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CHALLENGE, October 29, 2008

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29 October 2008 594 hits

Union Sellouts in Bed with Boeing:
WORKERS’ POWER IS OUR ONLY FUTURE

SEATTLE, WA, October 14 — The six-week strike by 27,000 Machinists against Boeing looks as intractable as ever after talks between the International Association of Machinists (IAM) and the company broke down, just a day after they resumed. There is tremendous anger among the rank and file who are holding the line in a very solid strike. Financial problems are weighing heavily on many as the worldwide capitalist financial meltdown forces the realization of how serious this struggle has become.
It’s reaching a point among some workers where discussion of revolution becomes much more logical. This was revealed in how workers answer the union hacks’ red-baiting. When the misleaders see CHALLENGE and PLP leaflets being handed out, they say, “we don’t want that crap here,” to which a worker retorted right in front of the sellouts, “I read that paper, give one here!” Discussion of revolution follows. The hacks end up being isolated.
The latest deal-breaker involved outsourcing jobs of workers who deliver parts to the assembly line. Mobilizing the might of a united working class is the only way to break through this logjam.
The union agreed to allow suppliers to enter Boeing plants and deliver their parts to receiving areas beside the assembly line, work now performed by IAM members. The union insists, however, that those jobs — inventorying, tracking and dispersing these parts — remain in the IAM, now and in the future.
The company discussed protecting current IAM members in these categories from layoffs during the three-year life of the contract, but refused to guarantee these 2,000 positions would remain as union jobs over the long haul.
“Once we work out this ‘job security’ stuff, all the rest will fall into place,” said international aerospace coordinator and head negotiator Mark Blondin. But don’t hold your breath; his definition of job security and any real-world security are miles apart.

CEO Is Serious About Fascist Economic Regime

These latest negotiations began as Boeing CEO James McNerney outlined his vision of corporate fascism in the now infamous “Monday memo” issued last week. Citing the “ongoing turmoil in the financial markets,” this three-page internal letter mirrors the U.S ruling class’ plan to re-industrialize through racist super-exploitation in the subcontractor factories. When he talks about “flexibility to run their business in the face of intense global competition,” he means using these racist attacks on subcontractor workers as leverage to attack employees in the traditional union plants as well.
He “see[s] tremendous pressure coming from ” competitors like Airbus and emerging aerospace powers like Russia, Japan, Canada, Brazil and, in particular, China. He then attacked our “track record of repeated [strikes],” vowing to “change this dynamic.”
“U.S. auto companies, for one, fatally wounded themselves by promising unsustainable wage and benefit levels...and job guarantees,” he continues. Explaining why the company cut off negotiations, Boeing spokesman, Tim Healy, put it even more bluntly. “No company can guarantee jobs,” he admitted. In other words, a decent life under capitalism is unsustainable. A system that can’t sustain a decent life doesn’t deserve to continue.
McNerney failed to mention that his buddy on the Boeing Board, Edward Liddy, just got an additional $35 billion from the Feds, on top of $85 billion in the last two weeks, to rescue the insurance giant AIG from its speculative excesses. Nothing the strikers are asking for even approaches this sum. The joke on the picket lines is that we should change our name to AIG. Then the bosses would throw money at us, instead of trying to starve us into submission.
The pro-capitalist union leaders’ answer to McNerney’s memo was pathetic. They scurried to Boeing Commercial Airplanes Chief Executive Scott Carson to reaffirm their support of the company’s global subcontracting regime. They pleaded for a few “ancillary [related] jobs at local factories” to remain in the IAM. Even throwing our class brothers and sisters in the subcontractors to the wolves doesn’t seem enough to keep these class collaborators in business.

Communist Ideas: The Alternative To Fascist Capitulation

In stark contrast to the company’s fascism and the union’s capitulation, stands Progressive Labor Party-led organizing and literature. On average, more than a thousand strikers have read CHALLENGE every issue throughout this strike. We’ve distributed thousands of additional Party leaflets advocating mobilizing the united might of the working class. The latest called for anti-racist, international unity with subcontractor workers, mass picket lines and production for need under communism as the only real-world answer to the bosses’ divide-and-conquer strategy. “Workers’ power is our only security,” it declared.
A relatively smaller group of strikers who regularly read CHALLENGE have met every week throughout the strike to put these ideas into practice. Some sell the paper as well; more should! We have scheduled dinners during and after the strike (whenever that is) aimed at asking strikers and supporters throughout the city to buy subscriptions to CHALLENGE, and join PLP.
The mass sales and distribution of communist literature — and the mostly positive response of strikers — have inspired our friends at these meetings to have a more bold approach to organizing their fellow strikers around anti-racist unity (not to mention, giving the sellouts fits!).
One reader wrote a “thank you” note to L.A. subcontractor workers who have supported our strike. Building on the Party’s success distributing CHALLENGE, he organized a small group of strikers to “hit” the strike-check distribution centers to publicly get signatures on it. The hacks backed off as friends and strangers alike signed.
It inspired us all to see our friends — who had never done anything like this before — develop convincing arguments to win their fellow strikers to this modest show of anti-racist working-class unity. Eventually we hope to personally present this “thank you” to subcontractor workers.
Last week, these CHALLENGE readers collectively prepared an answer to McNerney’s vision of corporate fascism — which really proved the validity of PLP’s politics — to be posted on the internet. This week we are discussing how to expand our modest attempts at class solidarity to industrial factories nation-wide. The situation calls for mass picketing, which could really up the ante. There is talk of going to other local unions and student groups, not only for support resolutions but for other workers and students to join the picket lines, as well as to force the union to organize such mass action.
Modest as these efforts are, they represent the only way forward. The company and the union misleaders are thinking about the long haul, not just the life of this three-year contract. So, too, do those of us more dedicated to the revolutionary potential of our class, with the communist vision of eliminating this profit system.

GLOBAL CRISIS WEIGHS ON STRIKERS’ MINDS,
LEADS TO DISCUSSION OF REVOLUTION

“My family says the government is lying to us,” said a shop steward at the last strike-check distribution. His extended family lives in Detroit. “They say we’re already in a depression. I honestly didn’t see this global depression/recession coming. Look how big this has become!”
“So what comes after a global depression?” asked our comrade.
“I hate to think about it,” said this new CHALLENGE reader, “but the last time world war followed.”
The conversation then turned back to McNerney’s memo and how the CEO seems to be setting us up for just such a scenario. After this introduction, our subsequent discussion about the necessity for communist revolution seemed to fit right in.
McNerney’s fascist memo ends, “Our Company is strongest when all of us — union and non-union alike — are lined up together, working...against our competitors.” He got the middle right, but the beginning and end set us up for the kill. Instead, we should say, “Our class, the working class, is strongest when all of us — union and non-union alike — are lined up together working against our common enemies: the union sellouts, the international bosses and their racist, imperialist capitalist system.”J

U.S. Rulers’ Biggest Bailout Scheme: Global War

U.S. capitalists are finding it extraordinarily difficult to organize their way out of the worsening global economic crisis they created. The most powerful sections of the ruling class are beginning to assert themselves by either taking over smaller, failing banks and companies or eliminating them. This will enable the top financiers to control the entire banking system and enforce their long-term strategy of fascism at home and war abroad to protect their oil empire. All the out-of-control profiteers seeking short-term gains are now being disciplined, to follow the top guns or fall by the wayside.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Paulson’s original bailout bill couldn’t make it through a rebellious Congress and the remake failed to inspire investors and contributed to Wall Street’s worst week since 1933. “Some $8.4 trillion has been lost from US stock markets in the past year.” (Times of London, 10/12/08)
Another failed cure was Paulson’s decision to let Lehman Brothers go under. Rather than cleanse the investment banking system, the move worsened the situation. Wall Street investment giants Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch have all had to find new ways to exist.
Even a massive bailout from Washington may not save General Motors as an independent company, it having launched merger talks with Ford and Chrysler. Tens of thousands of auto jobs are at risk, on top of the 750,000 jobs lost overall this year.

MEGA-MONEY BOYS SOROS,
BUFFETT, BLOOMBERG TAKE CHARGE

But economic chaos and destruction represent only one side of the coin. While the bosses appear to be losing control, the biggest U.S. capitalists, those with major stakes in U.S. imperialism, are in fact tightening their economic and political grip. Billionaire George Soros — who bankrolls anti-Russian regimes in Eastern Europe and urges anti-China “intervention” in Tibet and Darfur — helped steer a big shift in the bailout policy.
The New York Times reported (10/12): “Two weeks after persuading Congress to let it spend $700 billion to buy distressed securities tied to mortgages, the Bush administration has put that idea aside in favor of a new approach that would have the government inject capital directly into the nation’s banks — in effect, partially nationalizing the industry.”
On Oct. 1st, Soros had written in London’s Financial Times, “Instead of just purchasing troubled assets the bulk of the funds ought to be used to recapitalize the banking system.” Nationalizing the banks helps imperialists like Soros & Co. control capital and channel it to their own, increasingly military, needs to maintain U.S. rulers’ super-power status. That the Soros position prevailed over both Bush and the Congress reveals the true nature of state power. As Lenin said ninety years ago, politicians are ruled by finance capital.
Financier Warren Buffett, Forbes Magazine’s “Richest Man on the Planet,” is another master of U.S. capitalism’s rapidly evolving new universe. Buffett, an ally of the Rockefeller-led Eastern Establishment, has a big say in who survives the current carnage. He just threw multi-billion-dollar lifelines to two of U.S. imperialism’s flagships, worldwide deal-maker Goldman Sachs and arms maker General Electric.
Known for having a long-term outlook, Buffett recently invested heavily in U.S. railroads. Though not very lucrative at present, Buffett’s railroads will prove indispensible in mobilizing for global war and are beginning large-scale infrastructure rebuilding. Without an efficient rail system, it becomes very difficult to move large number of troops, supplies and weapons coast to coast.
Buffett is also the largest single owner of Wells Fargo, which bested Citigroup in its attempt to seize Wachovia, saddled with toxic subprime mortgages.
Wall Street darling Bloomberg’s bid for a currently illegal third term as New York mayor serves the same imperialist capital-concentrating purpose. On October 2, thirty ruling class big shots published an Open Letter in the NY Times urging lawmakers to “extend term limits [to three terms] in order to give New Yorkers the opportunity for whomever [sic] they think can do the best job during these tough economic times, including our current mayor.”
The signers included ultra-imperialists like David Rockefeller and his war criminal henchman Henry Kissinger. Others were J.P. Morgan Chase chief James Dimon, Goldman boss Lloyd Blankfein, and financier Wilbur Ross. The latter is bent on safeguarding U.S. industries like coal, steel, and textiles, all crucial to the manufacture of weapons, tanks, warplanes, troop uniforms and gear, and all the other ingredients of modern warfare.

GLOBAL WAR: OBAMA,
MCCAIN AGREE ON GOAL, DIFFER ON APPROACH

Stopgap measures like bailouts, buy-ups, and partial nationalization can only bring a mix of successes and setbacks to U.S. rulers. Their imperialist wing, however, eyes the Big Bailout, top-to-bottom militarization for global war with rivals like Russia and China. Liberal Robert Reich, Clinton’s Labor Secretary, let that cat out of the bag in an October 9 NY Times column.
Encouraging broad federal spending to counter the current crisis, Reich said, “the government will probably have to run deficits to keep the economy going anywhere near capacity, a lesson the nation learned when mobilization for World War II finally lifted us out of the Great Depression.” That’s when the mass unemployment of the 1930’s — 17 million jobless in a 50-million workforce — was “solved” by drafting 14 million into the military.
Candidate Obama vows to put millions to work —in low-wage jobs— in New Deal-style programs to rebuild strategic infrastructure. His call to reinvigorate the nation economically serves the rulers’ war agenda even better than McCain’s openly militarist appeal.
The rulers well know that most U.S. workers and GIs in World War II did not back the McCain-like, patriotic, right-wing “America First” line. Opposed to Hitler’s fascism, they bought into “The American Way of Life,” Roosevelt’s promise of state-sponsored post-war prosperity. This built the illusion that “reformed” capitalism can guarantee a decent life and tie workers to the profit system. Obama hopes to revive that illusion.
Neither economic crisis nor voting can eliminate the class dictatorship finance capitalists blatantly flaunt every day. Only communist revolution can because it abolishes profits, bosses and their wage slavery system and puts the workers in control of state power, guaranteeing our class — which produces all value — will share the fruits of our labors.
The profit system’s crisis, with its wholesale attack on workers’ wages, pensions, housing and healthcare, its racist super-exploitation of black and Latino workers, opens up limitless opportunities for communists to expose the anti-working-class nature of capitalism.
However, no matter how low capitalism sinks, it will not topple itself as long as the bosses hold their ace-in-the-hole — state power. That’s why the revolutionary communist PLP must be built and win workers to bury capitalism in the garbage heap of history.

Troops, Cops, Tanks and Copters Can’t Crush Morelos Teachers’ Strike

MORELOS, Mexico, Oct. 10 — For several days over 2,000 Army troops and state and federal cops, using tanks and helicopters, viciously attacked teachers, parents (many of them indigenous) and other supporters blocking a national highway. Some 24,000 teachers in this state have been striking for two months against a government “reform” called Alliance for Quality Education that aims to privatize schools and intensify attacks on working conditions teachers have won through many decades of struggles.
The teachers are not only fighting the repressive arm of the bosses’ state but also the “mother of all union sellouts,” Elba Esther Gordillo. She is “President for life” of the SNTE (National Teachers’ Union), a Senator and firm supporter of the government of Felipe Calderón.
The militant teachers and supporters have also repudiated all the bosses’ parties, burning electoral propaganda of the PAN, the ruling Party, the PRI (which ruled Mexico for 60 years) and the so-called pro-people PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution).
The teachers and their supporters fought against the military-cop attack even after being forced off the highway, battling the cops and troops from side streets. The rulers sent more reinforcements. Helicopters launched tear gas against protesters. Homes were raided and numerous arrests made, with many injured.
It was another major class battle workers and their allies waged against the capitalist dictatorship ruling Mexico. In the last several years, similar struggles occurred during the massive strike and popular uprising led by teachers in Oaxaca and by striking miners who repelled a massive attack by cops and troops.
During this battle, teachers and supporters marched from three different places and rallied at a major square to oppose the assault. Contingents of teachers from Oaxaca, Mexico City, Michoacán and Guerrero joined the demonstration.
On Oct. 8, in Mexico City thousands of teachers from 17 different regions marched to the Secretary of Education headquarters opposing the educational “reform” and denouncing the violent attack against teachers in Morelos. The marchers stopped at the Interior Ministry, ripped down fences surrounding the building and fought federal cops. They then set up a permanent “plantón” (picket line) at the Secretary of Education.
Some PLP teachers and friends from Oaxaca have gone to Morelos to support fellow teachers there, bringing our communist literature to them. Marches have been held in Oaxaca to support the struggle in Morelos. A national teachers’ strike is now pending and should become a general strike of the entire working class.
These militant actions take place amid the global capitalist economic earthquake which is hitting Mexico very hard since it is tied to the U.S. economy. The recent drop in oil prices and the decreased funds sent to Mexico from immigrants in the U.S. — who have lost their jobs because of the U.S. recession — have worsened the economic crisis here. Even the fortune of Carlos Slim, one of the world’s richest capitalists, has been cut in half because of losses in the local and international stock market.
Only the drug cartel business is prospering here, producing a violent war for the control of the drug profits involving different sections of the ruling class and their corrupt politicians and cops.
PLP teachers, workers and students must redouble our efforts to bring our revolutionary communist politics to the masses of workers and their allies who are experiencing the violent dictatorship of the bourgeois “democratic” state over the working class. DESAFIO must become a key ideological tool in this important task of turning the anger of workers and their allies into a mass revolutionary storm to destroy capitalism.
Teachers, students and workers in the U.S. should stand in solidarity with Mexico’s striking teachers, raising support in their unions and mass organizations.

Anti-Racist Unity Key to Stella D’Oro Strike
City Univ. Staff Backs Bakery Workers

BRONX, NY — Chants of “No Contract, No Cookies!’ and “Stella, Stella, Stella, we are Stella!” rang out from 135 members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTWGM) Local 50. These workers have been on strike since August 13 in reaction to the drastic, concessionary demands of their bosses. Brynwood Partners, the new owners of Stella D’Oro, are demanding the elimination of holidays, vacation and sick pay, requiring large healthcare premiums and calling for wage reductions in each year of the new contract.
Members of the Professional Staff Congress-CUNY (PSC) in the Bronx were well received when we joined the picket lines and offered our support. The president of BCTWGM Local 50 addressed a packed chapter meeting of PSC members. She reported that the strikers were 100% solid on the line and that they were committed to continue the fight, despite scabs in the plant and threatening letters from management. We passed the hat and made plans to support the bakers.
A week later, the citywide Delegate Assembly of PSC discussed and passed a resolution in support of the bakers. A delegate pointed out that while the Stella strike was different than the Boeing strike where tens of thousands were out, the struggles contained similar elements. One of the issues at Boeing is the loss of jobs due to the contracting out of work to non-union shops where mostly immigrant workers are paid a fraction of the pay unionized workers receive. At Stella, the Brynwood managers sent letters to workers telling them to quit their union and return to work at poverty wages. In both cases the owners are trying to drastically decrease wages.
While most PSC activists are sympathetic to the Stella strikers, there is disagreement as to how much of an effort our union can and should make to support the strike. Many feel overwhelmed by the financial crisis and upcoming budget cuts and feel that we should focus on our own problems.
PLP has always said that when workers fight their bosses we must support them vigorously, no matter how big or small the struggle. Helping these workers is not simply “charity.” The bosses use racism to prevent other workers from joining these mostly black and Latin workers in their fight, allowing for their super-exploitation. We must fight this by creating multi-racial unity in this and every fight against the bosses.
Only by uniting with other members of the working class can we build the fight for workers to fight back to end exploitation and the capitalist system. Workers and students from around the New York area should join the Stella workers on the line. Bring your friends and signs of support. Donate money and canned goods. Let us build solidarity and fight to win!

