CHICAGO, IL, July 1 — “We don’t get paid for this job,” the president of the Chicago Board of Education told parents at the June meeting.

“I’m glad to hear that you are displacing teachers and screwing our children’s education from the bottom of your heart,” a parent replied, in the spirit of two years of struggle by teachers in CORE (Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators), parents, students, and community groups. Speaking out — and demonstrating, when the opportunity arises — helps to mobilize and organize forces to oppose these attacks on education.

The Board wanted to use the meeting to solve its “budget crisis” on the backs of students and school employees, but the discussion didn’t go as planned. As one speaker said, “You guys should be ashamed.” Another pointed out, “Schools are more than bricks and mortar. Why should we terminate quality teachers?” Under capitalism, there is always plenty of money for imperialist war, bank and corporate bailouts, and politicians’ pet projects. But there is never enough for workers’ needs.

For example, the Chicago Public Schools CEO, Ron Huberman, claims that they might need to fire 2,700 teachers and raise the average class size to 35 to save $150 million and close their budget gap. Yet Mayor Daley is hoarding $250 million in “Tax Increment Funding” for his private slush fund. As always under capitalism, the question is more than dollars and cents; it’s about who profits — and at whose expense.

While Chicago’s disinvestment in its schools is a disgraceful case of child neglect, money alone won’t solve the problem. The content of U.S. public education is primarily aimed to give working-class students a salute-the-flag fast-track to fighting in imperialist wars, toiling in minimum-wage jobs, or suffering racist unemployment.

Parents and teachers spoke passionately about teachers who spend their own time and money and devise creative and effective ways to reach all students. The scores of people in the audience applauded these remarks, while Huberman and the Board members sat stone-faced or worse. (One board member fell asleep, and another was busy texting.) As one of about two hundred “honorably-terminated” teachers said, “We have been left on the street with no job and no health insurance.”

A PLP member underscored that racism continues to be perpetuated by Board policies. Because this administration claims to be “data driven” (meaning if student test scores don’t go up, teachers could be fired), the speaker used data to expose its racism. There are 2,100 fewer African-American teachers now than in 2002, a drop from 40 to 30 percent of the total teaching force. Thirty percent of white students attend selective enrollment high schools, or three times the proportion of students in general. Finally, 72 percent of African-American students attend segregated, low-performing schools with the greatest chance of being reconstituted (or “turned around,” as the Board likes to say) with all new staff. 

The PLP member concluded by stating, “The data-driven conclusion is that the Board runs a racist school system that provides separate and unequal education for over 70 percent of the system’s African-American students. In addition, it is decimating the system’s African-American teaching force.” Loud applause and handshakes from the audience, frozen stony faces from the Board. In an era where many think the U.S. has moved “past racism,” it is incumbent on communists and others to expose it at every opportunity. Capitalism will not be destroyed unless anti-racism leads the fight. 

School systems across the country are facing the worst cutbacks in decades, while Obama’s promises to withdraw from Afghanistan are coming undone barely six months after he made them. In a brazenly honest way, education secretary Arne Duncan has vowed to “let no crisis be wasted” in the ruling class’s ongoing strategy to solve their economic and military problems through attacks on the working class. This is the same Duncan who accelerated the re-segregation of the Chicago school system, coupled with a noxious cocktail of education “reforms” now being imposed throughout the country through the bribery of Obama’s cynical “Race to the Top.”

Charter schools, merit pay, data-driven teacher evaluation, standardized exams — none of these bosses’ ploys can meet the needs of students. Teachers must not be fooled into siding for or against any of these schemes. They’re all intended to deliver students more efficiently into the hands of the ruling class, to be exploited in the workplace or the military. It’s a contradiction for the rulers to “leave no child behind” in a “race to the top.” In such a race, working-class kids will inevitably lose because the capitalist education system was never designed to prepare all students to succeed.

Major ruling-class figures are saying so themselves. In the May/June 2008 issue of “Foreign Affairs,” the house organ for the Rockefeller wing of the ruling class, prominent pundit Fareed Zakaria wrote, “If the United States cannot educate and train a third of the working population to compete in a knowledge economy, this will drag down the country.”

If we do the math, that’s two-thirds of the working class that the rulers plan to leave behind. They are using the latest financial crisis as an opportunity to trim spending on classrooms and pension funds. They need a school system that will preserve the status quo of class relations. Under capitalism, a portion of workers is always disposable. In a society founded on slavery, these are mostly black and Latino workers. With rising racist unemployment devastating millions, the ruling class needs schools to help reorganize society and to crush the idea that a job is a basic right.

