a href="#Stella D’Oro Strikers’ Anti-Racist, Anti-Sexist Unity">St"lla D’Oro Strikers’ Anti-Racist, Anti-Sexist Unity
a href="#Norway’s Oil, Gas Bosses En‘Nobel’ Obama">Norw"y’s Oil, Gas Bosses En‘Nobel’ Obama
- a href="#McChrystal-Biden Debate Over War Focus Behind Phony ‘Peace’ Prize">Mc"hrystal-Biden Debate Over War Focus Behind Phony ‘Peace’ Prize
- a href="#Gore’s Nobel Had Same Imperialist Energy Motive">"ore’s Nobel Had Same Imperialist Energy Motive
a href="#Hundreds Protest Killer Kops’ Racist Murder">"undreds Protest Killer Kops’ Racist Murder
Cal Campus Rally Ties Budget Cuts to War Spending
- Obama A Cover For U.S. Imperialism
- a href="#‘Founding Fathers’ Justified Slavery">‘F"unding Fathers’ Justified Slavery
- Communists Led Fight Against Racism
- Haitian Revolution Crushed French Slave-owners
Bus Mechanics Fight Union Hacks, Demand Action vs. Racist Murder
- a href="#‘We’re the ones they come down on…’">‘We’re"the ones they come down on…’
- For The Future
a href="#‘I really want NATO and U.S. troops to leave….’">‘I r"ally want NATO and U.S. troops to leave….’
a href="#Imperialists’ Fight Over Pipelines Ignites Wider Wars">"mperialists’ Fight Over Pipelines Ignites Wider Wars
a href="#3 Minutes on Workers’ Revolution Panics Bosses’ Labor Lackies">3 "inutes on Workers’ Revolution Panics Bosses’ Labor Lackies
- Big biz media let Katrina die
- Capitalism globalizes toxic waste
- Jobless recovery, poverty growing
- 9/11 outrage outranked by Vietnam
- Oil wealth doesn’t reach workers
- We feel better working together
- California may be leading a rout
- Some big co’s block climate fight
- Socialists can’t bury capitalism
- Just how sexist can rich men be?
- Rich capitalisms starve the poor
John Brown, Harriet Tubman: Models for Multi-Racial Unity and Action
- From Childhood, Brown Vowed to Fight Slavery
- Tubman Single-handedly Freed 300 Slaves
- Black Rebels Petrified Slave-owners
- Class Struggle Trumps Racism
- Join PLP
Inspiration for All Workers:
a name="Stella D’Oro Strikers’ Anti-Racist, Anti-Sexist Unity"></">St"lla D’Oro Strikers’ Anti-Racist, Anti-Sexist Unity
BRONX, NY, October 8 — Stella D’Oro strikers, the working class salutes you!
You have shown the world an unbreakable solidarity that defied the attacks of profit-driven bosses for eleven long months during which not one worker scabbed, not one worker crossed the picket line.
You have shown how Latino, black, white and Asian workers, women and men, immigrant and native-born, can fight the bosses’ racist divisive tools and unite as a class.
You have shown that capitalist sexist ideology can be defeated, as men workers refused to take the bosses’ bribe offers to return to work, refusing to allow their sister workers to suffer a $10,000-a-year wage-cut over five years.
You have not let the bosses’ cops’ intimidation — tearing down your tent shelter in the dead of winter — break your spirit.
You have inspired thousands across the city — postal, transit, hospital and office workers, teachers, students and college professors — to come to support you and take back these lessons to their co-workers.
You have refused to succumb to anti-communism, working with supporters from PLP, discussing our communist ideas, edging closer to adopting the red flag as your flag, waving CHALLENGE as your flag as you entered the factory. As one striker said, "We’ve all been ‘infected’ now. Who knows where we’re all going to end up? But wherever we go, we’re going to spread PLP."
You have seen, on the one hand, the Labor Board supposedly "order" the Brynwood bosses to take you back honoring the old contract and then these same bosses, following their capitalist laws, close the factory, and sell the equipment and brand name to a low-wage, non-union boss in Ohio. From this you can learn the lesson that as long as the bosses have state (government) power, they can manipulate their laws to throw workers on the street.
Capitalism: Billions for the Banks, Joblessness and Debt for Workers
Yes, it is true that, after this long struggle, you have joined the ranks of 30 million other unemployed workers who have lost their jobs, their wages, their savings, their health insurance and many their homes. This must not be minimized. It is the terrible tragedy that a capitalist system, based on the drive for maximum profits, visits on the working class which produces everything of value but sees most of it stolen by the bosses only concerned with their bottom line.
And it is also true that the Obama administration gives hundreds of billions to the bankers who are responsible for these massive attacks on the working class. Meanwhile, it conducts wars seeking control of oil supplies and using our children as cannon fodder to kill brother and sister workers to maintain their profits in their fights with rival imperialists worldwide.
This combined oppression at home and abroad adds up pure and simple to fascism, U.S. style.
Through all this we can see the true colors of the labor "leaders" of unions who with over two million members in this city barely lifted a finger to support your valiant struggle. It is clear that, in their defense of capitalism, they are on the bosses’ side.
It is for many of these reasons that, on short notice, over 50 supporters, mostly organized by PLP, came to salute you, cheering and clapping as you left your final shift. After having chanted inside the factory, "The workers, united, will never be defeated!"— as you did at every shift change leading to the closing — you came out wearing your bakers’ caps, some in white uniforms, seemingly unwilling to let go of their craft.
One rank-and-file leader told us he learned as much in the last three days trying to organize workers to carry out a sit-down occupation than he had in the previous 14 months. His team did their best and did persuade a considerable number, but not, in their judgment, enough of a critical mass to spark a seizure of the factory.
What Is Winning?
So despite having been unable to overcome the whole system, its profit-protecting laws, its cops, its courts, its whole government, victory can be measured in lessons learned for the future:
• The multi-racial unity of black, Latino, Asian and white workers practiced in this struggle must guide our class.
• The international unity of native-born and immigrant from all over the world can defeat the nationalist divisions the bosses use to set us against each other.
• The equality of women and men is essential to every fight against the capitalists whose exploitation and degenerate sexist culture weakens our fight for a decent life.
• The solidarity of all workers — all for one and one for all — is our guiding light.
• The communist ideas of PLP are necessary to fight this capitalist system until it and the bosses’ state power are ultimately destroyed and a workers’ society replaces it in which the working class that produces all value will collectively share the fruits of our labors.
• Our biggest victory can become the joining and building of PLP — and the circulation of its ideas through the spreading of CHALLENGE, the only paper to report the truth of this long struggle — all to lead the overthrow of the racist, exploitative bosses who profit from our sweat.
A simple sign on the fence near the factory revealed the most important strategic lesson here: "The Stella D’Oro struggle shows that workers must take state power — PLP."
This is one battle in a long war against capitalism. The Stella D’Oro workers, especially those who join PLP, can spread their experiences among masses of the unemployed and among all co-workers on future jobs. The collective strength of the working class, led by communist ideas, has the power to eventually smash this hellish system.
Once more, we hail the magnificent struggle of the Stella D’Oro workers, a model for the whole working class.
a name="Norway’s Oil, Gas Bosses En‘Nobel’ Obama"></a>"orway’s Oil, Gas Bosses En‘Nobel’ Obama
Why did Barack Obama win the Nobel "Peace" Prize when he presides over two wars and the sharpest assault on jobs and wages since the Great Depression? The short answer is that the award has nothing to do with peace and workers’ needs.
Arms millionaire Alfred Nobel created the prize in his 1896 will, and subsequent war-making capitalists have controlled it ever since. U.S. arch-imperialists Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Henry Kissinger all won Nobels. A more detailed explanation of Obama’s award involves the Norwegian-prize givers’ role in an increasingly deadly global energy rivalry.
Choosing Obama was the brainchild of a committee hand-picked by the government of Norway, a major energy producer and strategic U.S. ally. Its giant Statoil Hydro is the world’s largest source of offshore oil and gas. Until recently, the deputy chairwoman of the Nobel panel, Kaci Kullmann Five, sat on Statoil’s board.
Nobel chairman Thorbjorn Jagland acted as Statoil’s virtual CEO as prime minister from 1996 to 1997 when the company was 100% state-owned. Jagland helped engineer sale of a 24% stake in Statoil to private investors led by U.S. banks State Street, J.P. Morgan and Bank of New York Mellon.
a name="McChrystal-Biden Debate Over War Focus Behind Phony ‘Peace’ Prize"></">Mc"hrystal-Biden Debate Over War Focus Behind Phony ‘Peace’ Prize
Through Obama’s prize surprise, Statoil/Norway is attempting to sway him in the direction of the McChrystal-McCain "surge-for-total-victory" model during the developing Afghan policy debate. Statoil aims to cash in on a U.S.-backed proposed pipeline — named TAPI — to carry gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. (See map page 6)
Next month, Statoil will serve as a "Silver Sponsor" — Exxon Mobil is a Gold one, BP is Platinum — at Turkmenistan’s 14th International Oil and Gas Conference. TAPI will be high on the agenda as western oil majors seek to break Russia’s stranglehold on Turkmen supplies. But TAPI’s success hinges on pacifying Afghanistan.
Tiny Norway plays such a big part in Obama’s war in Afghanistan because it could provide Statoil access to neighboring Turkmenistan’s gas riches. Norway has 500 troops in Afghanistan, a sizable contingent for a nation of 4.6 million, and the largest refugee bureau (Nobel’s current and Statoil’s ex-vice chair Kullman Five is a trustee). A Norwegian diplomat, Kai Eide, a former Statoil adviser, holds the highest UN post there. He recently "expressed support for the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan’s [McChrystal’s] call for more troops." (Voice of America, 9/29/09)
Eide recently fired his top U.S. aide Peter Galbraith for exposing the blatant rigging of Afghan president Karzai’s re-election. Statoil’s envoy fears that publicizing the fraud might fuel Vice-President Biden’s camp, which calls for toning down the Afghan war in favor of pushing into Pakistan.
Norway has cast its lot with U.S. imperialists for the long haul. During the Cold War, it was a staunch anti-Soviet strategically-located NATO member. It now houses NATO’s vast Joint Training Center at Stavanger, Statoil’s hometown. Norwegian, U.S. and other forces regularly practice there, not only for defending Statoil’s nearby oil and gas rigs but for invading Russia, just across the border. The "Peace" Prize move indicates Norway’s rulers are asserting their loyalty to their U.S. senior partners and demanding a piece of the imperialist pie now.
"Peace," as the Nobel Prize embodies it, actually means military conquest by U.S.-led imperialist coalitions and the loss of millions of workers’ lives. War will exist so long as the profit system endures. Capitalism thrives on armed conflict to carve up the world. It would be a serious political error to view Obama’s award as encouraging an end to U.S.-sponsored torture or ending Israeli-Palestinian strife or creating a new opening with Russia or Iran, as the New York Times says (10/9/09). For the working class, safety lies ultimately in joining PLP and building for a communist revolution to overthrow the profit-driven war-makers.
a name="Gore’s Nobel Had Same Imperialist Energy Motive">">"ore’s Nobel Had Same Imperialist Energy Motive
Al Gore’s 2007 "Peace" Prize for his efforts against global warming bears the Statoil hallmark, too. It so "happens" that Statoil, the world leader in trapping carbon emissions at gas plants, would profit mightily from the restrictions Gore advocates. In addition, such caps aim at stifling growth in U.S. rival China and potential rival India. On September 22, Statoil CEO Helge Lund joined the UN’s Expert Group on Climate and Energy, the only oil and gas executive invited. Lund’s booster Gore had helped found the panel.
a name="Hundreds Protest Killer Kops’ Racist Murder">">"undreds Protest Killer Kops’ Racist Murder
Rockford, IL, October 3 — Hundreds of workers and youth from Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan rallied today in Rockford against the racist police murder of Mark Anthony Barmore, a 23-year-old African American man. According to eyewitnesses, Mr. Barmore ran into a church day care center to avoid two cops who supposedly wanted to question him about a domestic violence incident. The cops ordered Mr. Barmore to come out of a closet where he was hiding and then shot him down when he came out, unarmed, with his hands raised.
As he lay on the floor face down and bleeding, they shot him three more times in the back, in front of over a dozen children who might have been killed by ricocheting bullets. Then, according to witnesses, the cops moved the body to rearrange the crime scene and then took family members to the police station and tried unsuccessfully to intimidate them into telling a false story. For this, the cops have been put on paid administrative leave while the case is being investigated.
Capitalism is declining and anger is rising. The real unemployment rate is over 20% and for young black men it’s over fifty percent. The cops fear the militancy of black youth and are intensifying their direct brutal assaults and intimidation in the hope of stopping rebellion. Only when there is fight-back do the big bosses decide to do a whitewash like the "legal" clearing (with Obama’s blessing) of the cop who killed Sean Bell in NYC, or if protests threaten to get out of hand to jettison a few "bad apple" cops.
Several members of PLP from the Chicago area attended the NAACP rally. Over two hundred people, including a number of youth, directed their anger against the cops and the system, instead of against each other. The bosses complain about youth violence but they would rather have youth killing each other than fighting against the capitalist system! When the anti-racist movement of the 1960’s retreated, there was a rapid rise in youth violence and gangs in our cities.
A mass anti-racist movement, led by communists, can channel this anger back against the capitalist system that is the cause of our problems. Of the many speakers that day, only one said positive things about Obama. Most made no mention of him at all. Many in our communities are coming to understand that he is not a cure for racist capitalism and that we have to fight back ourselves. About 40 copies of CHALLENGE were distributed and Party members are making plans with members of community groups to work on more projects together back home.
Over the past 50 years, many national leaders of the NAACP have worked together with the government to take the militancy out of the anti-racist movement, even to the point of attacking grassroots militants and siding with the police against them. But like many other unions, community groups, churches and schools whose leaders push capitalist dead-ends like electoral politics, the NAACP on the local level has many dedicated grassroots members who struggle hard to fight racist oppression. Communists must unite with these militant forces in struggle against racist oppression while we struggle with them to oppose the reformist leaders who support the capitalist system.
Modern racism was born in the slave trade with the rise of capitalism, and capitalism needs racism to keep workers divided and maximize profits from lower wages paid to black, Latino and immigrant workers. PLP has been in the forefront of the struggle to destroy racism and capitalism for almost 50 years. Join PLP and help build a world-wide communist revolution to destroy racism and all oppression once and for all.
Cal Campus Rally Ties Budget Cuts to War Spending
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, Oct. 6 — A student-faculty anti-war group held a rally on campus against the budget cuts in the California State University (CSU) system, and the war spending that contribute to these cuts. One speaker explained that in the U.S., war spending trumps all other priorities, amounting to about $760 billion in 2009.
Over the period since the Iraq war began in 2003 up to 2008, the U.S. has reduced the funding for states and cities to provide services like Medicaid by about $136 billion, including about $16 billion for California. The one-time stimulus grant to California in 2009 of $8 billion doesn’t even make up for funds diverted to the wars in the previous five years! Clearly the fight against campus budget cuts must be linked to the fight against imperialist wars.
Two other speakers protested a racist change in the admission policy that is a part of the cutbacks. This policy gives preference to students from other parts of the state, and is likely to reduce the percentage of black and Latino students on this campus.
Another speaker explained that the current economic crisis "provides us with a clear view of the priorities that the state of California, the United States, or, more generally, any profit-driven economy must take." He pointed out that California’s huge spending on its racist overcrowded prison system, where 70% of released inmates are sent back to prison, takes billions that should be spent on education and public services. The state spends $49,000 each on its 170,000 prisoners, more than 60% of whom are black and Latino, but has reduced state support of the CSU to $4,600 per student. "We should take the economic crisis as an opportunity to see clearly that the state’s priorities are not in the interests of working people, and recognize that these policies for war, for prison and for education cutbacks are not in our common interest as a working class."
Several hundred students heard some part of the rally, 300 leaflets were distributed, and about a dozen students signed up to be contacted further. It is our responsibility as communists to show students and faculty that fee increases and layoffs are a result of racism and imperialist wars created by capitalism.
Workers Must Destroy System
Capitalism Breeds Racism
Many of us identify ourselves by "race" and ethnicity in daily conversation as well as on government forms. However, according to the American Anthropological Association, there are no biological foundations or genes for "race." Humans are genetically more alike than different, yet the idea of "race" is embedded in our everyday dialogue. This is because "race" is an idea, a concept carefully reinforced and reproduced by capitalist society in order to maintain itself.
Over 140 years after the end of chattel slavery in the U.S, the ruling class still wields racism, as it’s most vicious tool against the world’s workers. In New York, official unemployment among blacks is four times the rate among whites. The college graduation rate of blacks is half that of whites in the U.S. Around the world, virtually every measure of health, from infant mortality rates, to stress and high blood pressure, to diabetes and heart failure, is worse for blacks. In the U.S., 1 in 10 black males age 30-34 is in prison, 1 in 4 is in the criminal justice system. On a daily basis young black and Latino men are gunned down in the streets by racist cops, or killed by crime that rises with the unemployment and poverty rate.
Obama A Cover For U.S. Imperialism
The election of a black president has not blunted racism. On the contrary, the bosses hope that Obama provides a cover to the horror of U.S. Imperialism. Already the ruling class is licking its chops at the rise in black military recruitment since Obama’s election. These young men and women will be sent to kill and risk death in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Meanwhile destitute workers from Uganda are being used as soldiers in Iraq, paid only a fraction of the wages of the U.S. military, and used as shields in a protective ring around U.S. mega-bases. Building anti-racist, international unity among these soldiers with a revolutionary outlook is the way forward to eliminate racism.
Racism is not merely a vestige of an old system, but an essential part of capitalism. From the very beginning of capitalist society, the ascending ruling class was profiting enormously from slave labor and indentured servitude, a system by which poor workers were committed to a single boss for a set period and then "freed" to become wage laborers. But as black and white indentured servants began uniting with Native Americans to resist exploitation in this new social order, race laws were enacted and brutally enforced to divide the colonial work force.
In 1662, Virginia passed a law that enslaved blacks for life. Legislation was passed to determine what a "black" person was since so much intermarriage occurred. These laws were also used to justify the enslavement of children produced from the rape of black slaves by the colonial rulers. While black slavery was enshrined in law, a 200-year genocide against Native-Americans was carried out, led by butchers such as Andrew Jackson who would go on to become President.
a name="‘Founding Fathers’ Justified Slavery"></">‘F"unding Fathers’ Justified Slavery
Slave-owning racist Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and the author of the Declaration of Independence, said in 1789 that he could never imagine a "biracial republic." The hypocritical "founding fathers" needed to justify their brutal ownership of enslaved African workers while simultaneously touting the "ideals" of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
The Abolitionist movement grew in reaction to the continued brutality of chattel slavery. Many people spoke out. John Brown and Nat Turner led the most militant attacks on slaveholders, with John Brown trying to unite white and black workers alike. They planted the seeds for anti-racist actions that played out in the U.S. Civil War, and continue to inspire workers all over the world.
At that time the ruling class was becoming divided between the Northern industrialists and the Southern slaveholders. The industrialists used the mass hatred of slavery to weaken the southern bosses, eventually leading to the Civil War. After hundreds of thousands died fighting slavery, Lincoln saw it was no longer politically tolerable and reluctantly ended chattel slavery in 1865.
The limited politics of the struggle didn’t allow for racism to be defeated, as the Abolitionists did not make the fight against capitalism the issue, but only against slavery. So, chattel slavery became wage slavery; it didn’t end, they just changed the rules. The bosses have since stolen trillions of dollars of additional profits through the super-exploitation of black, Latino and Asian workers being paid lower wages.
After chattel slavery, new laws against integration, called Jim Crow, physically and politically separated workers. White capitalists, using former confederate officers and soldiers to protect their privilege through terror, formed the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. They attacked black workers organizing, speaking out or uniting with white workers.