Strikers Defy Cops, Stand Fast

BRONX, NY, October 9 –– Bronx, NY, October 9 –– “This is a great article,” said a Stella D’Oro striker (Local 50, Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union) as he and others read the CHALLENGE article supporting their strike.
“Scabs. That’s who they have working in there. There is only one supervisor in there now who knows anything about the job. All the workers who know how to make cookies, including the guy who runs the computer, are out here with us,” another striker told PLP members and friends when we joined them on the picket line today. The scabs not only don’t know how to make cookies, but more importantly, they don’t realize that they are helping their own enemies. They simply see this as a chance to earn a few dollars. They don’t understand that the Stella D’Oro strike can give all workers an example of how we can unite to fight back against our bosses.
One striker explained, “they [Stella D’Oro and other bosses] just want to bust the unions and stop people from fighting back. The cops have harassed us off and on. At times they have tried to shut down our picket line.” They removed the shelter used to protect the strikers from the weather and ordered the removal of all chairs from their strike site.
“But we are still here,” added another. Counting on fear, the bosses had expected strikers to run scared, give up and accept their fascist contract which cuts sick days, vacation days and wages (see October 15 CHALLENGE for more details). Instead, after nearly two months the strikers are still united, angry and determined to keep fighting.
PLP’ers asked some strikers to come to the October 15 UFT (United Federation of Teachers) Delegate Assembly where we will try to raise strike support. We also invited strikers to speak at the October 18 PLP forum on the elections.
All workers have a lot to learn from the Stella D’Oro strikers, including how they are sticking together, black, white, Latino, Asian, native-born and immigrant to fight back. This anti-racist unity terrifies the bosses who depend on racism to divide workers. All of us must carry this fight to the point of uniting the entire working class to get rid of all the bosses and their capitalist system and build a system run by the working class for the working class.

Sellout Unions Battle for ‘Right’ to Screw Rebellious Hospital Workers

CHICAGO, IL October 9 – Cook County health care workers are in open rebellion against the SEIU union leadership. Class hatred has been brewing since SEIU defended County President Todd Stroger and his racist hatchet man Dr. Simon, as they closed half the health clinics that served more than one million uninsured workers in 2007. It cost us over 2,000 jobs and 100,000 fewer patient visits. This was a blatantly racist attack as 82% of our patients, and most of the workers, are black, Latin and Asian.
Now “safety-net” hospitals, like Michael Reese are closing. And with the current Wall Street meltdown, things are going to get a lot worse. Workers are under attack from the racist profit system that is expanding its trillion-dollar oil war in Iraq-Afghanistan–Pakistan, carrying out racist terror immigration raids, eliminating the second shift at the Chicago Ford Assembly Plant next month and having made one-out-of-every-four CTA bus drivers unable to support their families on new part-time schedules.
Just as politicians and preachers try to misdirect rebellions against police terror, and the IAM union leaders try to control the 5-week strike of 27,000 Boeing workers, misleaders are channeling this rebellion into a campaign to replace SEIU with the Caregivers Healthcare Employees Union (CHEU), led by the California Nurses’ Association (CNA). The struggle between the two unions has been growing around the country and has led to hundreds of SEIU members crashing a banquet at the Labor Notes conference in Detroit last spring. One SEIU member died of a heart attack in the melee.
In part, this is AFL-CIO President John Sweeney’s revenge after his protégé Andy Stern led SEIU and a dozen other unions out of the labor federation two years ago. They smell weakness at Cook County and are spending lots of money to defeat SEIU, including nightly catered dinners for the workers at a nearby hotel.
Petitions have been filed with the Illinois Labor Board (ILB) for elections in all four bargaining units. In response, County bosses are trying to buy SEIU some votes by finally paying the upgrade we “won” in the last contract, almost four years ago. It’s unlikely the $14 “upgrade” will put down the rebellion.
While the mutiny of workers at Stroger Hospital and other County facilities is good, trading one set of pro-capitalist union leaders for another will only lead to disappointment, especially in the midst of widening war and deepening economic crises. The real lasting victory will be increasing the readership of CHALLENGE and recruiting new members to PLP who will help build a revolution to replace this exploitative system.
No matter who wins the White House, the racist rulers will need trillions more to expand their oil wars and rescue Wall Street. A struggle against racist unemployment guided by communist politics, that unites County, CTA and Ford workers with immigrant workers and unemployed youth can build the revolutionary communist PLP and open the door to revolution!

Expose Obama/Spike Lee Drive to Win Youth to Fight Bosses’ Oil Wars

About 35 people, mostly high school students, came to a dinner-forum about the election, the economic crisis and the Boeing strike. After a clear presentation showing that Obama and McCain were both financed by big bankers and both support wider war, there was a very lively discussion. A student who went to support Boeing workers told about the militancy of the strikers and their openness to CHALLENGE. He invited the rest to help distribute it at factories and demonstrate in support of Boeing strikers.
The discussion emphasized how, while both McCain and Obama are capitalist politicians, Obama appeals to our friends who are angry about racism and attacks on education, health care and jobs. U.S. imperialism is in crisis. Preparations are being made for wider war. The bosses need to win young people to fight in this war, and an important goal of Obama’s candidacy is winning young people to support this system.
A comrade mentioned the new Spike Lee movie, “Miracle at St. Anna” as an example of this. In an interview in the 9/25/08 Los Angeles Times, Lee says, “It [the election of Obama as the first African American president] is going to happen,(and) I think that that is a sign of the greatness of this country” and uses a scene from the movie to make his point. Bishop [a black soldier in the movie] asks, ‘Why are we here? This is not our war.’ And Stamps [another black soldier] answers, ‘I am doing this for the future. I am doing this for my children.’” Both the movie and the Obama campaign are all about trying to win youth and workers to see the coming inter-imperialist war for profits as “our war.”
Many students at the forum pledged to expose the election as the bosses’ campaign to sucker young people into fighting against their class brothers and sisters in the Middle East. Many also pledged to help support the Boeing strike. They also took extra CHALLENGES, and asked when the next meeting was. The only war which is, in reality, “OUR WAR” is the revolutionary war which will put the working class in power and enable us to build a communist society. And we’re not waiting for a miracle — we’re taking steps now to make this a reality.

Belgian General Strike Blasts Bailout Assault on Workers

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, October 6 — The financial meltdown of world capitalism is prompting workers to fight back, refusing to pay for the bosses’ crisis. Today’s general strike here was “a warning to the government and the bosses.” Workers paid no heed to rulers’ pleas “not to aggravate” the shaky economic situation. Instead, workers here set an example for workers internationally by taking the offensive.
Workers are demanding no wage-cuts, a higher minimum wage, equal benefits for young workers, government action to reduce the cost of trips between home and the workplace, higher welfare benefits, and lower taxes on workers and higher taxes on the rich and the corporations.
The strike shut the country’s major factories, such as Audi (auto) and Sonaca (aeronautics) in the Brussels area and the Charleroi steel mills. Work stoppages and workers’ on-the-job mass assemblies hit banks and superstores. Teachers struck nation-wide, as did postal workers and workers in national and local governments. Some cities (like Sambreville) decided to close “in a show of solidarity” rather than be shut by municipal workers.
Antwerp and Bruges, in Flemish-speaking regions, ground to a halt, as did Charleroi and Liège in French-speaking areas. The subway, trams and buses in Brussels — Belgium’s capital and the seat of the major European Union institutions — were all at a standstill. Practically no trains were running, disrupting both domestic traffic and travel to Amsterdam, Cologne and Paris.
On June 6, 100,000 workers had demonstrated in Brussels demanding the government take emergency measures to defend their purchasing power. Since then only prices have risen: food up 7.9%; electricity up 20%; natural gas up 50%; and heating oil up 59%.
The Belgian bosses’ answer to that demonstration was a new round of downsizing, repeated attacks on such public services as education, transport and health care, an attempt to impose a wage freeze and to make any improvement in welfare benefits dependent on a reduction in the corporate tax rate.
However, the power of the workers is being derailed by the leadership of the three major unions, the socialist FGTB, the Christian CSC, and the liberal CGSLB, which only want to influence the government’s proposed budget, scheduled for October 14.
In this period of global crisis and endless wars, the bosses — even if they give workers some crumbs — will try to take them away as soon as possible. The best victory workers can gain from these struggles is to turn them into schools for communism, forging the revolutionary leadership needed to fight for real workers’ power: communism.

Anti-Immigrant Raids Attack on All Workers

GREENVILLE, S.C., October 7 — The Gestapo-like immigration police (Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE) has struck terror again, raiding the Columbia Farms poultry plant today and arresting 330 immigrant workers. Some 450 ICE agents started the raid at the 9:00 AM shift-change, breaking up families and leaving children without their parents.
They burst in like Nazi storm troopers, terrorizing workers. Similar to previous mass raids in a Laurel, Miss. electronics plant and an Iowa meat-processing plant, the agents blocked the gates to prevent workers from escaping. They then separated workers, giving blue wristbands to U.S. citizens and immigrants with resident cards, enabling them to leave.
Today we see the biggest anti-immigrant attacks “since the dragnet-style sweeps of the 1950s known as ‘Operation Wetback.’ On any given day, more than 30,000 ‘illegal’ immigrants are crowded into jail cells awaiting deportation. Annual deportations now exceed a quarter million, the highest level in U.S. history... This year there have been nearly 5,000 arrests, 10 times the level of just five years ago.” (Edward Alden, NY Post, 10/12). The claimed aim of the raids is to catch people guilty of I.D. thefts and those working without “proper documents.” But as Alden says, “the raids are conducted in headline-grabbing fashion designed to incite fear among other undocumented workers.”
The real aim is to terrorize immigrant and all workers to work for less and under rotten conditions, in order to produce super-profits for the bosses. So this is basically a terror attack against the entire working class. The same methods ICE is using today will be directed against any workers fighting for their jobs or for decent conditions, particularly in this age of economic meltdown.
The rulers are already preparing for any major fight-back against their economic crisis. The 3rd Infantry’s 1st Brigade Combat Team is returning from Iraq to be used as “an on-call federal response force for...emergencies.” (Army Times, 9/8)
Workers who support such raids, thinking they “will preserve jobs for Americans,” are not only fooling themselves but betraying their interests and those of the entire working class.

Public Health Workers Can’t Count on Obama

Over 10,000 public health workers will meet in San Diego for this year’s American Public Health Association (APHA) convention. The theme is “Health Care Without Borders.” The meeting occurs amid a global capitalist crisis and a growing trend towards fascism and world war.
APHA leaders will try to convince us to work quietly in our clinics and labs and not challenge the vicious out-of-control capitalist system. Last fall, the reality of anti-immigrant racism was dramatized when wildfires in the San Diego area burned undocumented immigrant workers to death as they made their way from the Mexican border, hiding from racist immigration agents in a wooded area.
APHA’s theory differs sharply from its practice. Its Governing Council has adopted resolutions against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars but every year military recruiters and billion-dollar defense contractors have lavish exhibits at the meeting. Attempts to exclude them were squashed by Executive Director Dr. Georges Benjamin, the former Director of Emergency Medicine at Walter Reed Army Hospital.
After 9/11, APHA leaders tried to tighten federal control over public health, coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security. Benjamin’s Washington-based APHA staff has consistently supported federal efforts to bring the public health workforce into line with the “national security” agenda but rank-and-file workers and students resisted.
This year, despite the pro-immigrant theme and the meeting’s location adjacent to Mexico, no anti-racist action is planned. Meanwhile U.S. government anti-immigrant racism gives the green light to gutter racists like the Minutemen, APHA could fight this. Imagine 10,000 public health workers picketing the racist border fence in San Diego!
The convention meets just days before the presidential election. Most public health workers deplore the terrible toll racism takes on the health of black, Latino and immigrant workers. The vast majority of APHA members support Obama for president. They view an election of a black president as striking a blow against racism. But just as selection of Dr. Benjamin, a prominent black health figure as APHA’s Executive Director did not stop racist cutbacks and hospital closings nation-wide, electing Obama will not lessen the systemic racist attacks against exploited and uninsured workers. He promises to expand the Iraq war into Pakistan and carry out the bankers’ orders to resolve the financial crisis.
A better world for the people and communities we serve will require more than a different defender of capitalism. It requires a different SYSTEM, communism, led by the international working class that produces everything.
On Obama’s Chicago South Side, 13 health clinics were closed in 2007, affecting more than one million uninsured workers in Cook County. More than 80% of County patients are black and Latino. In Washington, D.C., the White House is surrounded by a racist AIDS epidemic that rivals any super-exploited country. Either we will serve the people or the bankers. It will soon become clearer who Obama serves. It must become clearer who we serve as well.

LETTERS

Boeing Striker on Bosses: ‘Hang ’em all!’

We went to Seattle to support the Boeing strike bringing communist politics to the picket line. All the workers we talked to wanted the CHALLENGE, except for a couple of union hacks. There was tremendous anger at Boeing, the bankers and the IAM leaders. Very few defended capitalism. “Hang ’em [the bosses] all,” was a common refrain.
At one picket line, while a couple of union hacks made some anti-communist statements to CHALLENGE sellers, next to them a worker who had read the paper before was eager to talk. He said, “We’re all serfs.”
“Well, actually if we were serfs, we’d have a plot of land and grow food,” I replied. “We’d have to give most to the lord and have some to keep for ourselves. We’re workers with nothing to sell but our labor power.” He agreed and laughed at the point that, “If we were serfs then we’d grow food during this strike.” We talked about how capitalism created one international working class forced to work for a wage, how subcontractor workers in LA and in the south are also exploited by Boeing and how we need to unite as one class and get rid of the bosses. He gladly took the paper in front of the union hacks. He told us where other picket lines were and encouraged us to go there as well.
In a conversation at lunch the next day a CHALLENGE reader shop steward explained the hypocrisy of Boeing promising that in the face of contracting out work, the union has the “right” to bid on the jobs. “That’s impossible,” he said. “We don’t determine manpower. We can’t send a group of workers to do a job that’s slated to be contracted out.”
It’s time to build a mass PLP, to fight for workers to run society so that the vast potential of the international working class will be used to fight and produce for our own class’ needs. In a communist society, workers from all over will be welcomed to help meet the needs of our class, without wages, racist divisions or inequality. The growth of CHALLENGE among industrial workers is a step toward this life and death goal
Red Supporter on the Picket Lines

‘Service Nation’ Masks Obama-McCain War Draft

Along with fellow students and teachers from my PLP club, I recently participated in a demonstration at Columbia University against a National Service summit sponsored by “ServiceNation.” Both Obama and McCain presented their plans to launch a broad national post-election service campaign.
Our signs read, “Oppose McBama’s Imperialist Agenda”; “The election is a puppet show; cut the strings”; and, “ServiceNation is a Smokescreen for Military Recruitment.” Columbia students and others approached us with genuine interest in why we were opposing elections and calling Obama imperialist. We had in-depth conversations about changing society and addressed many systemic problems before us. We also distributed copies of the PLP election pamphlet and CHALLENGE. There were also several people who gave us cold stares, reminding us that liberal ideology can be viciously anti-communist and foreshadowing the climate under a possible Obama presidency.
Only a small audience was allowed inside to hear the candidates. The school erected a giant video screen in the quadrangle and over 1,000 students listened and applauded enthusiastically.
Upon returning home, I watched interviews with the candidates on C-Span. When interviewer Leslie Stahl asked Obama if he would consider extending better quality, military-style benefits to civilians who went abroad into countries who were hostile to the U.S., he said that was part of his national service plan and that he would consider it.
Thus, U.S. rulers are planning to use unarmed civilians (in an expanded Peace Corps-style program) as propaganda tools for U.S. imperialism. Further, they’re planning to offer material incentives to convince them, and they expect casualties.
Workers and other PLP members need to struggle with friends and expose national service plans.
Even if Obama loses the election, he said he plans to build a mass, non-profit national service organization. This indicates that the bosses are dead serious about “enlisting” us as much more active co-conspirators in their inter-imperialist struggles with their rivals. We must struggle with workers inside these organizations to categorically reject patriotic allegiance to countries (actually to its bosses) and wholeheartedly embrace service to the international working class. That’s true service: communism.
Intent on Serving the Working Class

Talking Communism with Stella D’Oro Strikers

Our new PLP study-action group of young people and teachers visited striking Stella D’Oro workers (see page 3) who are showing amazing strength and resilience against bosses’ sharp attacks on their livelihoods. This was the first time several of our leafletters, put forward communist politics publicly. “It made me come out of my shell,” said one youth, whose mother had encouraged her to “be more independent” and “be a leader.”
When a scab exited the factory, we confronted him in a heated exchange and refused to back down when he physically threatened us. The workers rose up in one powerful chorus when he dismissively said, “I didn’t come here to take anyone’s job.”
Bosses try to convince scabs they’re just taking care of themselves, but scabbing is a vicious and divisive attack on a united working class fighting for its needs.
Our best conversations involved talking to workers about communism. When we first asked these friendly workers what they thought of our politics, a few said, “Oh, we don’t want communism.” But as we explored what a communist society really means, and showed how the old communist movement made fatal mistakes in building socialism instead of communism, we made progress, showing them that they’ve been lied to by the bosses’ educational system and media, and that PLP is a serious party offering a well-thought-out alternative.
These were important steps in building our local collective, struggling with young people to lead in the class struggle. The bosses’ schools offer these youth “public service” opportunities which are deceptive and insult their potential as leaders while ultimately propping up capitalism.
We are struggling with these young people to immerse themselves in the bosses’ mass organizations while simultaneously emphasizing that only a revolutionary communist movement can provide true leadership opportunities to build a mass movement for their class, for the interests of workers worldwide.
Red Students and Teachers

Ayers No Radical, Just ‘Establishment’ Liberal

The McCain-Palin campaign is attacking Obama for his relationship with Bill Ayers, a former leading member of the Weathermen and today an educator guru linked to the Chicago Democratic Party machine. Ayers went from one form of reformism to another, all the time serving the interests of today’s biggest terrorists: the U.S. bosses.
The following letter was sent to the NY Times by two former members of Students For a Democratic Society’s Worker-Student Alliance caucus, something the Times will probably never print.
******************************************
Please stop calling Bill Ayers a radical. He demeans the term. We are former members of the Students For A Democratic Society (SDS), U.S. history’s largest student movement (which Ayers helped to destroy) and are still radicals today. There was never anything radical about born-to-wealth Bill Ayers. He opposed the radical “going-to-the-root” of social problems. In 1969, Ayers’ “Weathermen” sought to replace a movement of people organizing for freedom, equality and peace with authoritarian mis-leadership and bombs. Then, he was a liberal with explosives.
Today, he’s a foundation-funded liberal as Mayor Richard Dailey’s endorsement demonstrates. His tiny sect was the Mussolini-like”action-faction,” celebrating irrationalism, drugs and exploitative sex, pandering to the nationalisms of the day. They held most people in the world in utter contempt. Before the biggest outpouring of student activism in the last century, the Weathermen destroyed the SDS mailing list, leaving the movement with no center.
Those of us in SDS who opposed the Weathermen and who did not abandon grassroots struggles for worldwide justice, know him for what he is. That Ayers supports liberal Obama, who promises wider wars and is poised to oversee “national socialism,” is no surprise.

