was cleaned up even more, becoming a feature in Disney’s TV show, "The World of Tomorrow." In 1970 von Braun became NASA’s associate administrator.
In 1984, a von Braun assistant, Arthur Rudolph, fled to West Germany, following investigation of his war record. During the war, he had been operations director of the Mittelwerk factory at the Dora-Nordhausen concentration camps,— used exclusively for the Nazi rocket progam — in which 20,000 workers died from beatings, hangings and starvation. Despite his being an ardent Nazi since 1931, Operation Paperclip cleaned Rudolph’s record and brought him to the U.S where he designed the Saturn 5 rocket used in the Apollo moon landings.
A third top Nazi to become a leading NASA boss was Kart Debus, a former member of the Brown Shirts (SA), and later of the elite killer force (the SS). He became the first director of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. It’s not hard to imagine these Nazis saying, "Mein Führer, the moon landing is for you."
From Ford to Jim Crow to Auschwitz
But before and during the war, the process had been reversed. The Nazis used the U.S. bosses to make their fascist system work. The Nazi Nuremberg laws and the Eugenics pseudo-science of "racial purity" were based on the Jim Crow super-racist discrimination laws in the U.S.
But the Nazis used the death camps for another purpose: as slave labor for their war machine, reaping huge profits for German and U.S.-owned companies. On April 30, 1942, Oswald Pohl, chief of the SS Economic and Administrative Office, reported to Reichsführer Himmler that priority was now being given to the economic use of the concentration camps, forcing inmates to work until they dropped dead. Krupp and Siemens took advantage of this slave labor, mainly at Auschwitz. IG Farben set up a synthetic rubber plant in Buna — the third camp in the Auschwitz complex — using 35,000 slave laborers, 25,000 of whom died. (Raul Hilberg, La destruction des Juifs d’Europe, Fayard, 1988)
Volkswagen, DaimlerBenz and Opel (owned by GM) also used such slave labor to make super-profits while building vehicles for the Nazi war machine.
IBM profited handsomely from its keypunch tabulation system, used to identify and catalogue inmates at the death camps. ("IBM and the Holocaust"; Edwin Black, Laffont, Paris, Feb. 2001)
Ford plants in Germany produced trucks and engines for the Nazi war machine. Henry Ford and Hitler had a mutual admiration society. Ford’s photo hung in the Führer’s office. In 1938, Ford was given the Great Eagle Cross, a top Nazi honor. Ford and Hitler were notorious anti-Semites — Ford distributed worldwide the Protocols of Zion, a forgery concocted by the Tsar’s secret police in the early 1900s. The Nazis copied Ford’s assembly line methods in their war plants, both inside and outside the slave-labor death camps. The Nazis’ treatment of death-camp inmates followed the cattle-handling method used by the huge Chicago meatpacking houses.
Today, the U.S. prison system employs these slave-labor methods to force many of its 2.1 million prisoners (most of any nation worldwide) to work inside at pennies per hour for companies like Microsoft, Dell, Boeing, IBM, AT&T Wireless, Nordstrom, Honeywell and Hewlett-Packard among many others. The fact that 70% of the prisoners are black and Latino exposes this racism as a continuation of slavery that allegedly ended with the Civil War.
(Next: how the CIA used Nazi war criminals to launch the Cold War; how the CIA developed LSD and PCP based on Nazi research and why these fascist atrocities are not just aberrations but part of a capitalism system immersed in endless wars.)
LETTERS
Opposing U.S. Death Squad Base
For three years a main project in my church-based work has been organizing to close the "School of the Americas [Assassins]" (SOA), the Ft. Benning Ga. facility that has produced thousands of fascist death-squad leaders for U.S.-backed Latin American dictatorships. After a year’s work at the regional level, our committee developed a small movement that drafted and passed a resolution against the SOA at the annual denominational convention. Through this we drew closer to a number of people —some in the military — who are open to expanding the church-wide discussion of U.S. imperialism. Following this victory, I flew to Georgia to participate in my third SOA-Watch action.
Driving into Columbus, Georgia, near Ft. Benning, I saw buses from everywhere — Iowa, Michigan, New Mexico, the northeast, California — but also including Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana as well! High school and college teachers and students, parents and friends — largely Catholic-organized, white and maybe 20% Latino.
With all the weaknesses of liberalism, pacifism, philosophic idealism, still many, many mainstream workers and students from "the heartland" opposed one of the most obvious tips of the imperialist iceberg. The situation is similar to ’66 -’67 in its potential for PLP to struggle to bring our ideas to a one-sided, liberal-led movement, to sharpen the contradictions within it and to RECRUIT! No wonder the bosses’ media have made sure no one knows the annual SOA/WATCH action has grown from 16 to over 16,000 in less than a dozen years. Real potential for trouble for the ruling class!
I distributed 1,000 brochures describing the work of our justice and peace coalition. Young people were especially receptive to an "old-timer from the ’60s." I made five contacts.
By participating in the struggle to close the School of the Assassins, I’ve discussed imperialism and linked SOA to the U.S. oil war in Iraq and fascist torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons. I’ve made new friends and encouraged the leadership of old friends, including church members and clergy. When they discover they’re not alone, these people can do the vital "low profile" work needed to resist and smash fascism, and be won closer to and into PLP in the process.
There’s much work to be done!
Red Churchmouse
a name="HiP HOP: Imperialist Weapon in Paraguay""HiP HOP: Imperialist Weapon in Paraguay
Coming to Paraguay, I expected to hear folkloric or polka music in the traditional Guarani language. To my surprise, I did hear that music, but most of it was drowned out by Eminem, Fat Joe and Snoop Dogg. At first, being away from the U.$., I welcomed hearing a tune in a familiar language that I understood. But then reality dawned on me. I began to experience first hand the danger of hip hop, a weapon of cultural imperialism.
Video clips on TV which show half-naked women and promote drugs and alcohol get heavy rotation. Several Paraguayan youth have spoken to me of a downloaded Nelly video clip from Black Exploitation Television in which credit cards are swiped using the rear ends of women in thongs. U.$. hip hop culture dominates Paraguay, second only to forms of Argentine and Brazilian music that are equally degenerate and degrading.
This culture implants materialistic, unrealistic desires and goals in Paraguayan youth. It reinforces U.$. imperialism amongst the youth (although Brazilian, Argentine, Korean, Japanese, German and Chinese imperialists also have their hands in the neo-colonial pot of gold known as Paraguay). By adopting the individualistic, anti-social culture of the oppressor, workers and youth weaken their ability to struggle collectively against class enemies, making them easy pickings for the rich.
The U.$. Empire’s use of cultural imperialism is just like its predecessors in Rome, Britain and China. In China, the Ch´ing Dynasty ingrained a sense of cultural superiority that was supported by Confucianism. British colonists encouraged their subjects to imitate them, thus reinforcing the Empire.
Imperialist and terrorist, Zbigniew Brezinski crows about the power of such cultural imperialism in The Grand Chessboard, writing that "despite some crassness, American culture enjoys an appeal that is unrivaled, especially among the world’s youth. Cultural domination has been an underappreciated facet of American global power. America’s mass culture exercises a magnetic appeal, especially on the world’s youth. Its attraction may be derived from the hedonistic quality of the lifestyle it projects, but its global appeal is undeniable."
Cultural imperialism is an important tool the U.$. ruling class needs and uses to enhance its agenda of increased profits from, and oppression of, the world’s workers. Although there’s a lot of underground and progressive hip hop such as Talib Kweli, Dead Prez and the Roots, it’s just that — "progressive." Someone once said that progress is just a less oppressive form of the current condition.
It’s up to us in PLP to put out real revolutionary music as well as the spoken word, that’s not degenerate and doesn’t mislead the masses into aspirations for a world of diamonds, fast cars and fast women. Only PLP can develop the kind of creative music that can spread revolutionary ideas as well as a lifestyle worth dreaming and singing about — an egalitarian communist society from each according to commitment to each according to need. This is just one more challenge that I know the Party is willing to accept with revolutionary fervor! Not a step back!
Comrade in South America
Editorial Needs More Specific Facts
Our PLP club discussed the 2/2/05 editorial. It was well researched and made several important points about the Eastern Establishment connections of several Bush appointees. The dumping of Bernard Kerik as Homeland Security chief was clearly due to a lot more than just his "nanny" problems, sex life or Mafia ties. The overwhelming confirmation of Condi Rice by the Senate, including most Democrats, despite a few feeble protests, backs up these points. The recent resignation of Douglas Feith, head of the Pentagon special intelligence program, and neo-con hero, also supports these arguments.
However, the editorial does not present a convincing case to support its title that the new Bush Cabinet "Mirrors Big Bosses’ Drive for War." This is especially true for relatively new readers unfamiliar with the ruling-class forces fighting behind the scenes in these power struggles. Only weak connections were made between the bosses’ war plans and either Michael Chertoff or Robert Zoellick, the two cabinet picks discussed in the editorial.
This was a missed opportunity. Zoellick was Bush’s foreign policy advisor in the 2000 campaign. He was clearly ahead of the curve when it came to the U.S. bosses’ drive to control Iraqi oil. In a May 2000 debate against Gore’s National Security Advisor held at the Washington Institute, Zoellick said the Iraqis were gaining ground. He noted Russian support for Iraq (they were then asking the U.N. to lift sanctions). He called for striking Saddam and "taking away pieces of his territory."
In addition, the editorial didn’t mention the increased U.S. war moves against Iran over its supposed development of nuclear weapons. (Zoellick had railed against Iranian "weapons of mass destruction" in the 2000 debate). These plans have now been confirmed by the Seymour Hersh New Yorker article about covert intelligence operations in Iran, and the recent comments by Cheney, giving the Israelis the green light to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities.
Finally, although he is clearly not an Eastern Establishment candidate, it should have been noted that Alberto Gonzales, the Bush pick for the government’s top "justice" official, openly advocates using torture. Sure, he was attacked in the Judiciary committee hearings and required to do a "mea culpa," but he was confirmed. That doesn’t disallow the point that the ruling class is preparing for wider wars, and is willing to expand the limits of atrocities openly committed in the name of U.S. imperialism; rather, Gonzales’ confirmation supports it.
In conclusion, either the editorial wasn’t titled correctly, or it should have backed up the main point with more specific evidence.
New Jersey Comrades
Clarification ...
(of article on drug companies in CHALLENGE, 2/5)
Firstly, the rulers’ attack on drug company profits goes hand-in-glove with their political and economic assault on workers. Both reflect an overall disciplining of society as the rulers gradually but inevitably undertake a full-scale military mobilization. The loss of profit the Feds inflicted on Merck over the Vioxx medication simultaneously entails the far worse attack on workers — layoffs, wage reduction and speed-up. The Vioxx flap stems directly from President Franklin Roosevelt’s establishment of state control by means of the clinical trial regime. Workfare, prison labor and the prison boom in general today take the place of the New Deal’s WPA, PWA and CCC.
Secondly, there are four big players in the health care fight: drug makers, insurers, industries like auto with huge health costs, and, most importantly, the ruling class as a whole. Unions and doctors, once important, now sit on the sidelines. The ruling class’s interest lies in rationalizing this welter of interests, in subjugating the needs of individual firms to the wartime needs of the state that serves the main capitalists. In Clinton’s first term, he tried but failed to impose discipline on the health industry. Bush, revealing his true Establishment roots and his close ties to the biggest bosses, is starting to succeed. The rulers’ ultimate goal is to bring all industry, including health care, under their direct control as they organize society for intensifying imperialist wars.
Challenge And PLP Need Your Support
Dear Friends and Comrades,
Everyday events point to a sharpening of contradictions besetting world capitalism.
The U.S. imperialist war in Iraq is worsening for U.S. rulers so now they threaten to dig themselves an even bigger hole by attacking Iran. The assault on the working class, here and abroad, is intensifying. The Bushites’ plan for privatizing Social Security, increasing tax cuts for the rich and slashing funds for social services even further in their attempts to handle the system’s financial crises all means a still greater burden on the working class.
This is especially true for black and Latino workers who suffer the double oppression of racism in greater joblessness, worse health care and leaving a whole generation behind in capitalism’s "schools."
But, as PLP and Challenge continues to point out, the liberals/Democrats have no answer for the working class. If anything, they are more dangerous. The lesser evil alternative reached new heights in the recent election in the "anybody-but-Bush" campaign, which in turn led to a greater post-election "depression" for millions of honest Kerry voters.
However, PLP members took the offensive against this "depression" by organizing even more so against the war, raising the issue of supporting rebellions among GI’s, and linking the imperialist war to the cuts and layoffs and worsening health care at home. Therefore, Challenge and PLP-organized activity generally is needed more than ever.
But the ruling-class squeeze on the working class as a whole puts the squeeze on the ability to finance these activities as well. Costs for PLP’s printing, insurance and international activities, among other expenses, have all risen. In addition, the costs for this year’s May Day celebrations — about 12 weeks away — are upon us.
Yet communists will never allow capitalism’s financial pressures to force us to retreat. This has never happened in PL’s 43-year history. If anything, the opportunities created by imperialism’s sharpening contradictions should inspire us to advance. So we’re asking our friends and members to meet this challenge and contribute whatever possible for CHALLENGE and for PLP. We can turn a bad thing — the rulers’ taxes — into a good thing by donating government tax refunds. Raising money is a political question. How important is the existence of the Party and its ideas to the life of the working class?
Checks or money order can be made out to CHALLENGE PERIODICALS and sent to PLP, Box 808, GPO, Brooklyn, NY 11202, or cash can be given directly to PLP members and forwarded to area Party leaders.
This fund drive can demonstrate the fact that recent events inspire us to demonstrate how PLP’s line, more than ever, is the answer to what many may view as insoluble and hopeless problems.
Fight for communism!
The International PLP
RED EYE ON THE NEWS
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US brought ‘tsunami’ to Iraq
[Colin] Powell said of the tsunami, "The power of the wave to destroy bridges, to destroy factories, to destroy homes, to destroy crops, to destroy everything in its path is amazing." He said, "I have never seen anything like it in my experience."
Yes, he has. It was in Iraq. The tsunami was us….
In Iraq we kill off thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of innocent civilians…Iraqi civilians are homeless. We call it liberation….
No flags have been flown at half-staff for Iraqi civilians. There have been no moments of silence in Congress. There have been no speeches by Bush mourning "the tens of thousands of children who are lost." (Boston Globe, 1/10)
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Civilian deaths make vet rebel
Sean Huze enlisted in the Marine Corps right after the Sept. 11 attacks and was, in his own words, "red, white and blue in all the way" when he deployed to Iraq 16 months later….
Today, all that has changed. Haunted by the civilian causalities he witnessed, Corporal Huze has become one of a small but increasing number of Iraq veterans who have formed or joined groups to oppose war….
"Who I was before the war, who I was in Iraq and who I am now are three different men," Corporal Huze said. "I don’t think I can ever have the blind trust in the government like I had before…. (NYT, 1/23)
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GIs quiet, but want to go home
Soldiers on point do not debate…exit strategies or disengagement ....They…just want to get through the patrol…their tour in Iraq, and then go home…
"It’s a funny thing: They don’t want us here, and we don’t want to be here," said First Sgt. Robert Wright…. (NYT, 1/29)
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Order-givers aren’t indicted
"In Nuremberg, it was the generals being prosecuted. We were going after the order-givers. Here [at Abu Ghraib] the government is going after the order-takers."…the trial’s judge… "refused to allow witneses to discuss which officers were aware of events in cellblock One….
…There have yet to be any criminal charges leveled against any of the prison’s officers, let alone anyone higher up in the chain of command.
Nor are there likely to be any… (NYT, 1/23)
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US Prison abuse ‘everywhere’
…No one has any reason to believe any longer that these incidents were restricted to one prison near Baghdad. They were everywhere: from Guantánamo Bay to Afghanistan, Baghdad, Basra, Ramadi and Tikrit and, for all we know, in any number of hidden jails affecting "ghost detainees" kept from the purview of the Red Cross….Many of the abuses seem specifically tailored to humiliate Arabs and Muslims, where horror at being exposed in public is a deep cultural artifact…
…The Schlesinger panel has officially conceded… that Americans soldiers have tortured five inmates to death. Twenty-three other deaths that occurred during American custody had not been fully investigated by the time the panel issued its report… (NYT, 1/23)
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Wonderful democratic choices!
While Republicans listed changes in Social Security as their No.1 objective, Democrats made enlarging the armed forces and providing new military benefits as their top goal. (NYT, 1/25)
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Nazis best pals for CIA
…The American government worked closely with Nazi war criminals and collaborators, allowing many of them to live in the United States after World War II.
Historians who have studied the documents made public so far have said that at least five associates of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, the architect of Hitler’s campaign to exterminate Jews, had worked for the C.I.A….
…The C.I.A. tried to recruit two dozen more war criminals or Nazi collaborators.
American officials have defended the recruiting of former Nazis as having been essential to gaining access to intelligence after World War II, particularly about the Soviet Union…. (NYT, 1/30)
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India: women rebel against rape
In Nagpur, India, a group of women took matters into their own hands not long ago. In a nation where the conviction rate for rape is only 4%, the women of Nagpur meted out their own justice. A repeat rapist, who appeared to be getting off one more time, was stabbed and stoned to death. Three others had their houses burned down by a mob of 50 women. In the former case, the police detained five women, but were forced to release them when more that 400 women blocked the courtroom demanding that they be set free. A number of other cases of personal justice have occurred in Nagpur.
Arvind Jain, a senior advocate of the Supreme Court pf India has advised young women not to hesitate to kill a man who tries to rape them, because the Indian law makes it easier to defend one’s self of murder in self defense that to fight a rape case… (Pythian Press, 1/10)
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Democrats: doormat for fascism
In the book [Crimes against Nature, Paul] Kennedy implies that we live in a fascist country and that the Bush White House has learned key lessons from the Nazis. "While communism is the control of business by government, fascism is the control of government by business," he writes. "My American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as … a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically though the merging of state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism. Sound familiar?"….
…Visionary political leaders have warned the American public against the domination of government by corporate power. That warning is missing in the national debate right now. Because so much corporate money is going into politics, the Democratic Party itself has dropped the ball. They just quash discussion about the corrosive impact of excessive corporate power… (Mokhiber & Weissman, 1/21)
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No freedom for Al-Jazeera TV
…Early last year [the network]…Al Jazeera was kicked out of Iraq….American pressure on the station…has drawn charges of hypocrisy, especially in light of President Bush’s repeated calls for greater freedoms and democracy in the region.