Great strikes such as the New Orleans General Strike of 1892 illustrated that white and black workers could see past racism as the struggle united them. They fought scabs and the U.S. army and were stronger together than they ever could have been apart. From the 1930’s to ‘50s, uniting black and white workers in the struggle against racism became a cornerstone of the old Communist Party.
Communists Led Fight Against Racism
From building a mass movement to defending the young black men framed in Scottsboro, to organizing integrated sharecroppers and steel workers unions in the south, the communist movement led the fight against racism. Our Party came out of this movement, and by learning from its successes and mistakes and fighting many battles against the Klan, Nazis and racist cops, we have advanced our understanding of racism.
In June 1964, the first mass big-city rebellion erupted in New York City’s Harlem when many thousands of black workers and youth took to the streets to protest another police murder of a black teenager. They marched through Harlem’s streets, displaying the front page of CHALLENGE as their "flag."
PLM (Progressive Labor Movement, forerunner of PLP) was the only organization to support the rebellion — all the reformist black leaders and the old "Communist" Party tried to simultaneously cool the rebels and attack PLM. We defied being banned from Harlem by the state, and held a mass demonstration during the height of the rebellion calling for the bosses, their judges, and their cops to be hanged.
In the ‘60s and beyond, the bosses have tried to turn anger against racism into a wedge to keep workers of different "races" separate. Nationalist groups like the Black Panther Party called for blacks to stick together in a militant way. More mainstream ideas called for black-owned business, black cops and black politicians. President Obama is the ultimate figure in the disarming of the struggle against racism. His rhetoric about the "post-racial" society is an attempt to delude workers into not seeing the realities of racism all around them.
Racism As Widespread As Ever
The foreclosures and unemployment rates of the current economic crisis affect blacks more than whites. Racist police brutality persists, and during his candidacy, Obama’s only comment on the assassination of Sean Bell was that the police were justified. During his inaugural speech, this supposed trail-blazer described himself as following in the footsteps of the "founding fathers" who created the racism he downplays.
Racism was created by the ruling class and developed as capitalism developed. It allows bosses to keep workers of different colors apart so they will not join forces to rebel. Racism creates a group of super-exploited black and Latino workers, keeping wages lower for all, as workers fear asking for more because others work for less.
The most heroic class struggles of workers have been waged by building multi-racial unity. The battle of the Stella D’Oro workers over the last year has been the most recent example of this, with workers of every nationality standing in solidarity and male workers refusing to take deals that would not benefit the women workers in a stand against sexism as well. PLP was founded on the belief that we must fight racism in order to create a new world and that only a communist revolution can destroy this capitalist creation. The rulers built racism to make more profits for themselves. Workers don’t need or want the ideas that separate us from each other. Workers will destroy racism as they destroy the whole capitalist system and build a world that serves our needs instead.
Haitian Revolution Crushed French Slave-owners
The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was the most important revolution of its time. Haiti was the richest colony in the Caribbean, and it would have been a launching pad to begin a French offensive into the North American continent. The enslaved workers of Haiti, with nothing but meager weapons, managed to defeat the powerful French army. They fought Napoleon’s armies that were rampaging all across Europe, and they gave that despot his first defeat. The uprising was successful in overthrowing the French landowners, as well as defeating the European armies that came to France’s aid in order to restore "order." The former slaves also freed the slaves of the Spanish colony that would be later named "The Dominican Republic." The former slaves managed to wipe out their oppressors, but they were trapped in the ideology of race. They saw white workers as the enemy, and this racism became nationalism as it was co-opted by pro-capitalist misleaders like Toussaint L’ouverture.
The Haitian Revolution foreshadowed the failures of all of the future National Liberation Movements, as they did not fight against all bosses, but only the white bosses, not recognizing just how virulently racist the black slave-holders were. Haiti became the first example of neo-colonialization as well, as the capitalist nations forced Haiti to pay billions of dollars in today’s currency in reparations to the French slave-owners, thus impoverishing the Haitian workers and enslaving them economically to the designs of the imperialist nations. Haiti has been punished to this day for daring to rise up and defeat capitalism while it was ascending, and their great revolution has been carefully removed from the capitalist’s textbooks.
Bus Mechanics Fight Union Hacks, Demand Action vs. Racist Murder
LOS ANGELES, October 12 — After a bus driver’s nephew, Darrick Collins, a young black worker, was murdered by a racist county Sheriff (see CHALLENGE, 10/14), we asked the driver to speak at our union meeting of mechanics about this racist terror. When we talked to the family at the funeral, they called the uncle, and after a long phone conversation he said he’d be glad to speak to other union members. He related a dozen other recent police killings, news of which we distributed in our PLP flyers, "Wanted for Mass Murder: LA Sheriffs and Capitalism."
We told the driver we wanted to introduce a motion to condemn the Sheriff’s Dept. for this brutal racist murder and call for a five-minute work-stoppage in protest. "But," we said, "we know the union leadership will do everything they can to prevent the motion." The driver was unfazed, saying "I’ll have to get time off from work to make the meeting, but I‘m coming."
When the driver arrived at the meeting, the union president said, "You’ll have to wait outside. You’re in the driver’s union. This is a mechanic’s union." This "warm show of unity" toward another transit worker brought by a mechanic was followed by the divisive union hack’s warning the membership, "Watch your pockets!" (In other words, "he’s just here looking for money.")
But the rank-and-filers at the meeting rejected the mis-leadership’s motion to exclude the driver, saying they wanted to hear the brother. The Party, through CHALLENGE readers and friends, fought to make sure workers supported this fight in the union and at work.
a name="‘We’re the ones they come down on…’"></a>‘W"’re the ones they come down on…’
After waiting half-an-hour in the lobby, the driver was received and spoke humbly but urgently for us to take a stand against the killings. "I didn’t come here for pity or charity. I came to raise your awareness. I’m no one special; I’m just a blue-collar worker like all of you," but he warned, "We are the ones they come down on, the ones they kill, like this young man in my family."
Then there was a long discussion where workers talked angrily about experiences of racist police terror and jailings, while the union president sat numbly at the back. But soon he resumed his real role by ruling a job-action motion "out of order." "We have contracts," he cried. "We would get huge fines like New York City’s transit union [in 2005]." A service attendant asked sarcastically if we could now expect cops to shoot us with picket signs in our hands, when we go on strike, recalling a cop killing of a man with a stick in his front yard. "We won’t be going on strike," the president told him. But another worker said, "We need to go on strike!" Another worker said that everyone should wear red arm bands in protest of the racist murder of Darrick Collins.
Afterwards, in discussions in the parking lot, a black technician thanked a worker for inviting him and "for staying on my ass to make sure I came." One mechanic was disappointed in himself for not "shoving the president’s words down his own throat. It crossed my mind to make a motion to give a thousand dollars to the family since the driver never even thought about money. "He [the president] insulted all of us."
For The Future
As U.S. capitalism declines, it increasingly unleashes racist terror. Workers plan to take this motion to the drivers’ union as well. Even though we didn’t win the motion, more workers are reading and distributing CHALLENGE. The confidence of newer and older PLP members in the workers and the Party is growing.
Our leaflet, distributed outside and inside bus divisions, declared that these racist, cold-blooded murders by the bosses’ death squads are aimed at instilling terror in all workers, to accept passively the bosses’ economy of sacrifice and their genocidal wars for oil. It called for revolution to destroy racist capitalism.
Advocating a political strike against a capitalist system that thrives on racist exploitation and mass murder at home and abroad deepens workers’ understanding about the nature of the beast we’re fighting and the need to destroy it, together with its cops and union misleaders. In this fight, we’re going beyond calling for removing Sheriffs from transit security and restoring the Transit Police, as suggested by the union president. Instead we’re raising the need for communist revolution to bury our class enemies entirely.
a name="‘I really want NATO and U.S. troops to leave….’"></a>"I really want NATO and U.S. troops to leave….’
[A CHALLENGE reader received this message from a friend in Afghanistan.]
Today there was an explosion in an area in Kabul close to the U.S. embassy, NATO and ISAF (International Security Assistance Force), killing 80 people, not 16 as the media reported. I don’t know when they will stop killing innocents. The U.S., NATO and ISAF, the Taliban, the Jihadis (warlords) — they are all killing innocent people. Westerners are committing most of the explosions and killings.
I really want NATO and U.S. troops to leave. If they can’t bring security, why are they here?
The election will go to the second round. There will be chaos and, according to the constitution, a state of emergency. There will be a loyal jirga (a nation-wide council of representatives) but I’m afraid that the warlords who are now in power, like Masud, Rabani, Fahim (vice-president and minister of defense), Sayyaf and Dostum will dominate it again.
All those in power, including [president] Karzai, are rich, making money from the situation. They have militias and weapons and are only looking to fill their pockets. (Russia and Iran recently gave money to two warlords who control territory close to the Russian and Iranian borders.) They are criminals. They stole the reconstruction money. In eight years of U.S. occupation, they built no public projects. Even foundation work has not been started!
Who will bring work, education and security? Do you think the Americans will do this? They have done nothing in the last eight years. And they say they will not leave until 2015.
The military situation is very bad. They have plans to divide Afghanistan like Yugoslavia. But they will not succeed to divide Afghans; we will fight against that.
A friend in Afghanistan
CHALLENGE Comment — PLP supports our friend and the exploited masses in Afghanistan. We are fighting wherever we can against the U.S. rulers’ imperialist invasion of that country, which leads to our thoughts about the question our friend poses: "If they [NATO and U.S. troops] can’t bring security, why are they here?"
U.S. bosses invaded Afghanistan not to bring its people security but to attempt to control oil and gas pipelines from that region and its strategic military position, in their inter-imperialist rivalry with China and Russia. All of the forces the writer mentions are enemies of the country’s workers and farmers. This bosses’ battle is what is killing innocent people.
The U.S. ruling class is trying to remain the world’s dominant power to be able to exploit the world’s working class, not bring it security. In fact, it is these profit motives that are the source of the insecurity that tramples on the aspirations of the masses in Afghanistan and everywhere else, including on the U.S. working class.
a name="Imperialists’ Fight Over Pipelines Ignites Wider Wars">">"mperialists’ Fight Over Pipelines Ignites Wider Wars
The threat to U.S. political and economic domination of the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea areas today centers on pipelines that U.S. oil companies and rival coalitions of the area’s weaker powers are proposing to build to transport oil and gas to lucrative markets in Europe and Asia.
Afghanistan is a vital transit route for U.S. multi-billion-dollar oil and gas exports, going from the energy-rich Caspian Sea on Afghanistan’s northern border to the Arabian Sea. Five U.S. oil giants — Unocal, Chevron, Pennzoil, Amoco and Exxon — have invested heavily in the region, said to have the greatest energy potential outside the Middle East. Bush-Cheney, with strong oil company ties, invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to secure a flow of oil and profits. This policy — not the hunt for Al Qaeda — is also the driving force behind Obama’s continued military occupation.
Last year’s stand-off in Georgia highlighted the potential of Russia-U.S. military confrontation. Behind the clash was the U.S.-backed BTC pipeline, which by-passes Russia and Iran to transport Caspian oil from Baku in Azerbaijan through Tbilisi in Georgia to Ceyhan, the Turkish port on the Mediterranean.
In May, Iran signed a deal to export 150 million cubic meters of gas per day to Pakistan via a proposed Iran-Pakistan pipeline, which Russia and China are planning to fund. (India, initially involved in this project, recently backed out at U.S. insistence, sweetened by a deal giving India U.S. nuclear power technology, although India’s decision may not be final.) It would be routed through the Pakistani province of Baluchistan which shares a common border with Iran. China is potentially interested in extending the pipeline to its northwestern provinces bordering Pakistan.
All this intensified the conflict between Iran and the U.S. and revealed the dangers the U.S. faces from its so-called allies, Pakistan and India, and from its major competitors, Russia and China. The latter’s economic growth depends on a steady supply of oil and gas so it’s also making deals with Iran, whose oil reserves rank as the world’s fourth largest while its gas reserves are second to Russia — much of it undeveloped.
The Iran-Pakistan deal revived a proposed rival U.S. pipeline, TAPI (see editorial, CHALLENGE, 10/14), which would transport gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. TAPI is funded by the Asian Development Bank whose major investors included U.S. financial institutions and oil companies.
TAPI would go from Turkmenistan through Western Afghanistan, head south across Helmand province — the stronghold of the Taliban and local drug lords — through the neighboring Pakistani province of Baluchistan to the Arabian Sea for shipment to Europe and Asia.
The Afghan government is expected to receive 8% of TAPI’s revenue. Given the corruption in Afghanistan, very little of that would benefit the desperately poor Afghan population. There will be more civilian deaths, refugees and devastation in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the U.S. fights to protect the proposed pipeline routes.
In Baluchistan, where nationalist groups are already fighting for greater autonomy from Pakistan’s central government, the presence of a Pakistani pipeline could precipitate a break-away. Anger is rising at that government throughout Pakistan’s four provinces and federally-administered tribal areas.
Pakistani Senate Deputy Chairman Jan Muhammad Jamali told the Upper House recently, "Time is running out…. There is no other option left but to grant provincial autonomy to all the provinces, including Baluchistan."
U.S. government circles have also considered a Yugoslavia-style break-up to be advantageous to U.S. domination in the area. Baluchistan — where the CIA has been secretly training and funding the rebels — would become a U.S. client state, creating a buffer between Iran and India. It would help thwart China which is building a refinery in the Baluchistan seaport of Gwadar to be connected to the proposed pipeline taking Iranian oil north to western China.
With challenges and confrontations from enemies and allies, U.S. imperialists will do what they’ve always done to hang onto their economic and geopolitical power: use more military force.
To fight against these warring imperialists who are sucking the blood out of the masses, a revolutionary party is needed, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to mobilize the working class and the peasants towards the goal of destroying the profit system which is exploiting tens of millions in this region.
Racism Rampant in France
PARIS, October 7 — Brice Hortefeux, France’s Interior minister — the "top cop" in charge of the national police and the gendarmes — has been subpoenaed to appear in criminal court on December 17 for making racist insults. The chances that the bosses’ courts will condemn a government minister are, of course, microscopically small.
The suit was brought by the Movement Against Racism and for Friendship Among Peoples (MRAP) following the Internet publication of a video in which Hortefeux cracks racist jokes about North Africans. Hortefeux first tried to deny his racism; later he apologized to the French Council of the Muslim Faith.
Government Racism
Before being promoted to Interior minister, Hortefeux was the Immigration minister who (as CHALLENGE reported 10/31/07) launched a racist anti-immigrant rampage. Immigrants were so terrorized that they leapt from windows to escape the police, some leaping to their deaths.
Hortefeux’s racism is replicated by the cops he commands. One recent example: on May 9, during a clash between police and youths in the Paris suburb of Villiers-le-Bel, the cops fired tear gas and "flash balls" [rubber bullets] in all directions. Two black men lost their eyes.
Bruno, 31, a truck driver, told an interviewer: "It was a friend’s birthday. About a dozen of us were ordering sandwiches.... The riot police…entered the housing project, [and] started firing right away.... I wasn’t involved at all... I was eating with my friends, like we often do. And all of a sudden I was hit right in the head.... I fell down…. My friends…took me to the hospital.... My eye is dead. There’s no hope…. They’re going to operate to take it out and put in a prosthesis."
A rigorous study of police ID checks published on June 30 and conducted by the CNRS (a research organization financed by the Ministry of Higher Education) shows that the cops stop "Arab-looking people" seven times as often as whites, while blacks are stopped 11.5 times as often.
The Ministry of Higher Education itself spreads racism. Every year, the ministry-run academy of overseas sciences offers a 4,000-euro (US $5,880) prize for the best book dealing with "the positive aspects of colonization."
Similarly at the Ministry of Education, Serge Bilé and Mathieu Méranville have just published a 160-page book detailing the racism faced by black teachers on the part of the ministry, fellow teachers, parents and pupils.
a name="Bosses’ Racism">">"osses’ Racism
The bosses’ racism here — revealed in a university study published September 9 by the Observatoire des inégalités — shows that, on average, to get a single interview for an accounting job, a person with a Moroccan first and last name must send out 277 job application letters. A person with a French first and last name, with exactly the same qualifications, only has to send out 19 letters before landing a job interview.
According to sociologist Saïd Bouamama, the bosses here try to get all workers to accept this racism by promoting so-called "positive stereotypes." In a Sept. 29 interview, Bouamama said that "for this system to function correctly, they have to add an ideology that makes this situation less revolting. For example, blacks are supposedly better bouncers because they are ‘more diplomatic.’ North Africans are supposedly ‘naturally good’ in the building trades, and Asians are ‘painstaking’ in the garment industry.... There are supposedly ethnic capacities, or rather qualities. The strategy is to get as many people as possible to accept as self-evident the limitation of blacks or North Africans to a certain type of job."
Racist discrimination in housing, according to a French government study (September 3), shows landlords twice as likely to invite people with a French name to visit an apartment as people with an Arabic or African name, and four times as likely to sign a rental contract if the applicant is white.
Because of this racism, 22% of North African immigrant families live below the poverty line, compared with 6% of the general population.
France is sick with the racism bred by capitalism and imperialism. Racism generates super-profits through the super-exploitation of these groups. Their low wages drag down the wages of all workers. Most importantly, racism prevents the working class from realizing the class unity necessary for communist revolution, which is the only way to eliminate capitalist exploitation, the material basis of racist ideas. That’s why communists here and everywhere fight racism and promote the multi-racial unity of the working class.
a name="3 Minutes on Workers’ Revolution Panics Bosses’ Labor Lackies"></">3 "inutes on Workers’ Revolution Panics Bosses’ Labor Lackies
"A system that destroys decent jobs doesn’t deserve to exist," said a Machinist at a recent Boeing local union meeting. That was too much for the local president.
"Three minutes, brother!" he shouted, invoking a seldom-used rule to cut us off. Eventually he succeeded, but not before we called for demonstrations, strikes and sit-ins against a system that offers us nothing but fascism and war.
Interestingly, the district president Wroblewski hasn’t attended our local meeting since PLP’s well-received, much discussed Summer Project demonstrations at factory gates. We were protesting the no-strike deal demanded by the company, Democratic and Republican politicians and the bosses’ media. "Are you surprised?" asked another machine operator. "He knew we’d string him up if he ever agreed to such a thing after you guys passed out those leaflets at the gates."
But we should have no illusions; the union mis-leadership is trying desperately to find some kind of accommodation. Two meetings ago, the district president’s representative denied that Wroblewski even discussed this issue when he had a private meeting with the new Boeing Commercial Aircraft chief. He then droned on praising Wroblewski for "listening to the company’s ideas."
Cutting Through the Rhetoric
"That’s the worst non-denial denial I ever heard!" exclaimed an exasperated shop steward at an impromptu post-meeting meeting that discussed how to take the offensive. Now the bosses and their agents are floating code words like arbitration and contract extensions in a poor attempt to camouflage the no-strike regime.
Capitalism’s economic and political crisis is forcing the major union mis-leaders to look for new positions in an increasingly warlike world. Their trade union politics demand it.
At IAM (International Association of Machinists) national meetings they spread the illusion that the system is basically sound, that militant rhetoric and electing the right politicians can answer any "temporary" attacks. They contend the system will soon right itself and resume negotiating decent contracts. "It’s enough to make you sick," said an honest official after returning from just such a gabfest.
But actually the top union hacks have become overt members of the repressive bosses’ state apparatus. The New York AFL-CIO chief now heads the New York Federal Reserve, meeting with bankers from Chase and Goldman (government) Sachs to plot the salvation of the empire. The IAM international president calls for a national (actually fascist) industrial policy and commission in which he will no doubt be a major player.