Workers Need Class Analysis

With all the media hand-wringing over how investment houses, banks, insurance groups, real estate brokers and lawyers could sign off on the hundreds of billions in bogus housing loans which they knew could never be re-paid, I haven’t yet heard anyone suggest that Wall Street was just following the federal government’s policy of going $11 trillion in debt (mostly spent on wars and military) for which they had no credit. Whether the rulers decide to use taxpayers’ money to buy up the worthless loans and allow the same crooks to continue business (robbery) as usual or if they make regulations and penalties to limit some of the biggest gougers, the fact remains that our capitalist system is structured so that it must continue to exploit and steal from workers to survive.
Crises, recessions and depressions have been regular periodic features of capitalism since its beginnings, resolved only through additional suffering and death for millions of workers here and worldwide to bail out capitalists for the economic failures of their system.
Another form of bailout to preserve the rulers’ power and wealth during severe crises is wars against other capitalist competitor nations to send potentially revolutionary workers at home onto foreign battlefields to fight for their rulers’ international hegemony.
The rulers’ biggest fear is that the working class has the power to turn the guns around and end these bosses’ wars, end the $11 trillion debt and end capitalism itself, just at the Bolsheviks ended Russian involvement in World War I, renounced the Tsar’s debt to the capitalists and attacked capitalism. This is why the media is capitalist-owned and billions are spent yearly to convince workers that no matter how severe the crises or how corrupt the system, capitalism must be reserved at all costs.
Only our communist newspaper CHALLENGE can supply workers with a class analysis of why these crises and wars occur and why capitalism can never serve workers’ interests. Comrades must use every one of these rulers’ attacks to get CHALLENGE into workers’ hands and recruit them to PLP to build a revolution to destroy capitalism and create a system without profits, racism and wars, a system that provides for workers’ needs worldwide — communism.
Classy comrade

France-wide Protests Hit Bosses’ Meltdown of Wages

PARIS, October 7 — Some 100,000 workers demonstrated in 90 protests across France demanding workers not pay for world capitalism’s banking meltdown, the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Over 13,000 trade unionists marched in Paris. Three hundred unionists from 14 European countries met for the World Day for Decent Work sponsored by the International Trade Union Confederation.
PSA Aulnay auto workers were among the loudest in the Paris march, chanting: “To get out of the crisis, it’s not the banks that need to be helped, it’s wages that have to be raised.” This reflected the fear of millions of workers worldwide who are forced to pay to save the bankers and bosses with untold billions in bailouts.
A government worker in the Paris suburb of Stains defines himself first and foremost as a worker. His monthly salary, 1380 euros ($2,000) is his household’s only income, with unpaid bills piling up. He questioned why “banks that are up to their necks in debt are getting billions,” whereas no one’s bailing out his debts. “But,” he sighed, “that’s the way it always is for us workers.”
Nearby, another worker retorted: “That’s the way it is, but that’s not the way it should be!”
To be sure, but workers must realize the nature of the crisis. The union leaders, whose goal is a few more crumbs from a “reformed capitalism,” are part of the problem. They build illusions that a “lesser-evil” ruler can make things better for workers — “Dump Sarkozy, dump Bush and things can get better.” But it doesn’t matter who rules.
It’s not just some greedy bankers in Paris, London or New York; it’s not even the anti-working class, racist policies of Bush and Sarkozy — although they surely are at fault. It is capitalism itself. The nature of the system, social production but private profits for a tiny minority, creates the basis for these periodic crises.
With each successive crisis, workers pay more and more. Workers must learn from the lessons of the past. Global economic turmoil will sharpen all the inter-imperialist contradictions.
During the 1930s, the Nazis came to power and built a war economy to “solve” the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s New Deal created government-sponsored job programs, but another recession followed in 1937. World War II’s military draft “solved” the Depression’s mass unemployment problem in the U.S.
Only the then communist-led Soviet Union was untouched by the Great Depression, in sharp contrast to Putin’s Russia today. The USSR was also the only European country on the continent that didn’t fold or surrender when the Nazis invaded, and then defeated Hitler’s war machine.
Today, there’s no Soviet Union to inspire the world’s workers, but the threat of global imperialist war is now sharper. The world’s working class has a gigantic task: break with all the agents of the ruling class, regain class consciousness and learn from the past achievements and errors of the revolutionaries who preceded us. Fight for the only real solution to this capitalist hellhole: communism. That’s PLP’s goal. Join us!

Obama Healthcare Plan Hazardous to Your Health

Barack Obama is calling for affordable healthcare for all. While appearing progressive, a closer look reveals that his plan is barely a bandaid. Obama is not calling for universal healthcare. Even if he were, universal healthcare never means equal healthcare under capitalism. The following just touches the surface of his “reform.”
In 2007, PBS compared U.S. healthcare statistics to Japan, the UK, Germany and Switzerland.(1) The U.S. spends more on healthcare (15.8% of its Gross Domestic Product) than any of the above. But the increased costs don’t produce better care. The report shows that, in comparison, people here have a shorter life expectancy and higher infant mortality rate. The extra costs go into the profit coffers of insurance and drug companies. The other countries boast a “socialized medicine,” “national health insurance” or “social insurance” model. In these countries, everyone has healthcare (although it’s not free for everyone). However, as of 2006, 47 million people in the U.S. had no health coverage.(2)
The U.S. actually ranks 41st in life-expectancy statistics compared to other countries. Mainstream media often cites obesity and racial disparities as the main cause.(3) But without a class analysis, this seems to blame the problem on individuals, for being fat or black, instead of the system.

WILL OBAMA FIX THIS PROBLEM?

Myth #1: Under Obama’s plan everyone will receive free healthcare.
Reality: Those who don’t qualify for Medicaid or State Children Health Insurance Plan (an income of $20,614 for a family of four in 2006), will be expected to buy into the new plan, or purchase private healthcare coverage, with an income-related federal subsidy, if their employer does not offer health insurance.(4) This implies universal access to a health plan, but not government-mandated universal coverage (compared to other countries).
Myth #2: Catastrophic illness medical bills will be covered.
Reality: Catastrophic illnesses are those that incur major expenses such as lengthy hospital stays and financial losses, including loss of work. Heart attacks and cancer are examples of catastrophic illness. A high percentage of U.S. workers, 40% for example in California, hold jobs that do not offer sick days, and therefore lose a day’s pay for each day they’re out sick. Obama’s plan would reimburse employer health plans for a portion of the catastrophic costs they incur above a threshold.(5) The only people able to go to top hospitals for cancer or surgery would be those who could afford it, the way it is now.
Myth #3: Obama’s plan will cover long-term care for the elderly.
Reality: People over 80 are the fastest growing segment of the population. Most need some kind of assistant care. Currently, in a nursing home, Medicare pays only for short-term rehabilitation immediately following a hospitalization. After that, people must pay out of their pockets until all their money is gone and they’re eligible for Medicaid. Obama says he’ll “work to” improve the choices, the quality of care and to reform the financing of long-term care. Beyond that, nothing more specific.
Myth #4: The Obama campaign says he would finance his health plan costs by allowing expiration of tax cuts adopted in 2001 and 2003 for families making over $250,000. (New England Journal of Medicine, (8/21/2008)
Reality: In its projections, the Congressional Budget Office has already assumed this extra money coming from the ending of the tax cuts.
Myth #5: Taken from his website: “Obama will tackle the root causes of health disparities by addressing differences in access to health coverage.”(6)
Reality: This is impossible for Obama, or anyone else, to fix under capitalism. In its drive for profit, capitalism creates poverty and racism, which causes these disparities in healthcare. “Blacks with diabetes or vascular disease are nearly five times more likely than whites to have a leg amputated” and “women in Mississippi are far less likely to have mammograms than those in Maine.”(7)
Worldwide, a woman in Sweden or Japan will typically live past 80 years, while the average woman in Swaziland does not live to see her 30th birthday. Without noting that disparities in U.S. healthcare (and healthcare worldwide) stem from poverty and racism — inherent under capitalism — these problems won’t disappear.
While many workers believe Obama’s healthcare reform is in their interest, the truth is Obama only represents the interests of the capitalist class. But Obama and McCain and the bosses they serve face a major contradiction: On the one hand, they need more physically-fit soldiers to fight in their endless wars against their imperialist rivals, but on the other hand they need to cut the costs of all social services including healthcare, to pay for that very military and for their current fiscal meltdown. No doubt they will try to solve this contradiction on the backs of the working class.
1. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/sickaroundtheworld/countries/)
2. (http://public.cq.com/docs/cqt/news110-000002575515.html)
3. (http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/08/13/life.expectancy.ap/index.html)
4. (http://www.barackobama.com/issues/healthcare/).
5. ibid.
6. Ibid
7.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/health/research/05disparities.html

‘Religulous’: Methadone for the Masses

Amid an escalating crisis, the difficulties of life under capitalism enter conversations quickly. “I lost my home, but si dios quiere (god willing) we’ll get another one soon...as long as I don’t get laid off,” said a friend, a worker and single mother of two. She is not alone, as the California East Bay Area where she used to live has the fourth highest number of foreclosures in the nation. Today more than ever, workers’ lives are directly under attack, so why such faith?
“Religulous,” a documentary featuring comedian Bill Maher, outlines various reasons why people shouldn’t adhere to religion. He interviews creationists, a Christian congregation, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, ex-Mormons, and others. The film debunks religious claims to morality and history, concluding that believing in religion is like believing in fairy tales. “Religulous” links war, politics, and foreign policy to religion — interviewing a senator and using clips of Bush spouting blurbs of god, country, and freedom in relation to the Iraq War.
The combination of facts and comedic ridicule proves entertaining, but Maher’s elitist cynicism (he’s a libertarian apatheist [apathy + atheist] who is pro-Obama and pro-Israel) solves nothing. “Religulous” illustrates the antiscientific nature of religion, but falls short of an adequate analysis of its function under capitalism. Maher tells us why many religions are absurd, and how believers are manipulated, but he does not tell us why they have a grip on a large section of the workers of the world.
Marx and Engels analyzed the material (real-world) conditions that gave rise to primitive religion. These include fear of death, fear of life, material uncertainty and so on. Under capitalism, as workers’ lives fall under more vicious attacks during crises, these insecurities intensify. In tough times, workers often turn to religion, and as Marx said, “this society produces religion, [which is] an inverted world-consciousness.”
“Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and also the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” My California friend’s religious faith then stems directly from the attacks of capitalism and the uncertainty of our lives. Instead of fighting back, workers withstand abuse. Religion deprives workers of class-conscious fight-back.
Marx concluded that religion can only be uprooted through a complete reorganization of society and the material conditions which give rise to religion. A world free from religion entails a world free from poverty, layoffs, unaffordable healthcare and so on. Workers must have faith in the working class’s ability to understand this reality, not a misplaced faith in religion.
Communism may not bring heaven on earth right away, but it will certainly destroy this capitalist hell where workers are made homeless overnight. Lenin too saw religion as taking hold of workers “chronically menaced by the unforeseeable calamities of capitalism.” He stated “the modern class-conscious worker...contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth.”
To save the world, “Religulous “calls to battle all anti-religious people with ‘better judgment’ to rationally argue away the problem of religion. But it cannot simply be argued or rationalized away. Communist revolution is necessary to get at the core of the real problem. The solutions proposed by “Religulous” are in essence anti-materialist, mistaken, and superficial. Workers, through class struggle culminating in communist revolution, will triumph against an unjust world and religion.
Offering a clear path for revolution, Lenin states, “No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism.” Religion is one among many of these dark forces, and the struggle continues. Maher is not as clever as he seems...

REDEYE

Rich/poor gap hits 1928 record

NYT, 10/29 — ...the vast majority of Americans will be condemned to a lower standard of living for themselves and their children. The top 1 percent now takes home about 20 percent of total national income.... The last time the top 1 percent took home 20 percent of national income, not incidentally, was 1928.

Nervous Brits in a gold rush

GW, 10/10 — British... national calm — whatever you do, don’t panic — has dissolved somewhat... Last week the discreet London premises of ATS Bullion had a [line] outside, waiting to buy gold coins and bars.... The world’s smelters are casting the things 24/7 but stocks still dwindle. Don’t all rush at once; it’s a very small shop.

Read Lenin, fight capitalism

GW, 10/3—The notion that there might be alternatives to rapacious capitalism have been all but banished from the public square. That limited discourse leaves us with limited options.... Good sense demands a thoroughgoing reappraisal of a system that’s in a state of collapse.... “Capitalists can buy themselves out of any crisis, so long as they make the workers pay,” said Lenin. It is rarely regarded as common sense to quote him in polite company. Yet... it is the most sense I’ve heard in a long time.

Russia’s poor: Capitalism = death

NYT, 10/12 — There they were: the demonstrators.... They wore cheap, polyester suits in the blues, grays and browns that clothed generations of Soviets. Elderly women wore bows in their hair and black socks under their pumps. Their aging leaders rode on a truck, shouting through tinny megaphones.
Their faces registered grief: They had lost Russia. They were dying off themselves. On the sidewalk, Valentina Ivanova, 56, was wiping away tears. “We once were a great country,” she said. “Now we are divided into the rich and poor.”
They were poor, the people marching in front of us. The posters read, “No more increase in the price of food!” and “Revolution will return!” and “Capitalism = Death.” Igor Mishenev, marching at the end of the procession, described Russia’s post-Soviet history as a long heartbreak: The life expectancy for men is 59; the birth rate is half what it was in the late 1980s.
A small portion may have become wealthy, he said, but millions suffer. “All our slogans,” he said. “They all came true.”
Though he did not mention it, Russia’s new capitalism was experiencing its worst week in 10 years. Stocks were down 53.2 percent since Jan. 1.

Old quotes suggest new trouble

NYT, 10/12 — In the summer of 1929.... Here’s what some leading politicians, economists and business leaders had to say in the months before and after the crash. Sound familiar?
Bernard Baruch, financier and presidential adviser, in The American Magazine, June 1929:
“The economic condition of the world seems on the verge of a great forward movement.”
The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 23, 1929:
“The outlook for the fall months seems brighter than at any time.”
The Harvard Economic Society, November 1929:
“A severe depression like that of 1920-21 is outside the range of probability. We are not facing protracted liquidation.”
Bernard Baruch, cablegram to Winston Churchill, Nov. 15, 1929:
“Financial storm definitely passed.”

Smile, and keep on overspending

NYT, 10/7 — For advertising agencies, the challenge is how to write ads that soothe consumers who are alarmed by billion-dollar losses at their banks.

ERs don’t solve workers’ health

NYT, 8/29 — An influential figure... explained that we shouldn’t worry about the growing number of Americans without health insurance, because there’s no such thing as being uninsured. After all, you can always get treatment at an emergency room.... The truth, of course, is that visiting the emergency room in a medical crisis is no substitute for regular care. Furthermore, while a hospital will treat you whether or not you can pay, it will also bill you—and the bill won’t be waived unless you’re destitute. As a result, uninsured working Americans avoid visiting emergency rooms if at all possible, because they’re terrified by the potential cost: ...personal bankruptcy.

Russia prepares for a big war

GW, 10/3 — Dmitry Medvedev, the president, said Russia would build a space defence system and a fleet of nuclear submarines by 2020.... The armed forces had to be prepared for “various political and military scenarios”.... “This Russian leadership believes that a war with Nato is very much possible,” said... a Moscow-based defence analyst.... Russia wants to divide the world into spheres of influence. If not, we will prepare for nuclear war.”