"It’s completely two-faced for the United States to try to muzzle the one network with the most credibility in the Middle East, even if it does sometimes say things that are wrong," said an Arab diplomat. (NYT, 1/30
- Bush Cabinet
Mirrors Big Bosses' Drive For Wider War - Former Security Chiefs Press For 500,000 Soldiers
- PLP-led D.C. Transit Local:
Advance Young Black Workers to Leadership in Fight vs. Racist Inequities - World's Auto Bosses' Dogfight Bites Workers
- Mexico: Red Ideas Link Community and Factory Struggles
- Good Riddance to Private Prison Boss, Exploiter of Inmates
- Racist Unemployment Deadly for Workers' Health
- GI Morale Could Be Achilles Heel For U.S. Warmakers
- Invaders Also Destroyed By Imperialist War
- MAY DAY DVD
- Union Anti-War Motion Ties Fight-Back Here To GI Refusals
- Multi-Racial HS Club Takes Post-Election Action
- Going Toe To Toe with Garment Boss
- Government Using Stewart Trial
To Silence Dissidents - Fast Food Leads To Super-Sized Profits
- Why Is Rulers' Government Attacking Big Drug Firms?
- Nazi War Criminals Headed U.S. Space Program
- Japan Imperial Army Unit 731: The Other Holocaust
- LETTERS
- RED EYES ON THE NEWS
Bush Cabinet
Mirrors Big Bosses' Drive For Wider War
This issue of CHALLENGE goes to press the day of Bush's second inauguration. The coincidence highlights the real choice confronting workers in the very difficult period our class faces.
We can continue accepting the profit system and all its horrors and keep falling into the trap of electoral circuses that offer only candidates sworn to do the big bosses' dirty work against us. Or we can choose to fight for communist revolution by helping build and joining the Progressive Labor Party. That's the alternative: a status quo of war, police-state terror, racism, unemployment and cultural degradation; or a lifetime of struggle to win workers' rule.
The reshuffling of Bush's closest advisors recalls the old saying: be careful about what you wish for; you may get it. Many who voted for Kerry did so thinking he represented the best chance to stop Bush & Co.'s march toward fascism and war. Throughout the campaign, CHALLENGE warned that Bush and Kerry both served the same class interests and that only minor tactical differences separated them. We warned that a Kerry presidency would bring wider war and a tighter, even more oppressive police state.
Bush's latest moves confirm this. In fact, if anything, Bush's latest choices suggest that the Liberal Establishment, which backed Kerry, is finding ways to win the election after having lost it. Bush's appointment of Michael Chertoff as Homeland Security czar, in the wake of the Bernard Kerik fiasco, is a case in point.
The Kerik nomination reflected business-as-usual in the Bush style -- fascism on the cheap. Kerik comes from former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani's political machine. The Giuliani-Kerik approach to police terror relies on the crude, brutal, but relatively unsophisticated approach of giving small armies of racist cops guns and shoot-to-kill orders. It may work temporarily to terrorize urban neighborhoods and make downtown districts "safe" for business and lucrative tourism. However, it doesn't promote the police-state, pro-war, sacrifice-anything-for-the-flag mentality that the ruling class needs to militarize and therefore brutalize all of society. This was the task set by the Hart-Rudman Commission's 2001 Report on National Security in the 21st Century. It was Bush's assignment in the wake of 9/11.
Much of the Establishment's dissatisfaction with Bush can be explained by his failure to fulfill this task. Kerry was supposed to mobilize the population to endorse it but he flopped. His campaign mobilized anti-Bush sentiment but not the pro-war, pro-fascism wave the rulers needed. So Kerry lost, and some of Bush's initial cabinet choices indicated that he hadn't gotten the message, but the Kerik debacle may have persuaded him otherwise.
When Bush picked Kerik, the New York Times denounced the move. The Times has long backed the "community policing" line endorsed by Giuliani-Kerik rival and former NYC Police Commissioner Bratton (now LAPD Commissioner). "Community policing" takes a page from Hitler & Co. by inducing citizens to work with the cops and snitch on each other. Anyhow, within days of the Times editorial, Kerik found himself embroiled in a widening scandal and quickly withdrew his candidacy.
But the liberal bosses were just getting started. The Chertoff nomination shows how far they've come in forcing Bush to change tactical direction. Chertoff is pure Establishment. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, from 1994-2001 he headed Latham and Watkins, a law firm serving as outside counsel to Exxon Mobil and J.P. Morgan Chase. One of Latham and Watkins' main missions is helping big corporations comply with the new, tougher regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. The big bosses want these regulations to help impose self-discipline on businessmen who haven't yet fallen into line with the plans for war and fascism.
Latham and Watkins represented Exxon Mobil in its 2003 $12 billion deal to produce and market natural gas from Qatar. Qatar, not coincidentally, served as general headquarters for the U.S. high command during the 2003 Iraq invasion.
Chertoff is a typical wolf in sheep's clothing. As a federal prosecutor in the 1990s, he criticized the New Jersey State Police's notoriously crass "racial profiling" of highway drivers. But when push came to shove, he revealed his true colors. From 2001 to 2003, as head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division, he authorized the indefinite jailing of 700 immigrants from Arab countries. Not one has yet been brought to trial.
Another new Bush appointment reveals the extent to which he is becoming "Kerry-ized." He's picked Robert Zoellick as Condi Rice's top deputy in the State Department. Zoellick has no qualms about serving the Eastern Establishment. A favorite of James A. Baker III (Bush, Sr.'s Secretary of State and a Chase Manhattan heir), Zoellick belongs to the Council on Foreign Relations and has advised Goldman Sachs, a financial house with tight ties to the Establishment.
The Chertoff and Zoellick moves are straws in the wind. During the electoral campaign, CHALLENGE declared that regardless of the outcome, state power would remain in the hands of the big bosses, that their agenda wouldn't change. Pressed by events and stung by some of his first-term failures, Bush is now making tactical adjustments. Kerry would have done the same. None of this is good news for the working class. Left to their own devices, the rulers are about to widen their oil war and tighten the vise around workers.
Our job is to build our own forces and to achieve the long-range goal of destroying all the bosses, along with their system. Key to this process is understanding that we must stop relying on the political options the capitalist electoral system offers us. We can rely only on ourselves, on our brothers and sisters around the world, and on class struggle guided by communist principles. PLP's growth will serve to gauge our maturity and our understanding of this crucial truth.
Former Security Chiefs Press For 500,000 Soldiers
Revamping the Homeland Security police state bureaucracy to the Liberal Establishment's taste is proving easier than recasting the tactics of oil war in Iraq. The rulers keep "solving" their problems by creating bigger ones. But that doesn't mean they'll stop trying -- at the expense of Iraqi workers and U.S. working-class soldiers.
As CHALLENGE has stated, Bush, Rumsfeld, & Co. thought they could conquer Iraq, occupy it, and make it safe for Exxon Mobil on the cheap, with air power and 150,000 ground troops. They are learning the hard way that a large infantry remains the key in modern warfare.
Bush or his successors, Republican or Democrat, will eventually have to send more troops to the Persian Gulf. The U.S. may end up occupying the entire Middle East, perhaps not tomorrow, but this is the logic of imperialism. U.S. bosses' strategic need to rule the world requires a hammerlock hold on Persian Gulf oil and the sea lanes to transport it to market. Lurking in the wings are Chinese and Russian bosses, who share the same strategic need and ambition. This is the irresistible force vs. the immovable object, and no electoral circus will make it disappear.
So far in Iraq, Bush's racist tactics have succeeded only in butchering large numbers of civilians. He hasn't secured anything. In the wake of the election, the Establishment is renewing pressure on him to change tactics. U.S. military commanders have basically washed their hands of the upcoming Iraqi "elections," warning of a bloodbath. On January 6, Bush, Sr.'s National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, said that far from providing a "promising turning point" for U.S. interests, the voting fraud Bush, Jr.'s agents are about to carry out in Iraq would launch "a...civil war." (Washington Post) Scowcroft urged turning over the war to the United Nations. This is code language for cutting the U.S.'s European rivals in on some of the oil action.
Scowcroft was seconded by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Democratic Party's equivalent of Henry Kissinger and an imperialist strategist who was a leading architect of U.S. genocide in Vietnam. At the same forum where Scowcroft spoke, Brzezinski suggested that the U.S. could meet its goals in Iraq only if it "were willing to put in 500,000 troops, spend $200 billion a year, probably have the draft and have some kind of wartime taxation."
Brzezinski is an important Establishment figure. His estimate means he -- and his bosses -- may be setting the stage for a dramatic expansion of this war. They're also telling Bush & Co. to take steps toward this expansion. Kerry ran on a platform to do the same. Many people made the mistake of voting for him because they hated "Bush's war." Well, these wars don't belong to any particular politicians. They belong to the profit system and won't stop until a communist-led working class rises up to take matters into its own hands.
PLP-led D.C. Transit Local:
Advance Young Black Workers to Leadership in Fight vs. Racist Inequities
WASHINGTON, D.C., Jan. 9 -- Every advance in the struggle leads to a counterattack. Mao Tse-tung once said, "To be attacked by the enemy is a good thing," and Lenin spoke about how the bosses actually fought harder after they were overthrown because they understood clearly what was at stake. Therefore, ruthless struggle against our enemies is necessary.
This process is reflected in a small way here following the election of PLP'er Mike Golash as President of Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 689 (ATU) last June. The mostly black transit workers that keep the capital of U.S. imperialism running chose communist leadership while the bosses are waging imperialist war in Iraq and developing fascism under the guise of Homeland Security. In this sharpening conflict, we are fighting to consolidate and build a larger base for PLP. This leadership, and those who fought for it, promised to fight to meet the needs of the lowest-paid workers, and improve their benefits and working conditions. This means fighting the racist inequities facing younger workers, who've been on the short end of every contract for the last twelve years.
The newly-elected leadership took over two months after the contract had expired. The union was divided and negotiations had gone nowhere. To keep his promise, and gain time to consolidate a political base for a more protracted contract fight, Mike negotiated a one-year contract that shortened the racist wage progression by one year and thereby provided a substantial wage increase to the lowest-paid workers.
A right-wing faction attacked Mike for fighting for equality and organized to defeat the one-year contract, 1,934 to 1,844. The right-wing lied and misled the workers, telling the members we could do better and that the young workers had to pay their dues. These hypocrites criticized the settlement because it did not eliminate promotional testing in Bus Maintenance, but which they themselves had negotiated with management six years ago. In fact, Mike had been the only union leader to fight the unfair testing procedure and the only executive committee member voting against this previous sellout.
Mike invoked the contract's arbitration clause to resolve the dispute. The right-wing mobilized to attack Mike at the December union meeting. One stooge physically charged Mike after Mike exposed his role in supporting the promotional testing procedure. Five other workers defended Mike and drove the attacker back to his seat. Meanwhile, Mike formed a committee of the workers affected by the unfair testing to work on a proposal to present to management in the upcoming contract negotiations.
At the January union meeting, things were different. Dozens of workers had organized garage after garage, talking to hundreds of workers about the attack on the union's new red leadership. About 400 workers attended, including a pretty solid base of 200 young workers to defend the red president.
These young workers, by taking on the old leadership which is also mostly black, dealt a significant blow to nationalism and those who cynically profit from it, demonstrating the mass potential of PLP's internationalism. Supported by many senior workers who have come to know the Party's strategy over the last 30 years, these younger workers are becoming a base for the Party and its friends and creating the conditions necessary for a much more serious fight over the three-year contract that becomes effective July 1, 2005.
Clever negotiating and legal dodges won't cut it. Even militant action cannot guarantee a better life for workers. And being "right" isn't enough. In capitalism's developing crisis of inter-imperialist rivalry, war, fascist Homeland Security and racist terror, the attacks on workers will intensify. Only a politically conscious, well-organized working class will stand a chance against the bosses' strike-breaking threats.
Through sharp political and class struggle, we can show that capitalism is stacked against us, and that communist revolution is the only way out. The bosses' law makes it illegal to strike against Metro, and a strike here would certainly raise the Homeland Security threat level to RED! A walkout would bring the full power of the state -- court injunctions, jailings, fines, arrests, beatings -- against the workers. The transit workers' struggle must increasingly have a vision of a communist world run by workers. The first steps in this process means winning workers to join PLP and win others, mainly by spreading CHALLENGE throughout the Metro system. (For the latest presidential address to the union members, see: www.atulocal689.org/president.html).
World's Auto Bosses' Dogfight Bites Workers
DETROIT, MI, Jan. 15 -- Beneath the glitz and glamour of the 2005 North American International Auto Show, events reflect the sharpening billionaires' dogfight over the U.S. auto market and fascist attacks against the working class.
First, General Motors will slash about 8,000 jobs, or 7% of its U.S. workforce over the next 12 months. Similar cuts have occurred annually since 2000, when GM had 198,000 workers. Today, it has 153,000 -- down 45,000 in four years under the "job security contracts" negotiated with the UAW. Last fall, GM announced the elimination of 12,000 jobs in Germany, England, Spain and elsewhere at GM-Europe. This sparked wildcat strikes and mass protests among Opel workers, GM's subsidiary in Germany. (See analysis in CHALLENGE, 11/3/2004.)
GM CEO Richard Wagoner said, "...I feel pretty good," but "I don't feel good about the impact that [health-care costs] has on our U.S. profitability." (Detroit Free Press, 1/10) He said GM spent about $5.1 billion on health care for 1.1 million workers, retirees, surviving spouses and dependents, and will top $5.4 billion in 2005.
Secondly, on January 9, a new 6-year contract was ratified between the UAW and Caterpillar covering about 9,000 workers in four states. Caterpillar is the world's largest heavy equipment maker and made record profits last year.
Workers overwhelmingly rejected two earlier tentative agreements, but weren't willing to strike, having experienced a 6_-year standoff and two failed strikes leading to their last contract in 1998. Caterpillar used scabs to break those strikes and was ready to do it again.
Workers have learned the hard way that the pro-capitalist UAW leadership is unwilling to break the bosses' laws, seize the factories, and take on the scabs, cops and courts. Cynical, bitter, fearful and passive, workers nearing retirement sacrificed new and future workers. A two-tier wage system will hire new workers at $10 an hour, less than half the current hourly wage. Current supplemental (temporary) workers who become permanent will make about $17 an hour instead of the current wage of $20 to $22. They agreed to a wage freeze in return for lump-sum payments equaling 2% to 4% of their pay over the next five years plus a $3,000 "signing bonus." This means a new hire starting at $10/hr. this year will be making the same rate in 2009!
For the first time, workers will pay $3,000 a year toward their health insurance and sacrifice $1,500 to $2,500 a year in bonuses to cut retiree health care costs from $135 a month to $60 a month.
Thirdly, the U.S. "Big 3's" domestic market share sank to an all-time low of 58.7%, as Asian automakers captured 31% of the market last year. Big increases by Japan's top automakers boosted U.S. sales to a three-year high of 16.9 million vehicles for 2004.
Sales declined in 2004 for both GM (down 1.3%) and Ford (down 4.5%). The only "domestic" automaker to increase sales was the German-owned DaimlerChrysler AG, up 4%, raising its market share by 0.2 points.
Meanwhile, the Japanese Big Three of Toyota, Honda and Nissan posted record sales in 2004. Over the last 10 years, the U.S. "Big 3" domestic market share fell from 73% to 58.7%, while Japan's "Big 3" rose from 17.6% to 26.4%. (Chicago Tribune, 1/5)
"The Big Three Japanese are taking share from the Big Three U.S. automakers. It's been going on a long time, and it's a steady march," said auto analyst Robert Hinchliffe at UBS Securities in New York. (Detroit News, 1/5)
Toyota sales topped 2 million for the first time, up 10% for the year. Nissan sales rose 24% and Honda's rose 1%.
Ford and GM will start the New Year the same way they finished the last one, with production cutbacks -- and China plans to enter the U.S. market in 2007.
The fight for markets, resources and cheap labor is what defines imperialism, and ultimately, the imperialists settle their scores through war. The world's autoworkers -- with a long militant history of mass fight-backs and being the key to capitalist production, from Sao Paulo to Detroit to Wolfsburg, Tokyo and Beijing -- unfortunately are victims of their union leaders' anti-communism, patriotism and defense of capitalism. The climb out of this hole is long and hard, but the only viable road is to break with all the sellouts and their pro-boss politics and forge a revolutionary communist leadership. Join the PLP and help escape this trap!
Mexico: Red Ideas Link Community and Factory Struggles
MEXICO CITY -- Santa Maria is a working-class colonia (neighborhood) north of here. With 10,000 people, this is one of many poor colonias surrounding this city. It's also full of struggles: workers refuse to accept their oppression and poverty lying down. Even though the electoral parties' reformism manipulates and sells out many of these str xsuggles, the fight-back in the last four years in Santa María has taken another road, influenced by communist politics and the idea that working-class liberation means a fight for communism.
Colonia residents, understanding that bosses get rich from workers' labor, boldly confronted a dozen mid-size companies operating in the area, demanding economic support to improve the local school, an auditorium used for community activities, and payment for community musical and sport events. When the companies refused, the people threatened to block their operations.
When the bosses realized that these workers, many of them women, were serious and determined, they gave in. The workers also pressured local authorities into paving the streets and fixing several drainage systems.
There are many such struggles all across Mexico City, but Santa María was different in that many people involved in the struggle read DESAFIO-CHALLENGE. They are learning from workers' struggles worldwide, from the paper's analysis of the world situation, from the pluses and minuses of the old communist movement, and so on. Some are bringing these ideas to the factories. One brought PLP leaflets to his job at the Social Security office where workers have been fighting a government scheme to screw them out of their pensions.
In the past, PLP'ers led many struggles at the nearby Ford plant. This caused many neighbors to ask help at various workplaces, since they saw that PLP didn't sell out, or fall into narrow reformism, nor were we intimidated by the bosses, cops and union hacks' attacks. In all the struggles, PLP always advanced its politics about inter-imperialist rivalry for markets and cheaper labor leading to wars, plant-closings and mass layoffs. In all these struggles we have always spread the Party's ideas about communist revolution freeing the workers from capitalism.
Although, we were unable to prevent mass layoffs at Ford, we did learn the need to broaden struggles from one plant to many others and to local neighborhoods. Indeed, the fight for a worker-led society is long and hard, but we're taking modest steps in that direction.
There are many ideological barriers to be overcome among workers. One told us, "The struggle you're carrying out is good, but to win we must believe in god." We must show such workers that the way to win is to believe in ourselves, the working class, not in a supreme being.
As the struggle widens and sharpens, many such honest workers will see that the working class has the power to liberate itself. One good sign of this is the many workers now asking us, "When will you give us more DESAFIOS?"