To expose this charade, the union meeting speaker listed nation-wide examples marking the bosses’ real plans for re-industrialization through intensified racist exploitation. These include shutting down Pratt and Whitney aerospace engines in Hartford, Conn., moving the work to low-cost, non-union Georgia; closing unionized G.E. in Arizona to take advantage of cheaper non-union labor in the Southeast; moving work from Republic Doors in Chicago after a historic sit-in; and closing the Stella D’Oro bakery after a courageous 11-month strike and moving the work to a non-union outfit in Ohio.
The list ended with the threat of erecting a new Boeing-787 line in South Carolina after workers there rejected the union. "We can no longer assume that even hard-fought contracts can provide any immunity from the attacks of this sick system," concluded our speaker.
Adding an exclamation point, the company just announced another billion-dollar charge for the new 747 primarily because the crisis has forced airlines to delay orders. This means "thousands of layoffs" (NY Times, 10/7). So far this year the company has charged $3.5 billion to production delays. What seemed impossible just a short while ago is now a marked possibility: a federal take-over like GM, trashing our contracts and mounting job cuts.
The right-wing union leaders understood the implications of all this. That’s why they risked discarding any illusions of "democracy" to cut us off. Our friends and CHALLENGE readers were aware of the stakes as well. To win this struggle, these co-workers must help bring this developing revolutionary working-class understanding to the vast center in the shops, selling CHALLENGE to their friends and workmates, building class struggle and recruiting communist leaders.
Who Needs Three Minutes?
Unlike the union mis-leaders that must conceal their class-collaboration schemes, we "communists distain to conceal our views and aims." What Karl Marx said 137 years ago is still true today.
One doesn’t need three minutes to state the obvious: capitalism can’t meet the needs of workers and must be smashed. As the Communist Manifesto declared, "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist Revolution. [We workers] have nothing to lose but [our] chains. [We] have a world to win."
| LATE BULLETIN — More auto union sellouts in the works: The "leaders" of the UAW at the Philadelphia Boeing factory (making mostly military helicopters) scheduled to strike October 19, won’t call the local out on strike despite the contract expiration.
Meanwhile, the UAW leadership accepted an agreement at Ford freezing wages for new hires and containing a no-strike clause at the end of the contract. It awaits a membership vote. More next issue. |
Red Eye
Big biz media let Katrina die
MinutemanMedia.org, 9/10 — Four years later, corporate media outlets seem to have largely forgotten about Katrina and its survivors, let alone the conversations about race and poverty that were supposed to accompany it. Neither the Washington Post nor the Los Angeles Times ran a single piece on Katrina in the week surrounding the anniversary. ABC and Fox News didn’t mention the hurricane or its aftermath once. In the New York Times, readers found only a few articles on Katrina; it mentioned that "fundamental problems" still exist, like high unemployment, and some neighborhoods that seem "barely touched" since four years ago. Race, the elephant in the room, wasn’t mentioned a single time.
In addition to the estimated 1 million people still displaced by Katrina, rents in the New Orleans area have increased by 40 percent since the hurricane, and an estimated 11,000 people are currently homeless there. A report also reveals striking racial disparities in the impacts.
Capitalism globalizes toxic waste
NYT, 9/27 — Exporting waste illegally to poor countries has become a vast and growing international business, as companies try to minimize the costs of new environmental laws. Trash is bound for places like China, Indonesia, India and Africa. There, electronic waste and construction debris containing toxic chemicals are often dismantled by children at great cost to their health. Other garbage that is supposed to be recycled according to European laws may simply be burned or left to rot, polluting air and water.
The temptation to export waste is great because recycling properly at home is expensive: Because of Europe’s new environmental laws, it is four times as expensive to incinerate trash in the Netherlands as to put it – illegally – on a boat to China.
"The traffic in waste exports has become enormous."
Jobless recovery, poverty growing
GW, 9/25 — Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said last week that the recession is "very likely over." Bernanke cautioned that the recovery may not be strong enough in 2010 to generate significant job growth or bring down unemployment. The global recession is expected to push 89 million more people into extreme poverty by the end of 2010, the World Bank said last week.
9/11 outrage outranked by Vietnam
Creators.com, 9/11 — As assaults on a society go, the Sept. 11 attacks, which left 3,000 dead and are sure to be described in this anniversary week as being among the greatest historical outrages, were something less than that, given the world’s experience with the ravages of war. The countless Russians and the 6 million Jews killed... come to mind. The 3.4 million Vietnamese, mostly rice farmers, whom Robert McNamara admitted to having helped kill with his carpet-bombing of their country, are a forgotten footnote.
Oil wealth doesn’t reach workers
NYT, 9/27 — Destruction, or at least a lack of progress, has been the fate of most nations unlucky enough to sit on top of large pools of oil today. They have grown corrupted by oil, their leaders relieved of the need to show accountability as long as they can buy off well-connected foreigners and pay for the security and protection they need from their own angry, disenfranchised citizens.
Equatorial Guinea’s vicious leader, Teodoro Obiang, plunders virtually every cent of his nation’s wealth, aided by Riggs Bank of Washington, which sometimes sent employees to the embassy to pick up bulging suitcases of cash. Locals don’t even get the benefit of jobs because the manual labor is supplied by Indians and Filipinos brought in by Marathon Oil. One does manage to find a booming source of local employment: young Guinean girls called "night fighters" because they jostle for a chance to sell their bodies to the oilmen from Texas or Oklahoma. "Más Petróleo = Más Pobreza." So say graffiti on the pipelines.
We feel better working together
GW, 9/25 — Team players can tolerate twice as much pain as those who work alone. Researchers at Oxford University found that members of its rowing team had a greater pain threshold after training together than when they performed the same exercises individually.
Working as a group is thought to boost the rush of endorphins, a feel-good chemical that is released in the brain.
California may be leading a rout
GW 9/25 — Arnold Schwarzenegger described California as a "golden dream by the sea" when he was inaugurated as the state’s governor six years ago. The state that ocne boasted the best public schools, colleges and highways in America now has some of the worst. Its healthcare is ranked lowest of all the 50 states. Its prisons are overflowing; it has six of the 10 worst cities in the U.S. for air pollution ; its public finances are a disaster. In many ways, the golden state’s sickness is an extreme, hypertrophied version of the politico-economic problems of the whole United States in the early 21st century. The odds may be against the reformers.
Some big co’s block climate fight
NYT 9/28- In a rational world, the looming climate disaster would be a dominant political and policy concern. But it manifestly isn’t. Why not? This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don’t.
Nor is it just a matter of vested interests. It’s also a matter of vested ideas. For decades the dominant political ideology has extolled private enterprise, but climate change is a problem that can only be addressed through [collective] action.
Socialists can’t bury capitalism
NYT 9/29- Even in the midst of one of the greatest challenges to capitalism in 75 years, European Socialist parties have not found a compelling response. In France, asked this summer if the party was dying, Bernard-Henri Lévy, an emblematic Socialist, answered: "No – it is already dead."
The French Socialist Party "is trapped in a hopeless contradiction." It espouses a radical platform it cannot deliver; the result leaves space for parties to its left.
Just how sexist can rich men be?
GW 9/25- Food and sex, sex and food. Well, boys, here comes the best ever food-and-sex combo. Nyotaimori, the Japanese practice of eating food off a woman’s naked body, has arrived in London. The Nyotaimori evenings will rotate monthly around a number of posh restaurants and will cost just over $400.
With Nyotaimori the woman can be your plate and while she plays dead you can prod your metal chopsticks all over her naked form. What could be better?
Rich capitalisms starve the poor
GW 9/25- Eliminating the millions of tons of food thrown away annually in western countries such as the U.S. and U.K. could lift more than a billion people out of hunger worldwide, experts claim. Excessive consumption in rich countries inflates food prices in the developing world making grain less affordable for poor and undernourished people in other parts of the world. "There are nearly a billion malnourished people in the world, but all of them could be lifted out of hunger with less than a quarter of the food wasted in Europe and North America. That means we’re taking food out of the mouths of the poor."
John Brown, Harriet Tubman: Models for Multi-Racial Unity and Action
On October 17, PLP’ers celebrate the raid on Harper’s Ferry as a revolutionary action showing today’s need for militant, anti-racist, multi-racial, revolutionary struggle!
The southern slaveholders were terrified by the Harper’s Ferry raiders’ militant, multi-racial unity, a real-life rebuke of their racist stereotyping. One of the raiders’ five black freedom fighters, Osborne Anderson, described the atmosphere before-hand:
"I have been permitted to realize to its furthest, fullest extent, the moral, mental, physical, social harmony of an Anti-Slavery family, carrying out to the letter the principle of the Anti-slavery cause. In John Brown’s house, and in John Brown’s presence, men from widely different parts of the continent met and united into one company, wherein no hateful prejudice dared intrude its ugly self — no ghost of a distinction found space to enter."
From Childhood, Brown Vowed to Fight Slavery
This trust among whites and blacks did not happen overnight. John Brown’s father was a conductor on the Underground Railroad in Ohio. At 12, Brown met a fugitive slave boy and saw the suffering slavery had inflicted on him, influencing Brown forever. He believed blacks and whites were completely equal. He put this knowledge into action daily.
As an adult, Brown moved his family to a farm in North Elba, N.Y. near a black community of former slaves. Blacks were regularly invited to the house for dinner with Brown’s family. He addressed them as "Mr." or "Mrs.," sharply contrasting with the era’s racist mores (true even among many slavery opponents).
Preparing for the raid, Brown turned to both black and white abolitionists. In April 1858, while gathering money, arms and volunteers in Canada, he visited Harriet Tubman. She was well-known to the black fugitive slave community there, having personally guided many to freedom. Tubman supported his plans, urging him to set July 4, 1858, for the raid and promising to bring volunteers. They agreed to communicate through their mutual friend Frederick Douglass, black abolitionist and former slave.
Tubman Single-handedly Freed 300 Slaves
Tubman’s own experiences made her and Brown allies. Born around 1820 of enslaved parents on a Maryland plantation, Tubman performed house and field work, was subjected to physical abuse and tearfully saw many of her nine siblings sold away from the family. In her teens, Tubman suffered a broken skull from brutal plantation life. Her "owner" tried selling her as "damaged goods." Instead she fled, walking for several weeks, mostly at night, the 90 miles to Philadelphia via the Underground Railroad. She returned shortly afterwards, guiding her family out of slavery to Canada. And that was just the beginning.
Over the following 11 years, with a bounty on her head, Tubman made approximately 13 trips south and guided an estimated 300 slaves to freedom in Canada. This resolute, daring revolutionary declared, "I never ran my train off the tracks and I never lost a passenger."
Tubman warmly endorsed Brown’s armed struggles in Kansas against the pro-slavery gangs. Brown, in turn, knew Tubman’s courage, militancy, and knowledge of the land and Underground Railroad network, and felt Tubman would be invaluable in executing their plans to free the enslaved by any means necessary. He always addressed her as "General Tubman." Both believed in direct action and armed violence to end slavery.
Tubman became ill and could not bring her forces to Harper’s Ferry, but her work inspired the rest of the raiders. Tubman’s example, like that of Osborne Anderson and the other black raiders, discredited the image of black people as passive victims, terrifying the southern slave-owners and politicians, and inspired the abolitionist movement.
Black Rebels Petrified Slave-owners
To those today who say workers won’t fight oppression, the stubborn facts of history show struggle is universal. The slave-owners, although talking of "docile" blacks, knew this well. They were petrified of potential black rebels and of "outside agitators." They patrolled all night with dogs and guns to intimidate their enslaved workers and to keep Yankees and abolitionist literature away from them.
Today the "outside agitators" are PLP communists, fighting to abolish racist capitalism. The bosses assure us that the impoverished working class is too ground down, too alienated to fight back collectively, saying workers hate communism. Yet they organize cops, plant security, the Minutemen, black nationalists and sellout union "leaders" to try to keep communists out, and instantly fire them when they’re discovered in a factory. Why are they afraid if the working class is supposed to be so passive?
Today, uniting to fight the mutual class enemy is one of the main ways people of different backgrounds are able to overcome the "natural" segregation capitalist society promotes. Brown and Tubman demonstrated that racist and nationalist ideas cannot be overcome primarily inside one’s head. It requires material change in the way one lives. Among the black and militant white abolitionists, multi-racial unity developed over years of working together, getting to know each other while struggling over their differences.
Today, U.S. capitalism has created its own contradiction. Workers still often live in neighborhoods separated by "race" but many are integrated within their workplaces and schools. The bosses try to divide us there as well, with racist job classifications and different types of bourgeois culture to keep workers apart (e.g., soul "versus" country music). Nevertheless, workers rub shoulders every day. Class-conscious workers in PLP must develop these acquaintances into friendships and unbreakable bonds in struggle.
Class Struggle Trumps Racism
As in Tubman and Brown’s time, racism permeates society. But rebellions and strikes reveal multi-racial unity and struggle against the bosses. At the Smithfield Ham Factory in Tarheel, NC, for example, a 15-year unionization fight witnessed intense intimidation from the bosses to scare workers from signing union cards. But by organizing support from grocery workers from far and wide, Smithfield workers felt part of a larger community. When the bosses got immigration agents to raid the plant, targeting Latino workers for deportation, the workers saw through this divisive trick and, in November 2006, 500 marched out in a two-day strike protesting this raid, forcing the company to re-hire all the fired immigrant workers!
In the Bronx, NY, the Stella D’Oro workers struck for 11 months. These immigrant workers from across the world, men and women, overcame differences and stuck together. Not one worker crossed the picket line! PLP organized friends, comrades, teachers and students onto the picket lines, bringing solidarity and communist leadership. PLP members steadfastly stood in solidarity with the strikers via donations, rallies and marches, and supported their fight against plant closure.
John Brown’s raid and Harriet Tubman’s courage in freeing 300 slaves along the Underground Railroad teach us many lessons. Militancy was foremost in their thinking. Tubman declared she would never return to being a slave, that she would rather die fighting. Brown, after fighting in Kansas, realized that only bloodshed could end slavery. Many workers agreed with them, especially after the 1857 Dred Scott decision legalizing slavery nation-wide.
Multi-racial unity is essential in any fight. Black workers escaping from enslavement received needed help from white abolitionists to reach the North. Thousands of workers, black and white, helped escaping slaves along their journeys and defended them when attacked by slave-catchers. These workers attended public meetings, donated money, passed word to their friends and helped harbor fugitive slaves.
PLP does similar things today. We discuss political struggles and the vital need for multi-racial unity against the racist system with friends, coworkers and neighbors. We urge them to join in militant anti-racist demonstrations, build a multi-racial base with fellow workers or donate to CHALLENGE. Every time someone we know does one of these simple acts, they’re making a political commitment in the fight against racism, capitalism and imperialism, just as thousands of anti-slavery supporters did against slavery — taking small steps to serve and defend those who had escaped slavery as well as those who fought it directly.
Join PLP
We invite all workers, soldiers and students who participate in these struggles to join Progressive Labor Party.
Today’s supporters of anti-racist struggle understand — just as did the thousands backing Brown and Tubman 150 years ago — that revolutionaries like the raiders then and PLP now are the honest, reliable leaders in struggle. When direct action is required, they know to whom to turn. CHALLENGE constantly reports workers being won to militancy and multi-racial unity in struggles against the racist bosses, hailing those joining our ranks. Step by step, the communist movement will grow and lead the working class to revolution and a new world based on members of our class mutually meeting each other’s needs, without racist bosses and their profit system.
- Stella D’Oro Struggle: One Battle in Long War vs. Capitalism
- Rulers ‘Debate’ War: Afghanistan or Pakistan? Both Are Killers
- U. of Cal.: Need Strike vs. War-Inspired Racist Cuts
- PLP Unites Workers, Wins CHALLENGE Readers, Rebuts Union Hacks
- B’klyn Students Defy School Bosses, Stick It to the Fascists
- Tool Workers’ Strike Solid, But Union Relies on Bosses’ NLRB
- Fascist Terror: Racist LA Cops Murder 4 Black and Latino Workers in 6 Days
- El Salvador FMLN’s Capitalist ‘Reform’: Mass Unemployment, Daily Killings, $1-a-Day ‘Wages’
- Stella Strikers’ Open Letter to Ohio Workers
- LETTERS
- Workers Unite to Battle Racist School Closings
- LA School Compact ‘Racist attack on students...’
- Reformism A Trap to Maintain Bosses’ Power
- Red Eye on the News
- Lesson of Harper’s Ferry Raid Working-Class Violence: A Key to Revolution
Challenge October 14 2009
Stella D’Oro Struggle: One Battle in Long War vs. Capitalism
Rulers ‘Debate’ War: Afghanistan or Pakistan? Both Are Killers
Obama’s First Afghan Surge:
Mistaken Gamble On Supposed
Russian Weakness
Pakistan Better Near-Range Target For Long-Term U.S. War-Makers
U. of Cal.: Need Strike vs.
War-Inspired Racist Cuts
UCLA
More Action
PLP Unites Workers, Wins CHALLENGE Readers, Rebuts Union Hacks
Bosses Attack
Communist Response
Anti-Racist Victory in Long-Term Struggle
B’klyn Students Defy School Bosses, Stick It to the Fascists
Tool Workers’ Strike Solid, But Union Relies on Bosses’ NLRB
Fascist Terror: Racist LA Cops Murder 4 Black and Latino Workers in 6 Days
El Salvador FMLN’s Capitalist ‘Reform’:
Mass Unemployment, Daily Killings, $1-a-Day ‘Wages’
Stella Strikers’ Open Letter to Ohio Workers
LETTERS
Salvador ‘Left’ Pro-Capitalist
Need More Info on LA Fight
Criticizes Slavery Graphic
Workers Unite to Battle Racist School Closings
LA School Compact ‘Racist attack on students...’
Reformism A Trap to Maintain Bosses’ Power
capitalism functions. Such analyses can prevent the capitalist system from co-opting us, from allying ourselves with one or another branch of the ruling class, which doesn’t help our class in any way.
Red Eye on the News
Back Afghan pipeline, US backs you
Moore: Voting will cure capitalism
Cuba honors black rebel’s demise
Afghan women see little liberation
What Afghan ‘win’ really means
System ranks profits over health
Russian energy clout breeds conflict
Pfizer drug sales ‘endangered lives’
Lesson of Harper’s Ferry Raid
Working-Class Violence: A Key to Revolution
Racist Laws Still Exist
Follow Stella D’Oro Workers’ Lead Against Rulers’ Attacks: ‘Make the Bosses Take the Losses’
Oil $$$ Put U.S. Rulers in Iraq for the Long Haul
Howard U. Students, Workers Unite vs. Job and Service Cuts
Call for Teachers’ Strike vs. Fascist School Reform
Workers in Honduras, El Salvador Unite vs. Coup Bosses’ Attacks
Paraguay: Lugo Talks ‘Left’ but Intensifies Capitalist Exploitation
Bosses’ Education Reform: Use Schools to Strengthen Profit System
LETTERS
Joblessness ‘Recruits’ Workers on Both Sides of Bosses’ War
Book Reviews: Global Warming: Only Communism Can Save the Planet, Not Capitalist Schemes
Obama’s Afghan War Crucial to U.S. Bosses’ Global Control
- Teenagers bumped down, jobless
- A raw health deal for immigrants
- For profit, cheat the low-wagers
- Paul Robeson, noble anti-capitalist
- In poorest areas, sick dial 911
- US drove Sioux off sacred mount
- Insiders dumping their own stocks
Harper’s Ferry Raid Shows: Rely on the Masses to Change the World
Follow Stella D’Oro Workers’ Lead Against Rulers’ Attacks:
‘Make the Bosses Take the Losses’
NEW YORK CITY, September 12 — Stella D’Oro bosses told its workers this week that they will be thrown on the street and that their bakery will be closed — the brand and some machinery having been sold to Lance, a non-union company. It will make the products at a bakery in Ashland, Ohio.