People lose faith, tighten belts

NYT, 10/12—Based on interviews around the country last week as the market continued its steep slide, many people say they are sensing losses beyond... hits to their portfolios. Some feel a loss of faith in the United States and its government. Others are lowering their sights for the kinds of lives they expect to lead in coming years.... “I’ve kind of resigned myself to the fact that I’m going to be working for the rest of my life”.... Matthew Ehrlich, 23, a second-year law student at Wayne State University in Detroit, is.... still debating what type of law to specialize in.... “The way things are going, bankruptcy law seems to be pretty hot,” he said.

Blame capitalism, not US greed

NYT, 10/13 — A week ago, European leaders said they knew who was responsible for the global credit crisis.
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s prime minister, blamed a “capitalism of adventurers” in the United States.... British prime minister, Gordon Brown, pointedly noted that the crisis had “come from America.”
But now, after problems at European banks helped set off a global stock market... experts say lenders here all too willingly embraced many of the riskiest practices of their American counterparts.... “The same mechanisms that led to the crisis in the United States were operating here,” said Arnoud Boot, a professor of finance and banking at the University of Amsterdam.

‘Humanitarian’ war usually isn’t

NYT, 8/31 — “Freedom’s battle” is.... a lively narrative history of a string of European efforts to stop various massacres in the 19th century.... But although these interventions undoubtedly saved lives, Bass... [makes] clear that the motives behind them were not entirely humanitarian.... Tell that to the Latin Americans, who’ve already endured more than a hundred years of United States interventions, seldom, if ever, for any humanitarian purpose.... In a supposedly postcolonial age, interventions will almost always be promoted as humanitarian. And in a world running short of fossil fuels, most of them, like the one in Iraq, are ultimately likely to be about oil.

Market shows dialectical truths

NYT, 10/1 — Economists still try to understand markets by using ideas from traditional economics, especially so-called equilibrium theory. This theory views markets as reflecting a balance of forces.... Really understanding what’s going on means going beyond equilibrium thinking.... Pioneers... are building computer models able to mimic market dynamics by simulating their workings from the bottom up.... But the model also shows something that is not at all obvious. The instability doesn’t grow in the market gradually, but arrives suddenly. Beyond a certain threshold the virtual market abruptly loses its stability in a “phase transition”... the way ice abruptly melts into liquid water. Beyond this point, collective financial meltdown becomes effectively certain. This is the kind of possibility that equilibrium thinking cannot even entertain.... The model offers a potential explanation of.... Why we’re not likely to avoid future crises with a little fiddling of the regulations.
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Strikers, Subcontractor Workers: Unite Against Warmaker Boeing

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Profit Drive Killed 25 in LA Train Wreck

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AFL-CIO Labor Fakers Always Bail Out Bosses

LETTERS

Anti-Racism Leads the Way in Boeing Strike

Summer Project Unites Workers Across Borders

At L.A. Factory Gate: Everyone Reads CHALLENGE

REDEYE

Boeing Bosses Part of Rulers Who Oppress All Workers

U.S.-Russia Sharpening Rivarly Revs Up World War Threat

Strikers, Subcontractor Workers: Unite Against Warmaker Boeing

SEATTLE, WA, September 28 — "I was impressed," said a veteran Boeing CHALLENGE reader at our multi-racial strike-support BBQ. Referring to the traditional "Rolling Thunder" in which workers bang on metal every hour on the hour as the strike deadline approaches, she said, "At first, I was the only woman hammering, but pretty soon the new hires started hammering too. At first the banging was a few minutes; by the time the strike neared it was fifteen minutes. Those young people moved me right off my tub [metal container]! They got there with their hammers before I could even get started!"

Over 27,000 machinists are on strike. No work, no planes, no profit. But the bosses want a blank check to screw the workers. Carson, the company’s jetliner division boss, said, "It is important that it [the strike] be resolved in a way that allows the company to remain successful and…preserve…the right to manage the business."

The strikers, however, have their own ideas. As one worker told a CHALLENGE seller, "I’m not striking for the money. They could give me $50,000 and I wouldn’t take it. I’m striking for the kids and the grandkids."

We met plenty of other young workers as strikers grabbed 1,800 CHALLENGES and 2,500 four-page CHALLENGE extras (in five hours) and picked up their first $150 strike checks. Some had struck before they received their first check! All vowed to hold the line.

Strikers were impressed with our Party comrades from around the country and locally who came to support the strike with our revolutionary communist politics. "Thank you for coming out here to support us," said more than one. "This is the class struggle we all need!" responded one comrade.

Our organizing and literature stood in sharp contrast to the union misleaders’ narrow trade union view of job security. It’s clear to masses of strikers that our Party’s goal is anti-racist multiracial unity between subcontractor workers and those still in unions (see letter, page 6 ). We stand for revolutionary communist class-consciousness.

The union, on the other hand, is focused on insuring that what few jobs are left in the "heritage" (basic unionized) plants remain union (with new workers paid less than half the wages of veteran workers). The mass presence of our revolutionary ideas has put the union leaders on the spot. We brought our communist politics to life in this strike. It’s infuriated the right-wing. That’s why the hacks called the local security to order us to leave. But we didn’t leave until we sold and distributed every last piece of literature and gathered a dozen contacts!

Strikers See Big Picture

Everyone on the picket lines, at the strike-check distribution and at our BBQ was discussing the Wall Street financial meltdown. (The BBQ, incidentally, raised more than enough to pay for the cost of our CHALLENGE "Extra.") The "Extra" showed the link between the bosses we’re striking against (the Boeing Board) and this crisis and how they benefit from the bailout (see page 8).

One of the more interesting bailout discussions occurred in a Boeing CHALLENGE distributor’s kitchen. He, his wife and another striker nearing retirement joined a veteran Boeing comrade, a worker and a new teacher.

This group of black, Latin and white workers pooled decades of experience and knowledge to cut through the fog being thrown in our faces. Rather than accepting the excuse that Bush caused the meltdown, we traced the long history of U.S. imperialism’s need to rely on financial speculation. All roads now lead to more imperialist war and attacks on the working class.

We knew about one of the key economic attacks from personal experience: re-industrialization through racist super-exploitation. We described how a friend who makes Boeing parts in a subcontractor plant is about to lose his house despite massive overtime. Five out of the six concluded that revolution — as hard as it may be to accomplish — was the only answer. "Pacifist marches won’t do it," said a Vietnam Vet CHALLENGE reader, "This will come down to an armed fight!"

"Yeah, we’re going to have to bring the power of industrial workers like ourselves and soldiers together with
their natural allies if we want to succeed," suggested a comrade. Three older workers who participated in anti-racist, anti-imperialist rebellions during the Vietnam era began reminiscing about how it was done.

Much more was revealed in this hour and a half discussion. Here and in several other such gatherings are the beginnings of Party-led industrial groups who read and sell CHALLENGE and organize to win their co-workers, families and friends to PLP’s revolutionary communist ideas in the middle of class struggle. Our friends must become members and they, in turn, have to expand our paper’s sales and influence.

The union wanted strikers to come into this battle blaming black, Latin and Chinese subcontractor workers. But when one seller held up our CHALLENGE strike Extra and shouted, "Read how L.A. subcontractor workers support Boeing strikers," she was cheered.

Based on this experience, a Boeing CHALLENGE reader wrote a "thank you" note from us strikers to L.A. subcontractor workers who have sent support letters and spoken at some of our BBQs. It was the first political document he’s written. He presented it to our group that meets at a nearby restaurant. He knew the union would stonewall any effort to build multi-racial, international unity between non-union subcontractors and us so he proposed a way to gather many rank-and-file signatures right now. Another shop steward agreed to sell more CHALLENGES after this discussion.

Small, but useful, victories as the strike goes on. Holding the line while struggling to advance PLP’s revolutionary communist line.J

Subcontractor Workers Support Boeing Strikers

Workers in LA subcontractor factories are discussing how the Boeing strike affects them and how to support it. In one shop, workers posted PLP leaflets calling for support for the strike, building unity of all aerospace workers and fighting against racist super exploitation in the subcontractors’ factories. Some workers are being forced to work many hours of overtime. At another factory, workers eagerly took the leaflets and CHALLENGES, encouraging PLP’ers to "keep up the good work" and agreed that unity between union and non-union workers is "what we need." The bosses called the cops to hurry there in the middle of shift change. They told PLP’ers to leave or face arrest. But afterwards, more than a few workers drove their cars over to the sidewalk to get the literature and thank us anyway.

Imperialist War Needs Dictate Fascist Financial System Take-Over

Lenin explained many years ago the stage of capitalism where the big bankers eat up the smaller ones:

Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed. (Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916)

Facing Worst Crisis Since Great Depression

U.S. capitalists caused the financial crisis they now seek to solve with drastic measures like the stalled $700-billion bank bailout. Over the past 30 years, they drove house prices sky-high and workers’ wages down, creating the conditions for subprime loans. Financiers got rich, for a while, by trading these worthless instruments as if they were pure gold. But that joy ride has ended and left U.S. banks in a deep hole. The staggering consequences include a $1.2 trillion New York Stock Exchange plunge on Sept. 29th amid a spate of bank failures. And U.S. bankers’ woes extend far beyond Wall Street.

The profit system ties a nation’s capacity to exploit foreign labor, markets, and raw materials by armed force to the strength of its financial institutions. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), U.S. imperialism’s leading think-tank, is worried. "The issue today is whether Wall Street turmoil will produce similar pressure for the United States to look inward—and indeed whether its capacity to sustain an international role may have been compromised" (CFR website 9/29/08).

To maintain their global dominance, U.S. bosses are undertaking an unprecedented restructuring of their troubled financial system. Wealth and power are concentrating more and more into a handful of megabanks like J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and BankAmerica. The bank bailout, a massive infusion of capital to such firms from a Treasury run by Wall Street stalwart [See box.] Henry Paulson, is part of the plan. The big money boys continue to fight for it despite its Sept. 29th rejection on Capitol Hill. They also call for stricter government regulation of markets.

Through these proposed new regulations and massive consolidation that will give the ruling class more direct control over the financial sytem than ever before, the major U.S. capitalists are advancing economic fascism.

Rulers Want Congress Under Military Discipline

The bailout’s failure in Congress (which may prove temporary) highlights a major obstacle on the finance capitalists’ road to fascism and war. An inefficient political system, especially the House of Representatives, hinders actions they sorely need. With every house seat up for grabs in five weeks, most reps opportunistically pandered to their voting bases rather than support the bankers’ vastly unpopular bill.

U.S. rulers formed the Hart-Rudman (H-R) commission in 1999 to guarantee their world supremacy well into the 21st century. In 2001, it had proposed downgrading Congress’s cumbersome one-member-one vote rule in favor of a five person "leadership team" to "review the totality of Executive-Legislative relations." It was to consist of "the Speaker of the House, the Majority and Minority leaders of the House, and the Majority and Minority leaders of the Senate" and consult directly with the "the President, the Vice President, the National Security Advisor, and senior cabinet officers." Complaining of self-serving reps, Hart-Rudman said "Only by having the five most powerful members of the Congress directly involved is there any hope of real reform." One "reform" was that "every member of Congress...participate in one or more war games per two-year cycle" at the National Defense University.

Bush dropped the ball after 9/11, implementing only one of H-R’s 50 provisions (Homeland Security). Expect more ruling-class calls to clean up Congress following the bailout debacle.

As for the White House, the rulers hope the presidential race will produce a protector of the U.S. empire far more capable than Bush. The CFR is "looking for signals from both campaigns on how Obama and McCain would restore the economy, and thus maintain the ability to project power abroad" (website, 9/26/08). But the Establishment’s New York Times (9/30/08) laments, "Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama were far from Washington, bit actors at best in helping to resolve a crisis that one of them will inherit."

As this economic tsunami is hitting U.S. bosses harder than any other imperialist, the constant allusions in the media to the 1930s are telling. U.S. rulers long for a Roosevelt-style president who can implement the economic discipline they need before they can mobilize to confront rivals like China and Russia militarily. Over the course of a decade of far-reaching economic programs, FDR was able to raise taxes on the ruling class to pay for the consolidation and militarization of U.S. capitalism in preparation for WW II. So we can expect more drastic finance-capital sourced initiatives, like the bailout, under the next administration.

The ruling class, in the midst of a crisis, looks for opportunities to prepare for future conflict. For workers, the financial mess shows voting is a dead end. Obama and McCain are in fact competing to see who can best serve the most powerful camp of war-hungry bankers. We have to take advantage of every opportunity to expose the failure of capitalism and build confidence in our class and our Party as the future of humanity. Investing time and effort in building the revolutionary, communist Progressive Labor Party represents a far better "growth strategy" for our class. Financial disasters and wars are built into the profit system. It will take a long time to get rid of it. But efforts today will reward generations to come.J

Who Pays? ....We Do, Mostly

A few capitalists and all workers will bear the cost of the bailout and the crisis that necessitated it.

Bosses with shares of subsequently bankrupt firms see their holdings’ value drop to zero, but so do workers’ pension funds and individual retirement plans, which mainly hold stocks.

The $700-billion bailout price tag comes close to the Iraq war’s, which, combined with reduced public revenue due to the economic slowdown, spells sharp federal cuts in services for the working class.

The racist, anti-working class nature of the bailout will lead to African-American and Latin home borrowers losing between $146 billion and $190 billion from bad sub-prime loans, according to a United for a Fair Economy report (Interpress Service 9/25).

At the local level, New York’s mayor Bloomberg slashed $1.5 billion from health, education, sanitation and other necessities on Sept. 24 as a direct result of Wall Streets woes. Bloomie foresees a $5.2-billion deficit (roughly equal to his own personal wealth, which he is not about to part with) for 2011. New York governor David Paterson wants to increase his state’s already projected $1 billion service cuts and predicts a $24-billion budget gap over the next three years.

Taxes are going up. For example, seven percent, says Mayor Mike, on NYC property, which landlords jack up further as rent increases to workers.

The financial sector is already hemorrhaging jobs, some high-rollers but mainly working-class, in New York and other money center cities by the tens of thousands. The new consolidation onslaught hastens the pace.

Finance capitalists also want to bail out Social Security, which will be underfunded by 2017, and help themselves, by forcing workers to pay into "mandatory retirement accounts" managed by their banks. Leading this effort to rob workers in order to fund the war makers is the Concord Coalition headed by Pete Peterson, a major Rockefeller-allied investor who once chaired the Council on Foreign Relations.

Top U.S. Policy-Makers Serve Class Dictatorship Of Financiers

The Washington bigwigs doggedly pushing bailout count the biggest U.S. bankers as their main constituents. Treasury secretary Paulson is not just any Goldman Sachs alum. He headed the Wall Street powerhouse and was its biggest shareholder. Representative Barney Frank’s top donors come from Brown Bothers Harriman, a private bank that holds $2 trillion in custody for the ultra-rich. (Bush’s grandfather, Prescott, was a BBH partner.) Citigroup, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and J.P. Morgan Chase led the bankrollers of Senator Chuck Schumer’s last campaign. Senator Christopher Dodd cashed fat checks from Citigroup and AIG (as well as from war profiteer United Technologies).

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BRONX, NY, SEPTEMBER 27 — "All these factory bosses, big or small, have been trying to eliminate the unions all together," explained one of the 136 striking Stella D’Oro Biscuit workers here, out since August 13. Not one worker has crossed the united picket line. Support has come from other locals, transit workers, truckers and the community said one machinist. Strikers said that although lost wages are starting to hurt, they’re all determined to win this struggle.

The Stella D’oro strikers are in Local 50, within the much larger Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union (BCTGM). When asked why the other locals haven’t walked out in solidarity, one worker said, "That would be great but many are afraid to lose what they have." This integrated local has shown the rest of the international that withdrawing their labor power from the bosses is a key way of both turning fear into its opposite and making a real stand for workers’ power.

This strike represents many of the same dynamics attacking workers nation-wide. One worker declared, "We know that this strike is an outcome of the economy. They say there’s no money but they want to squeeze profits out of our wages while they spend $2.3 trillion on the war in Iraq!" This worker is absolutely right!

This particular attack began when Stella D’Oro was sold to Brynwood Partners in January 2006 for about $17 million. The crashing economy has reduced sales and profits. A union official said Stella D’oro bosses want to steal an additional $1.5 million annually from these workers.

Preceding the strike the bosses pushed the workers to the hilt. "They sped up production to sub-human standards," said one worker, adding, "It’s not just the contract that drove us over the edge… it’s the working conditions as well!"

The bosses want to eliminate four holidays, 12 sick days, one week of vacation and viciously attack workers‘ wages. Now they want every worker to pay approximately $400 a month for their health benefits and to contribute a dollar of their hourly wage towards their pensions. However, over a five-year period these combined cuts (plus union dues and other expenses) would slash take-home pay nearly 50%, dropping from $18 to as little as $10 an hour, not counting inflation, by 2013!

This bosses’ attack is also racist. Given the composition of the workforce — Latin, Asian, black and white (European immigrant) — the bosses figure they can get away with super-exploiting these workers, and net super-profits.

Although production has slowed down, it hasn’t been stopped. Scabs have been hired. "Nobody wants to get into trouble" physically stopping scabs, explained one worker. We told another worker that, "Stopping scabs from crossing a picket line has always been an important part of maintaining an effective strike." But this worker said this would need the backing of the entire BCTGM union.

We brought coffee and donuts and gave all 25 afternoon-shift pickets a copy of CHALLENGE. They were impressed with the front-page Boeing strike article. "We’re small and it’s good to see so many workers fighting like this," commented one worker.