Nobody in education — no liberal in the White House, no union misleader — is dealing with the heart of the matter. The basic drive of capitalism toward imperialist war and increased exploitation of the working class makes education reform a joke. The exceptional cases where schools do a better job of educating our youth can only be viewed as oases in a desert of racist neglect, not as models that the bosses will reproduce for all. Education reform will make education for the masses a meaningless process of test prep. Teachers also stand to be more sharply exploited, and will be forced to work harder for less money.

Communists need and value every one of us. Each individual contains the potential to understand and change the world. Through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of working people banished disease, illiteracy, and imperialist exploitation from their societies under the leadership of communists. These magnificent movements were reversed, but their achievements can and must be replicated and deepened. Communism, and only communism, leaves no child behind. Join PLP!

No matter how the Obama administration or the bosses’ media pundits try to spin the “economic recovery,” the actual 33 million jobless figure keeps getting in the way. Now even some of the NY Times analysts have taken to confirming what Karl Marx proved over a century ago: capitalism inevitably breeds unemployment. And capitalism based on racism breeds double unemployment rates for black and Latino workers.

As CHALLENGE has reported previously, the “official” U.S. jobless rate hovering around 10% represents 15 million unemployed. The latest headlines scream a June “drop” to 9.5% (a phony figure — see next paragraph). But the actual rate — including part-timers who can’t find full-time jobs and “discouraged” workers who have given up looking — jumps to 21.6%, more than double the “official” figure. (Shadowstats.com, Commentary #301).

And the “discouraged” workers are only counted as “discouraged” if they’ve stopped looking for up to six months. But millions have been out of work over a year and therefore are completely off the radar screen. All this doesn’t even count the workers on welfare who would work if there were jobs and available day-care.

Statistical Juggling

The government’s “official” unemployment rate for June “drops” to 9.5% because it is based on the Payroll Survey that counts the number of jobs — not the number of people with jobs — and therefore includes multiple job holders. The government’s own “Household Survey” counts the number of people with jobs which showed a June job contraction of 301,000! So how can the jobless rate “drop” to 9.5% when the number of people without jobs increases? Only by statistical juggling.

An Associated Press dispatch (6/19) ran under a NY Times headline, “Most State Jobless Rates Fall.” But right there in the first paragraph it reports: “mainly because people gave up looking for work and were no longer counted.” (Maybe the headline writer didn’t read the article.)

Meanwhile, the bosses’ Congress can’t even pass legislation extending unemployment checks for the 1.8 million whose benefits expired in the last two months — although they can “preserve a tax loophole benefitting the wealthy money managers at private equity firms” (NY Times editorial, 6/30). This gift-wraps tens of millions of dollars for these parasites who helped bring on the financial crisis in the first place.

None of these “analyses” of the jobless figures even mention the fact that at least 40% of the jobless are excluded altogether from unemployment benefits because of government restrictions. Many of them admit that millions of those currently out of work may never work again. That’s “democracy” under the profit system.

Yes, Marx Was Right!

Now along come some of these columnists writing about the economy to prove Marx was right. Marx said that because every capitalist drives for maximum profits, looking to capture as much of the market as possible, it inevitably leads to overproduction of the means of production and of goods: all of them can’t sell what their workers produced. So to try to maintain their very existence, many of them close factories and lay off workers, who can’t buy back what they’ve produced, leading to more closures and still more layoffs. That’s known as the “bust” in capitalism’s business cycle.

NY Times business writer Andrew Sorkin, in maintaining that no amount of financial “regulations” can stop this “bust,” says: “Businesses in general, and Wall Street in particular, often overreach in search of profits….We haven’t found a way to legislate around that reality.” (NYT, 6/29)

That reality means millions lose their jobs, their savings, their homes and their health insurance. And because of racist discrimination, doubly so for black and Latino workers.

Furthermore, this is an international phenomenon since capitalism covers the planet. So workers are facing this crisis in Greece, Spain (jobless rate 20%), Portugal, Ireland and Eastern Europe, among others, with France, England and Germany not far behind.

Meanwhile, imperialism — capitalists extending their search for maximum profits to low-wage areas in Asia, Africa and Latin America — reduces hundreds of millions of workers to permanent poverty, with several billion trying to live on less than $2 a day. This, of course, leads to imperialist wars as the only way these rival capitalists ultimately can settle who will have the “right” to exploit the most workers.