Stella workers, having struck for 11 months in a fiercely militant struggle against wage-cuts, descended with their supporters on the otherwise silent Labor Day parade today. Their contingent of 350 filled a city block with banners, signs, and chants of “Keep Stella in the Bronx: Fight, Fight, Fight!” and “The Workers, United, Will Never Be Defeated.” Cleaners from Domestic Workers United and musicians from the Rude Mechanicals group made the chanters’ rhythms dance and sparkle.
The effect on workers marching past was electric. Eyes brightened, fists went up, the booming chants echoed from scores of marchers, especially the many ranks of construction workers walking behind or riding on their heavy rigs. Imagine those rigs surrounding the Stella plant, preventing any machines being moved out!
“Keep Stella in the Bronx” struck a real chord with New York workers who identify the Bronx as a working-class borough. If they didn’t know about the Stella struggle, they do now.
PLP’s Stella supporters helped build the action from within our own unions and mass organizations, and continued the flow of CHALLENGE sales and chants like, “Kick the Bosses in the Ass: Power to the Working Class;” and “Make the Bosses Take the Losses: Keep Stella Open.” PL’ers added the chant, “Whose Factory? Our Factory!” which attacks the essence of capitalism, and the internationalist chant in Spanish, “From north to south, from east to west, we’ll win the battle, whatever the cost.”
The workers are planning a September 25 march and rally from Wall Street, site of Lance’s banker, Goldman Sachs, to City Hall. PLP members are backing the workers as they absorb this heavy blow, helping them contact the Ashland workers to explain what happened here, and planning how to fight for their jobs.
The bosses’ laws protect their ownership of the means of production, enabling them to move around assets indiscriminately without any thought about the effect on workers. None of us is safe under their rule. The Communist Manifesto described this inevitable destructive effect of capitalism back in 1848: “Everything solid melts into air.”
But workers inevitably resist being discarded like a bad batch of cookies. We’re learning from such battles that the real war is against capitalism itself, and that our international revolutionary party can create an alternative, a communist society where workers rule and share all the value we produce. But for that to happen, we must melt capitalism into the air.
These are days of hard political debate and soul-searching struggle among the Stella workers themselves. Their communist party, the PLP, is among them with practical help and unbreakable friendships, with the ideas of CHALLENGE, and with trust in the working class.
It is workers such as this dynamic international group at a small Bronx bakery who will help make PLP a mass party able to destroy the whole rotten system.
Oil $$$ Put U.S. Rulers in Iraq for the Long Haul
Most everyone has come to understand that the U.S. rulers’ invasion of Iraq was all about oil. But not even the oil barons knew just how much was up for grabs. Now it’s revealed that Barack Obama has 8.2 million reasons not to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq anytime soon. That’s how many barrels of oil companies like Exxon Mobil claim they can pump every day — if it ever becomes safe for them to operate there.
Stunning production targets emerging from Iraq’s ongoing oilfield licensing talks with major firms put it on a strategic par with oil kingpin Saudi Arabia. The rising stakes underlie the recent upsurge in Iraqi factional violence and guarantee not only a permanent U.S. military occupation but future deadly “surges” to help Exxon & Co. realize their goal. Production today stagnates around 2.3 million barrels a day (mbd).
Invading Iraq was the brainchild of U.S. Big Oil. Occupation plans took shape in a high-level joint project of the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the James A. Baker Institute, imperialist think-tanks both closely linked to Exxon Mobil and J.P. Morgan Chase. Just before the 2003 invasion, the CFR-Baker cabal issued a report, “Iraq: The Day After,” promising that “U.S. and allied military forces will quickly occupy, control, and protect oil fields” in order to “achieve more significant increases — say, to 6 mbd by 2010.”
When the Bushites bungled the invasion by sending too few troops, the liberal, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists blamed renegade neo-cons like Cheney and Rumsfeld for launching a misguided “war of choice.” But U.S. imperialists cannot afford to walk away from the 8 mbd windfall that new technology makes possible.
Saudi Rulers Unreliable Allies for U.S. Rulers
Controlling 8 mbd of Iraqi crude would sharply reduce U.S. dependence on shaky Saudi Arabia as the world’s sole “swing producer,” meaning a country having enough spare capacity to adjust production in an economic or military crisis.
But Saudi royals rule a powder keg. Though they profit from the most lucrative long-term deal in capitalism’s history, serving as Exxon’s biggest oil supplier, their 30 million subjects receive nothing from this bonanza. They sympathize more with al Qaeda and Hamas than with Washington. Prince Turki al-Faisal, former chief of Saudi intelligence, in an op-ed piece in the NY Times (9/13/09), said it would be unwise for his country to normalize diplomatic relations with U.S. ally Israel. The prince fears that Saudi workers’ anger at Israel’s concentration-camp treatment of Palestinians may dethrone his oily dynasty.
So Exxon Mobil-led groups have bids in for 6.3 mbd, or almost four-fifths of Iraq’s potential [See Table]. Meanwhile the U.S. war machine remains ever poised to invade Saudi Arabia to prop up its ruling princes if the masses were to rebel. The Pentagon has massive bases to the north (Iraq), to the east (Bahrain and Qatar), to the west (Djibouti) and to the south (Diego Garcia).
However, Exxon & Co. shouldn’t start counting their Iraqi chickens just yet. Iraq still has no national law governing oil contracts. And no sooner had Iraq held its first oilfield auction in June, “the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government condemned it as unconstitutional.” (Energy Intelligence, 9/7/09)
More ‘Surges’ On The Agenda?
Fighting among rival Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and attacks on U.S. bases have intensified since the oil projects were revealed. The NY Times (9/13/09) suggests that U.S. troops may have to seize the streets again: “After the withdrawal of most American combat forces from Iraq’s cities on June 30, violence has remained a constant, with attackers able to plant and detonate bombs....seemingly with impunity.”
U.S. rulers and their allies are ready to worsen an already sickening equation: over one million dead Iraqis and more than 4,000 dead GIs “in exchange for” eight million daily barrels of crude.
We need a sharpening fight against U.S. imperialism — in the shops and unions, the communities and churches, among GIs, and in all mass organizations — to mount militant battles against the U.S. bosses’ deadly goals. Out of these class struggles, tying the mountainous racist and economic attacks on the working class to the need to exterminate the profit system, we can build a mass PLP that can lead a communist revolution to destroy capitalism and its endless oil wars.
Howard U. Students, Workers Unite vs. Job and Service Cuts
WASHINGTON, D.C., Sept. 4 — Over 300 Howard University students, CHALLENGE readers and workers protested the administration’s plan to cut services and jobs, and hike tuition. Workers from SEIU Local 32BJ joined in the rally in support of the students and also demanded that the University stop its plan to contract out union jobs.
The Howard University Student Association (HUSA) raised 13 demands, including the firing of the executive leadership in the Office of Student Affairs due to their efforts to censor students; a public, transparent budget so students could see just how real the supposed deficit is; improvements in on-campus housing facilities; expansion and upgrade of the computer network; and a recycling plan to comply with the law and to reduce global warming.
Administrators refused to meet with the protestors, some of whom decided to march into the administration building to confront these bosses despite the HUSA leadership’s effort to stop them. The campus police shoved and kicked some of the students, including militant members of the Political Education and Action Committee (PEAC), to keep them out. Hard to believe that the new president’s slogan is “Students First!”
The economic crisis is hitting universities hard, and they in turn are hitting students and workers with big tuition hikes, cuts in services, layoffs, contracting out union jobs, and a more repressive atmosphere. The source of the economic crisis is the capitalist system with its single-minded focus on maximizing profit at the expense of everyone else. The universities’ role is to actually serve these capitalist interests.
During the same week that the protest occurred, Howard University announced a $2.5 million grant program from the Director of National Intelligence to develop a curriculum that will feed a pipeline of students into the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies. This effort to provide more agents for imperialism complements the existing Howard University ROTC programs. ROTC enrolls almost 200 Howard students per year by bribing them with scholarships to become the executioners of workers and students in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars are waged so that U.S. corporations can continue to dominate world oil markets and pipelines and maximize their profits. Military officers and intelligence agents are hit men for U.S. imperialism!
The struggle that heated up this week must begin to join with workers and students around the world to eliminate the source of the vicious attacks they face from profit-hungry imperialists across the globe. A concrete step these students can take in this process is joining the PLP.
Call for Teachers’ Strike vs. Fascist School Reform
LOS ANGELES, CA, Sept. 14 — At the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) area union meetings last week, some teachers called for a strike against the attacks on students and teachers, showing that “education reform” is fascist and part of the rulers’ moves to prepare for wider war.
On August 25, the Board of Education voted to turn over up to 200 lower-performing schools and 51 new schools to charter school operators. This is fascist reorganization of the local school system by a U.S. ruling class that is in an on-going war and an era-defining economic crisis. After years of neglect this school reorganization is a qualitative shift as the bosses attempt to create a school system that will produce technically-trained and patriotic young workers to join the military and future war production. PLP needs to work among these youth who are future workers and soldiers, key forces for revolution.
This school reorganization is also being pushed in Obama’s so called “Race to the Top,” where his education secretary Arne Duncan, has proposed a competition for $4.35 billion in federal grants to carry out “school reform.” States like California, where teachers’ unions had won laws that prohibit tying teacher evaluation and pay scales to student test data (so called “merit pay”) will be ineligible for these funds. But Duncan was in Sacramento recently to help State Senator Gloria Romero’s bid to change the law to make California eligible. And the LA Board of education just voted to enter the “Race to the Top” competition, also agreeing to tie teacher evaluations to test scores. These tests emphasize patriotism. Tying test scores to teacher evaluations is a way to enforce teaching patriotic lies and allow administrations to get rid of higher-paid older teachers while hiring younger teachers for lower wages and benefits.
In the face of the current attack, UTLA leadership is urging teachers to write local proposals to do school reform themselves. While the union pays lip service to organizing the Charter Schools, they are not even trying to organize all teachers, including charter employees, into the same bargaining unit. UTLA President Duffy, loyal servant of capitalism, calls on teachers to get involved in so-called grass roots school reorganization such as the innovation division, “i-design.” Such reorganization would be done to meet the ruling class’s needs, but would have to be approved by the school board and probably require a corporate partner. This is not grass roots; it’s doing the bosses’ patriotic work to remake the schools to better prepare students for war, to defend a system of exploitation, racism and war. Local school control means teachers working with students and parents to administer their fascist system. We can’t unite with those who oppress us, exploit us and send us off to war!
More layoffs and foreclosures are coming, so patriotic education reform will take on more importance for the bosses. A trade union response to this attack is totally inadequate. PLP calls on teachers, students and parents to organize a strike against the fascist reorganization of public schools. Organizing such a strike, based on expanding CHALLENGE networks, builds the unity of parents, teachers, and students to prepare us for the struggle to get rid of the capitalist system and build a communist society.
Workers in Honduras, El Salvador Unite vs. Coup Bosses’ Attacks
EL SALVADOR, September 13 — Recently at a meeting of teachers from El Salvador and Honduras, the latter (a member of the federation of Honduran workers) thanked the Salvadoran workers for their working-class solidarity in the face of the current crisis besetting workers in Honduras following the coup that ousted Manuel Zelaya. Zelaya is a millionaire member of the Honduran bourgeoisie who opposed trade deals with the U.S. and its allies, instead veering towards the Russian and Chinese imperialists through Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
The teacher from Honduras told of the temporary reforms financed by Chavez (to expand his influence in the region), enabling Zelaya to raise teachers’ wages to $1,000 a month (as compared to $500 a month for a teacher in El Salvador); afternoon snacks at schools; free uniforms and notebooks, among other measures. This has put Zelaya in conflict with sections of the Honduran ruling class, who were angered by Honduras joining ALBA (Chavez’s trade alliance) and Petrocaribe (Chavez’s oil alliance).
In Honduras they barely had time to cry for Roger Vallejo Soriano, a 38-year-old teacher shot in the head last July 30th during a demonstration protesting the coup, when another teacher, Martin Florencio Rivera, 37, was stabbed 25 times and killed after having participated in a wake for Soriano. All this is part of the brutal repression carried out by the security forces of the government of Roberto Michelleti.
Soriano was a victim of the on-going attacks by the police and the army, along with rapes of women. The teacher who spoke at the meeting was sprayed with cancer-causing chemicals when she participated in the marches.
In response to a PLP comrade’s question about the lessons drawn from this brutality, workers from Honduras replied: “We definitely must organize much better against the attacks of the system; we’re certain that the international bosses, including those in El Salvador, were involved in this coup.”
Said a PLP comrade, “If the bosses are organized, why can’t the international working class be organized for our own interests.”
This story reminded us of the massacres teachers in El Salvadoran suffered in the 1970’s and 1980’s. A PL teacher who participated in these struggles and saw the army and police kill many teachers in front of their students related his experiences in the teachers’ resistance in El Salvador and invited the teachers from Honduras to organize with PLP internationally to resist the bosses’ attacks.
The teachers and the international working class must see that the return of Manuel Zelaya, another capitalist exploiter, or any other capitalist president, will not end our problems. Those who exploit and kill the workers continue in power. There’s no reason to keep electing them.
The working class must fight for power by building its international party to organize for communist revolution, not continue supporting the murderous, rotten capitalist system. We must spread our networks of our revolutionary communist newspaper CHALLENGE internationally, to organize at work, school and in the fields to fight for a just system, communism. That’s how we can avenge the deaths of our class brothers and sisters.
Paraguay: Lugo Talks ‘Left’ but Intensifies Capitalist Exploitation
PARAGUAY — One year after taking power, “Leftist” President Fernando Lugo’s promises have proven to be empty. Liberation can only come when the latifundistas (large agricultural capitalists) are expropriated, imperialists are expelled, industrial capitalists overthrown, and workers seize power through revolution with communist goals of equality and collectivity.
Since he led no revolution and workers did not take power, Lugo, like all capitalist politicians, maneuvers among the U.S. and European imperialists, the Bolivarian Bloc, and the Brazilian ruling class to try to cut deals for the Paraguayan capitalists and landowners. These deals have all deepened the exploitation and oppression of workers in Paraguay.
He has made health care free in public health centers, begun to develop limited social programs for children, and attempted to cut a better deal with Brazil over the price it pays for energy from the jointly-operated Itaipu Hydroelectric plant. But these reforms pale next to the severe exploitation workers face in Paraguay.
Soy, Sesame and Capitalist Poison
Paraguay is the 6th largest producer of soy in the world. The players in the sesame and soy game in Paraguay are the small rural farmers, Paraguayan and Brazilian Agribusiness, large landowners (Latifundistas — 2% of the population owns 70% of the land!), and major U.S. companies including Monsanto, Cargill and Syngeta.
The agrochemical and biotech companies are helping the latifundistas force peasants off their land by legal tricks and poisoning crops. How? The majority of the soy produced in Paraguay is based on Monsanto Corporation’s transgenic seeds that are genetically modified for resistance to the herbicide glyphosate. Massive spraying of glyphosate kills everything else, including small farmers’ crops. Lugo’s solution? Ban such spraying 100 yards from waterways, wetlands, roads and populated areas. But this barely touches the problem of the small farmers, and may even be reversed given the power of the latifundistas and their imperialist allies. In 2008, the soy production rate was twice what it was in 1998. The major effect of the soy planting is that it has effectively displaced thousands of rural farmers who plant subsistence crops. Activists have begun to occupy big farms and have mobilized in the streets of Asuncion to fight against the expansion of soybean plantations.
Corruption, Courts, Cops
The Paraguayan Supreme Court judges were appointed over decades by the Colorado party (the fascist party that had historic ties to Hitler) and is both corrupt and powerful. The judges refuse justice to workers. For instance, they have been deaf to the appeals and demonstrations of workers seeking justice in the Ycua Bolanos case. This involved a fire at a supermarket whose owners (Coloradoans) ordered their security guards to lock the doors, killing over 350 people. President Lugo has opposed the appointment of another Coloradoan, Lovera Canete, to the court, but has declared he will not veto the right-wing Senate’s appointment of him.
Even more shocking, however, to Lugo supporters, has been Lugo’s decision to allow fascist Sabino Augusto Montanaro to re-enter Paraguay. Montanaro fled when the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship fell in 1989 because he feared retribution due to the torture and murders he ordered of Political Military Organization (OPM) fighters, Paraguayan Communist Party members, and their allies. In fact, Montanaro was directly responsible for the assassination of the guerilla column Mcal Lopez. Lugo puts out the welcome mat for this fascist trash? Not the mark of a friend of the working class!
The Way Forward
Workers in Paraguay have a long way to go in the class struggle. Lugo misleads workers into the arms of latifundistas, capitalists, and imperialists, weakening the resistance to exploitation in the same way that Obama’s popularity is misleading many workers into supporting imperialist war in Afghanistan.
Instead of supporting these phony leftists and building false hopes that sooner or later demoralize our class, we must build a revolutionary communist movement for change based on workers’ power, rather than on wishful thinking that a charismatic leader will deliver when the state apparatus is firmly in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Joining with PLP members around the world would be an important step in this process in Paraguay.
Bosses’ Education Reform: Use Schools to Strengthen Profit System
Every September, parents send their children back to school in the hopes that they will learn, grow and prepare for bright futures. But the capitalists who run the public school systems have their own racist plans for our children. As the economic crisis deepens and inter-imperialist rivalry over the worlds’ resources expands, the capitalist bosses become more and more entrenched in their own problems. Desperate to bail out their crumbling financial system and to prepare for more military conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the U.S. bosses spend billions. Shamelessly they continue to steal from the working class to save themselves and their system.
The current budget crises affecting U.S. school systems is a clear statement of capitalist priorities. These cuts are strangling a school system that was already failing our class’s children. In big cities where the majority of students are black and Latino, and families are already disproportionately suffering from unemployment and low wages, the cuts will be the worst.
In Los Angeles, classes will average 42 students. In NYC the school budget has been slashed by billions. This is forcing larger class sizes and cutting anything the Dept. of Education considers non-essential: art music, foreign language, sports, and after-school programs. In Chicago, where Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan honed his skills at cutting services to black and Latino students, many reading coaches, after-school and tutoring programs were eliminated. In San Antonio, schools full of black and Latino students are being shut down.
Washington, D.C, with a nearly all-black public school system, has been in the forefront of the bosses’ reform experiments, even as students continue to suffer. There, cuts are leading to layoffs of teachers as well as less money for vouchers and charter schools. While the schools are slashed, not a dime has been cut from the billions of dollars in interest going from the education budgets to the banks.
The attacks on working-class students are driven by the current crisis of the capitalists. In the 1950’s, the U.S. had emerged victorious from World War II and was launching the Cold War. U.S. bosses had the money to build huge factories that produced steel, autos, airplanes and factory equipment. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space, the U.S. bosses drove to invest in education for the “Space Race.” Now the U.S. is a power in decline. Those higher-paying industrial jobs are almost all gone. And the school systems with working-class students, always the poorest, are being gutted.
Capitalists view our children only as fodder for the bosses’ system. To the extent the bosses do care about educating working-class youth it is to have a politically loyal, skilled workforce to exploit. Technical education and patriotism are being pushed for black and Latino students. The advocacy for technical education reflects the growing need the ruling class has for skilled workers like engineers, drill press operators, and machinists, jobs needed for war production. Developing curriculum for the schools to create a workforce prepared for war is often masked by rhetoric saying the U.S. “needs to compete” with international rivals.
President Obama’s speech to school children on September 8 urged them to “set high goals, knuckle down in their studies and persevere through failure.” (NYT 9/9/09) Many parents embrace hard work and perseverance for our children but the subtext of the speech is that if children don’t succeed in life, it must be their own fault because they did not work hard enough. This idea ignores the reality of the capitalist world. No matter how hard school children work, they will not be allowed to all become doctors or lawyers. They will not even all have jobs. Capitalism relies on a pool of unemployed workers to keep wages low. In the current crises, unemployment is even higher; teaching workers to blame themselves prevents them from blaming the true cause of unemployment — capitalism.