The Boeing strikers’ militancy and the role that communist leadership plays should help embolden this small but spirited strike here. We will bring our co-workers and students to discuss such lessons with the workers on future visits. They were also excited to hear we would try to raise strike support at the next teachers union Delegate Assembly. We will also invite some strikers to speak at our October 18 PLP forum on the elections.

"While so many people are talking about the illusion of "change they can believe in" declared one PL’er, "you guys are showing workers and students the real direction of change!"

We have much to learn from the striking Stella D’oro workers because they’ve done what so many of us need to do. Ultimately, it’s the entire capitalist system that needs to be shut down. Only then will workers see the true potential of their power.

Ten Thousand March For Homecare Worker Demands

NEW YORK CITY, September 16 — Some 10,000 homecare and healthcare workers of Local 1199 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) marched in Midtown Manhattan to demand a decent contract. Homecare workers are among the most exploited section of the working class despite many being unionized. The average union wage is $8/hour with limited health benefits and no pension. Still worse, sleep-in homecare workers get no overtime pay and are paid for twelve hours a day when they usually work sixteen. These workers are overwhelmingly immigrant women from the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America and some from Russia and China. Less than half of all homecare workers are unionized.

Agencies like BestCare are threatening to eliminate healthcare benefits when the contract expires on Dec. 31. The agencies are funded by NY State and keep half of all funding as "administrative expenses," i.e. profits. A "decent" contract for homecare workers would have to double their subsistence wage and guarantee full healthcare and pension benefits.

But there’s no such thing as a decent contract for workers, because of capitalism’s drive for maximum profits. The union is only asking for a $2/hour wage hike and healthcare, and no pension. They want the state to take over administration of homecare from these agencies, cut the administrative cost and use some of that money to pay for increased pay. This collaboration with the state will not win a decent wage or benefits for these workers — especially in these days of financial crisis and endless wars — and weakens the will of workers to strike and prepare for the larger struggles ahead.

The relatively higher-paid hospital workers in 1199 will also face increasing pressure for future wage and benefit cuts. The racism used to divide hospital workers and the mostly immigrant homecare workers must be smashed. Anti-racist unity, fighting for all health workers, must be organized to win these struggles.

At the rally, Progressive Labor Party members, some in 1199 SEIU, talked with workers as we marched. That same day AIG, the world’s largest insurance company, was being bailed out by the Fed to the tune of $85 billion (see page 2 on the financial crisis). The workers expressed indignation that we’ll be paying to save Wall Street and yet can’t receive a decent standard of living or job security. But that is the nature of capitalism: workers pay and pay for the bosses in boom or crisis times.

We distributed hundreds of PLP fliers and CHALLENGES which pointed out that, to satisfy workers’ needs, the only real solution to the failure of capitalism is building a PLP-led movement to fight for a society where production is based on the well-being of all workers, who produce everything of value. We must continue building our CHALLENGE networks in our workplaces, turn them into PLP study groups and and Party-led on-the-job groups to lead the struggles against the racist bosses’ attacks and recruit more communists.

Anti-Racist Fight vs. Police Murders Continues

LANGLEY PARK, MD, September 24 — "Fight Back!" chanted PLPers at a rally against police brutality today. Over 150 people gathered here, led by CASA de Maryland (an immigrant workers’ rights group) and supported by the People’s Coalition for Police Accountability. Protesters spoke out against the police murder of Manuel Jesus de Espina, the lynching of Ronnie White by prison guards (officially a homicide according to the coroner’s report), and the SWAT attack on the mayor of Berwyn Heights. Dorothy Elliott reminded protestors of the long struggle for justice, which she has been seeking for the murder of her son by police in the 1990s.

PLP members brought a message of militancy and revolution to this gathering, distributing over 40 CHALLENGES to fellow protestors. Many in the crowd appreciated the more militant spirit. A Guatemalan man eagerly took DESAFIO and said, "we need a society where everyone is equal — these police will continue the brutality until we have a new system." He liked PLP’s international organizing and outlook, and planned to show the paper to his friends and family. A worker from El Salvador was visibly angry, declaring "the police are without shame; they come in the community and want our help, then they turn around and kill our friend. On top of that, when we stay on the corner looking to work, they kick us off the corner with threat of arrest, when I am only just trying to feed my family."

With the exception of the poignant personal stories and the revolutionary line of the PLP, this event was only a symbolic rally that had the effect of quelling any sense of fight-back. It is almost as if the organizers were saying: "Come out, light a candle, think about the victims, then go home and continue your lives as wage slaves and you will be lucky if you are not targeted by the police." Many workers were optimistic that the rally might lead to justice. But we need to build a fighting spirit of anti-racist militancy in the spirit of John Brown and Harriet Tubman and swell the ranks of the PLP to advance this struggle beyond symbolism.

The reality of the situation is that under capitalism, police protect the bosses and their property and use racist terror against workers. The long history of police brutality will not be ended by rallies alone. At a time when the bosses’ financial meltdown will lead to more oppression of workers, the bosses will need to control fight-back with brutality and intimidation. Only the development of a mass militant anti-racist movement, ultimately leading to a revolution against capitalism, can stem the tide of police brutality.

Profit Drive Killed 25 in LA Train Wreck

LOS ANGELES, CA –– The train accident on September 12 in the Chatsworth neighborhood of Los Angeles, in which 25 people died and over 125 were seriously injured, was totally preventable. The press has blamed the engineer, Robert Sanchez, for text messaging someone just before the accident, but this tragedy was caused by the greed of the bosses, their politicians, and their anti-worker capitalist system!

In this case a MetroLink commuter train collided head on with a Union Pacific freight train sharing the same track.

Yes, sharing the same track. Imagine driving on a one lane highway in which cars, trucks, and buses traveled at freeway speeds in both directions, but had to share that one lane. Furthermore, the only way a driver would ever know that an 18-wheeler was heading towards him or her was a stoplight. If it is red, drivers must get their car off the road. If it is green, just drive ahead on that one-lane highway.

This lunacy is the deliberate policy of the MetroLink Authority –– mostly appointees of local Southern California Democratic politicians –– which runs the Los Angeles area commuter train system. Their patchwork commuter system is woefully under-funded and run with callous disregard for the safety of passengers and MetroLink workers. And, to save a few bucks, MetroLink contracted with a French company to operate the system, including hiring workers.

Since these totally avoidable deaths, many people have pointed out the obvious fixes to avoid future accidents. First, the train system needs to be double-tracked; trains traveling in opposite directions would no longer share the same track. Second, all trains should be equipped with Positive Train Control. This is an electronic system widely used throughout the world which detects trains headed for a collision and automatically stops them.

New radios should be installed on local freight and commuter trains. Because MetroLink shares train tracks with freight trains and because passenger trains and freight trains use different radio frequencies, engineers are unable to communicate between the two systems.

Split shifts could be eliminated. The MetroLink engineer, who died in the accident, worked a 13- hour day. He worked the morning rush hour, then had the mid-day off, but had to report to work again for the afternoon rush hour. In addition to having such an unsafe work schedule all week, engineers have no back-up. MetroLink operates their trains with only one engineer, not two. If an engineer is sick, distracted, or misses one of those red lights, that’s it. No one else, and no safety feature, is there to back him up or catch his mistakes.

So far, after an enormous public outcry, the local and national politicians –– who are responsible –– have moved into inaction. Locally, California Public Utilities Commission directed rail companies to ban train employees from using cell phones while on duty.

Nationally, proposed legislation would reduce the number of hours railroad employees can work from 400 per month to 276. Workers can now work 90-hour weeks, but the new legislation would reduce their work-week to about 60 hours — still unsafe. In contrast, the FAA limits airline pilots to 100 hours of flight time per month, a 22-hour work- week.

As for Positive Train Control, current proposed legislation would not require these electronic safety systems until the year 2015. The bosses’ foot-dragging will lead to more people dying unnecessarily in the next decade because of this total disregard for the workers.

At a time when the Federal Government is spending about $1 trillion to bail out the banks and finance companies, spends more than $1.1 trillion per year on its military and spy agencies, and the lion’s share of local government budgets is devoted to cops and jails, the "no-money" argument of the politicians reveals that capitalism serves only the interests of the capitalists — at the expense of workers’ lives.

Workers and passengers are cogs in a giant capitalist machine devoted to squeezing every last ounce of profit out of the commuter train system. The bosses are sacrificing the safety and lives of the workers riding the trains (and transit workers) to bail out the banks, pay for imperialist war and line their pockets.

Only when workers take power will our safety and lives be more important than the dollar-bill flag of the bosses. A system that cannot provide safe transit is one more reason to join the fight for communist revolution!

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GRAND ISLAND, NEBRASKA, September 19 — About 150 Muslim workers were fired today at the JBS Swift meatpacking plant in a struggle over prayer time during the 30-day period of Ramadan. Of 2,500 workers, about 500 are Muslim, mostly from Somalia and Sudan.

While we don’t believe in prayer and religion, we must unite with Muslim workers and oppose racist anti-Muslim attacks. As the economic crisis deepens and the imperialist oil war expands, the rulers are building a mass fascist movement by getting workers to blame each other for boss-crated problems. The recent immigration raid in Mississippi — where more than 650 workers were rounded up — was called in by the AFL-CIO, and federal agents were cheered on by union workers as immigrants were handcuffed and led away. We cannot allow repetition of this chilling scene.

Last Monday, hundreds of Muslim workers walked off the job, protesting lack of prayer time, especially concerned for evening prayer, which ends the daily fast. Swift supervisors accused Muslim workers of taking too long on their prayer breaks. Some workers complained of being kicked by a supervisor while they prayed. A woman worker protested being followed into the bathroom by a male supervisor as she attempted to pray. They held a similar protest on Tuesday and marched to City Hall.

Break times were changed on the second shift to accommodate the sunset prayer, which forced all workers to work Saturday to get their 40 hours. That sparked a protest by about 400 black, Latin, Asian and white non-Muslim workers, who walked off the job Wednesday and Thursday in what was basically a racist protest against the Muslim workers. The bosses and union leaders of the United Food and Commercial Workers no doubt encouraged it.

About 80 Muslim workers were thrown out of the plant after a confrontation with protesters. When they tried to return for their shift Friday, they were fired, along with 70 others. No non-Muslim workers were fired. Also, the bosses reversed themselves on the new break schedules.

One worker said that the Somali workers "have changed everything," and that "Swift management has given in to the minority." Another said, "Nobody should have special privileges." How often have we heard white workers make these same racist comments about black and Latino workers? This is exactly the type of "unity" that Bush-Obama-McCain and the racist rulers are counting on to expand their war on terror to Pakistan, Iran and beyond.

One precondition for communist revolution is the highest unity of the international working class. "Globalization" and mass immigration worldwide, with more internationalized work-forces on the job, make this possible. But it doesn’t just happen. We must set the example of building anti-racist, international friendships, and a revolutionary communist movement that reflects the same. Like the Mississippi raid, we should see this Swift struggle as a sign of things to come, alert our co-workers and build the revolutionary communist PLP, the only antidote to the bosses’ fascist poison.

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September 29 — Union bus drivers are discovering the hard way what was buried away in the contract arbitration "award" forced on us last year. After a fear campaign of "doomsday scenarios" and sending the contract to arbitration to avoid a rank-and-file vote, our paychecks are shrinking and our jobs are less secure. All this is happening as more workers ride buses and before the current economic crisis.

The contract and the state legislators are funding a new Health Care Trust fund that most drivers will never use, by collecting 3% of every paycheck. In addition, they increased pension funding to 6%, more than wiping out the measly 3% wage "increase" we were "awarded." So far this has cost every worker about $2,000.

Even more dangerous, full-time senior drivers lost our 8-hour guarantee, and about 50 part-timers are being hired every month. Right now about 950 part-timers comprise almost 25% of the 4,000 drivers. They pay the same union dues as full-timers and get little more than the right to file a useless grievance. Part-timers cannot afford to feed their families on what used to be a job many young black workers sought. It’s so bad that union Local 241’s sellouts tried to get part-timers to support a 6-day schedule rather than split shifts, so they would have more time each day to work a second job to support their families!

Then there is the "Second Chance" program: workers on probation or sentenced to community service are cleaning buses and garages. Mayor Daley and the bankers want to run mass transit on poverty wages and prison labor. All this in a city and state run by the Democratic Party machine that created Barak Obama.

But workers are fighting back. Transit Workers United, a rank-and-file group of full- and part-timers, is circulating a petition demanding the union fight to make everyone full-time, and force the city to fill almost 200 vacant full-time slots. More than 200 part-timers attended the September union meeting.

This is good as far as it goes, but transit workers need to understand that this is not just our problem. We’re being assaulted by the same racist profit system that closed half the Cook County health clinics for uninsured workers in 2007, eliminating 2,000 jobs, and is eliminating the second shift at the Chicago Ford Assembly Plant this November.

These racist attacks hit black and Latino workers first and hardest. There are more than 20 million unemployed in the U.S., nearly a million in Illinois. The unemployment rate for black workers is twice the national average, and for black youth, ages 18-25, four times higher. With the unfolding Wall Street calamity, foreclosures on the South Side of Chicago have tripled; Detroit is the nation’s highest.

No matter who wins the White House, the racist rulers will continue their assault on the workers because they need trillions more to expand their oil wars and rescue Wall Street. As the rulers face increasing challenges to their empire from other imperialists, the threat of world war grows. A struggle against racist unemployment that unites transit, Cook County and Ford workers with immigrant workers and unemployed youth can be fertile grounds for expanding the revolutionary communist PLP and creating a more mass distribution of CHALLENGE. Fighting racist unemployment and for jobs, guided by communist politics, can open the door to revolution!

Italy: Black Workers Rebel vs. Racist Mafia Massacres

ITALY, Sept. 25 — Racism has grown all over Europe as the bosses need to superexploit immigrant and non-white workers to obtain massive profits and blame them for the crisis of capitalism. The racism built into the capitalist society breeds racist killers. The area of Castelvolturno was the scene of the first racist killing in post-war Italy when in 1989 Jerry Eslan, a black man, was killed by racists in the nearby Villa Literno. Today, racist violence is even more common.

More recently in Castelvolturno, a racist massacre was carried out by the Camorra, the local mafia. It was the biggest mafia killing in recent years. Some local gangsters randomly fired against a group of black workers and youth, killing six of them. The bosses’ media reacted to this atrocity by blaming the victims, who were condemned as criminals and drug dealers. In spite of these stereotypes, 99% of black workers work under semi-slave conditions in the tomato fields. But the mobsters shot at random to "teach blacks a lesson." Six were killed just for being black, just as neo-Nazis burn immigrant workers’ refugee centers to "teach them a lesson," and just as Roma people (often called by the racist term Gypsies) have been victims of a recent pogrom at the hand of racist mobs and the right-wing Berlusconi government. According to these racist killers, all immigrant and black workers should be killed.

This time black Italians protested the killings with a mini-rebellion, burning garbage cans and damaging some cars in the Caserta zone of Castelvolturno. A similar small rebellion took place in the bigger city of Milan.

These workers and youth are tired not only of being exploited on their jobs, but of being charged higher rents and of discrimination in general. They are tired of being treated as second-rate citizens.

In Milan, an Afro-Italian teenager was beaten to death with iron bars by two store owners. The killers said he stole some cookies, as if that was a crime punishable by death. This slander was repeated by the media without any real investigation of what happened, even though no cookies were found. Racism was the real cause of this horrendous crime.

The bosses, their media and some people influenced by racist ideas are labeling all blacks and immigrants as criminals, while treating the big criminals of the Mafia and their politician and cop protectors with kids’ gloves.

Racist brutality is a universal aspect of capitalism, from Milan to Paris to Brooklyn (like the recent killing of a mentally-impaired Latin worker with a taser) to Maryland (see article p. 3). Any worker who falls for this bosses’ racism is cutting his/her own throat, particularly today when the rulers need more racism to divide workers so they can exploit ALL workers even more to pay for their economic crisis and wars (Italy has a military contingent fighting with NATO in Afghanistan). Our slogan must be: same enemy, same fight! Black, Latin, Asian, immigrant and white, unite to smash capitalism and to fight for communism!

a name="Colombia: Uribe Gov’t Murdering Student Protestors">">"olombia: Uribe Gov’t Murdering Student Protestors

Colombia’s bloodthirsty ruling class has murdered thousands of people who oppose its policies of hunger, war and oppression. It’s even killed many who foolishly tried to change the system through elections. It has also forced over four million rural workers and their families, many indigenous and union activists, to flee their homes, losing everything.

According to a report of 400 human rights organizations presented to the UN High Commissioner in Colombia, over 13,600 people have been "murdered, executed or disappeared in the six years of the President Uribe administration" ("Página12", 9/24). Meanwhile, bodies of 45 youth have been found in Bogotá’s southern suburbs and in the poor coffee region of Central Colombia. The cops and army executed the youth, including a minor with mental problems, under the guise that they were all "common criminals."

Also, "Página12" (9/26) reported that death-squad chief Salvatore Mancuso, extradited to the U.S. in May, testified via video in a trial of two Senators of Uribe’s Party that the AUC (the death-squad organization) influenced the local 2002 Presidential elections.

Uribe, a Bush lapdog in South America, was one of the "world leaders" Sarah Palin spoke to briefly at the U.N. in mid-September. (The others included the U.S. puppet President of Afghanistan and war criminal Henry Kissinger.)

But now, to avoid more national and international outcries, instead of the past mass massacres, people are killed daily in ones and twos. Militant students are some of the victims of this "new" style of repression, ones like Johnny Silva, Nicolas Neira, Oscar Salas and many more who’ve been murdered. They’ve been part of the militant fight against plans to privatize public universities. For this the government and the bosses’ media have branded them "subversive guerrillas."