Good Riddance to Private Prison Boss, Exploiter of Inmates
Death finally claimed George Wackenhut, founder of the world's second largest private prison corporation, which owns prisons with 40,000 inmates in the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand. Wackenhut, a former FBI agent, "recruited former members of the CIA, FBI and elite military forces" to company management. (NY Times, 1/8/05) These included former FBI head Clarence Kelley, former defense secretary and CIA deputy director Frank Carlucci and CIA director William Casey.
This motley crew made deals with Federal, State and County governments to contract out inmates to Wachenhut's private prisons at up to $60 per man-day. This prison corporation then turns around and signs contracts with some of the largest corporations in the U.S. -- Boeing, Dell Computer, Lockhardt Technologies (LTI), IBM, AT&T Wireless, Honeywell, Nordstrom, Revlon, to name a few -- for prisoners to manufacture anything these companies sell. The private prison building program is backed by investors like Merrill-Lynch and American Express.
One example of Wackenhut's effect on U.S. workers: in 1995, LTI closed its Austin, Texas plant, laid off 130 workers earning $10 an hour and shifted its circuit board assembly operations to Wackenhut's "Work Program Facility" in Lockhardt, Texas where 180 prisoners make 50cents an hour while Wackenhut pays the state $1 a year rent. (The Nation, 1/29/96) No wonder Wackenhut's "legacy" is a multi-billion dollar industry based on slave labor.
Wackenhut began as a strike-breaking outfit and worked closely with the CIA to take over the Cabazon Indian reservation in California to manufacture explosives, poison gas and biological weapons for shipment abroad. It also developed a list of 4,000,000 U.S. "dissidents" for future use.
Wackenhut's business is based on the selling of human beings -- modern slavery. It is racist through and through. Seventy percent of U.S. prisoners are black or Latino, a majority of them jailed for non-violent crimes for which people are not imprisoned in European capitalist countries. They've now become fodder for the most exploitative profit-making since pre-Civil War slavery. The government auctions off mostly young black men to the highest bidder. Says one private prison company CEO, in promoting the country's biggest growth industry, "You just sell it like you were selling cars or real estate or hamburgers."
Unfortunately, the Wackenhut Corporation didn't die with its founder.
Racist Unemployment Deadly for Workers' Health
"When Fabiola Quitiaquez lost her job in New York City last May, she moved to the Atlanta area, confident she would easily find work there. `I thought maybe if would take two to three months,' she said. But after six months [she] was still unable to find a job, even cleaning houses or caring for the elderly. As her unemployment ran out in November, she found herself at odds with news reports of economic recovery. `I realized what all these people like me were going through,' she said." (New York Times, 1/9/05)
About 3.6 million workers ran out of unemployment benefits last year, the most in three decades. And 60% of the unemployed are not even eligible for any benefits! Since the start of the recession in March 2001, the average length of unemployment has risen to 20 weeks from 13.
But the effect of joblessness goes far beyond just loss of income. It leads to emotional and economic stress, the loss of health benefits, cutting corners on medical care and, as Ms. Quitiaquez told her daughter, put off your car repairs and "use a screwdriver to change gears." She has high blood pressure, "but," she says, "if you go to a doctor, that's a luxury." She says that if she can't find a job, she'll have to return to the Bronx and move in with her parents.
Unemployment leads to "a chain of adversity." As outlined by Michigan University psychology professor, Richard Price, a "cascade of negative events... follow....The family is forced to ration health care. Or you can't send a child to college, or make a car payment -- and then you don't have the transportation to look for a job. Or you can't sell your house because everyone else in the neighborhood is unemployed so property values go down."
A 1976 Congressional study attempted to "estimate the cost in human suffering of people being out of work." (NYT, 10/31/76) It concluded that every 1.4% rise in unemployment led directly to the death of 30,000 workers over the next five years from stress-related ailments, suicide and homicide. In fact, Dr. Harvey Brenner of Johns Hopkins University told the Congressional Joint Economic Committee that, "The national suicide rate...can be viewed as an economic indicator," so close is the link between joblessness and workers' violent deaths. This is in addition to increases in malnutrition, mental anguish and sickness, as pointed out in this study:
Infant mortality rates show dramatic increases within one to two years of an economic recession;
* Brenner testified that, "Short-term general hospital admissions...respond very sharply to adverse changes in the economy as do mental hospital admissions, for an unbroken period of about 127 years in the U.S."
* Death by suicide rises within the first month or two of a recession;
* Heart disease peaks 3 to 5 years after the start of a recession;
* Over 26,000 deaths from 1970 to 1975 from strokes, heart and kidney ailments were linked directly to just that 1.4% increase in the unemployment rate in 1970.
These effects are even worse for black and Latin workers since the racist nature of capitalism doubles their unemployment rate as compared to white workers, as well as lengthening the duration of joblessness.
The millions of workers sent to an early grave out of the tens of millions of workers laid off over the past 50 years could probably rival any mass killing anywhere in the world. But these constantly occurring deaths don't get the headlines that the murder of one hot-shot celebrity gets.
Such is the hidden and unrecorded violence that the capitalist profit system -- the direct cause of unemployment -- metes out to the working class. The only solution to these violent deaths is destruction of that profit system and its replacement by a communist system that bases itself on workers' needs, not bosses' exploitation of the working class.
"They say stress is highest when you don't know what's going to happen next," a jobless computer programmer in Hopkins, MN, told the Times. "That's what I deal with day to day."
GI Morale Could Be Achilles Heel For U.S. Warmakers
Ironically, U.S. imperialism's advantage on the world stage, its staggering military might, could wind up as its Achilles heel. As the war drags on in Iraq, morale in the military worsens.
Recruitment and re-enlistment in the National Guard is dropping to levels causing a crisis for the military. Guard enlistment is down 30% over the last three months, this was after failing to meet its 2004 recruitment goals. The Army is responding to the troop shortage by trying to eliminate the two-year limit on keeping Guard and Reserve soldiers active. This will only worsen morale still further.
The active Army had to push 20% of its 2005 incoming recruits into the military 2004, ahead of schedule, to meet its 2004 recruitment goals. The majority of the drop in enlistment and re-enlistment rates is among black soldiers. The rate of enlistment and re-enlistment among white soldiers in the regular Army is at about its pre-war rate.
Long-term this poses a huge problem for the military because over the last 20 years black soldiers have become the backbone of the Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) corps. Since the advent of the all-volunteer army, black soldiers have re-enlisted and gone on to become NCO's at a much higher rate than white soldiers. In a military that's about 25% black, the majority of NCO's are black. The NCO's are the ones who hold the Army together day to day. Losing these soldiers, and promoting soldiers they wouldn't have wanted to otherwise, will cause more problems.
Another sign of low morale is the 5,500 desertions since the start of the war. Relative to the size of the military, this is a desertion rate comparable to Vietnam, which was a draft Army. Additionally, 1,800 inactive reservists -- out of only about 10,000 that have been called up -- are challenging their activation by the Army in court.
In the short-term the military will offer more money to new recruits and re-enlistees. They're also forcing soldiers who don't re-enlist to serve an extra tour in Iraq. But using a carrot-and-stick approach to a political problem is risky for the ruling class. What will they have to pay if they need more soldiers next year? It can also create tension between higher-paid and lower-paid soldiers, particularly when some soldiers are being paid $1,000/month tax-free to stay in Iraq, while others have been forced into an additional tour there. It also runs the risk of not working. And then what will the military do?
Invaders Also Destroyed By Imperialist War
Herold Noel is an Iraqi War vet whose unit spearheaded the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Today he is homeless and suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
"Honorably discharged with a chest full of medals in August 2003, Noel spent some time in Hinesville, Ga. before packing up his 1994 red Jeep Cherokee and heading to New York last July. But dreams of a sweet homecoming soon dissipated." (NY Post, 1/10/05)
Noel and his family were unable to all squeeze into the small apartments of relatives in Brooklyn, and as the Post reported, "Today he rambles through the streets...in an SUV looking for a place to sleep," with his wife and children possibly having to join him shortly.
After seeing "things nobody should ever see," Noel is suffering the mental effects of a war that is destroying both the occupied and the occupiers. While the Army claims there's plenty of assistance available for Noel, anyone who has ever dealt with the VA knows how difficult it is to get help.
Noel is only one of many. A Center for American Progress report estimates that eventually over 100,000 veterans of this war will need mental health treatment. Wars of occupation lead soldiers to question what they have done. Captain Tim Wilson, an Army Chaplain, summed up what soldiers are thinking, "...after shooting someone, [they are] asking, `Did I commit murder?'"
The only one way GI's can prevent U.S. rulers from using them as cannon fodder in their oil wars to kill other workers and their families is to rebel against such orders, as some have done already. GI's can be organized to fight in their own class interests, to unite with workers internationally against U.S. imperialism, which would be powerless without a military to carry out its plans for world domination in its drive for maximum profits.
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Union Anti-War Motion Ties Fight-Back Here To GI Refusals
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, January, 7 -- At this month's union meeting, a mechanic distributed copies of a motion in support of the nineteen reservists in Iraq who refused to carry out their mission to deliver fuel. "If these troops were able find a way to fight back, even under the pressing conditions in wartime Iraq, surely we can find a way to fight back against the bosses attacks here," was one point in the motion.
The union leadership, especially the president, opposed the motion, which also called on the local's executive board and the city Federation of Labor to organize a fight-back against transit service cuts as funds bleed away to pay for U.S. imperialism's oil war.
The president said soldiers must obey orders even if they disagreed with them. Furthermore, he didn't like that the terrorists "had given the U.S. the finger in New York on 9/11" and they had brought the war on themselves. The vice-president spoke as an "old soldier who never refused orders" and then asked why the resolution called for bringing only the nineteen reservists home and not all the troops? He obviously wasn't on the same page and drew a withering glare from the union president. The motion finally didn't pass with some parliamentary "help" from the president.
The membership, on the other hand, wanted to hear about the motion. One worker spoke clearly and passionately as he summarized the existing back-door draft with reserves, National Guard and "stop-loss" GI's trapped into fighting a war they clearly want to get away from. He explained how the demoralization was reducing re-enlistments, that recruitments were falling and that a draft was more likely. "The U.S. isn't about to give up that oil," he concluded. Another, a bodyman, was glad to get the addresses of the 19 GI's in Iraq (as printed in CHALLENGE) on the back of the copies of the resolution passed out at the meeting. The war is an important issue to them.
Even workers who spoke against the motion started by saying they didn't support the war or didn't know why the U.S. had sent troops into Iraq in the first place, and that they respected the sincerity of the member who raised the motion. One thought the language was too sharp. Another wanted to omit the words "murderous nature of imperialist war." Still another asked, "Is the U.S. really imperialist?" saying, "I'm not sure what imperialism is."
However, the introduction could have been much stronger. Only one worker came to the meeting prepared to support the motion. Our Party club, including its leadership, didn't activate our base to see the anti-war motion as a real opportunity to link a weakening U.S. capitalism moving towards world war to the attacks on our class's standard of living. Our modest action hits directly at the bosses' ability to win workers politically to their fascist war economy.
In practice, there was much more positive response than the one we subjectively feared.
At our club meeting we'll struggle to correct this mistake by planning more struggles on the job and in the union to connect the cutbacks on us with the bosses' war economy. Our study groups on dialectics and political economy can help us and our friends understand the situation and the communist solution. That way we can open up a front at the union meetings for the battle between pro-capitalist unionism vs. workers' power. We should be able to both involve more workers in this fight and expand our study groups.
Multi-Racial HS Club Takes Post-Election Action
NEW JERSEY, Jan.17 -- Since September, a group of high school students has become politically active through a local Amnesty international chapter. Starting with just four students and one anti-war teacher, the meetings now draw about a dozen students, discussing issues such as sexism, racism, the war in Iraq and the root of these problems -- capitalism.
Although Amnesty International has been a school club for many years, a new advisor has steered it away from passive actions like letter-writing campaigns, and has struggled with students to participate in more active forms of dissent, such as attending weekly protests with the local Peace Action group and creating a newsletter to distribute throughout the school. Consequently, many other teachers are beginning to show support.
One teacher approached the club advisor and shook his hand enthusiastically after hearing from her friends in town that the students had demonstrated against the war in near-freezing temperatures. "This is great." She said, "This is great that you and the students are getting involved; if there's any way I can help, let me know!" After overhearing that conversation, another teacher said she wanted to attend.
The leaders of this group, who are Asian, white, black, and Latin, mostly women, have been looking for a place to express their frustration over the events around us. Since all of them were too young to vote (although many said they would have if given the opportunity), they didn't feel demoralized after the election, but rather felt even more motivated to spread the word about the club and the anti-war demonstrations. In fact, one student had proposed demonstrating at the military recruitment center, located on one of the town's busiest streets. Many others agreed, and plans are currently in the works.
Although many of them are quick to just blame Bush for current problems, some are open to communist ideas, spending literally two hours after school with the teacher discussing a revolution to smash capitalism and how we, the working class, would carry out a new type of society. Three students are currently reading CHALLENGE and attending local study groups.
With such excitement and activity in the first half of the school year, the second half can only get better. The sharpening imperialist rivalry between the U.S. ruling class and its competitors will affect students and workers here at home. Building a worker/student alliance is an important aspect of workers seizing state power. These are our future leaders. We owe it to the working class to win them to communist ideas, distributing CHALLENGE and struggling with them to take leadership roles among their peers.
Going Toe To Toe with Garment Boss
(Part of the ongoing struggle in a garment factory, continuing from CHALLENGE, 1/19.)
At 10 A.M. on a Monday, two workers who had helped formulate the workers' plan to act together for their demands, betrayed that agreement. They told Tomas, "We've decided to talk to the boss." "But Jaime," said Tomas, "we have a plan and must respect it. Everyone should participate." But Jaime retorted, "Are you coming or not?" Angrily Tomas went along, joined by a fourth worker.
"Sit down," said the boss when they entered. Jaime and his friend sat, but Tomas and the fourth worker preferred to stand, refusing the boss's gesture of "friendship."
"Mister, we've got problems," began Jaime. "What problems?" asked the boss. "Is Marta [the forelady] important for you? asked Jaime. "Yes," said the boss, adding "and also for Lucky" (the brand name for the pants we make). "She seems like Hitler," said Jaime, imitating the Nazi salute. But they couldn't reach an agreement. The workers' demands had stated: "Continuing harassment by any person in charge of a section will cause a work stoppage to seek their firing."
When they began discussing the new rule for punching time cards before and after the half-hour lunch break [with two old time clocks for 250 workers], Tomas supported the fourth worker's proposal that new time clocks be installed which don't force workers to lose time off their lunch period, avoiding the current long lines.
"I'm thinking about guying a time clock you mark with your fingerprints," said the boss, "so no one can punch in or out for anybody else." Nobody opposed this, but it was clear that any change would be used by the bosses to increase control over the workers.
When Jaime proposed a $5 deduction from every paycheck to be returned at the end of the year (as a "savings"), Tomas objected -- "This is not on the agenda. We must stick to the points agreed upon with the other workers."
Next they discussed wages. Workers must be paid at least the minimum wage for every hour worked. We're paid by the piece. On days when work is scarce, we don't make the minimum, but since the boss needs the production, we must stay all day. We don't get paid for waiting. To skirt the minimum wage law, the boss applies our wages on days when there's more work (and we exceed the minimum) to those days when we don't make the minimum but are obligated to stay there for 8 hours.
We didn't win on this point, which affects the boss's profits. No surprise -- capitalism's laws give the bosses the advantage. To win anything, we must break the bosses' laws with strikes and rebellions. Even then, the boss fights to take more and more of the value we produce for their war economy. As the meeting ended, Tomas proposed that we "tell all the workers the results of this discussion." Reluctantly, the boss "agreed" to talk to all of them at 12:30 P.M.
During the lunch break, the struggle continued. "Why are you opposed to a work stoppage?" Tomas asked Jaime. "Because," he replied, "they would close the factory. Everyone needs to work. And the workers won't support it."
"Look," replied Tomas, "we're not asking for much. And the boss can close the factory whenever he wants. If we don't fight back, the boss will take more and more from us and sink us deeper into poverty. True, if we fight, they threaten to throw us onto the street. That's why, in the end, we workers need to get rid of this criminal system. We must have confidence in the workers," he concluded.
"We have to continue with the plan," said a woman worker when told what happened in the boss's office. These expressions of support and struggle continued during lunch.
At 12:30, about 30 workers met to question the boss, but (to avoid stopping production) he said he would talk to everyone at the afternoon break.... (To be continued)
Government Using Stewart Trial
To Silence Dissidents
NEW YORK CITY. Jan. 17 -- The government's attempt to convict criminal defense lawyer Lynne Stewart on charges linked to the Clinton Administration's anti-terrorist laws passed in 1996, opens up another front in the struggle against the growth of U.S. fascism.
Ms. Stewart is currently on trial in Federal Court here. She's facing a 40-year jail sentence, accused by the government of "materially aiding terrorists" and violating Special Administrative Measures imposed by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. The indictment is based on a public press release Stewart passed from her client, Sheik Abdel-Rahman, to Reuters; on overheard, privileged attorney-client interviews; and on wiretapped conversations of the paralegal and interpreter on the case, who've also been indicted. Abdel-Rahman was convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and is currently serving a life-sentence.
Although prosecutors produced no concrete evidence of Stewart's involvement in any terrorist conspiracy from the 8,000+ intercepted phone calls and recorded conversations, the government is driving all out to convict her, using guilt by association to link her to the terrorist acts of her client's Egyptian fundamentalist group.
Her trial is partly similar to the Rosenbergs' case, tried in the same courtroom over 50 years ago, where the government also had no tangible proof but indicted -- and later executed -- the couple for "conspiracy to commit espionage." The ruling class used the trial to whip up anti-communism on behalf of U.S. imperialism during the Cold War, furthering wholesale rounds-ups and imprisonment of communists and other militants.
For 27 years Lynne Stewart has defended black and Latin working people and well-known political activists. This trial is an attack on lawyers who defend those who challenge the system. It's an attempt to silence dissidents.
The courtroom was packed every day with previous clients and political and professional allies. The government's propaganda is having an effect on members of mass organizations who fear attending forums addressed by Lynne Stewart.
PLP disagrees with her client's terrorist tactics, which would just replace U.S. bosses and their lackeys in the Middle East for other local and foreign exploiters. We believe the only way to free workers in the Middle East and worldwide is fighting against all forms of capitalist exploitation, fighting for communism. But in supporting Lynne Stewart, we can expose the sham of the U.S. legal system's claim to "provide justice for all" and reveal its true purpose: a ruling class tool to enforce its class interests.
Fast Food Leads To Super-Sized Profits
Fast Food Nation: the dark side of the all-American meal; by Eric Schlosser, 2001.