Capitalist schools spend much time dividing students into different groups. Tests are designed to magnify differences and assign arbitrary cut-offs, so children get sorted into different programs from gifted and advanced placement to prison-like dumping schools. Capitalist schools prepare a select few to steer towards the elite professions. The majority of students are left to fight for low-paying jobs or join the military (see letter, p. 6).
“Tough Choices, Tough Times,” the report of the rulers’ New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, proposes that capitalism’s divisions be further entrenched in the schools by forcing students into a defined path after the tenth grade, either college-bound or vocational. Obama wants school children to knuckle down in their studies and persevere through a system that is failing and that fails to offer them the future they deserve.
This latest economic crisis and the quagmire of constant war have left the rulers in a political bind. Individualism is a cornerstone of capitalism and since the anti-war and anti-racist rebellions of the 60’s the U.S. bosses have championed the politics, the art, the music and the philosophy of “me-first.” Schools collaborated with a curriculum rich in the stories of individual success and national progress as the result of individual “can-do” spirit or single-minded pursuit of individual success in the face of great odds.
The fact that the Nazis were defeated by the Soviet communists has been written out of history books. The bosses rewrote the truth of racism in the United States as the fiction of enlightened individuals struggling to champion the ideals of individual freedom. Slavery became an unfortunate “mistake” rather than the conscious policy of 250 years of racist rule codified in colonial law and the Constitution and enforced with ruthless violence that continues to define U.S. society today.
Obama tried to shift the message of individual success when he told students, “Don’t give up on yourself, because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.” National service has been a part of the Obama campaign since the beginning and now Obama is calling on schools to teach children to serve their country and to be inspired to sacrifice for the good of the nation. But it’s not “their” country, it’s the bosses’.
Obama and the rest of the ruling class know that the schools have been failing our children for a long time. They cynically use their own failure to meet workers’ needs as a rallying cry for reforms. Many of these reforms have won the support of parents and teachers who hope that they will improve education; but none of these reforms will change the fundamental problems of a system that doesn’t care about working-class children. After years and years of education reform plans, 39% of children in the U.S. live in families earning less then the amount needed to meet their basic needs. (Center for Children in Poverty) Capitalism cannot educate the majority of children, and for the bosses it is not a principle whether students learn to accept inequality in a large school or a small one.
Reading CHALLENGE in the last few years, one can see many examples of fighting against anti-working-class attacks in the schools: from high school students protesting budget cuts and walking out against police brutality, to college students demonstrating against a pro-torture professor and developing a Freedom School when summer session is cancelled. The Progressive Labor Party is not training students to calmly accept the life capitalism has in store for them. We want students to learn real history and real skills, to learn to organize, to learn to fight back and to learn to serve our class by building the fight for communist revolution.
LETTERS
Joblessness ‘Recruits’ Workers on Both Sides of Bosses’ War
Why do soldiers from different countries join the military to fight each other? Many times it is because they cannot get a job.
The San Francisco Chronicle (2/17/09) reported that a U.S. colonel said he believes the increase of militant activity is not ideologically-based but stems from poor Afghans being enticed into fighting by their need for money. Afghan officials “believe it’s the guys who say, ‘Hey, you want $100 to shoot an RPG at a humvee when it goes by,’ and the guy says, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that, because I’ve got to feed my family.’”
Pentagon officials say that the economic downturn and a rising unemployment rate are making the military a more attractive option. Undersecretary of State David Chu said the military does “benefit when things look less positive in civil society.” (SFC, 11/30/08)
The bosses want us to fight each other so they can be rich and control their country’s economy. We should unite with these other workers so we can fight for a better life for all of us instead of killing each other for the benefit of the rich.
Internationalism is a communist idea. It says workers of the world have more in common with each other than with the bosses that run the country they live in. The bosses teach nationalism and patriotism to convince us to ally with them, but remember, every ruling class teaches patriotism; only the communists teach internationalism.
California reader
Eyewitness to NATO Afghan Slaughter
[The following letter is from an eyewitness in Afghanistan to the events described below, which gives the lie to U.S. military reports on who was killed and how many.]
I was at a burial ceremony of our colleague cousin who died in the latest explosion. He was not a Taliban, only a villager. Most of the victims were civilians.
The bombing was in the Chardara district, 15 kilometers from Kundaz City. Some say it killed over 200, gathering to obtain fuel from hijacked tankers. Then came the NATO airstrikes. It included a few Taliban, the others are all villagers.
What are these bastards doing? Killing innocent people — is this democracy?
Today around 10:20 AM a vehicle suicide bomber exploded himself on Khanabad Road, close to Lodin village on the way to Khanabad, killing one German soldier and injuring two. The bomber was from Chardara; three members of his family died in the airstrike bombing.
A friend in Afghanistan
Reject Capitalist Ideas
In my workplace I can listen and talk to workers, many of whom are low-paid and trying to survive selling knick-knacks at traffic lights in the city of Bogota, Colombia.
For a long time, but especially since President Uribe Velez came to power, the working class has been fooled and kept busy by the media, which has blamed the misery in which we live here on only the symptoms of capitalism. It’s common to hear that it is because of pyramid schemes, the guerillas, the paramilitary, the worldwide crisis, traffic restrictions, too much rain, not enough rain, holidays, bank taxes, monopolies, landowners, bad governments and other innumerable reasons, that we live in poverty, violence and social decay.
That is why workers look for whoever can take them out of this state of misery. I tell people that the only culprit is the capitalist system itself. It is the system that produces individualism, racism, imperialist wars, sexism, and the miserable conditions workers are forced to live under, by a small minority that has the fascist state under its control.
That is why the only solution in our hands is to dump capitalism for its opposite, communism. That’s a system with no bosses, no wage slavery, a society controlled by workers united in Progressive Labor Party. This is not easy, but we should begin by rejecting practices such as consumerism and sexism, and strengthening the reading of political texts and dialectical materialism, reading, contributing to and distributing CHALLENGE — being a communist under capitalism.
CHALLENGE reader
Sotomayor As Judge Can Only Take Rulers’ Side
The recent hoopla about Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court helped the bosses reinforce an illusion they’ve worked hard at building: that the Supreme Court is “above politics” and makes rulings that protect or help people and limits bad things the government does. They constantly repeat how the Court’s rulings “ended segregated schools” (who’s kidding who!), legalized abortion and protect people from unfair police actions.
Many working people cheered her appointment because she comes from a working-class Puerto Rican family living in a Bronx, NY housing project — so she must be “one of us,” right? Wrong! No matter where she came from, she’s an Ivy League-educated judge who earned her promotion through a long history of doing the ruling class’s work in the courts. After all, that’s what the courts are for.
The rulers push the appearance of a Court with one black justice, one Latina and (now) two women as a body “representing” diverse sectors of society. But the essence is that there are two main antagonistic classes in capitalist society: workers who produce everything of value and bosses who exploit them for their private profit. There are no workers on this Court, never have been and never will be. Once Sotomayor became a judge, she joined the bosses’ side.
The Supreme Court is part of the structure of this class rule. It has two important jobs: maintaining the illusion that there’s justice for workers, and helping the ruling class police itself, sorting out differences and keeping the bosses in power. Does it matter who’s on the Supreme Court? Largely, no. The Court makes its rulings by interpreting constitutional law to meet the needs of the ruling class at a particular time.
During slavery the Court upheld it. When workers began to unionize and strike, the Court gave the bosses injunctions to stop them. When the air traffic controllers struck, the courts helped Reagan fire them all. And when the bosses needed a cover for election fraud, it turned to the Supreme Court to elect Bush. So when the bosses — especially the main liberal wing Obama represents — need to make the Court “look a little better” to workers, they appoint a Sotomayor.
In a future communist society, the “courts” will also represent its ruling class: but then it will be the working class. The “courts” will be workers who decide who has violated the rules the working class established to enforce working-class rule, and how they can be rehabilitated, if possible. The Sotomayors, Thomases, Roberts and Scalias will then be part of the garbage can of history.
Brooklyn Red
Global Warming: Only Communism Can Save the Planet, Not Capitalist Schemes
Book Reviews: Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America, by Thomas Friedman (Farrar, Strous, and Giroux, New York, 2008); and The Green-Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, by Van Jones with Ariane Conrad (Harper One, New York, 2008).
These two books on global warming were published last year as the Obama campaign moved into high gear. Friedman is a NY Times columnist. Jones is a human rights activist who Obama appointed as Special Advisor for Green Jobs but then was forced to resign recently after being attacked by right-wing Republicans for supposedly being a “Marxist.”
Both Friedman and Jones recognize that today’s severe global warming is due to increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) produced by fossil fuels (oil, coal and natural gas) in industry, transportation and in the generation of electrical power. They both recognize the urgent need for a solution. But they both (incorrectly) suggest, in different ways, that the capitalist market can solve this problem, if only governments worldwide would adopt “the correct policies.”
In his book, Friedman is an unabashed apologist for U.S. imperialism. Jones, on the other hand, denounces the U.S. history of genocidal theft of Indian lands, slavery and the ongoing racist treatment of black, Latin, Asian and Native American working-class people, as well as the extreme sexist discrimination against women. Racism/sexism and global warming are the “two biggest problems” (his subtitle) facing the world.
Friedman writes as though racism and the current oil wars never happened and calls on the U.S. to regain its mythical moral leadership in the world (after Bush allegedly destroyed it) by taking the lead in decreasing GHG emissions. Jones, on the other hand, calls on the U.S. government to solve global warming by creating green jobs to build clean energy usage that will also help to abolish the inequality of income and opportunity suffered by black and Latino workers. He says neither problem can be solved without solving the other.
The two authors seem to be living in two different universes — Friedman in fantasyland while Jones is almost in the real world.
While Jones doesn’t defend the war-criminal U.S. ruling class like Friedman does, he appears clueless about the nature of capitalism. He doesn’t recognize the antagonistic relationship between the capitalist class and the working class. He doesn’t see the capitalists’ absolute need to promote racism and sexism to enhance their super-profits and to maintain their political power — control of the state. This enables them to exert their class domination over both the working class and over competing imperialists.
Though Jones advocates the full involvement of “minority” workers to pressure the government to foster use of solar panels, windmills and other forms of clean energy, he proposes that such a coalition be led by “progressive” businessmen. (!) This position is misleading pie in the sky, typical of those like Jones who toy with revolutionary ideas at one point in their lives and then reject them to pursue a career in the Democratic Party.
His central error is not understanding that capitalism, with its driving profit motive, cannot stop using fossil fuels without dismantling virtually the entire body of physical capital in the world, replacing it with new physical plant and modes of transportation employing clean energy sources. The world’s capitalist classes can never agree to do this.
The world’s imperialists are locked in life-and-death competitive rivalries with each other. No “global policy” that interferes with their battle for maximum profits can possibly be written and enforced as long as these imperialists fight with each other over control of the world’s resources and markets.
The main battle we face in the movement against global warming is defeating the misleading strategies of writers like Jones and the fantasies of liberals like Friedman. We must redouble our efforts to demonstrate that only the abolition of capitalism, classes and production for profit instead of for use can lay the foundation for a renewed planet. Only the world’s working class, led by its communist party PLP, once having seized power from the capitalists and consolidated its power through revolution, will be able to clean up the world, revolutionize production processes with safe, clean energy and save the planet.
Obama’s Afghan War Crucial to U.S. Bosses’ Global Control
The fight between the U.S. imperialists and their Russian, Chinese and Iranian rivals — for control of the oil and gas fields of the Caspian Sea and Central Asia region and the pipeline routes to take these resources to market — is leading to wider Middle Eastern wars and eventually to an inevitable global confrontation. Controlling this region is crucial to the U.S. bosses’ efforts to regain absolute control of oil-rich Middle East, which have been the basis for their dominant imperialist position since the end of World War II.
Obama chose to concentrate on the Afghanistan war in hopes the U.S. backed TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline) could be built. This pipeline, bypassing both Russia and Iran, could reverse Russian-Chinese advances in the energy-rich former Soviet republics, giving the U.S. control of this strategic region.
If successful, together with a new string of U.S. bases in the area, TAPI would put Russia and China on the defensive militarily, break Russia’s growing world energy monopoly, especially of the European Union’s energy market, and position the U.S. bosses to potentially starve China of the energy resources needed to fuel its economic and military rise.
It would also free the U.S. military machine to deal with Iran, if it hadn’t capitulated by then. Iraq could then be more easily pacified and U.S. imperialism’s dream of extending its hegemony well into the 21st century would be within reach.
As U.S. imperialists’ political, economic and military hegemony shrinks, their ability to control the outcome of world events becomes limited. An example is the recent Afghan presidential election, aimed at getting rid of Karzai, who has become an obstacle to their geopolitical goals in the area. He’s been cozying up to China and deepening his ties with the warlords of the Northern Alliance, backed by Russia, Iran and India.
Their electoral scheme failed. So far, with 99% of the votes counted, Karzai is the winner with 54% against the U.S candidate Abdullah Abdullah’s 28%. Plan B was to claim massive fraud and call for a run-off election rigged to guarantee Abdullah”s victory. But some among their ranks like Zbiegnew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, disagree with this plan. They claim it would further destabilize Afghanistan and increase the “growing risk …that the Taliban …be viewed as a resistance movement against foreign occupation… and that would be a strategic defeat.”
The U.S. ruling class is clearly at odds over this. Some are making frantic efforts to force Karzai into a unity government with his rival Abdullah Abdullah (known in Afghanistan as “Obama’s wife”). Others see no option but to accept Karzai and to configure a government run by their ambassador Eikenberry and General McCrystal. Some call for the “Afghanization” of the war while others demand Obama’s unfailing commitment to his surge. Some, with Saudi Arabia and Britain, are working for a negotiated settlement with the “good Taliban.”
Besides, some of their European allies also disagree with the plan and are reluctant to send more troops. German Chancellor Angela Merkel praised the elections, while demanding, with leaders from Britain and France, an international conference to force the “Afghanization” of the war so “that the international engagement can be reduced.” Brzezinski agrees, arguing it might reduce “the growing risk of the war becoming a war of foreigners against Afghans,” and the Europeans allies “might be less likely to pull out entirely…. [Leaving] the U.S. alone in the lurch.”
Whatever tactics the U.S. butchers finally decide on, pipeline TAPI may never fly. It is detrimental to the ambitions of China, Russia and Iran. A U.S.-Taliban agreement will never bring peace to Afghanistan as the warlords of the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s sworn mortal enemies, will fight desperately to survive.
Even if the U.S. imperialists carve out an independent “Pashtunistan” from Afghanistan-Pakistan, as some are planning, the war is likely to widen as the area’s instability helps China and Russia further consolidate their grip on the Caspian-Central Asia region. The Iranian nuclear issue — nothing but a fig leaf to hide the vital role of Iran’s energy resources and strategic location in the fight for world domination — is rapidly forcing a showdown between the U.S., Russia, Iran and potentially Israel.
How many more millions must be murdered, maimed and displaced for the profits of the imperialists of the world? No election, peace agreement, U. N. resolution or slick-talking politician like Obama will ever put an end to this butchery. Workers, students and soldiers, getting angrier at the cutbacks and layoffs, need to see that the widening imperialist genocide, inherent in capitalist crisis, is costing $billions and murdering so many members of our class! Students need to unite with soldiers and workers who bear the heaviest burden for the capitalist war economy. Only an international communist-conscious working class under the leadership of PLP can put an end to this bosses’ inferno, with a communist revolution.
Red Eye on the News
Teenagers bumped down, jobless
NYT, 9/15 — This August, the teenage unemployment rate — that is, the percentage of teenagers who wanted a job who could not find one — was 25.5 percent, its highest level since the government began keeping track of such statistics in 1948. Likewise, the percentage of teenagers overall who were working was at its lowest level in recorded history.
“There are an amazing number of kids out there looking for work.”…. Explanations…mostly boil down to being at the bottom….Half of college graduates under age 25 are in jobs that do not require college degrees, the highest portion in at least 18 years….This has led to less…room for new workers at the bottom.
A raw health deal for immigrants
NYT, 9/6 — President Obama is…giving repeated assurances that [undocumented] immigrants would be excluded from any subsidized benefits under health proposals before Congress….
At the same time, [undocumented] immigrants would not be exempt from the obligations in the House bill…Most [undocumented] immigrants in the country would be required to buy health insurance or face tax penalties.
And since they would be barred from subsidies, they would have to pay for coverage at full rates, regardless of their income level.
For profit, cheat the low-wagers
NYT, 9/2 — Low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage, according to a new study based on a survey of workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago….
Researchers found that the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of an average weekly earning of $339.
The study found that women were far more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than men, with the highest prevalence among women who were [undocumented] immigrants. Among American-born workers, African-Americans had a violation rate nearly triple that for whites….One of the most surprising findings was how successful low-wage employers were in pressuring workers not to file for workers’ compensation. Only 8 percent of those who suffered serious injuries on the job filed.
Paul Robeson, noble anti-capitalist
NYT, 9/3 — Paul Robeson’s story is not forgotten, but is dimly remembered, particularly by the young. Born in 1898…he became the dominant college football player of his time, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, was Rutgers class valedictorian and earned a law degree from Columbia University.
He almost single-handedly legitimized black spirituals and folk music as an art form and became perhaps the most famous concert singer as well as a reknowned actor….
He became a pioneering and uncompromising human rights advocate. He spoke out against segregation decades before the civil rights movement began, and was a fierce opponent of colonialism when that was barely an issue.
He also became an enthusiastic, unflagging admirer of the Soviet Union, something he never renounced or backed away from, even in the face of Stalin’s [critics]. He embraced socialism, not capitalism, as the future. He was blacklisted, had his passport revoked, and, in many ways, was written out of history books….
“I’ve sat in on classes where people are talking about the 30’s and about civil rights and about Martin Luther King, and there’s this gap, as if this man never existed. He’s one of the giants of the movement, and no one knows.”
In poorest areas, sick dial 911
NYT 9/4 – Among the hidden costs of the health care crisis is the burden that fire departments across the country are facing as firefighters much like emergency room doctors, are increasingly serving as primary care providers.
About 80 percent of the calls handled by Engine Company 10 are medical emergencies because firehouse serves one of the city’s poorest areas, where few residents have health insurance, doctors’ checkups are rare, and medical problems are left to fester until someone dials 911….Those calls involved heart attacks, diabetic sores, epileptic seizures and people complaining of shortness of breath.
US drove Sioux off sacred mount
NYT, 9/2 – I have to admit: Mount Rushmore bothers me. It was bad enough that white men drove the Sioux from hills they still hold sacred; did they have to carve faces all over them too? It’s easy to feel affection for Mount Rushmore’s strange grandeur, but only if you forget where it is and how it got there.
Insiders dumping their own stocks
NYT, 9/8 – Better-then-expected corporate earnings in recent months have been the result of companies saving money through job cuts rather than raising revenue through sales growth. It is worthy of note that directors in the US have taken advantage of the rally on Wall Street to offload shares in their firms.
Obama message getting blurry
Jimmy Fallon (TV) – The President is going to deliver his speech to the nation’s schoolchildren next Tuesday. It will be about how if you study hard, you can become the most popular person in the world for eight months, then suddenly, not so much.
Harper’s Ferry Raid Shows: Rely on the Masses to Change the World
On October 17, 2009, PLP’ers are joining many others at Harper’s Ferry to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Harper’s Ferry raid which sparked the Civil War that ended chattel slavery in the U.S. Join us!
Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Osborne Anderson, John Brown, Harriet Tubman — these bold leaders of the anti-slavery struggle understood that the millions of enslaved Africans and millions more of the workers and small farmers oppressed by the slave oligarchy would, under the right conditions, rise up against slavery. They acted on this confidence in the masses and shook the world, from Charleston, S.C. and Southampton, Virginia, to bleeding Kansas and Harper’s Ferry. We should emulate this boldness in our struggles today, for the oppressed of the world will also, under the right conditions and communist leadership, rise up to destroy their exploiters.