So in addition to the usual brutal repression of young protestors during the annual mass May Day marches in Bogota, the rulers have now put a price on the heads of the more militant H.S. and college youth to try to quell the growing protest movement against the Uribe government.

As part of the struggle to give political leadership to angry workers and youth, two PLP comrades in Ciudad Bolívar are trying to bring communist ideas to some of the million people in this poorest section of Bogotá. Many of these residents are refugees from the murderous war waged by the rich landowners’ death squads and the army in rural Colombia.

The refugees face a lot of contradictions coming to Ciudad Bolívar. Instead of a countryside of trees and rivers, they now live in a boss-created urban jungle filled with unemployment, racist and sexist discrimination, alcoholism, police persecution and rejection by the bourgeois society. Their hard lives are made even more oppressive.

Many different groups are out to influence these refugees, some with pro-government ideas, others opposed to the government. We’re involved in some of them that are trying to bring the few available but limited resources available in this area. But we’re also struggling to fight for unity in action as the best way to fight for improvements for the residents of the area. We want to win some of the movement’s most active leaders into a political school, no easy task amid mass terror carried out by the bosses’ paramilitary goons, aimed at preventing us from organizing ourselves.

Our goal is not building a better reform movement begging for more crumbs from the government, but winning masses of workers and youth to PLP to fight for the only real solution to this capitalist hell: communism. DESAFIO is a key ideological weapon in accomplishing this long but vital process for our class.

AFL-CIO Labor Fakers Always Bail Out Bosses

NEW YORK CITY, September 28 — More than 1,000 workers and others demonstrated three days ago near the NY Stock Exchange against giving Wall Street a blank check in the financial bailout. This swindle is so unpopular — seen by many as "corporate welfare" — that the NYC Central Labor Council was forced to react and organize one of many similar protests held nationwide to demand a "fairer bailout" which helps working-class people. Big shot union sellouts like AFL-CIO President George Sweeney and teachers union chief Randi Weingarten attended the rally.

One of the AFL-CIO’s top demands is for the bailout to be governed by an "independent board." (Of course, the bosses pick these "independent" boards.) The labor honchos are banking on an Obama and Democratic Party victory so that some of the allotted $700 billion will finance Obama’s plan for infrastructure repair, which they hope could create many unionized jobs.

But as far as workers are concerned, the union mis-leaders are part of the problem. In every bosses’ bailout — from the NYC fiscal crisis to the one for Chrysler in the 1970s to all others for any company — the union sellouts have been on the bosses’ side, giving them huge concessions on jobs and benefits.

Lack of regulations, greedy bankers and speculators are all part of the problem but not the root cause. The first major post-World War II crisis occurred in 1973; then came the "Black Monday" Wall Street crash of 1987 followed by others in 1990-93, 1998 and 2001-2. As each crisis ended, we were told the problem was "fixed" — but then a new one occurred, slashing workers’ standard of living even more — and because of racism affecting black and Latin workers still more. On top of that, racist politicians and media pundits are blaming the victims of the subprime lenders for the crisis.

Company profit rates have actually not returned to their pre-1973 level. More than a century ago Karl Marx described this as the falling rate of profit. To compete with each other, the bosses invest in new technology, replacing workers. But machines by themselves don’t produce profits. Real profits come from workers’ labor, with the bosses pocketing most of the value that labor creates. While the volume of profit might increase, the higher investment in machinery and technology forces the rate of profit down.

As their crises worsen, bosses try to compensate by exploiting workers even more, by taking out or swallowing the competition and fighting with rival imperialists for new markets through wars. PLP has a different answer: workers of the world unite to smash a system based on war and economic crisis!

LETTERS

Anti-Racism Leads the Way in Boeing Strike

The Party’s work in aerospace subcontracting facilities (as well as other industries) has left us able to expose the racist super-exploitation present in these plants and tie it to the increased attacks on primarily white union workers in the basic heritage plants.

Subcontractors employ mostly Latin, immigrant and black workers. The fact that our Party has built a small concentration in the subcontractor plants over the last few years has given us a "leg up" on raising the absolute necessity for anti-racist, multi-racial class unity.

After more than a dozen visits to strike picket sites at Boeing plants all over King County it is clear that workers appreciate the Party’s revolutionary message. Almost every worker takes a CHALLENGE .

These visits to the picket lines have allowed the Party to expose how capitalism uses racism to attack all workers. Boeing strikers have shown great appreciation for the statements of solidarity coming out of subcontracting plants. The significant minority of black, women and now Latino workers in the Boeing union plants has been particularly receptive to this show of class unity.

Strikers delved into "how capitalism uses racism to attack all workers" at two recent lunches at a restaurant near the plant. A dozen strikers and a guest from England examined the condition of the working class from Katrina-ravaged New Orleans, to the slave-like conditions of India immigrant workers in Mississippi shipyards, to the ruin anti-black, anti-immigrant racism has wrought in the new "southern aerospace corridor" and the L.A. subcontractors. "It’s the same damn thing in England," said our British friend. "First they imported the Poles and when they started to organize the bosses switched to eastern Europeans — never allowing the Poles to become "legal."

No wonder many strikers believe the union can’t win on job security. The pro-capitalist union leaders’ narrow trade union outlook can’t deal with the racist and nationalist divisions that immobilize us. It’s impossible to save a few decent-paying jobs in the heritage plants while the bosses are hell-bent on attacking all industrial workers through racist super-exploitation in subcontractors.

A friend took a small step towards building anti-racist class conciousness. He volunteered to write a thank you note to L.A. subcontractor workers that have supported our strike. We are going to circulate it on the picket lines, and at our lunches and visits with strikers.

Even on my job, a construction site rather than an aerospace plant, the situation at the subcontracting plants has helped to illuminate the constant presence of racism on our site. After discussing the low wages and dangerous conditions present at these subcontractor plants one worker spoke up, "the immigrant workers on site are the subcontracted workers of construction." This is the first step to leading anti-racist fight-back on the job.

The key to defeating the boss’ divide and conquer tactics is to bring anti-racist struggle onto the shop floor. The sell-out contracts "won" by the UAW leadership and the current contract pushed by the pro-boss IAM leadership increasingly show how the fates of those in the heritage plants are tied to those in subcontracting plants. Ultimately this strike will be sold out as well. The only way to end this racist exploitation is to show workers that racism is inherent to capitalism and will intensify as the bosses scramble to shore up their shaky empire, and that only communist revolution can unite all workers by ending capitalism.

Red Worker

Summer Project Unites Workers Across Borders

The L.A. Summer Project showed that the working class must be internationalist. The comrades in the project shared experiences and learned from each other and lived in a comradely way, spreading PLP politics without being limited by borders and language barriers imposed by the bosses. We had a BBQ during the project where most of the participants spoke only English and a few of us spoke Spanish. But our communications, though limited by gestures and expressions, showed a lot of joy and curiosity in meeting people with the same goals: fighting for communist revolution. I was able to speak at the BBQ with a young worker living in L.A. who migrated from Mexico and told me about the difficulties of being a low-paid undocumented worker, living check-by-check and sometimes not being able to satisfy the basic needs of life. On top of that, he lives with the fear of being deported or fired from the job and so has a very limited social life because of these conditions. It is very difficult for him being away from his immediate family in Mexico to fight for the "American Dream" that is more and more a nightmare. But now that he knows the PLP, he is very happy with his friendship with the comrade who invited him to the BBQ and with other comrades he is meeting. He never imagined himself being part of a communist Summer Project.

I heard similar comments from a young Mexican immigrant couple who met our Party and politics for the first time, and now want to join a PLP study group.

Our Party offers answers to the hard daily lives so many immigrant workers, and workers in general, are suffering in this racist, crisis-ridden, war-making capitalist society. These ties make our Party more internationalist. Since bosses don’t respect their own borders when it comes to exploiting us, workers should put into practice the slogan: workers of the world, unite, workers’ struggles have no border!

A Young Comrade, Mexico

At L.A. Factory Gate: Everyone Reads CHALLENGE

This summer a comrade and I traveled to Los Angeles for our first Summer Project. As a new member and a friend of the Party we learned so much on this trip and gained a better understanding of the Party’s line.

At CHALLENGE sales we talked with many industrial workers and soldiers about their bosses’ exploitative practices and the horrible working conditions they endure on a daily basis. One worker told us she needed time off to care for a sick family member and was told not to come back if she took it. One of the greatest things we saw was the morning we had been at an industrial site and turned to look at the entrance gate and saw so many of the workers sitting outside reading the paper! Distributing papers to day laborers, one man told us how he had left El Salvador because of harsh conditions only to find himself worse off. He said that although the economic hardships were bad here too, the level of racist attacks against him and his family member was something he did not have to endure back home. We spoke with a homeless vet who told us of the deplorable tactics used by the military to deliberately train them to dehumanize civilian "enemies." This demonstrates how the bosses’ pit us one against the other in an attempt to break workers apart.

The Summer Project is a great opportunity to learn from other comrades about work done over their years with the Party as well as from each other. As someone very new to the Party, every discussion and reading helped me learn and inspired me. I was able to speak out more, and speak with others about some of my own questions. I helped lead a discussion of student/worker alliances which brought out the importance of keeping contact with friends we bring around the Party. Without the constant connections and close discussions we could lose those potential future leaders of the Party.

In my mind the LA Summer Project is a great way to be one step closer to the building of a communist revolution and the idea of living in a communist society. I know it has given me confidence to work harder, to ask more questions of my comrades, and want to step up to more roles of leadership. Everyone, no matter what their experience level, should attend every Summer Project they possibly can.

New Red

Talking Revolutionary Politics in Obama Campaign

I helped out at a voter registration drive in my neighborhood that I found out about through BarackObama.com. I never voted before and agreed with PLP’s position that voting can’t and won’t alleviate the suffering of workers under capitalism. I also agreed that the Obama campaign provides an important opportunity to meet workers that want to change society and introduce them to the ideas of the PLP.

I worked with two young women who felt strongly about voting and the "change" Obama promises. It ended up being a very good experience since we actually spent more time chatting then registering people. We talked about our lives and racism in the neighborhood and the media (my two fellow registrars were arguing about whether or not Tyler Perry [an entertainer] degrades black workers). Before I left we exchanged contact infomation. I am planning on attending some more campaign events with them and hope to expose them to some of Obama’s comments that accepted the Sean Bell verdict and discouraged violent protest.

Red Registrar

REDEYE on the News

Crisis shows voting doesn’t help
- GW, 9/26

The fact the credit crisis relegated the elections to the inside pages tells us two things.

First, that real power does not lie with politicians. The crucial decisions were made by traders, bankers and speculators….

Second, that…[the] contest to see who will run the country sheds little light and has little bearing on how it is run.

Pipe-dream of US diplomats
- NYT, 8/14

A bumper sticker that American diplomats distributed around Central Asia in the 1990s as the United States was working hard to make friends there summed up Washington’s strategic thinking: "Happiness is multiple pipelines."

People speak: Gov’t does opposite
- NYT, 9/25

Americans’ anger is in full bloom, jumping off the screen in capital letters and exclamation points, in the e-mail in-boxes of elected representatives in the nation’s capital…. in outright opposition to the White House plan…. members of Congress say reaction to the bailout does not appear orchestrated or coordinated, but rather individual expressions that come from the grass roots and run across the philosophical spectrum.

War opponents, for instance, are telling lawmakers that they are tired of an administration…[that] played "the fear card" too many times by leading the nation into war in Iraq to find nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and curbing civil rights in the name of pursuing terrorists.

US said ‘Don’t bail banks out!’
-NYT, 9/24

Wall Street and the administration’s record of financial oversight came under attack at the United Nations on Tuesday….

For some leaders, the Bush bailout plan seemed hypocritical given the tough course Washington has often advised struggling nations to take….

"They are all remembering the very hard, unforgiving advice that they got from American financial institutions" to "deflate your economy, let your banks go to the wall"…. The outpouring on Tuesday came from some of America’s closest allies and trading partners…

Big Washington meet: Look out!
- NYT, 9/25

In deference to the current emergency, we will refrain from pointing out that when our national leaders came together following Sept. 11, the results were, all and all, worse than if they had stayed home.

Boeing Bosses Part of Rulers Who Oppress All Workers

The Boeing bosses are part of a ruling class oppressing workers worldwide. Their Board of Directors is linked to some of the country’s largest corporations and biggest Wall Street investment houses who are looking to make a killing out of any bailout scheme that the bankers and their politician servants can work out. But they also have their hands full these days, with the strike and the financial crisis.

The top Boeing bosses run not only Boeing but they and their class run the whole country, and both political parties.

For example, Boeing director Edward Liddy is also a director of manufacturing giant 3M and (till recently) financial giant Goldman-Sachs. His 3M, like Boeing, makes profit the old-fashioned way, by exploiting workers who create value from making products. However, his Goldman Sachs has been profiting the deregulated way, by gambling and cheating — speculating in the markets and selling bad debts — because it was temporarily more profitable than investing in production.

But the new way has problems. Said the NY Times, "A significant portion of the financial boom…seems to have been unrelated to economic performance and thus unsustainable." So now Liddy and his cronies are getting the government to bail them out.

Their Goldman Sachs is taking advantage of the bankrupting of competitors like Lehman Bros. Had insurance giant AIG failed, it might have taken down Goldman Sachs, but the government bought, and saved, AIG — and Goldman Sachs. Now Liddy is the new CEO of AIG! Boeing director John Biggs is also a director of JP Morgan Chase and former CEO of TIAA-CREF, the national teacher’s pension fund. His successor there, Herbert Allison, is now head of Fannie Mae (currently on government life support).

While a bailout may be advantageous to these bosses, they still have to sell it — to Congress, U.S. workers and to international capitalists. If the world’s bosses don’t go along, it could endanger the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Another Boeing boss, William Daley, is a key Democratic Party power broker and an Obama "senior advisor." His brother Richard is currently Chicago’s mayor, and a big Obama backer. These Democrats are trying to convince workers and youth that "Republican greed" caused the meltdown and that Barack will lead them to the promised land of regulated capitalism. Obama’s main job is to win U.S. youth and workers to sacrifice blood and sweat for these thieves’ continued rule.

Although these Boeing bosses know they can count on Obama to serve Wall Street, some are backing his rival McCain (elections are unpredictable). Another Boeing boss, Kenneth Duberstein, is a director of Big Oil’s ConocoPhillips and was once Republican Reagan’s chief of staff. He’s a long-time McCain advisor and member of Timmons & Co., a leading lobbyist firm. McCain named its CEO, William Timmons, to lead his transition team.

Duberstein, a champion of unregulated capitalism, was also a Fannie Mae director. From 2002-2006 his firm advised that mortgage broker on regulatory matters — how to keep the scam going!

So, the Boeing Board members know that whoever becomes president, he will be tied to the same jackals that caused the meltdown in the first place.

They may have the election sewn up, but they still must convince the world that the U.S., while possibly going bankrupt, is still the only superpower. They plan strategy in the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rockefeller/Morgan-sponsored think-tank that ("unofficially") plots U.S. foreign policy. Its members include Boeing bosses Biggs, Daley, and Duberstein!

These bandits know they’re in deep trouble. Basically they didn’t make enough profit the "old-fashioned way" so they deregulated, starting with Reagan and growing under Clinton. Instead of investing in industrial production, they had to resort to scams like subprime mortgages — that the old rules made difficult — to make a fast buck.

Now they want to re-industrialize, but not making washing machines and hair dryers. What money remains will be spent on armaments to control the world’s oil supplies and destroy their rivals’ productive capacity.

They want to bail themselves out. But ultimately it’s workers’ loss of homes, jobs and health care, earning slave wages that would bail them out, in their drive to reindustrialize for war production to fight imperialist wars.

The union wanted strikers to come into this battle blaming black, Latino and Chinese subcontractor workers. But when one seller held up our CHALLENGE strike Extra and shouted, "Read how L.A. subcontractor workers support Boeing strikers," she was cheered.

Based on this experience, a Boeing CHALLENGE reader wrote a "thank you" note from us strikers to L.A. subcontractor workers who have sent support letters and spoken at some of our BBQs. It was the first political document he’s written. He presented it to our group that meets at a nearby restaurant. He knew the union would stonewall any effort to build multi-racial, international unity between non-union subcontractors and us so he proposed a way to gather many rank-and-file signatures right now. Another shop steward agreed to sell more CHALLENGES after this discussion.

Small, but useful, victories as the strike goes on. Holding the line while struggling to advance PLP’s revolutionary communist line..

Hospital Workers Back Boeing Strikers

STATEMENT FROM CHALLENGE READERS AT A BROOKLYN HOSPITAL

We the CHALLENGE readers express our solidarity with the Boeing workers.

We support our brothers and sisters in their struggle against the Boeing company.

Boeing recently made $20 billion in profit from super-exploiting Boeing workers yet Boeing refuses to meet the economic demands from the workers.

However, the bosses’ government is spending billions in taxpayers’ money to bail out the banks, mortgage and insurances companies, while millions of U.S. workers’ wages have stagnated and health and pension benefits have grown stingier.

We, the CHALLENGE readers, are contributing $70 towards your struggle.

Keep up the fight against the bosses at Boeing.

U.S.-Russia Sharpening Rivarly Revs Up World War Threat

As the Georgian-Russian war revealed, inter-imperialist rivalry has reached a new level. It demonstrated the Russian bosses’ willingness to commit military power to defend their centuries-old sphere of influence and their control of the energy-rich Caspian Sea-Caucasus region. It also again exposed the U.S. bosses’ growing inability to rely on proxy forces to defend their interests abroad, prompting an eventual clash of U.S. and Russian troops. This, plus the on-going worldwide economic crisis, has accelerated the threat of world war as the only "solution" to this rivalry.