Super-Size Me; directed by Morgan Spurlock, 2004.
Both these works concern the growing epidemic of obesity in the U.S., especially in children.
Morgan Spurlock is a writer, director, producer and founder of The Con, this film's production company. He says it is an "examination of the American way of life and the influence it has had on our children, the nation and the world at large."
In this documentary, Spurlock goes on a 30-day McDonald's binge, eating three full meals a day at their restaurants across the country. He gains 24_ lbs., raising his cholesterol count from 165 to 225, becoming addicted to the food, and essentially pickling his liver with fat. Afterwards, it takes him eight weeks on a vegan diet to normalize his cholesterol and liver function and another fourteen to lose the weight.
Throughout his journey to obesity, he interviews many average citizens, health experts, school officials and food-industry lobbyists. He concludes that: fast food is unhealthy; advertising targets children; the No Child Left Behind Act is cutting physical education and recess on behalf of more test preparation; and school districts are allowing sodas and other unhealthy foods into the schools and school lunches.
He gives one great example of how junk food and soda affect students' behavior and performance. A Wisconsin school for students who had problems in other schools contracts for school lunches with Natural Ovens, which provides low-fat, low-sugar meals. The school has also banned soda and candy machines on campus. This led to a marked improvement in behavior and grades. His solution: consumers have a choice and should not choose fast food.
Eric Schlosser is a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. His book examines the fast food industry as a whole, from its history to its secret inner workings to its employees to the effect it has on the community.
He exposes the flavoring industry that makes highly-processed fast food taste so good it keeps you buying more. He shows how the chains exploit teenage workers with low pay and little training and get government subsidies to do so. He explains how large corporations have turned family farms into factory farms which churn out cattle and chickens, fed each other's by-products, leading to food-poisoning and Ecoli outbreaks. He looks at the "most dangerous" job, meatpacking, how it exploits women and recent immigrants and flaunts safety and OSHA regulations, both for the food it produces and the workers who do the processing.
The book reveals that none of these industries care about workers, either those it employs or the ones who purchase its products. They are virulently anti-union and have a total disregard for safety and health. Their only concern is making maximum profits.
So what should we do? Schlosser says we should apply the USAS (United Students Against Sweatshops) campaign against Nike sweatshops to the meat-packing industry, using our power as consumers to boycott fast food until they improve its nutrition. In other words, work towards "kinder, gentler" capitalism.
As communists, we can use these statistics and issues to spark discussion about the true nature of capitalism and give concrete examples of its super-exploitation of workers. They demonstrate that the trend of consolidation permeates every industry, including food production and processing. Since there are no new markets to conquer, buy-outs and mergers become necessary for companies to maximize profits.
The idea that a consumer boycott will fix the fast food and meatpacking industries misunderstands how capitalism works. As consumers, workers don't have the power to shut down industry. Only organized at the point of production can workers do that.
To hit the food industry where it really hurts, workers need to organize strikes and work stoppages. But to actually stop the exploitation of workers in all industries they must organize a communist revolution.
Advocating boycotts also implies that some companies do not exploit workers. However, under capitalism companies make profits by exploiting the labor power of workers, by paying them less than the value they add to a product. There are no "good" capitalists, who do not exploit workers.
The bosses' utter disregard for the safety and health of both the workers who produce and those who purchase their products is just another crime in the long list of capitalism's evils. These exposés should not depress us, but should make us angry and even more determined to destroy the system that treats us as disposable.
Why Is Rulers' Government Attacking Big Drug Firms?
Recently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) attacked industry giant Pfizer for covering up the dangerous side effects of its painkillers Celebrex and Bextra. Late last year, the FDA forced Merck's Vioxx off the market because it could cause heart problems. Now the FDA has set mid-February hearings to rake Merck and Pfizer executives over the coals. But protecting consumers from the abuses of the big drug companies, also called Big Pharma, is not the FDA's purpose. Its crackdown on the drug-makers reflects a general tightening of control over industry by U.S. rulers. Intensifying fascism goes hand-in-glove with their widening imperialist wars.
The drug companies' fabulous profits eat up capital that the rulers need for rebuilding their industrial base and expanding their war machine. Drug sales hit $215 billion in 2002 and are predicted to reach $346 billion in 2007 -- nearly what the Pentagon spends. So the rulers are targeting Big Pharma's biggest moneymaker -- blockbuster drugs, ones that gross more than a billion dollars annually, like Vioxx, Celebrex and many of the cholesterol-lowering statins. In the blockbuster racket, a manufacturer gets swift approval for a product from a compliant FDA, advertises it to the skies, and then bribes doctors to prescribe it. When the patent comes close to running out, the maker (or a rival) tweaks a molecule or two and re-patents the new formula, assuring five more years of megaprofits. The best-selling painkillers and anti-cholesterol drugs are chemical knock-offs of one another. But the rulers are derailing this gravy train.
First, they had to wrest the FDA from the grasp of the drug firms. The London Financial Times reported (1/7/05), "the drug industry finances and controls most of the clinical trials on which FDA decisions are based." So the rulers found a whistleblower within the FDA, David Graham, who "argues that Vioxx was only the most `catastrophic' in a series of lethal regulatory failures in the past decade. He warns that at least five other lucrative blockbuster drugs on the market should be withdrawn." (FT) Supported by the ruling-class Rockefeller family foundations, groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest and Public Citizen launched a campaign of FDA exposés and pro-regulatory lobbying.
Next came an ideological assault by the rulers on the companies themselves. The year 2004 saw the publication of books like: "The $800 Million Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost Of New Drugs"; "On the Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health" and many others. Marcia Angell, the Harvard faculty member who wrote "The $800 million pill" decried the squandering of capital. "Drugs are the fastest-growing part of the health care bill -- which itself is rising at an alarming rate. The increase in drug spending reflects, in almost equal parts, the facts that people are taking a lot more drugs than they used to, that those drugs are more likely to be expensive new ones instead of older, cheaper ones, and that the prices of the most heavily prescribed drugs are routinely jacked up, sometimes several times a year." Jerome Kassirer, the Harvard-affiliated author of "On the Take," argues that elite universities (like Harvard, run directly by the ruling class) should steer health care in the U.S.
Merck and Pfizer are in hot water because, as the rulers seek to militarize society, they must become concerned with the long-range interests of their class. While their system is still based on the drive for maximum profits, they must demand obedience from capitalists like those in the pharmaceutical industry whose short-range greed threatens the long-range ability to maintain the system as a whole. So "sacrifice" has become their watchword among sections of the capitalist class, while at the same time demanding enormous sacrifice from the entire working class.
Nazi War Criminals Headed U.S. Space Program
On Oct. 4, 2004, SpaceShipOne won the $10 million Ansari X Prize, completing the required second suborbital flight within two weeks, carrying the equivalence of three adults to outer space. One of the pilots of this first private plane to reach outside the earth's atmosphere told reporters his dream began when he saw a 1950's TV program interviewing Wernher von Braun, the father of the U.S. rocket program.
Who was von Braun? He not only founded the U.S. space program, but Nazi Germany's as well. He held the rank of SS Major, saying later he "did it out of necessity." How did this Nazi, a protégé of Reichführer Himmler, become one of NASA's top guns?
Before he died, President Roosevelt had signed an order banning U.S. use of Nazi war criminals after the war. But when the war ended, the War Department (today's Pentagon) brought 1,500 Nazi scientists to the U.S., naming the undertaking "Operation Paperclip." Eventually 760 German, Austrian and other Nazi scientists were given U.S. citizenship. U.S. bosses were preparing for war against the Soviet Union, their allies during the war, the force which had defeated the bulk of the Nazi war machine. While publicly the U.S. was preparing to try top Nazis for war crimes, they were secretly employing many other Nazis for the coming Cold War against the USSR.
The Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) was formed in 1945 -- similar to the current Homeland Security Agency -- covering the intelligence services of all military branches. It would run Operation Paperclip. Its director, Bosquet Wev, explained the thinking behind this operation: "To emphasize `picayune details' -- like bringing the Nazis to trial -- means the best interests of the United States have been subjugated to the efforts expended in `beating a dead Nazi horse.'" (Linda Hunt, "U.S. Cover-up of Nazi Scientists," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April 1985)
The JIOA tampered with the charges against these Nazis to exclude them from war crimes trials. Von Braun and his entire team were brought to the U.S.
SS Major von Braun had began his career in the 1930's, working for Herman Berth, father of the German rocket program. By 1945, von Braun, at 32, was already an SS commander and a member of Himmler's personal command group. He worked on the V2 rockets -- which terrorized London during the war. They were built at the Mittelwerk plant, using 20,000 slave laborers from his exclusive Dora concentration camp.
Von Braun and his team used prisoners for human experiments. Theodor Zobel -- another Nazi scientist brought to the U.S. after the war -- used humans as guinea pigs in his aerodynamics testing tunnel in Chalais-Meudon, in occupied France. After 1947, Nazis already convicted of war crimes were recruited. One was Otto Ambros, an IG Farben boss during the war, who was part of the group authorizing the use of Zyklon B poison gas (manufactured by an IG Farben subsidiary) in the Nazi gas chambers. He chose Auschwitz to build a Zyklon B plant, using slave labor and testing the poison on prisoners at the death camp. He only served eight years for his crimes, and was hired by JIOA immediately upon his release. He was later hired as a consultant for WR Grace, Dow Chemical -- producer of napalm for the U.S. in Vietnam -- and the U.S. Army Chemical Corps.
The Nazi scientists led by von Braun were put to work at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. The first modified V2 rocket was launched in June 1947, built with parts taken from the Nazi Mittlewerk factory, but it failed, changing course and landing in a crowded neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez. Mexico thought it was being invaded by the U.S. The White House had a lot of explaining to do. But though this first try flopped, the Nazi scientists were very successful in helping the U.S. counter "the Sputnik effect" -- named after the first satellite in space launched by the Soviet Union in 1957.
(Information from Red Voltaire.net, 1/6/05 and other sources. Next: "Mein Führer, we're going to the moon." How these Nazis, heading NASA, helped put astronaut Armstrong on the moon.)
Japan Imperial Army Unit 731: The Other Holocaust
Some of the Second World War's most gruesome atrocities -- medical experiments on Chinese, Russian, British and U.S. prisoners -- were committed in China by Japan's infamous Unit 731.Sixty years later, the Japanese continue to deny or minimize these wartime barbarisms, refusing demands for a clear apology. In the post-war years, the U.S. conspired in the cover-up. Rather than allow Unit 731 research on biological warfare to fall into Soviet hands, U.S. rulers shielded some of the war's worst criminals in exchange for their knowledge. Only the Soviets' public trial of some of these murderous doctors prevented the U.S. and Britain from hiring them, as they did with Nazi scientists.
But it was the human experiments, more than horrible weaponry, that distinguished Unit 731. Once, in an operation aimed at extracting plague-infected organs, about which the surgeon, a Dr. Kamada, still finds it difficult to talk, he took a scalpel with no anesthetic, to a Chinese prisoner, or "log," as the Japanese euphemistically called their victims. "I inserted the scalpel directly from the log's neck and opened the chest," he told a Japanese interviewer anonymously at the time. "At first there was a terrible scream, but the voice soon fell silent."
Unit 731's sprawling headquarters were at Pingfan, on the outskirts of Harbin, China -- complete with an airport, railway stations and dungeons. Retreating Japanese troops burned down most of Pingfan, attempting to destroy evidence, but even today, a local factory still fires up an incinerator where victims of Unit 731's medical experiments -- at least 3,000 men, women and children -- were murdered. A dank cellar eerily suggests the thousands of white rats once bred there as carriers of bubonic plague and whose release at the war's end triggered an epidemic killing thousands of local Chinese.
Last June, Han Xiao, China's leading expert on Unit 731, confirmed what the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has long denied: in 1943 U.S. POWs in Mukden (Shenyang) were injected with various bacteria to test their immunity. Most survived, but many died.
A Unit 731 member, Nobuo Kamaden, speaking on the record for the first time, told U.S. News & World Report that his main job at Pingfan was to breed plague bacteria. "We would inject the most powerful bacteria into rats. On a 500-gram rat, we would attach 3,000 fleas. When the rats were released, the fleas would transmit the disease." Infected rats and fleas were also loaded into special porcelain bombs designed to keep the rats alive as they descended on a parachute from an airplane.
Such are the "fruits" of imperialist war.
(Source: http://www.technologyartist.com/unit_731/)
LETTERS
Fighting racism, sexism in the Navy
I have a First Class Petty Officer in my shop who has consistently given me hell since I arrived on the ship. Other sailors have told me he takes exception to me asking questions and attempting to ensure fairness in the shop.
In the Navy, sailors are assigned to duty sections to guarantee safety and the running of the ship on a daily basis. During the holidays, off-going duty sections have been leaving a little early once all tasks are complete. One day, when I was on that section, the rules suddenly changed.
First, the lead Petty Officer on my duty section told one of my E3 colleagues he could leave early. When the E3 asked about me, the Officer told him not to ask questions, get his stuff and leave, as did the lead Petty Officer. I was left holding the broom.
The E3 asked me if I was told to leave by the lead Petty Officer. "No," I said. Then an E4 Petty Officer, a Latina woman, seeing this injustice, asked the First Class Petty Officer why was I still in the shop. He replied I should check with my supervisor -- a double standard because my E3 colleague didn't have to check with his supervisor (the E4 asking about my liberty). Since my supervisor was getting physical, my E3 colleague suggested that we ask him about my liberty.
We did and he said he had no tasks for me, that I could leave. When I inquired about the injustice, another sailor with my supervisor said I should just leave and ask no questions.
The next day, I went up the chain of command. My supervisor lied, stating he was charged by the First Class Petty Officer with liberty for duty section. The lead Petty Officer lied, saying that he made a general announcement in the lab for everyone to leave. The First Class Petty Officer lied, stating my supervisor, who's not on our duty section, is responsible for liberty for those on duty. It all adds up to racism and sexism.
I talked with the Senior Chief (E8). I'm filing an informal complaint, to bring all parties coming to the table to discuss this situation. Through this, I hope to win my E3 colleague and those below to realize we don't have to accept this madness, that only through struggling together will we prevent tyrants such as this First Class Petty Officer from singling out sailors based on personal biases. None of this would have been possible without my E3 colleague refusing to go home until I was given liberty and without the E4 Petty Officer challenging the First Class Petty Officer.
This gives me hope that we can win workers' power. Although small, this little struggle shows the inherent potential of our class. We must continue to conduct such struggles, exposing the class contradictions and winning sailors and soldiers to PLP's ideas.
Navy Red
So long Social Security
Seventy years ago, retirement plans were rare. If our aged parents and grandparents had been able to save a few dollars, or had children to move in with, they might be able to live O.K. If not, anything could happen -- the "old folks' home" or even begging on the street.
It was depression times. Banks closed. Millions were jobless. Entire families went hungry. Across the US, workers sought food on bread lines and in soup kitchens.
Many unions struck in protest. Workers took to the streets or sat down at their machines and refused to work for lousy wages and long hours. New unions were organized on the docks, in auto and steel. Less than 20 years before, workers in Russia had made a communist revolution. In China, they had begun the same process.
The big bosses were awfully scared. These workers' rebellions forced them to pass child labor laws, set minimum wages and shortened hours. And they set up a Social Security system for retiring workers.
It wasn't a great system. It had many faults. But many seniors now had a chance to take care of themselves when they could no longer work. It was a small victory the workers won, with their sweat and blood, and often with guns.
Now the bosses are seeking to bury Social Security without causing another rebellion. (Have you ever heard of a boss really giving a damn whether you have retirement security or not?) The press, TV and radio are talking about it. The bosses call it "privatizing," and everyone's arguing this way and that. But it all amounts to the same thing: They're going to gut Social Security, and use our earnings for their wars to control oil and expand their empire!
Well, let's just make them EAT it, their whole half-assed capitalist system. Including "Social Security"! Then we can build a true workers' society with security built-in: communism.
Old time Red
Not all Tsunami deaths were preventable
While ruling class pundits are solemnly quoting Shakespeare about nature's cruelty (see David Brooks, NY Times, 1/9), CHALLENGE is to be commended for highlighting the "man-made" nature of various aspects of the tsunami tragedy in the Indian Ocean and putting it in political perspective. It's true that, had the tsunami buoys been in place, at minimal expense, "hundreds of thousands" -- as CHALLENGE states -- might indeed have been warned and been able to seek safety. It's also true that, compared even with the devastation wrought by this tsunami, imperialism kills far more people every year. The Indonesian fascists slaughtered a million leftists in the 1960s and have murdered some 20,000 more rebels in Aceh alone over the past two decades. Millions have died in the Congo over the past several years because of imperialist-driven competition over natural resources. A recent study by the World Resources Institute reveals that some 13 to 18 million children -- 12 million under the age of 5 -- die every year because of International Monetary Fund and World Bank structural adjustment policies.
But I think CHALLENGE was wrong to preface the 1/19/05 editorial with the statement by Canadian tsunami expert Dr. Tad Murtry that, "There's no reason for a single individual to get killed in a tsunami...From where the earthquake happened to hit, the travel time for the waves to hit the tip of India was four hours. That's enough time for a warning."
Murtry was talking about India, where in fact "only" a few hundred people died on the mainland. And what he says might also hold for Sri Lanka and Thailand. But the largest devastation occurred on the Aceh peninsula of western Sumatra, very close to the epicenter of the earthquake that caused the tsunami. In Aceh over 100,000 people died almost immediately -- not "just" the "thousands" that CHALLENGE says perished there.
Most of these people would have died even with tsunami buoys in place. A massive wall of water descended on them within a couple of minutes. The prominent highlighting of the Murtry statement leads the reader to conclude that all the deaths in the Indian Ocean were socially caused; that there's no such thing as a "natural" disaster. This is a non-materialist approach to causality.
There's no doubt that the great majority of people who die prematurely in the world every day do so because of capitalist-engendered poverty and devastation, and that the poverty in Sumatra pressured many fishermen to live in crowded, vulnerable, low-lying areas. But even under communism there will be earthquakes and fishing communities; and even the finest architectural safeguards, oceanic warning systems, and provisions of mass evacuation won't prevent tragedies caused by "nature" -- even if we understand that much of what is called "natural" is conditioned by the "social."
So let's not confuse our levels of causality. And let's not create the mistaken notion that once we get rid of capitalism, there'll be no "natural" tragedies, even though their effects will be mitigated, and they won't be compounded by the racism, structural inequality and malign neglect built into class society.