Racist ideology intensified in the run-up to the Civil War as the rulers tried to ideologically undermine the anti-slavery cause. Blacks were portrayed by Southern slaveowners as an “inferior breed,” “happy” with slavery, and unfit because of their “inferiority” for a life of freedom alongside whites. Racists in the North repeated the picture of blacks as servile, shuffling, meek, cowardly and dancing in blissful ignorance.
These lies continue today in various forms and are applied to every ethnic group of workers to keep people divided and demoralized. Left out of today’s picture is the eleven-month Stella O’Doro strike in NY, the sit-down strike at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, the massive outpouring of opposition to the racist attacks on the Jena 6, black students who fought back against oppression in Louisiana, and hundreds more actions, large and small, around the world.
Anti-slavery rebels knew, contrary to the racist images, that enslaved and free blacks and anti-slavery whites planned and carried out ingenious and daring escapes from slavery with courage and fortitude in the face of whippings, jailing and death. Thousands of slaves escaped to the Dismal Swamp in Virginia, to the Florida swamps, and to the mountains of Jamaica to form egalitarian maroon societies in defiance of the slave system, defending their communities by any means necessary. Slaveowners and their racist apologists claimed that these fighters were the “lunatic fringe,” but John Brown and other anti-slavery activists knew better.
The slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 terrified slaveowners because it demonstrated that every enslaved person was a potential “assassin” of his “beloved” master. Brown and other activists eagerly studied the formation of armies of thousands of the enslaved on the island of Santo Domingo and their success in annihilating their French masters in establishing a black Republic of Haiti in the 1790s.
These experiences led to two profound, if simple, conclusions: people fight back against oppression and their struggle causes change. These conclusions are often poorly understood. Today, many workers say, “Nobody where I work wants to do anything” or “You can’t fight City Hall.” or “You can’t win.” Or “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” But PLP knows better, and acts on the historical knowledge contained in those two simple conclusions.
While the anti-slavery movement grew apace, the European revolutionaries Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were sharpening the working-class fight against wage slavery. Based on their participation in the revolutionary movement and their study of history they developed the philosophy of dialectical materialism. This philosophy, outlined in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, proven true over the years, explains that class struggle is the motive force of history. Periods of seeming passivity among the oppressed, however prolonged, are replaced by blazing struggle, like the explosion of a seemingly dormant volcano. Systems of class exploitation, although they seem at times, permanent, and even “natural,” end. We are no longer cultivating crops and building pyramids in the Nile Valley. Slavery is ended. Feudalism has ended. Capitalism will also end.
Most people do not yet realize this, just as most people in 1859 did not yet realize that slavery was on the verge of extinction. The enslavement of Africans and the system built on this edifice had existed for over 200 years and appeared permanent, like capitalism today. But, with the growth of the PLP and a communist revolution in the face of imperialist war and the continuing crises of capitalism, communism will replace capitalism and all forms of class society.
- France: Auto Parts Workers Seize Plant, Fight for Jobs
- Obama Echos Kennedy ‘Legacy’: War, Racism, Police State
- Union Hacks Screw Transit Workers Despite Rank-&-File Defiance:
- South Africa: Workers, Soldiers Challenge ANC Rulers
- PL’s Ideas Inspire GIs’ Exposé of Brass’s Corruption
- Health Reform Band-aids Will Never Cure Racist Capitalism
- Bosses’ Labor Day Can’t Displace Workers’ May Day: Stella D’Oro Struggle, Not Labor Fakers, Is Model to Follow
- LETTERS
- Red Eye
- Credit check can cost you a job
- Marx, Engels ‘outlast the ages’
- Nigeria drained by foreign oil co’s
- US plotted to overthrow Allende
- Afghanistan legalizes Shia sexism
- Bill Clinton should have sat it out
- Plenty of excuses for new wars!
- Cuban docs’ jump to US ‘unfair!’
- Useless? If it sells, it’s in GDP!
- John Brown’s Raid: Guns Against Slavery
France: Auto Parts Workers Seize Plant, Fight for Jobs
Obama Echos Kennedy ‘Legacy’: War, Racism, Police State
Kennedy-Obama Health Scam = Wartime Consolidation
PLP Fought Kennedy Liberals’ Building of Racism as ‘Integration’
More recently, Kennedy perpetuated liberal deception:
Union Hacks Screw Transit Workers Despite Rank-&-File Defiance:
Before...
...and After
CHALLENGE sale is being organized. A young teacher brought a few students (Summer Project attendees) to distribute our flyers. There are signs of growth and development in Party members that bodes well for working-class people in the Bay Area.
South Africa: Workers, Soldiers Challenge ANC Rulers
PL’s Ideas Inspire GIs’ Exposé of Brass’s Corruption
Health Reform Band-aids Will Never Cure Racist Capitalism
Bosses’ Labor Day Can’t Displace Workers’ May Day:
Stella D’Oro Struggle, Not Labor Fakers, Is Model to Follow
PLP calls on all workers to back the Stella D’Oro bakers all the way, with all the strength of our class.
LETTERS
PLP and Religion, Deep in the Heart of Texas
Planting the Idea of ‘Money Not Needed’
LA Summer Project Wins 8 Youth to PLP
Haiti: Mass Demonstrations for Minimum Wage Hike
Freedom School: Students Fight to Learn, Learn to Fight
‘District 9’ Attacks Racist Apartheid But Offers No Solution
vigorously calls for the aliens to be removed to camps outside of the city.
dispatching alien babies with flame throwers (joking that they pop like popcorn), dissect mass numbers of aliens for medical experiments (in a crazed attempt to locate the source of their “power, á la the Nazis), or regularly gun down aliens in the street for fun it elicits a different response since they do it while wearing business suits or crisp white uniforms. The film plays on how we have been taught to abhor the violence of petty gangsters while ignoring state-sanctioned genocide caused by the capitalist class.
Red Eye
Credit check can cost you a job
Marx, Engels ‘outlast the ages’
Nigeria drained by foreign oil co’s
US plotted to overthrow Allende
Afghanistan legalizes Shia sexism
Bill Clinton should have sat it out
Plenty of excuses for new wars!
Cuban docs’ jump to US ‘unfair!’
Useless? If it sells, it’s in GDP!
John Brown’s Raid: Guns Against Slavery
Two-Day Battle
Great Violence Needed to End Slavery
The Inspiration of John Brown
No Reform Can Fix Capitalist Healthcare
Health Battle Shows Narrow Capitalist Self-interest Persists
Philly Hospital Workers March Against Speed-up
a href="#Airport Bosses’ Sweatshop Conditions Murder Immigrant Worker">"irport Bosses’ Sweatshop Conditions Murder Immigrant Worker
a href="#Fight ‘Choice’ of Wage-cuts or Layoffs at Cal State">Fi"ht ‘Choice’ of Wage-cuts or Layoffs at Cal State
a href="#Imperialists’ Battle over Honduras Kills Workers">"mperialists’ Battle over Honduras Kills Workers
Guadeloupe, Martinique: Bosses Reneg on ‘Promises’ that Ended Strikes
a href="#S. Korea : Auto Workers Seized Plant, Repelled Cops’ Attack">". Korea : Auto Workers Seized Plant, Repelled Cops’ Attack
Wage-cut, Wage-freeze: GE Practices Obama’s ‘Shared Sacrifice’
Clinton Visit to India: Red Revolution Needed to Stop Global Warming
Letters
a href="#‘No plea bargain when you know you’re right...’">‘No "lea bargain when you know you’re right...’
a href="#‘Throw a (red) stone in the water and the ripples spread’">‘T"row a (red) stone in the water and the ripples spread’
Rank-and-File Militance Scores vs. Exploiting Bosses
a href="#L.A. Summer Project Spreads PL’s Politics to Industrial Workers and GI’s">L.". Summer Project Spreads PL’s Politics to Industrial Workers and GI’s ‘Hungry for more action...’
Project Developed Young Leaders
a href="#‘Broadened my horizons about all workers’ struggles...’">‘Bro"dened my horizons about all workers’ struggles...’
a href="#‘A productive week...’">‘A"productive week...’
a href="#[Excerpts from a speech given at PLP’s LA Summer Project]">"xcerpts from a speech given at PLP’s LA Summer Project
Imperialist Rivalries Spurred 1969 Moon Landing
- Fired? Your wage won’t recover
- Working-class tradition: help out
- Profit system rules banks’ actions
- Obama = Bush on immigrant raids
- System rewards those who rob us
- And they’re still at it….
- Sex discrimination can mean death
- US-China clash exploding in Africa
- US gets airbase, winks at tyrant
- Drugs prey on no-hope workers
a href="#‘The Ugly Truth’: Sexism Knows No Boundaries Under Capitalism">‘T"e Ugly Truth’: Sexism Knows No Boundaries Under Capitalism
No Reform Can Fix Capitalist Healthcare
U.S. bosses and their politician-servants are arguing over how best to dole out health care to the working class. One side of this battle, mainly Republicans and the so-called "Blue Dog" Democrats, wants to protect the profits of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies at all costs. The other side, mainly liberal Democrats, sees the current health-care situation as a threat to U.S. bosses’ ability to maintain their position against imperialist rivals. As far as the working class is concerned, the likenesses between these sides are more important than their differences.
Neither faction has offered the real solution for all workers: Free and readily accessible health care, as was the situation after the revolutions in the Soviet Union and China. Clinics were widespread and masses of health-care workers were sent into rural areas to serve peasants and farmers.
PLP believes this history shows that workers in power can provide a healthy environment, just as we’ve learned from what happened when these revolutions were reversed and capitalism restored. In the former Soviet republics, workers’ life expectancy, which dramatically increased in the 30 years after the revolution, has decreased since the late 1960s. In China, schistosomiasis, a disease caused by a parasitic worm that ravaged rural areas, was widely controlled due to planned social action initiated after the revolution; it has reemerged.
The results of socialism were a return to capitalism and renewed attacks on the health of the working class. This is why PLP advocates fighting directly for communism and for a society where all aspects of workers’ health will be primary.
Improving workers’ health is not on the top of the agenda for the ruling class, but the faction that now controls the White House and Congress is focused on maintaining U.S. dominance in the world and therefore has two main goals for health-care reform: 1) force the U.S. working class to accept across-the-board low-quality health care as a fact of life; and 2) discipline the sections of the ruling class which are only interested in short-term profits and threaten to undermine the U.S.’s ability to oppose its rivals. Both of these goals represent a move towards greater fascist control.
Here are the bosses’ plans and a communist analysis:
- Require everyone to have health insurance or else pay a penalty.
This requirement is a direct attack on workers who, because of falling wages, find it more and more difficult to divvy up what they have between food, rent/mortgages, heat, clothing, etc. This racist attack will especially affect black and Latin workers who generally suffer from lower wages and higher rates of unemployment.
- Require small businesses to provide insurance that meets "minimum standards."
These "minimum standards" will attempt to ensure a working class that is only healthy enough to exploit for profit and fight in their oil wars. This means that health care will be rationed and health care for workers who are not "productive" (in the capitalist sense, meaning they don’t produce profits), namely the elderly and seriously ill, will be limited.
- Expand Medicaid to cover the uninsured who can’t afford to buy their own health insurance.
Medicaid fails to provide decent health care now and would have to be expanded just to adequately cover those who aReady use its services. The financial crisis has swelled the number of unemployed (and thus added to the nearly 50 million uninsured), with black and Latin workers disproportionately affected, meaning more and more workers will come to rely on Medicaid. Their ability to force us to accept these racist conditions is a measure of their ability to prepare us for future attacks.
- Tighter regulation of health insurance companies.
This attempt to increase regulation reflects the split in the ruling class discussed above and indicates that Obama & Co. are attempting to discipline those capitalists who care only about their short-term profit-making. It remains to be seen whether health-insurance bosses will submit to this disciplining, but the working class has no stake in the outcome of this battle, because no matter which group of capitalists are running the show, our health will always take a back seat to profits. Of course it’s gratifying to see CEOs get "punished" in public, but it will not mean that Obama and the Democrats actually care about our health.
- Taxing generous insurance plans.
As a legacy of the militant union reforms of the 1930s and ‘40s, there is a section of the working class which has decent health care insurance, primarily industrial and government workers. Not content with helping to wipe out many of these benefits that went along with unionized auto industry jobs, Obama has called for a tax on the remaining decent health care plans.
This plan to tax those few workers who have somehow managed to retain decent health benefits reveals the essence of the entire reform effort: The heavy taxes on the premium plans will drive them out of existence (for workers) and help to create a single, low-quality level of health care for the working class, one that allows for greater government control and discipline, e.g., fascism.
Getting behind either of the factions is a mistake for the working class. Neither side has our interests at heart, a fact clearly indicated when we consider that there has been no mention of a particular super-exploited section of the working class that has a key role to play in this debate: healthcare workers. Mainly women and often immigrants, these workers suffer racist double-exploitation. Their working conditions are awful, especially for home-health providers (who get paid very low wages and have to buy their own gas to get to their patients) and nursing-home attendants (low wages, long hours, too many patients). Improving the health of the working class should begin with improving the health of those who take care of the rest of us.
When we are told of the deaths of workers from disease we often hear "Our mother died of tuberculosis," or "My sister died from AIDS," or "My son died from cholera." These things, the tuberculosis or cholera bacteria or HIV, are only the specific reason for an individual’s demise. The essential point is that capitalism creates the conditions in which these particular pathogens actually kill people. Clean water and adequate sewage treatment, which is the biggest healthcare improvement that’s available, is denied to hundreds of millions of workers in poorer countries (and millions in imperialism’s heartland).
Whatever it is that makes us sick, from treatable infections to imperialist war, from racist police brutality to stress from having to work two jobs (or from being unemployed), it is capitalism that is the real disease. Fortunately there is a cure: communist revolution and a workers’ society.?J
Fascist Economy Rules the Roost for U.S. Big Bosses
In contrast with the rapid and vast restructurings in the auto and banking industries, health care "reform" is proving a much harder task for Obama and the dominant, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists he serves. The hallmark of fascism, tightened, centralized economic control — which, like an expanded military, U.S. rulers need to compete in a sharpening global rivaRy — is developing unevenly.
In effect, the government runs GM and Chrysler, and banks and brokers have dwindled to a dominant handful. But individual capitalists have yet to display the sense of "sacrifice" Obama demanded at his inauguration, "giving our all to a difficult task."
Reforming — especially nationalizing — health care would benefit the U.S. capitalist class as a whole in various ways. It could relieve the major expense of workers’ health care — which, for instance, cost GM $3 billion annually — thereby boosting companies’ profits. By reducing such costs, it could free up capital for rebuilding infrastructure and the rulers’ war machine, as well as make them more competitive with rivals in Europe, Japan and Canada where health care is aReady nationalized. It also could make people more directly dependent on the government and consequently loyal to it.
Health Battle Shows Narrow Capitalist Self-interest Persists
Reluctant, self-interested capitalists are turning Obama’s health roadshow "town meetings" into bad days on Jerry Springer. New York Times columnist, Nobel Prize winner and leading proponent of economic fascism Paul Krugman lamented: "Angry protesters...have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform." (NYT, 8/6) "Well-heeled interest groups are helping to organize the town hall mobs," Krugman continued. "Key organizers include...a new organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights...run by Rick Scott, the former head of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital chain." Such hospitals, and their doctors, will lose big if Obama succeeds in eliminating current fee-for-service — which enables them to charge what the traffic will bear — and replaces it with government-mandated salaries and test charges.
Health insurers, HMO’s — fearing marginalization if a federal plan takes hold — also oppose Obama, who’s trying to carry out U.S. capitalism’s larger, long-term interests. Drug makers, however, love him, for the same reason: profits (not patriotism). Their lobbying group PhRMA has authorized a $150-million advertising budget to back Obama’s plan. Pharmaceuticals "stand to gain millions of new customers from the expansion of healthcare coverage." (NYT, 9/9/09)
Obama’s consolidation/nationalization effort has succeeded most in auto, where short-term profit has vanished. This has slashed the DuPont’s financial power, whose Wilmington Trust is the largest creditor — meaning loser — in GM’s bankruptcy.
At GM, Obama installed ExxonMobil director Edward Whitaker as chairman. This oil giant is the largest beneficiary of U.S. imperialism’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This may even have engineered the demise of the 95-year-old influence of the DuPont family, which sometimes has been at odds with U.S. imperialists’ broader agenda. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, DuPont president Ellen Kullman quit GM’s board in December, just after Obama’s election.
Greedy Execs Ignore War Agenda for Quick Cash
Many bank executives, like health industry bosses, mainly see the current crisis as an opportunity to get even richer. Frank Rich, another NY Times’ U.S. imperialist pundit, noted, "Nine...bailed-out banks — which in total received $175 billion of taxpayers’ money, but as yet have repaid only $50 billion — are awarding a total of $32.6 billion in bonuses for 2009." (8/9) He includes Goldman and JP Morgan. The same day’s Times editorialized for government regulation of bankers’ compensation.
CEOs and others who won’t submit to the leading rulers’ greater needs invite the full force of state power upon them. Convicted Enron bosses rot, or have died, in jail. The ever-unfolding Madoff case and last month’s round-up of crooked politicians and rabbis in New Jersey and Brooklyn help the rulers test just how much public sentiment they can stir up against wayward servants of their own class. This includes the potential to spread anti-Semitism in case it’s needed against Goldman for grabbing billions in bonuses.
But in-fighting among the bosses is no mere sideshow for workers. Capitalists’ disciplining of one another punishes the working class in far greater numbers. For every Bernie Madoff or Enron or WorldCom telecommunications exec, tens of thousands of workers lost jobs and pensions. This is especially true for black and Latino workers who, due to racist discrimination, have been thrown on the scrap heap in disproportionate numbers.
U.S. rulers are counting on Obama to impose the wartime economic discipline they require. Viewing his proposed reforms as "progress" would be a serious political mistake. Our Party’s task is to spread the only viable alternative — for workers — to Obama’s "town meeting" message. In short, we must eliminate the profit system which creates all kinds of exploiters of the working class — whether those driving for short-term immediate profits or their long-range imperialist opponents, primarily concerned with saving their system. Destroying capitalism with a communist revolution will take a lifetime of effort.
Auto and Banks Rapidly Consolidate
In further consolidation, the bosses backing Obama have anointed just two firms, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, as the U.S.’s flagship financiers. Goldman’s close Washington ties have earned it the nickname "Government Sachs." And, trying not to be too obvious, once word hit the papers, JP Morgan called off an unprecedented July board meeting in Washington that was to have included Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff.
Behind the scenes, Mellon’s Bank of New York (BNY) and Boston’s State Street, both trustees of Obama’s bailout funds, have become, with JP Morgan, undisputed custodians of U.S. capital. BNY manages $19.5 trillion, JP Morgan $13.5 trillion and State Street $11.3 trillion. Beleaguered Citigroup today comes in a distant and dwindling fourth at $1.8 trillion.
And don’t underestimate former titan, now relatively small Brown Brothers Harriman. This old-money "wealth advisor’s" partners, having bankrolled House banking czar Barney Frank, pull important levers in Washington.
Philly Hospital Workers March Against Speed-up
PHILADELPHIA, PA, August 4 — A group of hospital workers recently marched on the nursing administration to protest the bosses making one worker do the work of two different job classifications.
The workers’ march was provoked by the bosses persuading a nursing assistant to do the job of a nursing clerk. Because this worker wasn’t an actual nursing clerk, the bosses had her enter nursing notes into the computer using an RN’s name. Not only is this a speed-up and a contract violation, but it is also illegal. Even the RN was afraid that she would be in trouble if the wrong notes were entered. A second union member resisted when the bosses tried to force her to do the same thing. She contacted a union delegate who organized a meeting for the clerical workers that led to the march.