Sorkin faces the facts of capitalism. His article is headlined, “Preparing For Next Big One,” stating, “The next Great Crash is coming. Guaranteed….[and] sooner than we think.

“How can I be so sure? Because the history of modern markets is a story of meltdowns.”

He then details the blow-ups in the U.S., Mexico, East Asia, Russia and the dot-com bombs — all in just the last 20 years. Every one of these produced mass layoffs for workers. Then he catalogues “The stagflation of the 1970s, the Depression of the 1930s, the panics in the 1900s…and back and back and back…all the way to the Dutch and their tulip bulbs.”

“Booms go bust. That’s the way markets work….[And] the one thing it [the Obama financial reform Act] won’t do is prevent another crisis….”

He concludes that this Act may help “prepare us for the next Big One….But it won’t stop it.”

There’s only one thing that can stop it — communist revolution, because it destroys the profit system and the capitalist state apparatus that enforces it. Communism is a society run by and for the working class which, after all, is the class that produces all the value in capitalist society. But in a profit-free society our class will allocate all that we produce according to workers’ needs. That’s the real “Next Big One.” 

Treating the latest Russian spy scandal as mere entertainment misses the point. Sure, all the makings of a Hollywood blockbuster are there. But U.S. media are likening the plot to 1960s thrillers (or parodies of them), to obscure the stubborn fact that U.S. and Russian capitalist rulers still aim at destroying one another, while killing millions of workers in the process.

Despite Obama’s promised “reset,” the imperialist rivalry between U.S. and Russian rulers is getting hotter. The two remain the most heavily-armed contenders — followed by Chinese and European bosses — in a sharpening competition for control of the world’s resources, markets and labor.

Kremlin bosses bent on economic, political and military expansion practice espionage seriously. So do their Pentagon foes, charged with maintaining the tottering U.S. empire. Some U.S. pundits dismiss the spy incident as a harmless, out-dated holdover of a Cold War mindset that no longer applies. In fact, it reflects the ongoing inter-imperialist struggle, headed to escalate into armed conflict.

Obama & Co. Step Up Missile,
Nuke Face-Off

While front pages and web pages featured images of Russian agent Anna Chapman, Hillary Clinton was in Krakow on July 2 signing a pact that puts U.S. Patriot and SM-3 missiles on Polish soil. Obama’s envoy absurdly claimed the missiles will defend Europe from a potential attack by Iran. But it’s Russia, not Iran, which lies on Poland’s border.

Clinton just wound up a whirlwind tour of former Soviet and Soviet-bloc states seeking their military allegiance to Washington. “Poland has been rattled by Russia’s more assertive foreign policy on the territory of the ex-Soviet Union, especially in Georgia, and the Patriot deal is seen as symbolically important in underlining U.S. commitment to its security.” (Reuters, 7/1) She also visited the Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia, areas hotly contested by Russia’s military presence and by George Soros-financed pro-U.S. election rigging.

More ominously, U.S. and Russian rulers continue to jockey for supremacy in city-destroying nuclear arms. But the U.S. wants the lethal edge in current arms talks that may soon limit strategic warheads to 1,550 a side, mainly for financial reasons.

Asked how the spy flap might affect his stance on the treaty, liberal warhawk Senator Joe Lieberman said, “I’d like to be assured that we’re investing enough money in modernization. In a world in which there will be nuclear weapons for a good long time... I want to make sure that the smaller number of weapons we’re left with in our stockpile work.” He no doubt worried about Russian infiltration into the U.S.’s bomb program. One Russian agent had “made contact with an individual who works for a U.S. research facility that works on small-yield, high-penetration nuclear warheads.” (Christian Science Monitor, 6/28)

Russian Spies Not As Incompetent As U.S. Bosses Pretend

Though probably not top agents, the seized Russians were hardly incompetent bunglers. Their influence reached fairly high into the U.S. Establishment. One spy, Cambridge, Mass.-based Donald Heathfield, had discussed a business deal with strategist Leon Fuerth, who would have been Al Gore’s national security advisor if Bush hadn’t stolen the 2000 election. And another spy, Manhattan Mata Hari Chapman, met Nouriel Roubini several times on “social” occasions. Economist Roubini has become a darling in U.S. rulers’ eyes because he foretold the current economic crash.

What we are witnessing in the spy case is not theatre, but a deadly aspect of what Lenin called “the highest stage of capitalism.” He was referring to the imperialist rivalry that underlay World War I. Forget the “James Bond” jokes. For workers today, the stakes are as high as in 1917.