A Comrade
Racist health care kills
According to a report in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health, more than 886,000 deaths could have been prevented from 1991 to 2000 if black people had received the same health care as whites. Over those ten years, that's more than five times the number of people killed in one day in the recent tsunami tragedy in south Asia. According to Steven H. Woolf, lead author and director of research at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Family Medicine, "five times as many lives can be saved by correcting the [racist] disparities than in developing new treatments." (WASHINGTON POST, 12/21)
During that decade, age-adjusted mortality rates for white men and women averaged 29% and 24% lower than those of black men and women. The authors calculated how many deaths could have been averted if the two groups' mortality rates were equal.
The study also emphasized the class basis to this racist inequality, saying, "Socioeconomic conditions represent a more pertinent cause of disparities than race.... An intriguing question is whether more lives are saved by medical advances or by resolving social inequities in education and income."
Racism is the fiber that holds the capitalist cloth together. It will never be eliminated until we eliminate the profit system with communist revolution. That is what we fight for, today and every day.
NJ Comrade
CHALLENGE changes Churchgoer's Ideas
Often when I circulate CHALLENGE in my church, I question how many read it. During the first Gulf War and the years of sanctions afterwards, I received little feedback.
Then one day, a parishioner approached me to say how the facts and perspectives had generated much understanding. He noted especially the deaths of the many children in Iraq and what caused them. This man is in his eighties and holds a most cautious outlook about radical opinions.
When I told him I'd write a letter to the paper explaining that CHALLENGE had altered someone's view of the world, he agreed. This is being written a year after that original exchange, but when I said I'd do it this time, he corrected me: "It's not only thepaper," he said, "but it's been our conversations over the years that have given me these changed ideas."
Yet another red churchmous
RED EYES ON THE NEWS
Nazis also used religion
Fritz Stern, a refugee from Hitler's Germany and a leading scholar of European history, startled several of his listeners when he warned in a speech about the danger posed in this country by the rise of the Christian right....
He told his audience that Hitler saw himself as "the instrument of providence" and fused his "racial dogma with Germanic Christianity....It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas. . . ."
"When I saw the speech my eyes lit up," said John R. MacArthur, whose book "Second Front" examines wartime propaganda. "The comparison between the propagandistic manipulation and uses of Christianity, then and now, is hidden in plain sight. No one will talk about it." (NYT, 1/6)
Shelter shows hard truth
...Ms.Abbott-Young is the undisputed queen of the $1-million-a-year mission operation, which provides shelter for the homeless....
"This is the most startling...We have people here who have work, but they can't make it on the wages they are paid. We watch the debate about raising the minimum wage to $7 and laugh, as if anyone can survive on $7 an hour." (NYT, 1/11)
Abuse points to high-ups
...Five officers [were] recommended for discipline in a Pentagon report in August....
That report implicated 29 other military intelligence soldiers in at least 44 cases of abuse from July 2003 to February 2004, including one death, beatings, using dogs to threaten adolescent detainees, and having prisoners stripped naked and left for hours in dark, poorly ventilated cells that were stifling hot or freezing cold.
The report said that while the claims of Specialist Graner and other military police soldiers that they had been acting at the behest of military intelligence were "self-serving," they did "have some basis in fact."
Lawyers for the low-ranking soldiers who have been charged say they remain skeptical that higher-ups will ever be charged.
"The higher up they go, the more problems they have....Pappas gives them Sanchez, and they don't want that. Sanchez can give them Rumsfeld, and they don't want that.
"Rumsfeld can lead to Bush and Gonzales, and they definitely don't want that." (NYT 1/17)
Brutal draft is planned
...The Pentagon is also considering plans to further change the rules about mobilizing members of the National Guard and Reserve. Right now they cannot be called up for more than 24 months of active service. That limit would be scrapped, which would permit the Army to call them up as frequently as required.
That's not a back-door draft. It's a brutal, in-your-face draft. (NYT, 1/10)
US health trails Cuba's
Here's a wrenching fact: If the U.S. had an infant mortality rate as good as Cuba's, we would save an additional 2,212 American babies a year. (NYT, 1/12)
US kids: stark poverty
...In 2000, 9.8 percent of French children lived in poverty; in the Netherlands, 8.4 percent; in Sweden, 3.7 percent. But in the United States, 26.3 percent of children were growing up in poverty. (Wash. Post, 1/9)
Vote - armed bandits?
Some say that slot machines are a way of taxing the poor. At least they pay off better than voting machines (Tribune Media)
Marx scores again
[Steve] Nash, a heady, selfless point guard....has led the [Phoenix] Suns...to the best record in the NBA....
Nash has been doing some light reading on the road, studying a playbook of sorts that outlines team concepts like discipline and sacrifice for the common good.
"I'm actually reading the Communist Manifesto," Nash said with a smile after a recent practice....
Nash explained that he picked up the Manifesto, "only because I was reading the autobiography of Che Guevara and I wanted to get a better perspective." (NYT, 1/19)
With this issue we return to our biweekly schedule
Capitalism Kills Again: Turns Natural Disasters into Mass Death
Imperialism Slaughters Millions In Wars For Profit
a href="#Only Rebelling Soldiers Can ‘Bring The Troops Home’ From All Imperialist War">On"y Rebelling Soldiers Can ‘Bring The Troops Home’ From All Imperialist War
a href="#Spitzer: Hit Man For Finance Capital’s Fascist Drive To Discipline Wayward Bosses">"pitzer: Hit Man For Finance Capital’s Fascist Drive To Discipline Wayward Bosses
Wall Street, 2005= Berlin, 1939
a href="#Politics Move Garment Workers To Fight Boss’s Attack">"olitics Move Garment Workers To Fight Boss’s Attack
a href="#Airline Workers Stage Sick-out; Can’t Reform Sick System">"irline Workers Stage Sick-out; Can’t Reform Sick System
New Death Squads: Gangs Ape Murderous Ruling Class
Repression Of Salvadoran Youth Fails to Curtail Crime
Bar-B-Que Yields Meaty Discussion
Racist Attack on ML King Hospital Helps Fund U.S. Wars
a href="#Health Care For Profit And Good Health Don’t Mix">"ealth Care For Profit And Good Health Don’t Mix
Double Death Rate for Afro-American Babies
a href="#Government ‘Snow’ Job on the Deficit and Social Security">Go"ernment ‘Snow’ Job on the Deficit and Social Security
Pizza & Politics: 500 At HS Teach-in Debate U.S. Mid-East Oil Wars
Strike Aftermath: Chicago College Students, Teachers Fight Arrests, Cutbacks
a href="#Big Banks Back Blood-sucking ‘Lenders’ To Squeeze Workers, GI’s">Big "anks Back Blood-sucking ‘Lenders’ To Squeeze Workers, GI’s
a href="#Like The Drug Dealer Says, ‘The First Hit Is Free’">Li"e The Drug Dealer Says, ‘The First Hit Is Free’
a href="#…and whose side is the bosses’ government on?">…a"d whose side is the bosses’ government on?
Bye, Bye Pension; Hello Profiteers
Anti-Communist Liberal Beats Drum for Fascism and Imperialist War
Racist Politicians Use Slave-Era Rules On Prisoners to Hold Power
LETTERS
a href="#Student’s GI Letter Spreads School-Wide">"tudent’s GI Letter Spreads School-Wide
Internationalism Key to Fighting All Nationalism
a href="#Pinochet ‘Trial’ Is Phony Justice">Pi"ochet ‘Trial’ Is Phony Justice
a href="#Bosses Hide Behind ‘Labor Reform’ Schemes">Bo"ses Hide Behind ‘Labor Reform’ Schemes
- Countless battered in Iraq
- A Red world could cope
- Religions lie about sex
- Big Biz likes TV as is
- Legal Aid: anti-red vaccine
- Bush: Armchair Slugger
CAPITALISM KILLS AGAIN: Turns Natural Disasters into Mass Death
"There’s no reason for a single individual to get killed in a Tsunami. The waves are totally predictable. We have travel-time charts covering all of the Indian Ocean. From where this earthquake happened to hit, the travel time for the waves to hit the tip of India was four hours. That’s enough time for a warning." — Dr. Tad Murtry, University of Manitoba tsunami expert (quoted in interview with free-lance journalist Lila Rjaiva).
Tsunamis are phenomena of nature. However, the mass destruction, disease, and homelessness caused by the December 26 undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean were anything but a natural disaster. The blame for 150,000 deaths and the tens of thousands more who will surely die in the tsunami’s aftermath falls squarely on the profit system. Capitalism murdered these people — mostly very poor workers and their children — just as surely as capitalist bullets and bombs are murdering Iraqi workers in Bush, Jr.’s oil war.
A key to preventing the tsunami’s havoc would have been a simple system of buoys, each costing about $250,000. These detector buoys, called "tsunameters," have been in existence for decades. According to Dr. Eddie Bernard, director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, just a few, costing a couple of million dollars, could have done the job.
If the tsunameters had been in place, a warning network would have had to have been established. Several hours could have made all the difference, and hundreds of thousands of people could have been evacuated. But as recently as a June 2004 meeting of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, when experts determined that the Indian Ocean faced a significant threat from local and distant tsunamis, the governments of Thailand, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and other countries in the region chose to ignore this warning and twiddle their thumbs.
Individual reasons may vary. The Thai government didn’t want to perturb the lucrative tourist industry with potential false alarms. Many thousands have died in Aceh, Indonesia, but the Indonesian military — the same butchers who in 1965, with CIA guidance, murdered one million workers accused of being communists — has been slaughtering Acehnese workers in even greater numbers for years to keep the energy resources there safe for Exxon Mobil and the Indonesian bosses tied to U.S. imperialism. The rulers of India — as racist as their U.S. counterparts — could care less about the corpses of a few more thousand poor workers.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is using the tragedy to build a coalition with Japan, Australia and India, mainly as a future force against the Chinese bosses. One reason the Bushites felt it necessary to increase U.S. contributions was "because China’s quest for a large Asian leadership role didn’t go unnoticed." (India Times New Network 1/4/05) And India is using this to expand its naval operation throughout South Asia. So even during such a tragedy, all the bosses are mainly concerned with their imperialist goals.
In essence, the overall culprit in the situation remains the racist profit system, which cares very little about the lives of poor Asian workers. The technology to detect tsunamis and avoid their devastation exists. But the social organization needed to do this does not. Right now, the U.S. is by far the richest and most powerful capitalist force on earth. Yet warfare and, at that, warfare for empire and world domination, is the only kind of intervention for which it can mobilize. After hearing of the tsunami, Bush promised $15 million for disaster relief. When a U.N. official called him stingy, Bush found another $25 million. Now he’s all the way up to $350 million and bragging about U.S. generosity. But this sick parody of "A Christmas Carol" stands in stark contrast to the expenses U.S. rulers really consider important (Contrary to the Bushites’ stinginess, immigrants from the affected countries and workers in the U.S. and worldwide have been very generous in their aid to the victims):
•The Pentagon spent $425 billion in 2004 on war and war preparations.
•The cost of Bush’s current Iraq war is approaching $150 billion.
•The U.S. military feeds, clothes, houses, and provides sanitation and health care for 1,246,000 active-duty troops.
•In Bush, Sr.’s Desert Storm I, the Pentagon supported 750,000 troops in the middle of the desert for months.
•The U.S. has an extensive network of seismic sensors to catch nuclear rivals, but it isn’t set up to warn of natural disasters.
You get the picture: billions to conquer the world, and chump change for the victims of preventable disaster.
The real disaster is the profit system. It’s been a long time since the fundamental conflict in society was between humanity and nature. Capitalism continues to make war and tsunami-like devastation inevitable. Workers need the social tsunami of communist revolution. It will take many years of patient, hard groundwork to develop. But it is as inevitable in its own way as the change of seasons, and when our Party leads it, it will send the entire class of war-making profit moguls to a well-deserved grave.
Imperialism Slaughters Millions In Wars For Profit
While it may be difficult to come to terms with the massive deaths caused by this tsunami, one should remember that U.S. rulers dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, killing 250,000 in one day. A 1975 cyclone killed more than 500,000 people overnight in Bangladesh. A similar toll occurred after a 1970 cyclone, which intensified the conflict between the U.S. and the USSR, since India was armed by Moscow. So the U.S. Navy sent the nuclear-armed Sixth Fleet to threaten the Indian navy.
Cyclones in 1988 and 1991 each killed over 200,000 people.in Bangladesh, although the number of victims was probably many times that. A 1991 CHALLENGE explained the role of the imperialist World Bank — how it dictated rice cultivation in a way that compelled a major population shift, forcing people to live in areas prone to flooding and cyclones.
However, in the current catastrophe warnings were not hard to come by (see adjoining editorial). The U.S. military can guide a missile to any spot on the planet. How come its operators at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii couldn’t pick up the phone and warn Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka of an approaching Tsunami?
All the excuses — "didn’t have the right phone numbers," misjudged the size of the original earthquake — fall flat when, in fact, they did warn the U.S. military base at Diego Garcia, smack in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Perhaps that is the purpose of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center: to warn the U.S. military. The rest of the world can go to hell. After all, right in the middle of an imperialist war in Iraq U.S. bosses refuse to give a count of Iraqi civilians they have killed.
Today we owe the families of over 150,000 dead in Asia condolences and support. But, in this much-touted information age, we also owe them clarity and a solution. Information in the hands of the imperialists is a weapon of mass murder. We need unity and organization on an international scale the working class has never yet attempted. We need one revolutionary communist party and that is the aim of PLP.
It is not to take away from the heartache of our Asian brothers and sisters that we point to the suffering of those in the Congo. Every three or four months they bury as many dead as this tsunami killed. Every three or four months the mass funerals go on and "somehow" the information age ensures ignorance of their grief. The Congolese are burying "only" about 31,000 a month because "peace" has been signed!
In the six years of war before the "peace," 3.8 million people were killed in the Congo. No single country since World War II and the Vietnam War has suffered such a high number of war dead. The wars and "peace" are being fought over which robber capitalist will profit from the wealth of minerals found in the Congo. Minerals like coltan — used in cell phones and computers — sell for as much as $350 a pound. The very tools of the information age have Congolese blood on them!
Our condolences and support spread from the Congo to South Asia. In addition to the immediate aid our brothers and sisters require, we must seize the moment to fill a most strategic need: the development and spreading of our international communist newspaper CHALLENGE-DESAFIO. Information in the hands of the imperialists and capitalists is a weapon of mass destruction. In the hands of the working class, it can be a weapon for revolution and liberation!
a name="Only Rebelling Soldiers Can ‘Bring The Troops Home’ From All Imperialist War"></">On"y Rebelling Soldiers Can ‘Bring The Troops Home’ From All Imperialist War
An active-duty soldier recently wrote to the Syracuse Post-Standard (12/20/04): "The president should ask himself: Why are US troops in Iraq? Because we, the soldiers, are the ones living the everyday, never-ending hell. Soldiers and people dying, a great amount of oil, but still we have not found any weapons of mass destruction. When you ask a soldier who has been living in Iraq for a year why he is there in front of a camera, he might reply that it is to make Iraqi people free. But when he is out of the spotlight, his anger, pain, and hate will come flying out like it does in his everyday Iraqi life."
Catherine Ayro, mother of Lionel Ayro of Jeanerette, LA., a 22-year-old private killed in Mosul, said, "The soldiers in Iraq should all come home. Nobody should be there — nobody!"
Jorge Castro, the father of Spc. Jonathon Castro, 21, also killed in Mosul, is angry at Bush and the Pentagon. He said, "The public affairs people sent me a statement for me to send to the newspapers. I threw it out….He didn’t join the army to ‘fight tyranny.’ He joined the army to go to college." Through a sea of tears, he told CBS News, "What are we doing there? Killing all those people for nothing!" These black and Latino families’ anger is growing.
The day after the attack in Mosul, a New York Times front-page headline claimed, "Fighting On Is the Only Option, Americans Say." The next day, the Times printed ten letters, most expressing the opposite opinion. Surely they received many more such letters. The sharpest was from a relative of a soldier in Iraq saying, "If it was wrong to invade Iraq, how can staying there as an occupying force be less wrong? Innocent civilian lives are lost, and United States service members die right along with them…. If we as Americans don’t agree with the war, we must speak out and say so! Support the troops; bring them home now!"
Anti-war sentiment is growing among soldiers, military families, workers, and working-class high school and college students — especially those most affected by the war. During the Vietnam War, it took ten years before there was anti-war sentiment in the workplace. Today this feeling is growing at work.
Even the Army Times admits that at least one-third of the combat vets are against the war; 39% of active-duty military respondents to their latest poll disapprove of the way the war is being handled. Spontaneity alone won’t end the bosses’ war.
Aggressive organizing is warranted among these angry groups. The only way to "bring the troops home" is when the troops themselves fight for it, like they did in 1946 when U.S. rulers tried to get them to fight their former Russian allies. Even reactionary Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman said the occupation of Iraq will only last as long as the "grunts" are willing to be there.
All this proves the correctness of the communist strategy towards war: "In time of war, …the slogan of transforming the imperialist war into a civil war will remain nothing but an empty phrase unless regular political work is carried out in the armed forces in as serious a fashion as possible." ("Armed Insurrection," by A. Neuberg, p. 154; published by the Comintern in German in 1928, in French in 1931, and in English in 1970 by New Left Review Editions, London.)
In 1981, when the U.S. government began selective service registration, several groups distributed leaflets at Post Office sign-ups. While pacifists told people not to sign up, PLP urged them, if drafted, to pledge to fight racism and for revolution inside the military. In a CHALLENGE article (1/21/81) entitled "Draft Dodging Won’t Stop WW3," PLP members in New York reported on this activity, citing the Communist Third International communist tactics in imperialist wars: "In the event of a big mass movement arising at the moment of the outbreak of war in favor of refusing military service, the Communists must combat the boycott ideology and the pacifist boycott slogan. They must speak quite frankly about the inadequacy of refusal of military service as a means of combating war, and make it clear to the masses that the only correct way of combating the imperialist war is to transform it into civil war. Strenuous propaganda must be conducted urging the necessity for carrying on revolutionary work in the bourgeois Army." History has much to teach us.
a name="Spitzer: Hit Man For Finance Capital’s Fascist Drive To Discipline Wayward Bosses">">"pitzer: Hit Man For Finance Capital’s Fascist Drive To Discipline Wayward Bosses
(First of a series on various ways a police state is developing in the U. S. Future installments will deal with consolidation of finance capital, heavy industry — particularly war industry — health care, education, the media, and the political mechanisms by which the rulers seek to implement fascism.)