While this increased activity can temporarily improve morale, it also highlights some important questions: Where is this activity leading us? Will the unions we’re in (or the unions we want to join) convince us that we have no choice but to accept more layoffs and cutbacks "because of the economy". Will the workers’ inevitable anger and militancy be watered down into paper grievances, drawn-out legal fights in the bosses’ courts, and voting for the "lesser-evil" bosses’ politicians?
Or will workers refuse to accept that the working class must pay for the bosses’ economic crisis? "Union ideas" alone don’t show workers that we must defy every aspect of the capitalist class system. Heck, "union ideas" these days mean concession after concession without any fight
whatsoever!
The rich bonuses paid to the bosses in the auto industry and Goldman-Sachs show that "belt-tightening" only applies to the working class. Despite the U.S. bosses’ efforts to downplay class differences, the working class has nothing in common with the bosses. Our interests can only be served by PLP’s ideas of overthrowing capitalism with communist revolution.
Strikes must be built, scabs must be stopped, injunctions and the cops who enforce them must be defied, and international multi-racial unity must develop. Past union movements have pursued these goals and won significant reform victories, but now so many of those victories have been taken back. The attack on the auto workers’ pensions alone undermines the pension of every other worker. That’s why all of our fights must have the ultimate goal of communist revolution. Communist ideas give us the understanding to see how even a defeat of one reform fight or another can be a victory if it advances the revolutionary movement.
The current struggle of one Philadelphia union shows the damage when there are no communist ideas to challenge the bosses. After working under their previous contract for the last 18 months, union workers at Acme food markets just overwhelmingly approved a contract recommended by their union leadership, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776. Although Acme leads this area in sales, their competitors are gaining and Acme’s response is to attack their higher-paid union workers. Acme currently paid "250 percent higher than the average competitor in the Northeast region" for health benefits according to Acme’s President Judith A. Spires.
The new contract accepted by the Acme workers has major concessions. The bosses will reduce the percentage of full-time workers from 23% to 18%. This hurts younger workers by reducing the number of available better-paying jobs. The new contract also allows Acme to lease areas in their stores, opening up the door to replacing higher-paid jobs like union butchers with lower-paid workers brought in by sub-contractors.
Why did the Acme workers accept these cutbacks? Without communist ideas the workers were limited to the "leadership" of their union
officials and the bosses. For example, one worker told a reporter, "There’s no strike, which is very good, because no one wins at that," This is the same idea preached by Acme’s President. "We have to tighten our belts and stop the bleeding," Spires said "Nobody wants a strike. Nobody wins in a strike." No wonder the ACME workers conceded without a fight.
We don’t have to be stuck in a system basically playing by the bosses’ rules and fighting the same fights over and over again. Capitalism’s history shows it can only bring workers crises, misery, racism, sexism and war. Communist revolution and building PLP are the only tickets off this bloody merry-go-round.
a name="Airport Bosses’ Sweatshop Conditions Murder Immigrant Worker">">"irport Bosses’ Sweatshop Conditions Murder Immigrant Worker
QUEENS, NY, August 1 — Bosses at LaGuardia Airport here are guilty of the murder two weeks ago of a subcontractor worker, Yendi Medina. By creating exhausting working conditions, they caused a deadly accident. Yendi, a 22-year old Dominican immigrant worker, leaves behind a two-year old daughter and a grieving family.
On July 29th around 5 am, Yendi was waiting to clean an airplane parked away from the terminal. After a long night on the graveyard shift she sat down next to the plane on a bag of pillows she was carrying. An aircraft mechanic, himself working a ten-hour night shift, accidentally ran over Yendi with his company pick-up truck. The airlines prefer to have most of their cleaning and repairs done at night since then planes do not have to be taken out of service during the day and they can reap more profits.
This accident reflects the nature of capitalism, that in its quest for maximum profits bosses constantly endanger workers and do not value our lives. Of course, the bosses and their representatives do their best to try to convince us this is not the case. After Yendi’s death, local bosses quickly told workers that it was a "tragedy" and no one was to blame. They spoke out of both sides of their mouth however, scolding the workers for not exercising enough caution when we drive and walk around on the airport ramp. They allowed some workers to attend the funeral but would not stop calling their cell phones telling them to return to work.
These are the same bosses who, a day before the death, yelled at the workers for complaining about mandatory overtime. These are the same bosses who give them a hard time if a plane is delayed, and encourage them to rush. Under capitalism bosses can never hide their number one motive — profit — for long. Communism will fight not only to meet workers needs at home, but also on the job.
Ironically, the company and subcontractor bosses who now are shedding crocodile tears have said nothing about the racist, sexist conditions they forced upon Yendi before she died. Yendi earned $7.15 an hour with no benefits. Most of the subcontractor workers are immigrants and women and perform some of the dirtiest work at the airport (like removing the waste from airplane bathrooms). On top of all this, the subcontractor bosses saw fit to fire one of Yendi’s coworkers two days after her death. They claimed that the worker was "driving in an unsafe manner." They saw her as an excellent scapegoat.
The only reasonable response to these attacks is to fight back. When a worker was suspended for refusing to work mandatory overtime, other workers rallied to his cause and the bosses allowed him back to work. The bosses know that without workers, the planes, the trains, the machines and the whole society would grind to a halt.
Unfortunately, as long as we live under capitalism each small victory will only be temporary. We can win a worker his job back only to see another killed. The bosses ensure that no worker’s life or livelihood is safe under capitalism. This is why Progressive Labor Party fights for communism. We have a world to win!
a name="Fight ‘Choice’ of Wage-cuts or Layoffs at Cal State"></">Fi"ht ‘Choice’ of Wage-cuts or Layoffs at Cal State
LOS ANGELES, August 5 — "Banks got bailed out, we got SOLD OUT" chanted the crowd throughout their Cal State University (CSU) campus to students passing by. Despite the small summer attendance due to decreasing class offerings and increasing fees and unemployment, a good turnout fought back against the worsening conditions students and faculty are experiencing across the CSU system, the State’s educational system and in the economic crisis in general.
Students received CHALLENGE and leaflets calling on students, faculty and workers to strike against these attacks and to join the long-term fight to eliminate the racist capitalist system which attacks the working class, wages imperialist war and bails out the banks. This campus demonstration followed the Board of Trustees’ meeting where it voted for a fee hike for students, raising the total increase by 32% in one year! (See CHALLENGE, 8/12).)
As community college faculty in Los Angeles were forced to choose between layoffs or furlough days, CSU faculty face the same "choice" — 24 furlough days a year or layoffs. Many faculty, and even students, albeit from good intentions, see the furloughs as a lesser evil of this "choice," but in reality furloughs put the bosses’ crisis on the backs of working-class faculty, staff and students. It amounts to a 10% wage-cut.
Through conversations with students, as well as various working-class people during PLP’s recent Summer Project, it’s clear that this crisis is an all-out attack on the working class, regardless of occupation, while hitting black and Latino workers and youth the hardest. In the schools, professors, teachers, staff and K-graduate students are all affected by the budget cuts in apparently different but essentially similar ways. As these attacks on the working class sharpen, we must participate in these struggles in order to fight for the only solution to this crisis: communist revolution.
a name="Imperialists’ Battle over Honduras Kills Workers">">"mperialists’ Battle over Honduras Kills Workers
TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS, August 10 — At this writing, the struggle of the Honduran people against the military coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya is in its 43rd day. There have been uninterrupted occupations of bridges, highways and buildings, work stoppages and massive mobilizations. On August 7, marches began from the country’s interior, slated to converge in Tegucigalpa and the country’s second largest city on August 12. This massive show of force is in support of highway blockages and a scheduled general strike that could paralyze the country and bring to a head the struggle to reinstate Zelaya.
Beatings, arrests, woundings and killings have occurred. Nevertheless, this great capacity for struggle and sacrifice by the country’s oppressed masses will in no way advance their real class interests. The only possible liberation for the Honduran working class lies in an armed insurrection that fights for communism. But without a revolutionary communist party to lead them, the workers in Honduras and throughout the world will be pawns in the hands of the imperialists’ rivaRy for maximum profits and world domination.
Presently, Honduras is in the eye of the storm of this rivaRy for the control of Latin America. Zelaya’s mortal sin against U.S. imperialism was getting too close to Hugo Chavez and his Cuba-Bolivia-Nicaragua populist bloc. This bloc — together with the rising regional power of Brazil and its MERCOSUR bloc, plus the European, Russian and Chinese imperialists — is challenging the almost two-century-old U.S. hegemony of the continent.
Zelaya and the Honduran capitalists who back him — like the South American capitalists led by Chavez and Brazil — are striving for a bigger share of what’s produced from their workers’ exploitation by allying with the U.S. bosses’ rivals. These rivals, on their part, need to pry this region from the U.S. imperialists’ grip as each tries to enlarge their control of the world’s resources and profits.
Zelaya and his backers, just like U.S. rulers and their lackeys, claim they are "fighting for democracy." But this is just a scheme to win workers and others to fight for their capitalists’ interests. "Democracy," whether imposed with bayonets or legalized by elections, is the capitalists’ dictatorship over our class.
Our liberation lies in forging a communist revolution to impose our working-class dictatorship to smash all the world’s capitalists and guarantee they never rise again. From this we will build a communist society that will eliminate the wage system, money and all capitalist evils. We will produce to satisfy the needs of our class internationally, not to make a handful of parasites richer.
Honduras reveals a weakness of U.S. imperialism. Gone are the days when the U.S. can impose their will unilaterally in Latin America. Whatever the outcome of the Honduran crisis, the struggle for the control of the region will intensify.
Honduras shows that U.S. rulers can only use the military option to regain absolute control of the hemisphere. It also shows that the workers’ only option is to organize for a communist revolution. Zelaya, a capitalist whose family murdered many leftist organizers during the 1980s, will never help workers build such a movement. And any so-called working-class leader who supports him or fights for "democracy" is either knowingly or unknowingly a traitor to our class. Joining and building the internationalist Progressive Labor Party and the fight for communism are the only paths to working-class liberation.
Guadeloupe, Martinique:
Bosses Reneg on ‘Promises’ that Ended Strikes
(what else is new?)
POINTE-A-PITRE, GUADELOUPE, August 4 — Five months after the 44-day general strike against capitalist profiteering, the situation remains tense on this Caribbean island, a French overseas territory.
One of the islanders’ main grievances has been the profiteering by SARA, the oil company owned by Total, Esso and Chevron-Texaco. But on July 22, barely one month after taking office, Marie-Luce Penchard, the new Secretary of State for Overseas Territories, announced the government will allow a hike in gas prices later this month.
This came although the Ollier/Taubira commission — set up under the March 4 protocol that ended the general strike — has not reported yet. Since the announcement, repeated rumors of impending gas-price increases have caused runs on gas stations, jangling people’s nerves and filling the station owners’ cash registers.
Both the LKP collective (an umbrella organization of unions, political parties and cultural associations which led the general strike) and the UGTG trade union are calling on the government — in accordance with the March 4 protocol — to force SARA to reimburse over three million euros that it wrongly received from local government, instead of allowing the company to grab even more.
A measure of the tension here was the cops’ violent reaction when the slam poet Vasko shouted an insult at French president Sarkozy during his June 26 visit to nearby Martinique, which had also been shut by the general strike. Vasko was immediately slapped twice on the face, thrown to the ground, handcuffed and charged with insulting a public official.
There also may be a teachers’ strike when school begins on September 2, demanding more teacher positions as promised in the March 4 protocol.
But now the bosses’ government is going back on its promises that ended the strike — and end to SARA profiteering and more teacher jobs. This bears out what CHALLENGE reported during the general strike: the bosses try to take away benefits that workers win during their struggles, which is why communist revolution is the only way to obtain real, permanent change.
a name="S. Korea : Auto Workers Seized Plant, Repelled Cops’ Attack">">". Korea : Auto Workers Seized Plant, Repelled Cops’ Attack
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA, August 7 — Hundreds of workers occupied the Ssangyong Motor Company for over two months, resisting layoffs. After two raids by the police, which the workers resisted by firing nuts and bolts from slingshots, 500 of 900 workers remained in the plant. They occupied the paint shop where thousands of gallons of flammable paint are stored. The workers initially rejected the company’s offer to reduce the number of layoffs and said in a statement that rather than being divided they would "die together." (NYT, 8/5/09) The next day the union negotiated a settlement that further reduced the layoffs and pressured the workers to end the occupation. The struggle continues.
Wage-cut, Wage-freeze:
GE Practices Obama’s ‘Shared Sacrifice’
GE is following a classic capitalist method of squeezing profits out of workers: pitting one group against another to lower wages and conditions for all. GE chairman Jeffrey Immelt has told the company’s unions that "production costs must be competitive to keep factories from closing and moving to Mexico or China" (NY Times, 8/7) — where GE has been moving all along. Its Schenectady, NY, work-force is now 6,000, down from a high of 40,000.
Now, in exchange for building a new plant in Schenectady and expanding one in Louisville, the IUE/CWA union has swallowed a 2-year wage-freeze and a two-tier wage system that cuts newly-hired workers’ wages $10 an hour. For that, GE has "promised" not to move operations for two years. Immelt whines about "America’s sagging manufacturing base," saying that the U.S. has "lost its competitive edge in many areas, falling behind other countries." When he says "U.S." he means U.S. bosses.
GE’s billionaire CEO says that by expanding domestic manufacturing, the company is "putting its money where its mouth is." Translation: GE is "putting workers’ money (stolen from them) into GE’s profits."
Immelt wants to mask the class contradiction between workers and bosses behind what Immelt says is "more alignment of management and labor." He wants bosses and workers "on the same side" — with the bosses on top and workers at the bottom. This is Obama’s "shared sacrifice" with a vengeance: a $10-an-hour wage-cut, a wage-freeze and a (bosses’) "promise" to stay put in this juicy situation for two years.
They need workers’ help in producing more goods for less wages to enable U.S. capitalists to compete with rivals worldwide, and guarantee they can ensure production for their imperialist wars.
Rather than helping GE to "put its money where its mouth is," workers need to put the bosses where they belong — six feet under.
Clinton Visit to India:
Red Revolution Needed to Stop Global Warming
Global warming, caused by capitalism’s mad rush for profits and devil-may-care attitude about the future, has aReady produced alarming weather events — increasingly violent hurricanes like Katrina, and hurricanes in the North Atlantic, where they had never been recorded. It has produced more severe droughts and flooding and the potential for a rise in sea level that will chase tens of millions from their homes in cities near coasts. So what do we make of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to India (July 18-20), where she failed utterly in pressuring India’s leadership to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that cause global warming?
Clinton’s approach to India was a study in the imperialist rivaRy that dominates global politics. Rather than accommodate her, India’s Environmental Minister Kamesh criticized the U.S. for generating a century’s worth of greenhouse gases (GHGs) without let-up and then preaching to the developing nations that they should stop emitting GHGs.
The capitalist ruling classes of both India and China — the two most populous nations in the world, containing over one-third of the world’s working class — know that the U.S. call for capping GHG emissions is mainly an attempt to slow their growth and prevent them from challenging the U.S. economically. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund aReady predict that the Chinese economy will surpass that of the U.S. in the next 20 to 30 years. This is what Clinton is trying to stop, not global warming!
U.S. bosses want a new international treaty on global warming at the December intergovernmental conference in Copenhagen, Denmark (the sequel to Kyoto). But developing nations are fighting against mandatory caps placed on their GHG emissions because it would hinder their economic growth, so Copenhagen is likely to fail due to the maneuverings of competitive capitalist interests. This neglect of the future of the working class and our planet illustrates why smashing capitalism is necessary to stop global warming.
Recently, the U.S. ruling class switched gears in its position on global warming. Previously, it had encouraged media denials that global warming was a problem or that it was caused by GHG emissions. The media and government were obedient to the short-term interests of giant energy companies like Exxon-Mobil. Now the rulers are pretending that they are about to tackle the problem and decrease U.S. emissions. The Obama presidential campaign began this shift in earnest.
But the world’s working class should not be fooled. Obama remains loyal to the profit interests of the energy companies. The U.S. capitalists are merely adopting a strategy to attack and isolate their Chinese and Indian rivals. The actual changes proposed by Obama and reflected in the Waxman-Markey bill (recently passed in the House of Representatives and being debated in the Senate) are too trivial to begin to make any difference in the rising concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere. The 17% reduction in U.S. GHG emissions by 2020 proposed in the legislation won’t even touch the problem.
Obama & Co. have no intentions of doing anything to harm the global strategic position of the U.S. ruling class. No capitalist government, no matter how worker-friendly it pretends to be, will ever do so. That’s why the world’s working class can only end the emissions of GHGs and prevent the devastating consequences of global warming by taking matters into its own hands.
We must throw the capitalists off the stage of history around the world through communist revolution, and organize a communist society in which both the short-term and long-term needs of workers (including the ecological health of our planet) will be the only considerations in determining how and what to produce.J
What Else Was Clinton Up to in India?
Clinton’s visit to India wasn’t just about global warming. Loyal to her capitalist masters, she also played the saleswoman for the big bosses. She pushed for a contract for U.S. corporations to build two nuclear power plants, and for a deal for India to buy $10 billion worth of fighter jets from Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The Indian bosses liked this part of her visit. It’s all about the money!
Letters
a name="‘No plea bargain when you know you’re right...’"></a>"No plea bargain when you know you’re right...’
I am writing this to all workers that have been wrongfully fired or arrested, on or off the job. You must not give in and take a plea when taken to court. The system is designed to make every innocent person into a criminal.
My personal experience with this follows. I worked at LaGuardia Airport in New York for nine years as a skycap for Delta and Northwest airlines, under two different contractors doing the same job. On November 7th, 2008, I was on the job when I was suddenly grabbed from behind, knocked to the floor, cuffed and taken to jail by two men in plain clothes. I was charged with resisting arrest, hustling and trespassing.
I was fired from my job wrongfully. When I went to court I was offered a guilty plea with a sentence of community service and a $100 fine. But I refused to give in and returned to court at least six times, each time refusing pleas and telling them I was innocent, so acquit me or take me to trial. They knew they would lose, so eventually they dropped all the charges.
I want to say thanks to all the people from PLP who stood by me from the beginning to the end. They all rallied around me and I am so grateful to all of them.
So what I am saying is never take a plea bargain when you know you are right. You will be called a criminal. Never give up. Thank you.
Red-Leaning Sky Cap
[Editors note: The bosses’ courts regularly trap black workers with plea bargains as a way of avoiding the work of a trial. As we saw with this trial and others, the police and courts are willing to work hand-in-hand to frame workers and serve the bosses’ interests.]
a name="‘Throw a (red) stone in the water and the ripples spread’"></">‘T"row a (red) stone in the water and the ripples spread’
A group of teachers at my inner-city high school were sitting around at the end of term. We were marking the state final exams. An older teacher asked me if I was planning to retire. "Probably," I said.
She said, "Maybe this will change your mind," and related the following story: "I was in your Assistant Principal’s office one day — you know, the one who gave you all that trouble in February."
"Oh yes," I said. "She gave me an unsatisfactory rating in November of 2008."
"Well," the teacher said, "A whole group of students came in and confronted her. They told her ‘Don’t mess around with Mr. _________. If you do there’ll be trouble.’ Your Assistant Principal said nothing, but she blinked. She stopped coming into your class during the last period on Friday to bother you, didn’t she?"
It was true; the Assistant Principal had bothered me last term, but not this term. I had wondered why it had stopped. In fact, she gave me a satisfactory rating for this past term and for the whole year. "Wow," I said. "And the students didn’t tell me anything."
We never know how many ripples spread when we throw a stone in the water and when we struggle over ideas with our students and other people we know. What we do really does count.
A Red Teacher
Rank-and-File Militance Scores vs. Exploiting Bosses
On July 18, an annual march on Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn, N.Y. ended the program called "Wake Up Bushwick" in which, for three years, a workers’ project has carried out a campaign by an area community organization and a union.
We won some victories against businesses whose bosses exploit the workers, not paying overtime, decent wages nor basic benefits.