At stake in this Georgian dogfight is not only who will exploit, transport and decide where to market those energy resources, but which imperialist gangs will dominate the world, which, since World War I has been based on controlling the world’s energy resources. Since WWII, U.S. bosses’ world supremacy stems from controlling the oil-rich Middle East and energy resources in Latin America and Africa. This control, however, has been eroding, hammered by unrelenting challenges posed by rival imperialists and local bosses.

All this has intensified the U.S. bosses’ decline. To reverse it, says Foreign Affairs (September/December 2008; "A Daunting Agenda" by Richard Holbrooke), the weakness in "the domestic economy" must be repaired because "in the long run, the rise and fall of great nations is driven primarily by their economic strength…." But in reversing this economic downturn "… a new factor has emerged, unlike any the United States has previously faced"; with the high price of oil "...Americans ….are contributing to the greatest transfer of wealth from one set of nations to another in history" — an astounding $3 trillion yearly to oil-producing countries.

Historically, economic power helped determine military power of past empires. U.S. rivals, like Russia, are using their energy wealth to rebuild their military with state-of-the-art weaponry. The Russian navy has commissioned six new carrier groups to be built starting in 2012. The U.S. has eleven.

To regain its economic clout, U.S. imperialism must reassert control over the world’s energy resources and seize or destroy its main rivals’ industrial base. Energy-wise, so far, it has been waging a losing battle in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Venezuela. It recently suffered a major defeat in the Caspian Sea area as Russia’s Gazprom outfit bought most of the region’s exportable oil and gas resources. This effectively killed the West’s projected NABUCO pipeline to transport oil and gas from this area to Europe, bypassing Russian territory.

Now, because of its Georgian military victory, Russia can shut the only pipeline that bypasses the Russian Federation, the BTC (from Azerbaijan to Georgia to Turkey), or achieve this through clients like the Turkish Kurds. Recently, during repairs fo9llowing a Kurdish attack, the million barrels of oil BTC transports daily to Europe was rerouted through the Russian network. Given this, the deputy vice-president of Azerbaijan’s State Oil Co. said, "his company is considering an offer by Russia to buy all of the firm's natural gas production for both domestic use and export to Europe." (LA Times, 8/18/08)

Thus, U.S. rulers’ dreams of using Central Asia’s energy resources to break Russia’s stranglehold on Europe’s energy supplies — to maintain the NATO alliance for geopolitical reasons and eventual global war against Russia and/or China — have temporarily being dashed. Thus, gaining control of Iran — the world’s third largest oil and second largest natural gas reserve — has therefore become more crucial than ever to an ever more desperate U.S. imperialism fighting to maintain its world hegemony, with very few options left but war. Iran is also the perfect land bridge to transport Caspian Sea’s energy to Europe.

All this will require a war of unpredictable consequences. That’s why Holbrooke states, "The next U.S. president will inherit a more difficult set of international challenges than any predecessor since World War II." A challenge either Obama or McCain will dutifully undertake.

Capitalism/Imperialism breeds war under either nationalized or privatized means of production. Eighty percent of the world’s oil/natural gas resources have been nationalized but it’s only sharpened the inter-imperialist rivalry and moved the world closer to global war. Whether Saudi Arabia’s Princes, Iran’s Ayatollahs, Venezuela’s Chavez or Mexico’s Obrador, nationalization serves the interest of one sector of the local ruling classes and whichever imperialist they are allied with.

Our class should never support any of these butchers or participate in any capitalist electoral circus. Our interests lie in building a mass revolutionary communist PLP to fight for a communist world, where our class will decide how to best use and allocate the world’s natural resources to meet the needs of the world’s workers.

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Two Day Rebellion Leads To Boeing Strike WORKERS MUST FIGHT RACISM

SEATTLE, WA, September 14 — “Sellout!” shouted machinists as International Association of Machinists (IAM) aerospace negotiator Mark Blondin announced Boeing workers would be going to work the next day, September 4, despite an 87% strike vote. He said Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire had arranged for 48 hours of federal mediation. In response the workers threw chicken bones and water bottles (left over from the volunteer vote counters’ dinner). The union hall erupted. Blondin and IAM District President Tom Wroblewski fled the stage. They sent out the union P.R. person, hoping for better results. No dice!
Blondin and Wroblewski flew the next day to negotiate at the Disney resort in Florida to be joined by IAM International President Buffenbarger. Back on the shop floor, “No Contract, No Work” signs sprung up at abandoned workstations. One foolish manager tracked down a worker to do a “hot” job (one that would hold up the assembly line). “Why don’t you call the governor and get her to come down here and do it!” the worker replied angrily. By afternoon, the assembly line had stopped because they couldn’t get enough workers.
When management asked us what more can we possibly want, many replied, “All we want is our egg salad on white bread (the traditional fare for picketers).” Some half jokingly threatened to “picket the union hall with baseball bats.” By Friday night demonstrations moved towards the gates with “United We Stand” signs.
Small picket lines began forming outside the plants. The Party distributed flyers and signs in the plants and at the gates. Clearly the union leadership would have to let us strike after the initial 48 hours, no matter what deals they worked out. “I always thought the union had one leg in the bed with the company, but I didn’t realize they were way under the covers,” a facilities maintenance worker said. We were in no mood to accept any contract. We made plans to wildcat if they dared to extend the “no strike” negotiations.
Even as the Boeing strike enters its second week, the big story is still how we got here. Wroblewski has been going around to union meetings pleading, “I understand the memberships’ emotion. The pot was boiling.” Acknowledging that he’s taken licks on the picket line, he tries to justify the leadership’s 48 hour betrayal saying the company blinked. If this spin doesn’t work (and it isn’t), we’ll hear many more incredible excuses. His greatest fear is being boiled in the pot of rank-and-file insurrection he had to face during those 48 hours.
The Dictatorship Of The Bosses vs. The Dictatorship Of The Working Class
Since the strike vote was taken PLP members and friends have had discussions on the nature of the bosses’ dictatorship and general revolutionary history.
Many workers want to know what the communists are saying. Most are friendly; others are incensed at our influence on sections of the workforce. We pointed out that when the federal mediator and the governor stepped into the negotiations, they were not neutral parties. The federal mediator is in daily contact with the chief IAM negotiator.
As the Party’s flyer stated, the Governor and the mediator were “the political representatives of the ruling class.” Lest we forget, “this is the same federal government whose Pentagon says ‘outsourcing is the answer’ to the exorbitant expense of their high-tech weapons.” Outsourcing means shifting work to racist, low-wage subcontractors employing larger numbers of black, Latin and immigrant workers. This is the same government that wants a “southern aerospace corridor” in the low-wage, non-union Southeast. The legacy of racism has driven down the wages of these workers in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi. “Both rely on racist super-exploitation to fund the bosses’ imperialist ambitions and we will continue to fight these efforts to divide us,” our leaflet warned.
“That’s what the bosses’ dictatorship looks like,” our Party argued in numerous shop floor debates. “They’ll let you vote on anything until it threatens their power. Whether it’s a Democrat or Republican, it’s still the bosses’ racist dictatorship.”
When we refused to work during those 48 hours, overriding their contract and pro-capitalist union leaders, we showed the potential power of the dictatorship of the working class. Communist revolution relies on the might of a united international working class, smashing the bosses’ repressive government apparatus. “Let the bosses tremble at the power of the working class” our leaflet ended.
“I’m Not Driving That Truck
Under Any Flag”
In another discussion an anti-communist tried to portray the dictatorship of the working class as the dictatorship over the working class. He pointed to the reactionary, often pro-Nazi, people that fled the USSR after World War II, portraying them as heroes. Older CHALLENGE readers were having none of it. They remember the ex-Nazis that they were forced to work with years ago. “Those bastards would openly celebrate Hitler’s birthday at work, wearing Nazi uniforms, and the company allowed them to,” said an irate machine operator. Besides, they were the biggest kiss-asses in the shop.
This led to a discussion on how fascism relies on extreme racism and nationalism. This discussion inspired another reader to relate a small but significant struggle he had against flag waving. A small U.S. flag was placed on top of the delivery truck his area uses. Every time he saw it, he would throw it to the ground. Finally, he had enough. He gathered his shop-mates around and delivered an ultimatum. “I’m not driving that truck under any flag.” The flag hasn’t been seen since.
We ended with an old story from WWII. A PLP veteran was with the U.S. Army in a small town in Italy when the war ended. The locals got a ragtag band together to celebrate. He thought they would play the Italian national anthem. Instead they broke into The (communist) International. Red flags of revolution were everywhere --- Now there’s a flag you can drive a truck under!
Some of the participants of this last discussion will organize continued discussions in various cities to accommodate Boeing’s far-flung workforce while we are on strike. Either way, we are filling the [non] workday with intense struggles over revolutionary ideas.
We need your support! Send letters of solidarity and donations to help produce leaflets and CHALLENGES to Boeing Strikers C/O PLP Box 808, Brooklyn, 11202.

Job Security, Outsourcing Big Strike Issues

“They say you can’t have job security these days,” said IAM District President Wroblewski at recent union meetings, referring to one of the most contentious strike issues, “And I agree with them.” He then pleaded for a break from worrying about this during the next three years (the duration of any new contract signed after the strike). 
The union has confined the debate to facilities maintenance, parts delivery inside the plants, and bidding to undercut proposed manufacturing outsourcing. The latter will accelerate the racist trend to a low-wage union workforce within the Boeing plants: what has become known as the “Kick Your Kids to the Kurb (KKK)” contract.
The union is reportedly looking for language that is similar to that among GE unions. What a joke! GE is known as the Gone Elsewhere, having outsourced more jobs than anyone.
It’s true under capitalism workers have as much security as a pig at a BBQ. That’s why we can’t limit the debate to what’s possible under this system. Production for profit pits not only nation against nation and company against company, but also worker against worker. Communism, on the other hand, produces for the needs of our class. Under communism we welcome extra hands. We would use the help to increase production to support the revolutionary aspirations of our international brothers and sisters, dedicate more of our time to developing political leadership among our fellow workers or shorten the workday.
It’s no accident that it is only our Party that has produced letters of support from subcontractor workers. Uniting with these super-exploited workers will build the kind of anti-racist, international solidarity that can really advance the struggle and pave the path to revolution.

U.S. RULERS DEMAND NEXT PRESIDENT IMPOSE FASCIST SACRIFICE

A regimen of “discipline and sacrifice,” enforced by the next president, is the only cure for the U.S.’s deep economic problems, according to the New York Times’ Sept. 9 editorial. The Times, the leading mouthpiece of liberal U.S. rulers, decried the “vulnerabilities” that the emergency nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exposed, and worried cryptically that it would “divert resources from other needs.” Those “other needs” appear more clearly elsewhere in the news. The U.S. is expanding its Afghan war and raiding unstable nuclear-armed Pakistan. Russia, emboldened by its Georgia blitz, has emerged as a military rival. Moscow is sending bombers and a naval squadron to Venezuela to counter the revived U.S. Fourth Fleet which is responsible for naval operations in the Caribbean, Central and South America. Chinese shipyards are working overtime on a blue-water navy “China stands every chance of becoming the world’s largest shipbuilder by 2020” (Le Monde Diplomatique, Sept. 2008). Iraq seems destined for permanent occupation.
CAPITALISTS AND POLITICIANS MUST JUMP ON WAR WAGON
Despite serious government attempts at regulation, including jailings and billions of dollars in fines, U.S. financiers remain largely unfocused on this sharpening rivalry--unlike their counterparts in Russia and China. Putin now adds armed force to Gazprom’s and Lukoil’s energy blackmail of much of Europe. China’s central planners manage economic growth and militarization simultaneously. Wall Streeters, meanwhile, still serving their separate interests, have been selling each other worthless “securities, “ sparking crises, and undermining the U.S.’s overall global standing, especially its ability to finance wars. Re-nationalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (LBJ privatized Fannie to help pay for U.S. genocide in Indochina) and selling damaged firms like Bear, Stearns to bigger ones aim ultimately at creating a wartime economy. Consolidation of capital under tight state control is a hallmark of fascism. But U.S. rulers have far to go in putting their financial house in order. We can expect sharper crackdowns on financiers in the near term. Lehman Bros. may be one example as they’re forced into declaring bankruptcy with no bail-out. Ultimately, world war is the only way for U.S. bosses to maintain their status in the world.
In the same vein, the rulers strive to whip politicians into line. A commission led by James Baker (a major heir of both JP Morgan and Exxon Mobil) and Warren Christopher (whose law firm represents Exxon) proposes a new War Powers Act of 2009. By demanding Congress’s express approval within 30 days of any future U.S. military action, it means to stifle ruling class dissent. It also targets today’s war-impeding hypocrisy whereby Congress members tell constituents they oppose the Iraq war then vote for every nickel the Pentagon and White House ask for.
YOUR RETIREMENT OR YOUR LIFE
Workers should also prepare for more drastic attacks on the working class, which produces every penny of the wealth that capitalists steal as profit or--more and more--war expense. The dominant liberal, Rockefeller-led wing of U.S. rulers hopes that Obama or McCain, once elected, will drop campaign lies and rob Social Security and Medicare in order to bankroll the U.S. war machine. The liberals made this clear recently in a two-page New York Times ad sponsored by Peter Peterson, a Clinton cabinet member and David Rockefeller’s successor as head of the Council on Foreign Relations, the rulers’ top foreign policy think tank. The ad called upon the future president to address a $53-trillion financial hole with “meaningful reforms” (this means cuts) in Social Security and Medicare. Peterson & Co. made it more than clear that workers will pay for coming wars either with their lives or the retirement they have earned. “Americans have grown too used to hearing we can have everything, tax cuts, spending increases, and war funding--for free....When politicians tell us we can have it all without making any sacrifices, we must reject that siren call and hold them accountable.” Tellingly, the ad also bore the endorsement of Warren Rudman. He helped draft the Clinton-sponsored Hart-Rudman reports, a blueprint for wartime fascism designed at maintaining U.S. supremacy well into the 21st Century.
STRIKING BOEING WORKERS SHOW THE WAY
As this is written, tens of thousands of workers, many putting forth our Party’s views, are striking against a major U.S. war contractor, Boeing. Their militancy shows a more viable response, than backing Obama or McCain, to the rulers’ escalating war plans. It shows the potential when the working class, armed with communist ideas can seize power through communist revolution.

DRAFT: RULERS NEED IT, BUT CANDIDATES CAN’T SAY IT— YET

NEW YORK CITY, Sept. 11 — As the U.S. bosses expand their wars to Afghanistan-Pakistan and in the future to Iran, Georgia and more, their overextended military will need millions of troops. On the anniversary of 9/11, Barack Obama and John McCain made a visit to Columbia (Obama’s alma mater) to push national service as part of the “ServiceNation” kick-off event.
Both got loud boos when they told the audience that Ivy League colleges should re-institute officer training (ROTC). Both avoided the words “draft” and “mandatory” when they spoke, mainly focusing on volunteerism and charity work. Knowing that John Kerry’s push for obligatory service helped torpedo his 2004 campaign, the duo tread lightly around the issue—for now.
ServiceNation is a bipartisan “grassroots” organization made up of politicians from Caroline Kennedy to Neil Bush, many CEOs, and retired military brass. It is backed by imperialists like Goldman Sachs and the Rockefeller Fund. The group’s utimate goal is a universal national service act by, at the latest, 2020.
While a handful of students were admitted to see Obama and McCain speak in person, thousands gathered on the main campus to watch via Jumbotron.
Leading up to the event, many comrades were able to get out a wide variety of literature at the campus gates, despite heavy police presence. This included copies of leaflets and pamphlets exposing the elections and “national service,” as well as issues of CHALLENGE and THE COMMUNIST magazine. We made several contacts, and engaged in a number of generally positive discussions. Inside the gates was a different story. The awestruck atmosphere towards Obama at the rally inside the campus made it more difficult to distribute literature.
Although the students in attendance at the event are not representative of the majority of working-class students around the country, we were able to get out a fair amount of literature in spite of many obstacles.
We must join the bosses’ national service programs, to alert students to the gathering storm and win them to anti-imperialism, anti-racism, and — most importantly — the Party itself. In this sense, while the amassing of students in national service organizations is a great danger, it is also an opportunity for us.