For U.S. capitalists, the big story of 2004 was the growth of fascism within their own ranks. The London Financial Times’ choice as "Man of the Year" wasn’t Bush or Kerry or even bin Laden or Putin, but Eliot Spitzer, New York State’s attorney general. Spitzer won the honor for enforcing police state-style regulation of U.S. financiers and anybody who deals with them. Business leaders accuse Spitzer of "using regulation by terror to dictate the detail of how companies are structured, what prices they can charge, and even whom they can employ as chief executive." (FT, 12/24/04)
The U.S. ruling class is brandishing state power to tighten its control over the flow of money. Banks, brokers, mutual funds, and insurance companies engaging in speculation, fraud or any other practice diverting capital away from the rulers’ needs, have felt the heavy hand of Spitzer and federal enforcers. Workers have no interest in backing any of these capitalist forces — neither the big bosses who support Spitzer nor the smaller fry he’s whipping into shape. They’re all our class enemies. Understanding the process can help us avoid this trap.
Recognizing that finance capital controls the economy at large, Spitzer & Co. has targeted the largest Establishment firms. In 2003, he forced J.P. Morgan Chase and Citigroup to cough up a total of $255 million in fines for shady loans to Enron. Enron had run afoul of the main rulers by cornering the energy supply in California, jacking up prices and temporarily crippling the state’s industries. But September 11 made such robber baron maneuvers — especially the disruption of war production— unacceptable to the rulers.
Next on Spitzer’s hit list came brokerages and mutual funds that were undermining investors’ confidence by lying to or stealing from them. The rulers require a continuous flow of capital (largely workers’ pensions and life savings) into these markets. Merrill Lynch paid a $100 million settlement with Spitzer. Janus, Putnam and other funds refunded over $925 million in fees. All in all, Spitzer has wrung more than $4 billion in fines and restitution from Wall Street firms. In the eyes of one mutual fund watchdog, Geoff Broboff, "the ethical practices of the industry have been restored." Another, Mercer Bullard, praises Spitzer’s intimidation tactics: "If you are working in the industry, you care most about your fate. It’s the powerful image of a couple dozen high-level executives being disgraced, losing their jobs and in a few cases ending up in jail." (San Francisco Chronicle, 1/2/05)
Spitzer’s disciplining of wayward Wall Street executives parallels the climate of fear rulers in Germany spread among similar businessmen at the dawn of World War II (see box ).
Spitzer styles himself the "people’s lawyer," but his main support comes from the top ranks of U.S. capitalists, those with the greatest interest in restructuring the U.S. economy on a wartime footing. A group called "Restore the Trust," created and bankrolled by the Rockefeller Family Fund, has guided many of Spitzer’s reform efforts. While Spitzer rails at "big corporations," he actually strives to consolidate economic control.
Spitzer spent a two-year stint in the mid-’90s at Skadden Arps, the Wall Street law firm that, more than any other, helped bring about the mega-mergers that re-launched the U.S. drive to become the world’s dominant economic power. During Spitzer’s ruling-class apprenticeship at Skadden, the firm represented Mobil, Chase, and Travelers in their respective mergers with Exxon, J.P. Morgan, and Citigroup.
Spitzer takes the same approach to foundations, which function like banks in providing capital to, and thus controlling, non-profit organizations. Spitzer wants to abolish all foundations with less than $20 million in assets, a move that would further strengthen the hand of already powerful foundations like the Rockefeller, Ford and Mellon groups.
For more than a century, politicians’ regulatory reforms of big business have paved the way for U.S. imperialism’s wars. Spitzer claims Teddy Roosevelt, one of U.S. imperialism’s first mass murderers, as his model. TR’s highly selective trust-busting disguised the massive industrial consolidation (General Electric, U.S. Steel, etc.) that eventually enabled U.S. rulers to enter World War I. In 1938, another ambitious New York attorney general, Thomas Dewey, marched Dick Whitney off to Sing Sing. This thieving Morgan associate and ex-New York Stock Exchange president proved a convenient scapegoat for the Depression. But, more importantly, his jailing, signaling the end of Morgan’s power, greased the liberal FDR-Rockefeller camp’s consolidation of finance capital in the run-up to World War II. Complete government control of the economy soon followed.
After Clinton’s anti-trust prosecution of Microsoft, a chastened Bill Gates began investing in the Newport News shipbuilding yards, the U.S. Navy’s sole supplier of nuclear aircraft carriers. Spitzer pretends to aid the investor, the consumer, the "little guy." In one highly publicized media event, he once went to bat for Central Park pretzel vendors. But his, and all liberal politicians’ efforts mainly advance the ruling class’s war agenda.
(Next: The flap over pain-killers and the rulers’ need to tighten the vise on both the pharmaceutical industry and the government agencies which regulate it.)
Wall Street, 2005= Berlin, 1939
Günther Reimann, a German-American journalist, described the pre-World War II climate of fear Hitler’s bosses sought to spread among businessmen reluctant to fall into line for Nazi fascism. Here he quotes one of them:
"The German businessman sweats with fear….He does not know whether he has broken some law, whether and when he will be caught. He wakes up in the morning dreaming of an investigation by some state bureaucrat who has discovered some irregularity of which he, the businessman, knew or did not know. He enters his office fearing that he will find the announcement of a new decree which curbs his business, or that the condition of state finances will lead to some new measure of expropriation. When the office door opens, he expects a tax official who will investigate his business affairs for many years back until he finds some "irregularity." You may think this anxiety unreasonable. But unfortunately I cannot help fearing that I will experience tomorrow what is happening to others today."
a name="Politics Move Garment Workers To Fight Boss’s Attack">">"olitics Move Garment Workers To Fight Boss’s Attack
Southern California — The following fight to organize a work stoppage in a garment factory has lasted over several weeks and was preceded by a year of shop and political struggle. There were two work stoppages last year. The first won the re-hiring of a fired worker while the second one occurred when the boss refused permission for workers to leave for a funeral of a co-worker, but they left as a group. We have regular CHALLENGE sales and leaflets, including one about how much surplus value the bosses steal from the workers; many political discussions about the war in Iraq and the rebellious soldiers who refused orders, as well as a discussion about two students in Mexico expelled from school for refusing to salute and pledge the flag. Most workers thought the students were right because the flag represents the bosses, not the workers. Now the struggle has sharpened again. A group is emerging to give leadership and support to their fellow workers. Now our story begins….
"Starting next week, everyone must punch out and punch in for lunch," announced the boss. He was timidly "booed" by some.
The news angered the 250 workers because there are only two antiquated timeclocks to mark the cards and only 30 minutes to eat. This attack opened up a bunch of other issues: bad treatment, the extra money the boss robs from our already miserable wages and especially, how to confront these attacks.
"We’re discussing important things, not trivial ones!" said one worker to another who had started talking about soccer. "What are you talking about?" he asked, getting interested.
"This is the last straw; they impose their rules and we just accept with our heads down," said Roberto, very angrily, adding, "We have to talk to the boss."
"And this damned forelady is so arrogant, she’s nothing more than a boss’s lap dog!" exclaimed Memo, referring to the harassment by a department supervisor. "She’s never said anything to me and I’ve never seen anything," said the soccer fan. "But," answered some workers, "that doesn’t mean she doesn’t do it to others."
"We have to stop production and unite all the workers to confront the boss!" said Tom, angrily. "No stopping production," exclaimed Jaime, "no, we don’t want to hurt anyone." He was surprised to see the rest of the workers, except for the soccer fan, nodding their heads in agreement with Tom. "It’s better if two or three of us go to the office and talk to the boss," Jaime insisted. "But," said Tom, interrupting him, "the workers must feel our strength and courage. Also, we need to learn to defend our interests together, not individually, because individually we’re weak."
Of the half dozen who participated in the discussion, not all were convinced to stop production, but they helped talk to other workers. This occurred on a Friday. At 9:00 A.M. on Monday morning, a leaflet was distributed hand to hand with the workers’ demands.
Everything seemed to be going well. The work stoppage was planned for 12:30 P.M. that day. No one was supposed to punch out for lunch or punch in again for work. The other workers supported the plan. Their comments poured out: "Count on me….I’m with you all….I’m going to talk to my co-workers back there….I agree, but we have to protect those people with problems….I like the idea that we all talk to the boss because last time, only those who went into the office knew what he said."
"Julia is right," said Tom. "We can’t negotiate behind the workers’ backs. The leaders of the working class can’t flirt with the bosses."
Some workers feared joining the work stoppage; others doubted the rest would support it, saying, "Look, the people won’t support us…The people don’t understand.…Many have problems with their [immigration] status….They’re afraid to lose their jobs."
To be continued….
a name="Airline Workers Stage Sick-out; Can’t Reform Sick System">">"irline Workers Stage Sick-out; Can’t Reform Sick System
CHALLENGE ran two good letters from airport workers recently, the latest featuring a fight against racist attacks on part-timers. Each touted the increased circulation of our paper with the theme that the Party’s ideas were guiding modest class struggle. Meanwhile, baggage handlers and flight attendants staged spontaneous sickouts in cities nationwide, snarling traffic and stranding bags throughout the airline system over the Christmas holidays. It’s good workers are taking matters into their own hands, but spontaneity will eventually have to yield. As the letters imply, only increased class struggle guided by communist consciousness remains viable. Reform of capitalism is a dead letter at the airports.
Last year, the airlines announced $7.5 billion in cuts and at least 20,000 firings. This follows over $10 billion in wage and benefit give-backs and 100,000 layoffs during the prior two rounds of concessions. Last month, United Airline’s pilot union agreed to terminate its pension plan, portending the end of traditional airline pensions. This domino effect may seal the doom of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insures defined-payment pension plans country-wide.
"Some new flight attendants will earn just $12,000, less than they might earn at Wal-Mart," reports the New York Times (12/27/04). "There are proposals being floated under the table now for mechanic wages that would make them better off at a Chevy dealership than at US Airways," adds the Dallas Morning News (12/19/04).
This structural reorganization of the airline workforce into a more non-union, low-wage entity, stripped of any reasonable pensions and benefits, follows the pattern set in auto, steel, coal, aerospace manufacturing and machine tools. More than market forces are at work here. The ruling class is searching to revitalize basic industry and transportation networks — systems increasingly falling behind its imperialist rivals. Japan’s total manufacturing output now surpasses the United States ("Unsustainable: How Economic Dogma is Destroying American Prosperity," by Eamonn Fingleton), not to mention the combined production of the European Union and a surging China.
Workers Pay for War Reorganization
Lest "these great [foreign] manufacturing nations serve as a powerful counterweight to the United States’ vaunted position as the world’s ‘sole remaining military superpower,’" as Fingleton warns, the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), in particular, is advising the ruling class to pay more attention to its industrial base. The economy — focusing on basic manufacturing and infrastructure — must become a war economy, using market forces where convenient, the State when necessary.
Without such a "revitalized" (on workers’ backs) industrial base, the cost of maintaining the high-tech military machine necessary for the Iraqi occupation and other imperialist adventures becomes prohibitive. For example, the cost of flying troops to the Middle East will be paid, in part, by airline worker give-backs.
Peter Peterson — Chairman of the CFR and The Blackstone Group, the country’s largest private investment firm — warns that we must choose between "retirement security and national security." He might as well have been looking right at airline workers when making this threat.
Unions Don’t Have Answer
The unions are stymied. "I don’t think anyone has an answer," admitted American Airline pilot union head, Philpot (Dow Jones, 12/02/04). Some unions, like Philpot’s, openly collaborate with management.
"We have not recognized that unions are a business," said American’s head of human resources, Brundage, "We saw them as something difficult we had to deal with, rather than legitimate business partners." Of course, collaboration hasn’t stopped management from instituting billions in cuts and a new round of layoffs.
In a year-end greeting, United Chief Executive Tilton praised employees for exceeding their goal in a new collaborative performance program. In the same message, he reminded his "business partners" that the airline would reward them with cuts in pay and benefits (Dow Jones, 12/22/04).
Meanwhile, the "independent" Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association is raiding the AFL-CIO unions using a racist, dead-end strategy of blaming lower-paid, largely minority workers. The new flight attendants union at Northwest is also unaffiliated.
Others, gathered around the Unity group in the AFL-CIO, endorse the opposite tactic, advocating merging airline unions "to better manage the crisis facing airline workers." (Los Angeles Times, 11/18/04)
‘Crisis’ Offers Stark Choices
None of these groups target the bosses’ imperialist war plans to control Mid-East oil. No matter what the tactic, trade unionism must attempt to "manage the crisis" in periods like this, disarming workers by limiting their outlook to "getting their share of (an ever-decreasing) pie." The union misleaders’ narrow trade union outlook forces them to play a reactionary role, building passivity and cynicism in our ranks. That’s how fascist traitors are born!
Our Party, however, must focus our fire on the system’s main contradiction: linking every skirmish to the inter-imperialist fight over control of the world’s energy sources. Such political consciousness, built over a lifetime of the closest personal ties, is essential to making the case for revolution. A narrow trade union outlook must be defeated within our class if we are to develop such a revolutionary strategy and build PLP, the only way to deal with the 21st century reality of this sick system. Such a firm grasp of reality is the best way to motivate workers to fight back, as the "crisis facing airline workers" intensifies.
Imperialism’s Needs Come First
The "hollowing out" of the U.S. industrial base, relative to its imperialist competitors, has more dire consequences than just extra cost. "The latest in a series of five studies by the Pentagon’s Office for Industrial Policy point to…significant problems with the defense industrial base…, raising concerns about U.S. technology lead in traditional weapons," reports Defense Daily (11/02/04).
The Office of Industrial Policy is pushing for an Industrial Base Acquisition Fund to bribe capitalists (with taxpayers’ money) to invest in U. S. manufacturing capability necessary for the maintenance of imperialist armed forces.
Competitive pressure has forced manufacturers to seek cheap labor abroad. Once foreign capitalists learn how to organize this outsourced production, they acquire the inside track on the next generation of technology. In addition, they obtain physical plants and the knowledge of how to quickly bring that technology to market. For example, when TV production was outsourced to Asia, firms there ended up owning the next generation of technology — VCR and DVD players. Now they have a crucial lead in related laser production, a key military technology.
The ruling class think-tanks have awakened to this threat. Recently, there has been a hue and cry about Boeing outsourcing wing fabrication — a key component of aircraft production — on its new commercial jet to Japan. Nobody seems to know how to stop it, given the success of Boeing’s chief rival, Airbus. One strategy with which all the pundits seem to agree is to establish a large domestic system of low-cost subcontractors. As the needs of the U.S. military machine grow, the ruling class will have to use its State power to force industry to conform to its imperialist goals.
Killing Women in Mexico and Central America:
New Death Squads: Gangs Ape Murderous Ruling Class
On Dec. 23 in a city north of Tegucigalpa, capital of Honduras, a bus full of passengers was shot up by a group of supposed Maras (gang) members, killing 29 innocent people, mainly women and children. This may have been instigated by the Honduran government or some high-ranking members — the weapons used in the massacre probably came from some in the army — to justify more repression of workers and youth in general and the Maras in particular. In any event, it appears these Maras are not merely "juvenile delinquents," but are hardcore murderers who ape the violence of local bosses and imperialists and prey on working people throughout Central America. The next day these criminals murdered 10 innocent people for no reason whatsoever.
These gangs are at war with the government, probably over who will control drug money. In May, some 100 gang members were incinerated when their jail cells caught fire and the authorities let them burn to death.
These gangs are becoming the new death squads of Central America. Many were trained in the gangs of Los Angeles and other U.S. cities, and then were deported back to Central America to proceed with their crimes, often helped by the cops or corrupt politicians.
In Guatemala, these gangs are responsible for many of the 1,500 women murdered since 2001, 500 just in 2004. While the murders of women near Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, bordering El Paso, Texas, have made news worldwide, little is said about a worse situation in Guatemala.
Most victims are poor, young women, killed by men full of hatred towards women. They’re modern Jack the Rippers, slashing their victims’ throats and even cutting them into little pieces, scattering the parts in different places. The victims are "single mothers, factory workers, poor immigrants and prostitutes. Most…are…no more than 20 years old, mainly living in very poor neighborhoods." (Argenpress.info, 12/25/04). All this brutality is used to terrorize women factory workers to prevent them from organizing against super-exploitation.
Just as in Ciudad Juárez, most of these crimes remain unsolved, either because of police incompetence or complicity. Of 383 women murdered in Guatemala in 2003, only 10 cases were solved. Those caught were mostly gang members or other criminals, and even cops.
Many women are raped before being killed. Some are murdered by their own fathers or stepfathers, many of whom had abused their victims.
Magali Urbina was working in a clothing store in Guatemala City. Gang members demanded money for "protection." a la Al Capone, but she had none, being deeply in debt, raising her two children. In early December, gang members entered her house in the Mixco area and, after savagely torturing her and her children, cut their throats, along with Luz Maité López, a pregnant friend living in the same house with her 18-month-old daughter. She tried to escape but her body was discovered in the backyard. Her infant daughter was the only survivor, found alive a few days later because she had drunk the dead victims’ blood.
How can anyone commit such heinous crimes? One good reason is capitalism. These gang members are engaged in the drug trade and other criminal activities, part and parcel of a capitalist society based on money, profits and greed. The "authorities" in these countries are also involved in many such crimes. Directed by the CIA, they created death squads that killed hundreds of thousands of Central Americans fighting for a better life. The Guatemalan Army carried out a racist ethnic-cleansing war, murdering tens of thousands of workers and peasants, mostly Indians. These soldiers were trained and armed by the U.S. government. Col. Efrain Montt, who ruled in the 1980s when the massacres were more intense, was a born-again preacher trained by the same Christian fascists who today support Bush and his murderous imperialist war for oil in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Blame can also be placed on the treachery of the fake leftists who led the insurgent movement in the region. Today, the Salvadoran FMLN and the Guatemala’s former guerrilla leaders are immersed in the electoral game, supporting various forms of capitalism, either pro-U.S. or pro-European. These opportunists betrayed the hopes of million of workers and youth for a better world.
A strong revolutionary movement fighting against all bosses and for communism can win some of these young people away from the gangs and ultimately erect a communist society that will eliminate these crimes and the capitalist sexist attitudes producing them. We must intensify the building of such a movement, for the sake of all these working-class victims, past and present.
Repression Of Salvadoran Youth Fails to Curtail Crime
EL SALVADOR, Dec. 28 — The government of President Elías A Saca admitted today that the "Super Hard Hand" plan to fight the maras (gangs) has failed. Nevertheless, cabinet member Rene Figueroa said police operations will increase in 2005 in the country’s working-class neighborhoods to "fight juvenile delinquency."
This means that the "hard hand" of right-winger Saca and the previous administration of Francisco Flores (1998-2004) — mass jailings of youth — have not stopped crime. For instance, on Sept. 2, 30 young people were arrested, accused of being gang members. But judges freed a goodly number due to lack of proof.