The march ended at the Associated Supermarket where the workers celebrated their biggest victory. The owners were forced to pay more than $1 million to 40 workers who endured this mistreatment during their whole time working at this market. This settlement also includes packers who were never paid a wage, working for a lousy tip.
It was a militant march, chanting, "See this fist — Workers to Power!"; "The workers, united, will never be defeated!"; and "Workers’ struggles have no borders!" These slogans symbolized that only the unity of the working class will make us strong and that we workers have no "nationality" to defend nor borders that divide us.
Our community organization was also demonstrating in support of workers at the Bergament store, whose boss has gotten away with exploiting and mistreating his workers. In this protest, our organization’s youth gave the event a very special flavor, inspiring the crowd with their chants and speeches. It showed that in the hands of progressive youth our future will be bright.
These were small victories but they show that the unity and strength of rank-and-file workers in the committee can be schools for communism that will eventually destroy this system of wage slavery and exploitation. In this area we have a network of about 50 CHALLENGE readers from which a group of eight friends are studying the Party’s ideas by discussing the paper’s editorials.
A Brooklyn Worker
a name="L.A. Summer Project Spreads PL’s Politics to Industrial Workers and GI’s"></">L.". Summer Project Spreads PL’s Politics to Industrial Workers and GI’s
‘Hungry for more action...’
I just started getting involved with activism and the PLP earlier this summer, and my perspective has quickly changed from that of a nihilist sickened by the world around him to a motivated communist revolutionary. The PLP and the simple fact that there are a substantial amount of compassionate people that aren’t just living for their own selfish desires has given me new hope, and a better outlook on life. My Summer Project experience was fantastic, and I’m not trying to sugarcoat anything. My eyes have been opened and my devotion to the struggle has been reinforced. I found an instant camaraderie with people from around the world because we were all focused on one cause: a classless society free of money and superficiality, a society based on compassion and need, and most of all equality for all. Sharing stories with all the workers I met has been a very satisfying experience and leaves me hungry for more action.
A Developing Red
Project Developed Young Leaders
As always, I think the key to our Summer Projects is the development of our young leaders, and this certainly is happening in LA. After several days of distributing literature, several groups got together for a study group on dialectical materialism. Three young comrades did an excellent job in preparing and leading the discussion. Everyone participated, and there was some sharp, but friendly debate, which clarified some aspects of what we were discussing: contradiction. It was really exciting to see the clear understanding and sharp analytical thinking and the continuing development of our young comrades.
One exchange was particularly helpful. A Party comrade could not get a friend to voice a question, so the comrade read the question from her friend’s notes. It turned out that the same question was on many other people’s minds. This started a sharp exchange involving quite a few people, which led to a clearer understanding of dialectics.
Project Volunteer
a name="‘Broadened my horizons about all workers’ struggles...’"></a>"Broadened my horizons about all workers’ struggles...’
I didn’t know what to expect coming to the Summer Project. It was my first one and with no expectations. I was told that it would be a communist boot camp. I found that the working class is more than just NYC. I was very New York-centric and coming to this project has broadened my horizons about the struggle of all workers. The problems that affect workers in New York are much the same as the problems that affect workers here in L.A.
My favorite experience so far has been being at the rally/demonstration in Disneyland. The workers there were very passionate and angry that they have not received their fair share or better said, what they have earned. The moment that sticks out in my mind was when a worker banged his drum and began a chant that went like this: "Do you hear us Mickey?, Do you hear us Pluto?, Do you hear us Donald?" Well do you hear us bosses…you better because we are coming.
From New York to Mannywood
a name="‘A productive week...’"></">‘A"productive week...’
Having now spent three days with the Los Angeles Summer Project, I can happily say that it has been a productive week. As a neophyte in the Party, I had few expectations for the Project, save that it would be a collection of communists actively working towards a classless society. My favorite event thus far has been an evening forum on dialectical materialism, in which Party members clarified the definition of the term, and actively challenged one another regarding processes and conflicts that exist along the pathways towards communism.
In addition to great discussion, we have conducted some paper sales in the garment district and at a local high school in Los Angeles. Though we have distributed countless papers and flyers, I question how effective our efforts have been without constant reinforcement at these locales. With greater organization and communication between Party members, we may be able to capitalize upon existing strongholds with more structured events like rallies, forums, and debates.
A New PL’er
When the Summer Project volunteers visited GI’s, we noted the importance of winning people in the military to communist ideas. Without this, there can be no revolution. The following are some comments from volunteers who visited a town near a military base to talk to GI’s:
I wish we’d stayed longer. Our best conversation was with an Arab-American GI from Detroit. Both his parents lost their jobs when Chrysler folded. He totally understood the capitalist crisis. When he took CHALLENGE I suggested he send it to his parents after he read it.
Both Marines I spoke to were accepting and genuinely interested in our leaflet, newspaper and ideas. One GI kept looking at the leaflet’s map of Afghanistan and the oil pipelines. Something clicked. He said, "But they didn’t tell us this. They told us it was to stop terrorism." When his friend said, "Put that down. It’s communist," he apologized to us for his friend’s attitude and pocketed the leaflet. Bringing our ideas to these GI’s is why I’m a communist.
The Marines wanted to hear our communist analysis, even those who at first disagreed. Many know they are being kept in the dark about the true motives of U.S. imperialism.
One group distributed about 20 CHALLENGES plus leaflets and CHALLENGE EXTRA’s. One 25-year-old GI eagerly took our literature, agreeing it was a war for oil and oil pipelines and said older Marines like him knew this. He worried about the younger ones who were "gung ho" because they didn’t understand the real situation and said we should talk to them. We agreed but also suggested he should talk to them as well. He hadn’t considered the potential power rank-and-filers in the military have, but liked the idea and wanted to know more about past historical experiences.
I was very hesitant about going to this town near a military base but was pleasantly surprised that people didn’t beat us up or get defensive. In talking to people I found one-to-one personal conversations were best.
I had my doubts but this was the best sale I ever had. Many were aware, wanted the paper and quite kind. It was a worthwhile experience.
A GI told us, "The brass tells us everything is good. If they told us what was really going on, we wouldn’t fight." Another said, "I know it’s all politics. It’s the system." When we said the system had to go, he took CHALLENGE, saying he would read it.
One GI said he knows the war isn’t about terrorism, although that’s what they feed them in boot camp. He said it was about oil and was open to talking about revolution.
We had a good time. The map we passed out helped show the oil pipelines the U.S. bosses want in Afghanistan. Many of the GI’s thought we had a reasonable point of view, including about organizing for revolution.
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At a meeting, a boss of a factory-construction company told teachers about the need for more engineers for competition. He said, "Imagine a map of the world and on it the cost of engineers: $1 for an engineer here in the U.S.; in Britain, 90¢; Germany, $1.10. But in India it’s 5¢ and in China it’s 2¢. How can ‘we’ compete? It used to be that we had the best engineers and the best technology, but they are catching up!" He said some jobs could be outsourced but, "What about those jobs that we can’t outsource, those jobs that need citizenship?" He [meant]… production for imperialist, racist war.
Racism, Sexism, Nationalism
The bosses need racism and sexism to super-exploit sections of the working class and to justify brutality and oppression. More workers are unemployed; incarceration rates and police brutality are increasing. Even before the current crisis, young urban black workers suffered unemployment of 50%; it was 36% for Latino workers. The situation is much worse now.
Unemployment and poverty are brutally racist; black workers usually are the last hired and the first fired. The bosses also need racism for their wars. They try to hide it under a humanitarian face. Spreading democracy, freedom and justice are code words for more imperialist oppression. They push racist ideas on soldiers to try to dehumanize fellow working-class brothers and sisters so they might commit acts of murder or torture for the bosses’ interests in oil, resources and strategic locations.
Our War Is A Class War
We must do everything we can to defeat our enemy. The Party…[knows] the strategic importance of organizing in the military and in war-production factories. A communist base in basic industry and the bosses’ military can organize workers to destroy capitalism and run society directly in the interest of the working class.
If you are passionate about the Party, know what the Party needs, if you are finishing high school and able-bodied, consider joining the military or going to a trade school to become a machinist, a welder or an electrician. Teachers and the whole Party need to get behind this effort.
Soon international capitalist competition will push for all-out imperialist war and we must prepare our Party. The current depression shows the crisis of overproduction will force the working class into the war-production factories and into the military. We must…organize to win the fight by building a base for communist revolution, with a strategy that will mean victory for the working class.
Imperialist Rivalries Spurred 1969 Moon Landing
July marks the 40th anniversary of the 1969 U.S. moon landing. President Obama celebrated the anniversary with the Apollo 11 crew by asserting that the U.S. would remain committed to space exploration and that his education reform is crucial to the work of NASA. Obama failed to mention that both NASA and the education system have served as vital gears in the bloody U.S. war machine for the past 50 years.
Obama’s call for education reform comes at a time when the dominant role the U.S. has played in the world since World War II is being threatened by the growth of imperialist rivals in China, Russia and Europe. Following the lead of educational reforms outlined by Bill Gates, Exxon and Lockheed Martin, a heavy emphasis on math and science in high school is seen as a way to keep the U.S. from falling further behind the curve of its technologically-advanced rivals.
In 1962 when John F. Kennedy declared that "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard," the U.S. ruling class was much more certain of its place in the world than it is today. Anti-communism, and post-WWII prosperity for some, allowed U.S. rulers to bolster support for themselves against supposed communist threats abroad. Like Obama, JFK summoned the tools of the state — through the expansion of military programs and the reworking of the education system — in order to strengthen U.S. imperialist ambitions.
When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the U.S. ruling class in response created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). By promoting "space race" hype, the NASA program encouraged workers in the U.S. to root for "team America." In 1969 U.S. astronauts planted a U.S. flag on the moon that was meant to be a symbol of their global power, but by this time the U.S. was hated around the world.
The Tet Offensive had turned the tide of the Vietnam War and rebellions of U.S. GIs were increasingly common. Unable to rely on its own soldiers, the U.S. became heavily dependent on carpet bombings, bringing the Vietnam War into its bloodiest phase. The bosses cover up this history to keep workers in the dark about capitalism’s bloody past and to spread patriotism so workers will support the bosses’ war plans.
The same year NASA was created, U.S. rulers created the Advanced Research Project Agency (now DARPA) to meet the research and development needs of the U.S. military. Over the next 50 years DARPA developed weapons ranging from the M-16 rifle which aided in the murder of countless Vietnamese during the Vietnam war to the Hellfire-missile-equipped Predator drones currently being used to kill and maim workers along the Pakistan border. DARPA initiatives paved the way for increasing technology-driven warfare and the eventual militarization of space.
The same year NASA and DARPA came into existence, Congress created the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). Aimed at creating a generation of tech-savvy workers able to compete with Soviet rivals, the NDEA included support for loans to college students, and the improvement of science and mathematics in schools. Hoping to win students to U.S. nationalism, students had to pledge anti-communism in order to receive college loans. Students involved in anti-war activities were punished and denied loan money.
The U.S. defeat in Vietnam signaled the beginning of the end for U.S. global dominance. In 1979, the loss of Iran as a Mid-East watchdog coupled with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan intensified the worries of U.S. rulers about their ability to control vital resources in the region. The rise of competing imperialist powers in Europe and Asia has only escalated tensions in the Mid-East. Obama has picked up the torch of imperialism where Kennedy, Carter and Clinton left off, deepening imperialist war in Afghanistan and carrying it over into Pakistan.
The appearance of Obama’s foreign policy may differ from his predecessors, but the essence remains the same: war and destruction of rivals are the only sure ways an imperialist power can stay on top. Obama & Co. understand the vital role the education system plays in their ability to wage war. It is no accident that Obama chose as his education czar Arne Duncan, who as CEO of Chicago public schools handed over control of four public high schools to the U.S. military.
While education reform is expected to produce a new crop of workers able to make the next generation of technologically-advanced weapons, the Obama administration realizes that this type of weaponry alone cannot win wars. U.S. rulers have adopted a boots-on-the-ground approach, recently deploying tens of thousands to Afghanistan and calling for thousands more. They are paving the way for future recruits though the creation of various national service programs and through standardized testing regimes that push students out of high school and into the military.
As workers’ cynicism and lack of patriotism persist along with the economic crisis, the bosses have amplified their call for sacrifice. The bosses aim to disarm workers by teaching patriotism and lies about the history of the working class. We must bring the message of revolution to the classrooms and workplaces and organize students and workers to fight against imperialist war under the banners of the Progressive Labor Party.
Red Eye
Fired? Your wage won’t recover
NYT, 8/4 — ….it can take years for a worker’s earnings to bounce back after a layoff, and… it can take even longer for a layoff during a recession. Economists, in fact, say income losses for workers who are let go in a recession can persist for as long as two decades, a depressing prognosis for the several million people who have lost their jobs in the current recession.
Working-class tradition: help out
NYT, 7/12, Barbara Ehrenreich — As in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the [recession’s] most reliable first responders are not government agencies, but family and friends....
There is a tradition among the American working class of mutual aid, no questions asked. My father, a former miner, advised me as a child that if I ever needed money to "go to a poor man…."
When I worked at low-wage jobs in the 1990s, I was amazed by the generosity of my co-workers…. Such informal networks — and random acts of kindness — put the official welfare state, with its relentless suspicions and grudging outlays, to shame.
But there are limits to the generosity of relatives and friends…. The poor simply run out of resources.
Profit system rules banks’ actions
NYT, 8/1 — So why isn’t it happening? Why aren’t we seeing kinder, gentler banks trying to repay their debt to society? When I spoke to bankers this week, they sounded aggrieved at all the anger directed their way, and they claimed they were doing the best they could. And from their perspective, they are.
But their perspective is that of anyone running a business: their priority is to maximize profit…. That’s what capitalists do…. Maximizing profits means, for instance, jacking up credit card interest rates… and foreclosing when that makes more economic sense than modifying a loan. To ask them to put aside the profit motive, even temporarily, for the good of the country — it’s not even in their frame of reference.
Obama = Bush on immigrant raids
NYT, 8/4 — After early pledges by President Obama that he would moderate the Bush administration’s tough policy on immigration enforcement, his administration is pursuing an aggressive strategy for an "illegal"-immigration crackdown that relies significantly on programs started by [President Bush].
A recent blitz of measures has antagonized immigrant groups and many of Mr. Obama’s Hispanic supporters.
System rewards those who rob us
NYT, 8/3 — Crashing the economy and fleecing the taxpayer aren’t Wall Street’s only sins…. Financial-industry high-fliers made fortunes through activities that were worthless if not destructive from a social point of view.
And they’re still at it….
Unfortunately… the Obama administration… still seems to operate on the principle that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America.
Neither the administration, nor our political system in general, is ready to face up to the fact that we’ve become a society in which the big bucks go to bad actors, a society that lavishly rewards those who make us poorer.
Sex discrimination can mean death
NYT, 7/30 — These dramas play out constantly in poor countries. One woman dies a minute from complications of pregnancy or childbirth somewhere in the world, and 20 times as many suffer childbirth injuries.
There’s no mystery about how to save these lives. Some impoverished countries, such as Sri Lanka, have succeeded stunningly well at saving mothers simply because they have tried. But foreign aid donors like the United States have never shown much interest in maternal mortality, and impoverished women are typically the most voiceless, neglected people in their own countries — so they die at astonishing rates….
One of the most lethal forms of sex discrimination is this systematic inattention to reproductive health care, from family planning to childbirth — so long as those who die are impoverished, voiceless women.
US-China clash exploding in Africa
NYT, 7/19 — Chinese business interests in Africa have grown dramatically in recent years…. Bilateral trade between the regions quintupled, to $55 billion, from 2000 to 2006, and that the figure is expected to reach $100 billion by 2010….
The authors contend that China’s ambitions in Africa are grandly geopolitical…. "I’m going to be honest with you, China is using Africa to get where the United States is now, and surpass it…."
Many African leaders are enamored of the Chinese mix of authoritarianism and capitalism in business affairs, an emphasis on efficiency and a lack of preaching about human rights….
It is not hard to join the authors in predicting that this joining of Chinese and African interests will likely succeed to the chagrin of the rest of the business world.
US gets airbase, winks at tyrant
NYT, 7/23 — …The Obama administration has [ranked] pragmatic concerns over human rights in dealings with autocratic leaders…. Politicians and independent journalists have been arrested, prosecuted, attacked and even killed over the last year as the Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbeck Bakiyev, has consolidated control….
The United States has remained largely silent in response to this wave of violence, apparently wary of jeopardizing the status of its sprawling air base, on the outskirts of the capital, which supports the mission in Afghanistan.
Drugs prey on no-hope workers
NYT, 7/30 — For more than five years Mr. Eche has been a slave to paco, a smokable [sic] drug made from bits of cocaine residue mixed with industrial solvents and kerosene or rat poison. Labeled "the scourge of the poor" by politicians, the drug has become the greatest social challenge facing shantytowns like [Argentina’s] Oculta….
"Every time he comes out of treatment it is worse because he has nothing, no work. There is nothing for him to do…."
Paco averages only 10 percent cocaine, with the rest being highly toxic substances, [a] judge said. "Doctors we have consulted say nerve cells and brain cells start dying soon after consumption begins," he said….
Oculta’s residents are starving for jobs with decent salaries to help break the cycle of hopelessness that is creating whole families of paco addicts.
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The new movie The Ugly Truth starring
Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler (of the horrifically racist, fascist movie 300) is a rehashing of an old romantic comedy stand-by, the uptight career woman looking for love who falls for her smooth-talking, womanizing male co-star. Written by three women (proving sexism knows no boundaries under capitalism) the tired, rehashed plot reaches new levels of crass sexism. The movie is hyperbole at its worst, insulting the audience by force-feeding them wholly unbelievable and insulting caricatures of what "real" men and women are supposed to be.
Heigl plays a morning news producer who drives men away because of her demanding nature, while Butler’s character is a cable-access TV personality whose show is based on telling women "the ugly truth" about men, that they’re all shallow, sex fiends incapable of love and uninterested in any sort of relationship with a woman other than physical.
The movie is rated R for the unnecessary and copious amount of vulgarity that replaces any attempt at witty dialogue or character development. The Ugly Truth boils down to the lesson that women should be subservient to men in all ways: by making less money, wearing skimpy clothing, laughing at unfunny jokes and, most importantly, leaving their brains and hearts at home (and that men should look for and only find satisfaction in such women).
Like Sex and the City, The Women or Bride Wars, this movie wants us to believe that happiness really lies in vacuous consumerism and oversexualization. In the end the main characters end up together, but this union doesn’t come about because of some profound lesson learned about the importance of respect for each other, but rather Heigl’s willingness to be the objectified woman Butler’s character wants.
I went to see this movie only a few days after it opened and so watched it in a packed theater. The mix of people was fairly evenly distributed between men and women and their reactions were quite interesting.
There were few laughs from anyone (this may have been due in part to the movie’s hackneyed script) but there was a general air of disgust. More than one couple walked out of the film and of those who stayed many seemed uncomfortable or insulted. The man sitting next to me kept groaning and shaking his head. It seemed that no one was satisfied with this movie’s portrayal of men and women or the nature of their relationships, and why should they be?
The ruling class is constantly shoving sexist crap down our throats, utilizing all media at their disposal, but in recent years the level of filth the working class has been asked to ingest has worsened. Recent action movies like 300 and Watchmen fetishize sex and violence, but romantic comedies like The Ugly Truth are doing their part as we "laugh" along to women being treated like mindless sex objects and men being portrayed as soulless perverts.
Sexism is critical for keeping the bosses’ profits up and the working class divided. As the bosses’ economic crisis deepens they will have to rely even more heavily on sexism to keep their system running. Movies like The Ugly Truth show the degenerate nature of the U.S. capitalist class and its culture here in the waning days of the empire. The battle lines are clear: for the bosses there is sexism, racism and fascism; for the workers there can only be communist revolution!