Instead of creating decent jobs enabling young people to survive the harshness of capitalism, the rulers’ "only answer" is to intimidate workers and youth in general — not to fight the big criminals, including many cops and government officials. (See adjoining article.)
Bar-B-Que Yields Meaty Discussion,
Plan of Action "We workers have to wake up and learn to fight, because nobody will do it for us." That was the slogan for the Bar-B-Que/meeting we organized at a park. From the time I arrived at 11 A.M., the one co-worker already there reserving the space was slowly but surely joined by others, as workers kept coming and coming.
As we cooked, we talked — about family, friends, the Governor of California, cars, the workers who couldn’t come, etc. When the meat was ready, we "attacked" it, and at the same time attacked the ideas of the capitalist enemy.
Soon one comrade began speaking, noting that everyone knew we were getting together to analyze the bosses’ attacks on us; the lack of leadership for the workers; the weakness of the unions; and the need of a labor movement capable of uniting the working class in general. He detailed the cuts in services, hospital closings, higher tuitions, and a future of more such attacks, linking all this to the war in Iraq and a potential draft.
Everyone listened attentively. Then one worker added more of the misfortunes awaiting us. After that, everyone wanted to speak. Someone asked, "How do we connect the war to our problems?" Another said, "We need to know more, to educate ourselves politically. I’ve read CHALLENGE, but I think we need more than that." Another worker offered his house for a study group.
"I thought I’d better come see if you were really having this Bar-B-Que," said a worker jokingly, after driving 25 miles from a church in another part of the city. "I also wanted to see who came and who didn’t." Though he came late, he and his son stayed afterwards to help clean up and continue talking politics. He was very impressed with the number of workers there.
This was a qualitative step. Previously few workers had come to such activities. We’ve been helped by our consistency spreading CHALLENGE and building ties with the workers, the closeness of our families and the ideological struggle. At one point a comrade suggested we need study groups to learn more about the fight for revolution. Two were organized. Most of the workers read CHALLENGE and some help distribute it among their friends.
In addition, some are circulating a petition supporting the soldiers from the 343rd Q.C. who refused their suicidal orders. This petition, which calls for an end to the war in Iraq, got a boost when some soldiers confronted Rumsfeld about better armor for their vehicles. We’re putting forward the petition at the next union meeting. Part of the struggle is to win our co-workers to come to support the fight against the racist, anti-worker, imperialist war for oil profits in the Middle East.
Racist Attack on ML King Hospital Helps Fund U.S. Wars
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 27 — Racism kills. This is clearly evident in the threatened closing of Martin Luther King Hospital (MLKH) here, a public hospital staffed by mainly black and Latino medical workers and administrators. The ruling class needs the resources to finance their oil wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere for world domination. Keeping people healthy and alive is secondary, so expenditures for U.S. workers’ health must be cut back.
The rulers’ deliberately under-fund MLKH, and their media then spread racist distortions about it. After the 1965 Watts rebellion, MLKH was built as a political "showcase" in response to community demands. It provides the appearance of concern for the predominantly black and Latino South Central community it serves.
But because of long-standing racism throughout the healthcare system, it’s difficult for MLKH to recruit health professionals. Only 3% of U.S. doctors are black (Chicago Reporter, July-Aug. 1998), and 3% Latino (AMA statistic). Only two medical schools in the U.S. train mostly black doctors — Howard and Meharry, on the East Coast. Few of their graduates want to work at MLKH, with its miserable conditions, an under-funded, non-prestigious institution that doesn’t produce high quality research. Repeated cutbacks have lowered morale.
Racism in health care is so deadly that, "More than 886,000 deaths could have been prevented from 1991 to 2000 if African Americans had received the same care as whites, according to an analysis in the December issue of the American Journal of Public Health." (Washington Post, 12/21/04)
a name="Health Care For Profit And Good Health Don’t Mix">">"ealth Care For Profit And Good Health Don’t Mix
Now along comes the Los Angeles Times with a recent five-part series of front-page articles about MLKH, detailing a host of horror stories about incorrect, fatal care, overpaid doctors, fake workman’s comp. claims, etc. The series’ theme implied that the hospital was bad because it was run by Afro-Americans. But almost any hospital would record similar stories. Without excusing the racist and negligent errors made by the MLKH staff, it’s a fact that most hospitals have a poor record concerning patient care (i.e., Kaiser and LA County-USC Medical Center) — mainly because of terrible understaffing and the profit needs of the capitalist class. An estimated 98,000 people die in U.S. hospitals annually due to complications from receiving the wrong medicine, or from acquiring an infection during their stay. (Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, Institute of Medicine, "To err is human: building a safer health system"; Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, March 2000). This excludes deaths from medical care errors outside hospitals.
The LA Times series was the height of racist journalistic sensationalism to influence public opinion. Spinning many facts in the series distorted the essential truth.
In stating the hospital was mismanaged, the Times didn’t say why. The series noted that another public teaching hospital, Harbor/UCLA, was better-managed, implying that was because it was run by Anglo-Americans. The Times totally omitted the real reason for Harbor’s better productivity: it is one of the country’s most prestigious hospitals, receiving millions in grants and contracts from the U.S. medical establishment — drug companies and the U.S. government which provide far more subsidies to Harbor than to MLKH. Adequate funding engenders better quality medicine.
MLKH doesn’t receive such monies because its doctors aren’t considered "good enough." This reflects the whole racist system of academia. As mentioned above, 12% of the U.S. population is black, but only 3% of medical doctors are black. Afro-Americans are not on editorial boards of medical journals, nor on grant committees. This systematic racism excludes Afro-Americans from the mainstream of academic medicine.
Although Harbor’s medical care funding has steadily declined, its position in academia and relations with the drug companies has compensated for these disastrous cuts — an advantage unavailable to MLKH.
The Times is running this series to justify closing MLKH, saving the County $342 million annually. This will intensify LA County’s current deadly emergency room crisis. Five ER’s and dozens of clinics have been eliminated in the past two years. (N.Y. Times, "Los Angeles Emergency Care Crisis Deepens, 8/21/2004) These facilities serve black, Latino, Asian and white workers. Racism is the cutting edge of attacks on all workers. Northridge Hospital, serving mainly white workers, was closed. A week after the MLKH series, the LA Times admitted that the governor is planning deeper cuts in Medi-Cal and health facilities for all workers rather than raising taxes on California’s businesses. Currently 3,000,000 people in LA County alone have no health coverage.
This threatened closure of a public hospital is part of a massive nationwide cutback in workers’ health care. The bosses believe they can get away with this because they don’t feel threatened by a united working class fighting for health care and for power.
All workers should fight the closing of MLKH. This attack is part of — and diverts attention from — the entire, vast assault on the health care of all workers. Such a system is increasingly incapable of serving the most basic needs of the vast majority of workers. The bosses use racism to divide and weaken us, and blind us to the fact that capitalism is the mortal enemy of all workers. Our health and very lives depend on destroying it!
Double Death Rate for Afro-American Babies
Afro-Americans have always had a higher death rate than Anglo-Americans in the U.S. These higher death rates stem from all diseases. Deaths at birth: 8.2% of Anglo-American babies, 18.2% of Afro-American babies. ("Resolving disparities in infant mortality," Michigan Summit, 2001); Afro-Americans are less likely than Anglo-Americans to be insured or to have a primary care doctor or to have a hospital nearby. (Jet, 10/20/03); Afro-Americans are less likely to visit a doctor because of cost. (Chicago Reporter, July-Aug. 1998).
a name="Government ‘Snow’ Job on the Deficit and Social Security"></">Go"ernment ‘Snow’ Job on the Deficit and Social Security
The Bush administration has been claiming that the federal deficit was "only" $412 billion. But last month the U.S. Treasury Dept. posted the country’s financial statement on its website with this message from Treasury-Secy. John Snow: "In the fiscal year 2004, government revenues were $1.9 trillion….The net cost of the government’s operations was $2.5 trillion….Total revenues less operating costs resulted in a net operating cost of slightly more than $615 billion."
Translation: When the "net operating cost" exceeds revenues, that’s a DEFICIT. Why was it $203 billion more than the widely publicized (phony) deficit of $412 billion? Because that $203 billion gap "is the amount of Social Security money that the government collected and used for its everyday operations." (John Crudele, NY Post, 12/28/04).
That’s right, the government took the Social Security surplus — the amount of payroll taxes collected that exceeded the amount it paid to retirees — and used it to pay for the military war machine, among other expenses. And then tells us the deficit is actually $203 billion less than it really is.
On top of that, it keeps up this steady chatter about Social Security being "in the hole." Sure, if you keep stealing its surpluses every year! This has been government policy since the Vietnam War, under every administration, Democrat and Republican. While they cry about the "crisis" of Social Security when the baby boomers retire, they’ve stolen TRILLIONS of dollars from Social Security surpluses for 40 years. Just one more scam through which the ruling class swindles workers out of their hard-earned retirement.
Challenge for Youth: Be A Future Revolutionary Organizer of Industrial Workers
We working-class youth have been coerced out of school by the racist school system and forced to work, either for a company, in the army, or in a prison, or it’s the unemployment lines. We must make a decision about who we’ll serve, and what we’ll do the rest of our lives.
Capitalism drives most of these decisions, so we must decide: will we be corporate boot-lickers, subservient to a system that will never serve our interests, or will we rebel and prepare to rise up against capitalism? What must we do to prepare for such an uprising?
Some of us have already joined the Progressive Labor Party and understand the necessity of communist revolution, while some feel capitalism is not the answer, but haven’t yet figured out what’s necessary to take state power away from the bosses and run society in the interests of our class.
Capitalism profits from all the products our labor creates. From the bars of soap we use to wash our hands, to the cars we drive, to the machines that we use to make things, even the guns that cops use to kill black/Latin workers and youth on the streets, and the bombs used to murder Iraqi workers for oil — all this comes from the hands of industrial workers.
These workers are the most powerful because they produce everything that everybody uses. They have the potential, when organized, to stop production bringing this system to its knees. But this alone won’t wipe out capitalism. Stopping production is an important exercise in class struggle, but the bosses will answer back with their state apparatus — cops, courts, prisons, armies. Since they won’t give up their power without a fight, we must be very careful to prepare for their counter-attack on our class.
Our main task in the factories must be to use every struggle, both inside and outside the workplace, to prepare our co-workers to smash the bosses’ state and establish a communist-led workers’ state. From fighting attacks on our health and safety to fighting racist police terror to fighting imperialist war, every assault on our class can become a way to expose the system and show the need for its destruction.
What’s an industrial worker? How do you become one? Industrial workers are factory workers: machinists, welders, machine operators, press-setters and any number of occupations involved in the means of production. One can become an industrial worker either by going to a trade school or going straight into unskilled factory jobs.
Some say industrial workers are fast disappearing. But capitalism cannot exist without producing the things people use. Industrial workers will always exist, as long as people need things to use. And U.S. bosses plan to increase the number of low-paid industrial workers here.
If you who are at a cross-roads in life, young, and have decided to take on this system, what better way to take it down than to become an industrial worker organizing for communist revolution?
Pizza & Politics: 500 At HS Teach-in Debate U.S. Mid-East Oil Wars
BROOKLYN, NY — A guiding principle of being a communist is reliance on the working class and its youth. We believe that not only will workers make a revolution against capitalism and its racism and profiteering, but that working people will build a new world based on collectivity and sharing. Recently, working-class young people at a high school here showed that a communist world is definitely in our future.
Youth are hungry for all kinds of nourishment. They certainly like pizza, but much more than pizza they want to make sense out of this crazy capitalist world. Just before the holiday break over 500 students jammed into a crowded school auditorium for a teach-in about war and imperialism in the Mid-East.
Starting with a young woman’s rousing speech denouncing Bush’s lies about 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction, she blamed the Iraq war on imperialism and oil. She also linked U.S. imperialism’s drive for oil to Saudi Arabia and to the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Other activities showcased the talent, political commitment and tireless organizing of many young people. One group stayed after school many days to paint a huge banner depicting Bush the imperialist. It’s now displayed in the school’s halls. The debate team practiced for hours, constantly gaining new members. Rather than debating before a small polite audience, they faced a noisy crowd of 500. These young, inexperienced debate team members did great, under difficult circumstances.
Afterwards many students discussed the issues debated: When should soldiers disobey the orders of their commanders? Were the soldiers of the 343rd Q.C. justified in refusing an order needlessly endangering them? The step-dancing team put on a great show, ending with a poem over the bodies of fallen soldiers. These soldiers were victims of an aimperialist war.
The cheerleaders and the dance team entertained. Poetry was read and exhibited. A Power Point presentation about the war was shown several days later to a smaller group.
An after-school student club and some social studies teachers organized the 2½-hour event, beginning at 3 PM in the auditorium and ending in the cafeteria with a snack of 50 pizza pies. Meanwhile we distributed all kinds of literature, including hundreds of information sheets about the draft, extra credit sheets to be returned to social studies teachers and lyrics from Bob Dylan’s song Masters of War. Best of all, 200 people got their hands on this terrific revolutionary newspaper. Many students signed up for the after-school club.
For communists, for anti-imperialists, for working-class youth, this was quite an event!
But are pizza and politics contradictory? Well, shortly after 5 PM, as the Teach-In was ending and the pizza distribution beginning, things got a little chaotic. Some students let greed take over; maybe some just did not believe everyone would get a slice, although everyone did. While some students rushed to the front of the line, quite a few took the initiative to help with the distribution. It was quite something to see young men and women stand behind, and even on top of the tables and take charge. After the successful distribution of 400 slices, many didn’t even care if they got a slice or not. Political commitment not pizza was motivating them. Next, a discussion about communist political commitment will make a big contribution to the struggle for the world we want. And we will have that discussion!
Strike Aftermath: Chicago College Students, Teachers Fight Arrests, Cutbacks
CHICAGO — The Chicago City College (CCC) strike ended two months ago, but vicious attacks on teachers and students persist. The lose-lose settlement between the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT) Local 1600’s union hacks, the administration and their investment bankers, is showing its true colors. The CCC bosses have prepared a blacklist of dozens of part-time faculty who supported the strike; they won’t be rehired. At Daley College, the administration’s plan to lay off part-time faculty was stopped for now, after full-timers marched on the president’s office. Two-thirds of the faculty are part-timers, with no benefits or job security, a group which Local 1600 refused to unionize (they have since organized two separate part-time unions).
A PLP student organizer at Malcolm X College was arrested at a demonstration at City College headquarters just two days before the strike ended, charged with battery and trespassing. We’re organizing a big turnout for his January 20 trial date. In addition, the school administration has dragged him to two disciplinary hearings, threatening him with expulsion. About 60 students and teachers attended his first hearing, and 40 were at the second, despite intimidation. Police arrested a teacher at his home a week later and charged him with assault and trespass for the same demonstration. An international student faces possible deportation.
The more than 150,000 primarily working-class black, Latin, immigrant and women City College students have been bombarded repeatedly with racist cutbacks, layoffs and tuition hikes. The IFT leadership has been complicit in these racist attacks, occurring in this period of war and fascism. The administration is using the new contract as a pretext to increase tuition by $2,700 for nursing students «, and add tuition hikes for all students every semester for the next three years. The CCC bosses are threatening to close colleges, particularly in black neighborhoods.
Working-class college students will pay for the Iraq war and the Homeland Security police state with $300 million in Pell Grant cuts scheduled for next fall. The Pell Grant is the primary scholarship for low-income students. As many as half of the 5.3 million Pell recipients will receive smaller grants; about 89,000 will get none. In addition, the new rules for the 2005-6 academic year "are expected to have a domino effect across almost every type of financial aid, tightening access to billions of dollars in state and institutional grants…" (New York Times, 12/28/04)
Throughout this struggle, PLP has fought for the political leadership of students and teachers. A dozen students attended our CHALLENGE Dinner and gave militant leadership in helping to form the Strike Solidarity Committee, which is now organizing campus clubs. We have formed a new PLP City College club and will increase our CHALLENGE distribution.
a name="Big Banks Back Blood-sucking ‘Lenders’ To Squeeze Workers, GI’s"></a>"ig Banks Back Blood-sucking ‘Lenders’ To Squeeze Workers, GI’s
The Sopranos and other Mafiosi are penny ante loan sharks compared to the $7 billion raked in by the "Pay Day Lenders" industry, all of them backed up by four of the country’s ten largest banks. Pay Day Lenders (PDLs), collecting interest rates from 390% to 780%, "trap borrowers in a cycle that few can break without defaulting and facing legal judgments." (Bloomberg News, 11/23/04; all quotes and information from this source.)
"Free and equal access to credit for any legitimate business that complies with all the laws is a cornerstone of the free enterprise system," says Susan Stanley-Jones, spokesperson for Wells Fargo, 4th largest U.S. bank, which makes millions from providing hundreds of millions in credit lines to PDLs, enabling them to exist.
Tell Jason Withrow, a U.S. Navy petty officer second class, about that "cornerstone." On July 4, 2003, Withrow was struck by a car, injuring his back, while on sentry duty at his base in Kings Bay, Georgia. He had to quit his job unloading beer kegs at the base’s liquor store. Unable to pay his bills, the sailor turned to one of the PDLs — Advance America Cash Advance Centers among the thousands that are cluttered around military bases — and agreed to pay a $90 "fee" for a $300 loan, to be repaid two weeks later. Unable to meet that deadline, he rolled the loan over for another $90 fee, "an annual percentage rate of 780%"!
"Withrow got deeper in debt as he struggled every two weeks to pay the fee — let alone the loan itself. He borrowed more cash to service the first fee, and by February 2004, he’d paid about $5,000 in interest on $1,800 in payday loans at four different lenders." That’s what capitalism calls "legitimate business."
Demonstrating just how much the PDLs care about putting GI’s "in harms way," they concentrate on areas around military bases. "It’s legalized thievery," says Sgt. Andrew Perrin at Fort Bragg, NC. "These companies put pressure on soldiers because they can be discharged if they default on too much debt." As they struggle to make payments, "It…can affect a whole unit big time," according to Sgt. Carlton Brown.
a name="Like The Drug Dealer Says, ‘The First Hit Is Free’"></">Li"e The Drug Dealer Says, ‘The First Hit Is Free’
Of the 105 million households in the U.S., 14 million used PDLs in 2003. The overwhelming majority these PDLs target are exploited workers who have bank accounts and jobs but live from payday to payday on an average annual income of $25,000. "Payday lending is structured so you just pay the interest every two weeks," says Georgia State Insurance and Safety Fire commissioner John Oxendine. "They never want you to pay back the principal." Some PDLs even wave the initial fee to attract customers. "It’s similar to what you hear from drug dealers: The first hit is free," says Mark Pearce of the Center for Responsible Lending.
Nine of ten loans are made to repeat borrowers with more than five payday loans per year. The average borrower spends $600 in "fees" annually on a $300 loan. (2004 report in Yale University Journal on Regulation) Those caught in this web sink ever deeper in debt.
The PDLs could not exist without the big banks. They "are profiting from a predatory financial industry," says Matthew Lee of the Inner City Press/Fair Finance Watch. "By partnering with payday lenders, they have enabled them to sprout like mushrooms all over the country." From just 200 PDLs in 1993, they have skyrocketed to over 22,000. In California alone there are 5,626, five times the number of McDonalds in that state. Skirting the usury laws through exemptions, PDLs are legal in 36 states.
JPMorgan/Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Wachovia — four of the five largest U.S. banks — have combined to extend credit lines of a HALF BILLION dollars to the largest of the PDLs. In addition, Wall Street investment houses like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley helped these banks underwrite these loans, all of whom themselves hold stock in the publicly-trade PDLs. All this has enabled PDLs like Advance America — the country’s largest, with 2.290 outlets in 34 states — to reap $6 billion in "fees" as an industry on $40 billions in loans in 2003.
a name="…and whose side is the bosses’ government on?"></">…a"d whose side is the bosses’ government on?
Just in case anyone thought all this might be "illegal," the government’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which regulates state-chartered banks, has approved this wholesale swindle, concluding that "bank partnerships with payday lenders and the exportation of interest rates are not prohibited by federal law."
No matter how much capitalism exploits the working class, it always finds way to top itself. After stealing profits from workers at the point of production, it then robs even the measly wages they receive in their paychecks. Just some more reasons to destroy this murderous system.
Bye, Bye Pension; Hello Profiteers
In preying on desperate people, these payday lenders have come up with a new twist: pension-lenders.
Retired army veteran Kevin Jones was frantically trying to raise money to get his wife out of the Philippines after her home was destroyed in a bombing. He saw an ad by a Florida "financial services" company in The Army Times. Desperate to reunite with his wife and re-settle his in-laws, he signed over his $1,000-a-month military pension to C & A Financial Programs for the next five years, a total of $60,000, in exchange for $19,980 (after fees and insurance) immediate cash. These leeches pay out about $20,000 and make $40,000 profit.
Legal? While it’s supposedly against the law to offer military pension advances, neither the Pentagon nor Congress has prevented the practice. The Pentagon defines it as a "loan based on retired pay as collateral." (N.Y. Times, 12/29/04)
Anti-Communist Liberal Beats Drum for Fascism and Imperialist War
Liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof recently called Vladimir Putin a "Russified Pinochet or Franco." However, Kristof continued, "a fascist Russia is…much better…than a communist Russia. Communism was a failed economic system, while Franco’s Spain, General Pinochet’s Chile, and the others generated solid economic growth, a middle class and international contacts — ultimately laying the groundwork for democracy." (NYT, 12/15/04)
Firstly, the working class was worse off under fascism in Spain and Chile. Secondly, the "failed communist Russia" built a modern industrial society in 20 years, fought and smashed Hitler’s war machine — history’s most violent up to that time — virtually by itself, all during a period when the entire capitalist world was trying to obliterate the Soviet Union from 1917 on.
Here, in a nutshell, is why we communists must struggle even more sharply against the liberalism of the "blue-state" New York Times than against the "red-state" ideologues of the Bush administration. Kristof is reviving the bourgeois cry of the 1930’s, when liberal apologists for capitalism said, "better Hitler than Stalin."
Kristof conveniently ignores the fact that U.S. imperialism supported Franco, put Pinochet in office, and for over half a century — continuing right up to the present — has backed fascist regimes on every continent except Antarctica. CHALLENGE readers don’t need Kristof to tell us that Russia (and China) are now fascist states — we know that the USA is also racing towards it fast.
Kristof’s double-talk about fascism "laying the groundwork for democracy" is the same twisted logic used to justify the flattening of Falluja, and instituting a police state there, to "prepare for elections." It would justify the USA/PATRIOT Act and other fascist measures the ruling class called for in the Hart-Rudman report as a way to "save American democracy."
Kristof calls communism a "failed economic system" when what failed in Russia and China was not communism, but a socialism that led to state capitalism. For the working class, capitalism, whatever its form, is a monumentally failed system. Citing UNICEF statistics on the misery and death inflicted on children worldwide, CHALLENGE (1/05/05) correctly describes capitalism as "the most horrendous holocaust the world has ever seen."
That same CHALLENGE front-page also explains that "Russian and U.S. imperialism are on a collision course over energy." That means war, sooner or later, and when liberals like Kristof attack Russian fascism, they’re really trying to win U.S. workers to support U.S. fascism in this impending collision.
Some students at my school are very interested in CHALLENGE, because of the information it contains but even more so for its eye-opening communist analysis. Others, however, are reluctant even to look at it. "I don’t want to read that, I support the pro-democracy movement," said one young anti-war activist. "Communism didn’t work," said another. That’s Kristof’s line in action. After some struggle, both of those students have taken and read CHALLENGE. Now it will take a lot more struggle — within the context of our anti-war organizing, and the friendships developing out of it — to win them, and many others like them, to our politics.
That’s important because many students, including these two, say they’d never join the U.S. military, even if drafted. But staying out of the military won’t end imperialist war, just as liberalism can’t stop fascism. As long as ideas like Kristof’s prevail among anti-war youth, they’ll be, at best, ineffective against imperialism, and at worst won to support it in the name of "spreading democracy" or even "fighting fascism." Our job as communists is to combat liberalism, fight anti-communism, and build a worker-soldier-student alliance to turn the bosses’ war into a revolution for communism.
Racist Politicians Use Slave-Era Rules On Prisoners to Hold Power
The New York State electoral system has reverted back to the one embedded in the U.S. Constitution that used slavery to increase the Congressional power of Southern slave-owners — and is just as racist.
The original Constitution counted slaves as 3/5 of a person when apportioning Congressional districts, so the South was granted many more Representatives than warranted by the actual voting population. Of course, slaves had no right to vote, along with no other rights, in the great traditions of U.S. "democracy."
Now along comes the liberal "blue state" of New York to mimic that slave heritage. The 1970s’ Rockefeller drug laws led to mass imprisonment of non-violent, first-time offenders, "many of whom would have received brief sentences, drug treatment or community service under previous laws," (N.Y, Times, 12/26) but now were sentenced to 15 years to life. (All quotes from NYT.)
Nearly all these prisoners — 70% of whom are black or Latino — ended up in upstate New York. Legislators lobbied for new prisons in their sparsely-populated districts. "Nearly 30 percent of the people…counted as moving into upstate New York during the 1990’s were prison inmates."
Interestingly enough, the Census rules count these inmates as "living at their prisons" and therefore "residents" of those upstate counties, even though their actual homes are hundreds of miles away in New York City. Thus, these "prisoners are included in the population counts that become the basis for drawing legislative districts."
A la slavery, these prisoners, as "convicted felons," have no right to vote. But they gave new life to seven upstate New York Senate districts "that meet minimal population requirements only because prison inmates are included in the count." Otherwise many of these State Senators would be "merged" out of existence due to shrinking populations. These slave-era rules motivate them to keep filling (and building more) prisons for non-violent offenders, many of whom cannot afford quality counsel and are threatened into plea-bargaining even if they are innocent. The Republican Party relies on its large upstate delegation to maintain its majority and political power, and the Democrats go right along with this racist practice.
As during slavery, once again the racist rulers — who sentence black and Latino youth and others to long prison terms because of alleged possession of a few grams of crack-cocaine — use them as prisoner/"residents" to enhance their rule.
Racism infects every aspect of U.S. capitalist "democracy." It can be destroyed only if the profit system itself is destroyed.
(For a full analysis, see PLP pamphlet, "Prison Labor: Fascism, U.S. Style.")
LETTERS
a name="Student’s GI Letter Spreads School-Wide">">"tudent’s GI Letter Spreads School-Wide
I attend a small high school. Every year there’s a toy and food drive/military package for orphans or homeless people or soldiers. As a frequent CHALLENGE reader I saw an article about the soldiers in the 343rd Q.C. who refused orders in Iraq because they believed it was a suicide mission. I got the idea that since we’re collecting packages for the military, we should write letters to these soldiers who refused their orders.
I suggested it to my English teacher and read the article to her. She thought it was a great idea but said that rather than just a class project, it should be done school-wide. She asked me to read and explain the article to a school assembly. I did, and my teacher made it an extra-credit assignment, and gave us community service hours for doing it.
Everybody in my school sent individual letters to soldiers in the 343rd, along with a small package containing basic items, as a Christmas gift. My letter said, "I thought it was awesome, that thousands of people are reading about soldiers who resisted orders in Iraq. I thought to myself, ‘We never hear about soldiers who resisted, only about how many die each day fighting for ‘freedom’ in Iraq and about their courageousness.’ I also thought that if these soldiers received acknowledgment publicly for dying and trying to save others lives, how come no soldiers are acknowledged for refusing to kill hundreds of more people. Wouldn’t NOT killing someone be considered saving their lives also?
"I truly believe that if more soldiers did this, as a true act of leadership and courageousness, then there wouldn’t be any more soldiers to fight and the weapons could be turned about to the true terrorists, don’t you think? I’ve written you this letter because I truly believe that a soldier to do such a courageous act deserves just as much respect as those who the media publicizes."
A fifteen-year-old comrade
Internationalism Key to Fighting All Nationalism
Recently, a CHALLENGE article entitled "Vote or Die is a Death Threat" condemned the Vote or Die movement led by Sean "P Diddy" Combs and other Hip Hop artists. It also stated that the Pan-African/Black Nationalist movements of the late 1960’s were rooted in the ideology of black superiority.
I agree that nationalism never unites but only divides the working class, and that "Vote or Die" is a death threat misguiding many youth about the cause of society’s social ills. However, I firmly disagree that the so-called Pan-African/Black Nationalist movements of the late 1960’s stemmed from a belief in black superiority over other groups. This distortion hinders our ability to build a base in black communities here and abroad.
The Pan-African movement finds some roots in the Niagara Movement launched in 1906. A young W.E.B. DuBois convened many leading black intellectuals, scholars and activists in Niagara, New York to discuss colonialism and racism — hence the beginning of the modern-day Pan-African movement. Such bold acts as the heroic 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner against plantation owners in Southampton, Virginia, and the publication of David Walker’s revolutionary "Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the United States" in 1829 spawned the Black Nationalist Movement in the U.S.. These movements were a direct response to systematic racism and oppression. They weren’t based on a belief in black superiority over whites.
Movements such as Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (NOI) did (and still) argue a supremacy position. These nationalist movements are spiritual/mystic/cultural in character and not expressly political. They’re an ultra right-wing response to racism and oppression, hence the hate they produced. However, cultural nationalism is not political nationalism. There’s a big difference between the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the NOI. The latter argued that whites are the devil incarnate, while the early BPP argued that the state is the root of oppression; many of its chapters and members joined with whites to fight racism. Later, however, the BPP’s nationalism led it to support black capitalism.
Ultimately, nationalism never works for any oppressed group. However, lumping all nationalist groups and their supporters together with no explanation and analysis is a mistake. Yes, nationalism is not a progressive reaction to racism. Political nationalism may initially inspire oppressed people to combat their exploitation. But, with patient struggle, we will win them to understand that anti-racist internationalism based on working-class unity is the correct and effective way to fight racist oppression. PLP’ers can sharpen the class contradictions by fighting racism from this vantage point, both inside and outside nationalist organizations.
Navy Red
a name="Pinochet ‘Trial’ Is Phony Justice"></">Pi"ochet ‘Trial’ Is Phony Justice
For the second time in recent years, we’re being told that General Augusto Pinochet, the bloody dictator who ruled Chile after the 1973 AT&T/Kissinger/CIA-organized fascist coup, will be brought to justice for his crimes. But will he really pay for the murder and torture of thousands or is this just another bosses’ media show?
To believe that Chile’s "democratic" bosses will bring this monster to justice is a deadly mistake. "Socialist" President Lagos represents the third "elected" government since Pinochet surrendered power 15 years ago. But Lagos, like the previous "democratic" leaders, owes a lot to Pinochet’s political base. So he must try to show workers and their allies that his regime is indeed a bit different than Pinochet’s.
These workers have received very little benefit from the economic bonanza these "democratic" regimes say they’ve created. So they must give workers some crumbs. The Pinochet show trial is one such crumb. Actually, Pinochet could have learned much from how Lagos and other "democratic" leaders rule. Their methods of social control are much more effective than Pinochet’s brutality, which was generating increasing social unrest despite the heavy repression. These new rulers — many from the fake left — know well that capitalism is a dictatorship of the bosses against the workers and their allies, so they create a dictatorship with more subtle "democratic" methods than the old fascist General’s iron hand.
These new rulers now talk about capitalism with a "human face," or "economic growth for all." But in essence, the gap between bosses and workers has actually grown under this "bourgeois democracy." The rich are richer and the poor poorer. Patricio Malatrassi, an economist at the Alejandro Lipschutz Institute, notes that 95% of Chile’s business people are very happy with "socialist" Lagos, indicating which side the government is on. He says that in 2004 transportation costs rose 9.5%, basic food needs up 16.8%, telephone charges up 4.8%, and so on, while wages barely rose 0.8%. These are the official figures; the real ones are worse.
Chile might have a greater Gross Domestic Product than other Latin American countries, but most of this wealth goes to a few bosses and the imperialists. The workers get zilch.
While we hope killer Pinochet gets his due before he dies in bed, it won’t really matter much because the conditions he engendered will remain, though with a "democratic face." We shouldn’t expect any real justice until we get organized to fight capitalism and build a worker-led society, communism.
A reader in the Southern Cone
a name="Bosses Hide Behind ‘Labor Reform’ Schemes"></">Bo"ses Hide Behind ‘Labor Reform’ Schemes
National Public Radio broadcast a program on how "pro-labor" sneaker manufacturers in Jakarta, Indonesia pay their union workers a higher wage (proportionate to their economy) than non-union workers in Texas. The spokesman for the Jakarta bosses said notes describing workers’ unions, benefits and working conditions were inserted in every sneaker box so consumers would not feel guilty about helping to exploit fellow workers, a common condition throughout that area.
A woman called in thanking the spokesman for giving workers an opportunity to choose products made in a "fair environment." Another caller cursed the spokesman, calling him an anti-labor liar who was using foreign workers to "steal American jobs." The spokesman replied that Jakarta workers were showing labor solidarity with U.S. workers who opposed exploitation by demonstrating the benefits of unionization.
The bottom line for the bosses in this contradiction is that ALL bosses steal the surplus value workers produce and use it to make war on the international working class by reducing us to poverty, servitude and war. "Labor reform" schemes go back to the early 19th century and attempt to portray the bloody capitalists as benevolent leaders. But these reforms have always failed because capitalism is a predatory system dependent on increasing labor exploitation. Any boss who doesn’t do this is soon ruined and out of business.
The bottom line for workers is ending production for profit by building the PLP to win a communist system that will convert all our production into use value to serve the needs of the international working class.
Radio comrade
Red Eye On The News
Below are excerpts from mainstream newspapers — Abbreviations: NYT=New York Times, GW=Guardian Weekly (UK)
Countless battered in Iraq
An Army study shows that about one in six soldiers in Iraq report symptoms of major depression, serious anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, a proportion that some experts believe could eventually climb to one in three, the rate ultimately found in Vietnam veterans…
Veterans say…extensions of duty in Iraq are emotionally battering, even for the most stoical of warriors….
"People see the figure of 1200 dead…. Much more rarely do they see the number of seriously wounded. And almost never do they hear anything at all about the psychiatric casualties. (NYT 12/16/04)
A Red world could cope
[A]Natural disaster …may doom the community to future disasters, on an even greater scale.
The tendency is to rebuild in the same place (because there isn’t room elsewhere) in the same way (because there isn’t money for better construction).
Some of the world’s largest cities, and hundreds of others, sit on faults and flood plains. Whole regions — the Indonesian archipelago, Central America — are dotted with active volcanoes, their slopes crowded with farms and towns….Threat monitoring and effective warning systems…are expensive, but far less costly than repeated disasters. (NYT 1/2/05)
Religions lie about sex
Not only have abstinence-only programs failed, they’re telling our kids lies.
The Southern Baptist Convention claims that in the 10 years since launching its "True Love Waits" program, over 2.4 million teenagers have taken the virginity pledge. But….88 percent of teenagers who had pledged virginity until marriage ended up having premarital sex and…their rates of STD [sexually transmitted disease] were identical to those of teenagers who had not signed the pledge. Most troubling of all…virginity pledgers were less likely to use condoms, less likely to seek out medical care for an STD and less likely even to know they’d contracted one. They proved more irresponsible than kids who took no pledge at all.
No wonder such programs have failed. They don’t tell teens the truth….One text, for example, teaches that simply touching another person’s genitals "can result in pregnancy." Others assert that sexual activity increases the risk of cervical cancer, that having an abortion means a woman is more prone to commit suicide….
All abstinence-only government grants go to so-called "faith-based" or "church-based" organizations….It’s religion over science, and our kids are suffering. (Tribune Media Svc 12/3/04)
Big Biz likes TV as is
If anything is to blame for what appears on our screens it is the free market….Sex and violence sell well everywhere; high culture does not. So the entertainment titans keep dishing up more of the same….
The bottom line of capitalism is that if somebody will buy it, somebody will make it….
The real engine at work here, for better or worse, is the profit motive….Let’s face it: There’s not much money to be made off children’s piano recitals…or performances by your local orchestra. (Creators Syndicate, 12/1/04)
Legal Aid: anti-red vaccine
The Legal Aid Society….was not set up as an act of altruism — or even an attempt at social or legal fairness.
Instead…legal aid societies were initially designed to co-opt recent immigrants into "buying in" to an American society that provided them with lawyers when they had legal difficulties.
…."By convincing impoverished immigrants, its primary constituency, that justice was within their grasp it would deflect them from anarchy, socialism and Bolshevism and would strengthen their loyalty to American institutions."
How much has reality changed? (NYT, 12/22/04)
Dropout rate nearly half
While officially New York City’s dropout rate is put at about 20 percent, education officials say that 40 to 50 percent of city schoolchildren never earn their regular high school diplomas. (NYT, 12/17/04)
Bush: Armchair Slugger
Mr. Bush…was born into one of the most privileged families in the United States…As Jim Hightower memorably cracked... "He is a man who was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." (NYT, 12/20/04)