Relying on Politicians Won’t
Stop Racist KKKops

PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY, MD, Aug. 20—Hundreds of workers, mostly Latino, attended a vigil to protest the brutal killing of plumber Manuel Jesus de Espina by a Prince George’s County cop. Manuel and his son were drinking in the stairwell of his apartment building, celebrating his 40th birthday. The cop, known for his swaggering brutality, claimed he feared for his life because Espina grabbed for his gun (or was it his baton? The story kept changing), but working-class eyewitnesses reported that Espina did not resist arrest but was beaten, blinded with pepper spray and then shot. Who do you believe? PLPers brought the message of militancy, anti-racism, multi-racial unity and the need for communist revolution to this gathering.
Under communism, there won’t be cops protecting rich people’s property, because there won’t be any rich people or private property. The communist leadership of the new society will resolve conflicts in a comradely way, jail racists and build a unified working class. The role of cops under capitalism is to terrorize workers and protect the bosses and their system. As anti-immigrant racism grows, the cops will increasingly brutalize and murder immigrant workers to fulfill this mission.
Today we are still exploited by capitalism and murdered by racist cops. In Prince George’s County, 14 workers have been shot by the cops since January 2008, several fatally. Twenty years ago, cops beat Gregory Habib, a Ghanaian student, to death here after he failed to stop at a stop sign. The cops were exonerated. “Going through channels,” advocated by leaders of the vigil, has never worked to hold cops accountable, and never will end this racist, fascist intimidation.
We are already campaigning against the lynching of Ronnie White (almost certainly by cops or prison guards) in his jail cell two months ago (CD, 30 July). Then came the needlessly brutal SWAT attack on the home of a Mayor Calvo of Berwyn Heights, and now Espina is murdered in Langley Park. These blatant attacks are just the latest in our area’s long history of police violence, racial profiling and murder. The grassroots People’s Coalition for Police Accountability (PCPA), led mainly by black workers in the County, launched resistance to police brutality over ten years ago, and the 2005 PLP Summer Project in D.C. joined that struggle.
Local politicians and some community activists called for patient reliance on the very system that oppresses all workers. They urged attendees not to “take matters into their own hands.” The wife of State’s Attorney Glenn Ivey (charged with investigating and prosecuting the lynchers of Ronnie White) hugged family members, spoke of justice for Mayor Calvo, but did not mention Ronnie White. She gave Mayor Calvo’s dead dogs killed by the cops more play than a lynched young black man! Politician Victor Ramirez, Delegate to the Maryland House of Representatives, actually blamed Manuel for his own death, saying that he may not have led the most perfect life, and then quickly added that violence never solves anything, so rely on the “justice” system and don’t fight back.
In addition to politicians, representatives of several African American organizations spoke out in solidarity as well. PCPA leader Dorothy Elliott spoke eloquently both about Ronnie White, and her son Archie Elliott, who was murdered 15 years ago by the cops as he sat handcuffed in a police cruiser. The translator never translated her words about Ronnie White!
The lack of militancy did not sit well with the hundreds of angry workers, who rushed to our militant bilingual signs charging PG County cops with racist murders, and linking the attacks on African American Ronnie White and Latino Manuel de Espina with the slogan, “Workers, United, Will Never Be Defeated.” Several new friends offered to help hold these signs, and hundreds more eagerly took CHALLENGE-DESAFIO as over 250 papers flew out of PLPers’ hands.
The organizers invited friends and coworkers of Manuel to speak after the politicians. In the beginning, they mostly spoke of what a great and loving father Manuel was. But then workers’ anger came out and stories of police brutality and intimidation rang out over the crowd. The organizers only let that go on for two or three speakers and then shut down the rally, fearing the growing militancy of the crowd.
PLPers spoke afterwards with workers. One man said, “It isn’t just here that this happens. It happens all over. As long as there is money in a system there will always be oppression and wars.” Another cited the importance of multi-racial and multi-gender unity in the common fight against our common exploiters. Several contacts were made and all were invited to our next events, including the annual PLP Crab Feast and the PCPA forum scheduled for September 9. Our fight against racism, police brutality and for the working class will continue until the exploitative system of capitalism is crushed by workers’ power.

Airport Workers Catch Thieving Bosses

A MIDWEST AIRPORT — “We were robbed! The bosses cheated us!” These are the only printable comments describing how airport janitors were cheated out of eight hours pay by racist ABM Industries bosses. ABM cleaners, mostly immigrants from Mexico, Central America, Africa, and Asia, were paid eight hours short on their July 17 paychecks. The bosses blamed it on the “new time keeping system.” The real reason is racism.
Anti-immigrant Nazi-like raids conducted by ICE and Homeland Security, racist movements like the Minutemen and a failing economy have produced a racist anti-immigrant climate in the U.S. ABM bosses thought they could take advantage of already super-exploited immigrant workers by stealing eight hours pay. Also, they paid some of the black workers full pay, trying to divide citizens from immigrants. But a black PLP member and union shop steward organized the workers to resist this fascist attack.
A meeting was held at the home of a co-worker and CHALLENGE reader, where we discussed what to do. We agreed to file a mass grievance and to try to get all the victimized workers to sign on. We also requested an emergency meeting with the union leadership.
An SEIU leader misled the most militant workers (and CHALLENGE readers) into thinking he was not coming to the airport, when in fact he actually did! He wanted no part of us because he was afraid of being called on to do something to get the workers’ the eight hours owed. So we called for a second union meeting. Some workers distributed a PLP flier that attacked the SEIU leadership for supporting the racist bosses.
At the next meeting, with everyone there, the workers put the misleader under pressure. Some workers got into a heated exchange with the SEIU misleader who shouted, “I’m not the enemy!” He hurried up and left! The workers won that round!
Later, the union leader reluctantly filed the grievance. ABM bosses were extremely upset that a few workers would defy them. They even called the shop steward into the office to attempt to intimidate him and find out how the workers were going to fight back. The shop steward kept his cool and the bosses learned nothing! It was a clumsy fascist attempt to stop the workers from resisting.
ABM workers scored a small victory and got the eight hours owed them! The bosses underestimated the anger and ability of workers to unite across nation, race and gender. Officially, we lost the grievance, but we’re still getting paid from the main corporate office. The airport bosses hate this!
Frederick Douglass, the great antislavery freedom fighter said, “Power concedes nothing without struggle.” Self-critically, we could have done more. But a few workers, mostly regular CHALLENGE readers, collectively contributed to this struggle, “from each according to ability.”
More fascist attacks are coming because the racist bosses are in a global crisis. If we are to survive and defeat fascism with communist revolution, we must learn how to organize under any and all circumstances, including the most extreme. Workers, soldiers, and students need PLP!

PLP Exposes Deadly Election Politics to
Iraq Veterans

ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA, August 30th—At this year’s Veterans for Peace (VFP)/Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) convention the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) met and worked with old friends to distribute Challenge and our “GI Notes” newsletter and  make new contacts.
IVAW’s actions at the Democratic and Republican national conventions drew the most excitement among the young vets. At the DNC (Democratic National Convention), IVAW led over 3,000 in an anti-war march and claimed victory when Barack Obama’s top veterans affairs advisor accepted a message against the Iraq war from IVAW on behalf of the presidential candidate. However, when the vets asked Obama’s representative for an expected time of reply, Obama’s reps refused to give one. While IVAW is currently eager to negotiate a meeting with Obama, the lesson we in PLP saw was that Obama and the Democrats are willing to pretend to listen while they plan expanded wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (see article on page 4).
Many in IVAW are not fooled by Obama’s supposed “anti-war” stance—some in IVAW even pushed to officially oppose the US war in Afghanistan—but few see alternatives to pressuring politicians. We in PLP said that working class, lower enlisted troops, and students can end imperialism through generations of class struggle and armed revolution, not lobbying and elections. Imperialist wars continued after the US bosses defeat in Vietnam because of capitalism’s constant drive  for profit and power, not “greedy” corporations and “corrupt” presidents. The openness by some vets to PLPs line at the convention left us energized and eager to aid in active-duty and vets struggles.
The role of police was also a hot discussion. Some wanted to trust and work more with the police because at the DNC, a handful of police in riot gear refused to point their weapons at the IVAW contingent, left their posts, and were moved to tears by a powerful speech given by an IVAW member. 
The police attacked the rest of the DNC anti-war marches. Also, the basis of IVAW’s appeal to police was individualist and patriotic, focusing on the psychological effects on the cops for attacking “American” veterans who were mostly white. Given racist police murders and anti-immigrant raids by ICE, law enforcement would probably treat black, latino, and immigrant troops differently. 
Similar tactics of vets appealing to cops did not work at the RNC. Uniformed cops openly tried to sit in IVAW’s closed workshops in the IVAW convention room, they photographed vets walking to hotels, and attacked protestors during IVAW’s attempt to bring McCain’s campaign a veterans rights message.
Many at the convention were motivated to stop more troops from experiencing the guilt of killing for oil and greed, and to stop the killing of civilians. Many really believe politicians will listen to them or that enough troops and public will rise up so the anti-war movement will stop the bosses war in the next few months or years. But vets need a long term struggle against the profit system behind the wars. Many of the young vets we met are motivated to do more around Veterans issues and racism against Iraqis. PLP plans on working with and giving them communist leadership to oppose capitalism and all it’s imperialist wars, not just Iraq.
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Will U.S. Invade Pakistan?

PAKISTAN –– On September 14, Pakistan troops fired shots into the air to stop U.S. troops crossing into the South Waziristan region of Pakistan. A couple of weeks before, twenty Pakistani villagers, including women and children, were killed when the U.S. troops crossed the border from Afghanistan to supposedly attack Taliban insurgents in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry immediately condemned it as “a grave provocation.” Seven days later Bush announced U.S intentions to continue the raids — with or without the approval of the Pakistani government — and to send additional troops to Afghanistan (Obama and McCain agree on expanding the war in this region.)
Pakistan and Afghanistan share a 1,500-mile border, that 19th century British imperialists arbitrarily cut through mountainous land inhabited by Pashtuns. U.S. insistence that the Pakistan military crack down on the Taliban has caused a backlash against the army by Pakistani fundamentalists (often Pashtuns) and al Qaeda (foreign jihadists). The fierce confrontations have killed many civilians and left thousands homeless. In Afghanistan, the seven-year U.S.-NATO occupation has worsened conditions for the majority of Afghans. More than 1,000 civilians have been killed this year.
The U.S. and its ally, India, claim that Pakistan is the center and cause of the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, accusing members of the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) of helping the Taliban. This is the excuse for the recent U.S. invasion of Pakistani territory. The U.S. wants to replace its decades-long indirect domination of Pakistan with direct military control.
A 2005 report by the U.S. National Intelligence Council and the CIA, forecast a “Yugoslav-like fate.” for Pakistan. A former Pakistani High Commissioner to the UK predicted that, “The central government’s control probably will be reduced to the Punjabi heartland and the economic hub of Karachi, by 2015.” (Times of India 13 Feb 2005).
Breaking up Pakistan would facilitate U.S. exploitation of the vast energy reserves of the Caspian Sea region to the north. Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of Barak Obama’s foreign policy advisors wrote in 1990, “The Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea.” U.S. oil companies plan to build pipelines to transport that oil and gas from the region through Afghanistan and Balochistan — a Pakistan province — to the Arabian Sea and so to markets in Europe and Asia. If the U.S. is unable to secure this pipeline, Russia — and China — may monopolize the Caspian oil fields. The survival of the U.S. as a leading imperialist power depends on the control of the world’s energy sources — a point emphasized this week as oil baron Cheney shuttled around the Caspian States meeting local rulers and representatives of Chevron and BP. As Brzezinski noted, “whoever controls Eurasia controls the world.”
The U. S. is now sponsoring India’s membership in NATO, which will add one more powerful U.S. ally to the growing circle around Russia. When the Indian army took part in NATO exercises in Arizona in August, Russia retaliated by announcing that its strategic bombers would patrol the Indian Ocean. The U.S. and India signed a nuclear arms agreement that, according to Administration officials, “seals a long-term strategic alliance between the two countries, which had tense relations during the Cold War.” With a rapidly expanding capitalist economy, seeking new markets, trading partners and oil, India also has interests in the Caspian Sea reserves and has its own plans for pipelines from Iran, through Balochistan to India.
Nationalism and religion are constantly being used by the ruling classes to divide workers and their allies. In Pakistan, India has joined with the U.S and Britain to covertly support and arm the separatist Balochistan Liberation Movement. In Indian-controlled Kashmir tension is growing between Muslim and Hindu, fundamentalists and secularists, and spreading to the border with Pakistan in the east.
The former Yugoslavia was broken up in part with the promotion of nationalism and the organization of separatist militias. For Yugoslavia’s working class the result was fascist/racist terror, bloody civil wars and atrocities. Revolutionary communists must show the Afghan, Pakistan, and Indian working class and its allies — Pashtuns, Balochis, Sindhis, Punjabis, Kashmiris, Hindus — that nationalism is not the answer to their problems. That is the goal of the PLP in the region. Join us!

France: Thousands Strike Against Job Cuts

UZES, FRANCE, Sept. 11—The summer holiday season is over and the first strikes and demonstrations against job cuts and worsening conditions are breaking out. A case in point: high school teachers struck the whole first week of classes in this small town in Southern France (pop. 7,800, 2004 unemployment rate: 19%, average weekly household income: 275 euros), occupying the principal’s office on Sept. 1. The strikers were mobilizing against obligatory overtime and over-crowded classes. The local board of education refused even to receive a parent-teacher delegation on Sept. 4.
The French banks have lost nearly 20 billion euros since the beginning of the subprime crisis, practically throwing the economy into recession. According to UNEDIC (the French unemployment agency), 35,000 workers lost their jobs in the second quarter of 2008. And the real income of the average French household fell over the past year, according to the National Consumption Institute. But workers are fighting back:
Hospital workers struck at the public hospital in Strasbourg yesterday to protest the administration policy of placing profits over patient lives and the resulting multi-tasking of hospital workers.
Over 2,000 auto workers struck Renault plants across France today against the planned axing of 4,000 jobs, which comes on top of 10,000 job losses over the past three years.
And thousands of teachers demonstrated today in over half of France’s 100 départements (the equivalent of a county), with strikes in five départements (Ardennes, Champagne, Essonne, Guadeloupe and Marne) to protest job cuts: 11,200 this year, 13,500 planned next year, and 40,000 over the next three years.
Five postal workers’ unions are calling for a 24-hour national strike and demonstrations throughout France on Sept. 23 to protest government plans to privatize the postal service.
Finally, six trade union federations are calling for a national protest on Oct. 7, the “world day for decent work” organized by the reformist International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).
But all this indicates is that the reformist and reactionary trade union leaders, with the radical unions in tow, are pursuing their usual strategy of launching isolated local protests and 24-hour strikes in the hope of “building momentum” for a big national demonstration, and possibly a nation-wide 24-hour strike. This piecemeal strategy has failed to obtain any gains for workers since 1995.
As a result, Education Minister Xavier Darcos felt safe heaping scorn on the protesting teachers when he appeared on national television today, proclaiming “I love teachers” while denouncing teachers unions as promoting a “strike first, negotiate later culture,” and denying that job cuts are resulting in larger class sizes and poorer education.
Leftist trade unionists here are trying to overcome the piecemeal strategy by pushing for an unlimited general strike, like the one that shut down France for two months in 1968. But that experience shows that even an unlimited general strike, if it leaves the capitalist system intact, falls short of what the working class needs— particularly in this age of worldwide capitalist crisis, more racism and endless wars. Workers here need to turn these struggles into schools for communism, and build a revolutionary internationalist movement to fight for the only real solution to the bosses’ attacks: communism.

Bolivia: Gas-Oil Profits Behind Racism of Fascist Goons

LA PAZ, Bolivia, Sept. 15 — This Andean country is on the verge of a racist civil war as the governors of the “Half Moon” (in the eastern plains of the country) are in open rebellion against the central government of Evo Morales. There is a real threat of the country breaking apart. Right now, there are two governments: one led by Morales in the Andean region and the other led by the “autonomist” governors of the eastern plains. The gas and oil fields there are at stake, as well as the agricultural wealth of the “Half Moon.” The openly fascist governors — supported by the U.S. embassy — don’t want to share this wealth with the central government, particularly since Evo Morales is an ally of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Morales expelled the U.S. ambassador last week, accusing him of meeting with the “autonomists.” Ambassador Goldberg was a U.S. diplomat in the former Yugoslavia in the mid 1990s when it was ridden by imperialist-caused nationalist civil wars.
The “autonomists” are openly fascist and racist. When their attempted putsch began last week in the state of Pando, with open support from the local governor, neo-Nazi goons from the youth group Juventud Cruceñista targeted what they call the “damn Indian race.” They killed 30 indigenous workers and peasants. These thugs attacked central government offices, took over an airport, gas and oil fields, cutting off gas supplies to Brazil (which get 50% of their gas from Bolivia) and Argentina.
Evo Morales has mass support, winning 67% of the votes in an August referendum. Since then, the aim of the pro-U.S. fascists has been to provoke a military coup (Bolivia has a long history of putsches). But, Morales so far has the support of army since he put some of his loyal officers in control. Most soldiers are recruits and Indigenous (most upper and middle class white youth use their families’ economic power to avoid the draft.) Chávez threatened to send troops to Bolivia to help Morales, and even expelled the U.S. ambassador to Caracas in solidarity when he accused Venezuelan military officers of conspiring to kill him.
Given the growing instability in the region, the powerhouse of South America – the Brazilian ruling class — decided it doesn’t want the U.S. oil companies to control the gas and oil fields of Bolivia (because they will compete with Brazil’s Petrobras). So Brazil’s President Lula put his foot down and stated that Brazil will not tolerate the break-up of its neighbor, Bolivia. (El País, Madrid, 9/14). This led to a regional rulers meeting — excluding the U.S. — which came out in support of Morales.
But, the contradictions between the secessionists and Morales continue since the anti-Morales bosses don’t want the national government to cut into their share of the revenues (taxes) they get from the oil-gas profits. Also, the rivalry between the U.S. imperialists and Brazil and Venezuela is growing. And the inter-imperialist dogfight will sharpen as Russia’s Gazprom is in negotiation with YPFB (the state-owned Bolivian energy company) a $2 billion investment.
As far as workers and their allies are concerned, the solution doesn’t lie in the 21st Century socialism (state capitalism) of Chávez or its Morales’ version of Andean capitalism. Morales continues attempts to negotiate a deal with the open fascists, demoralizing workers and peasants who have illusions about his government. The only solution is to build an anti-imperialist and anti-racist movement to fight for a society without any form of capitalism: communism.

Imperialist Rivalry Spurs Mexican Rulers’ Oil Battle

The U.S. now faces a historic crisis and, desperate to stop their decline, they must control sources of energy. They are currently pushing for privatization of energy in Mexico through the government of Felipe Calderon and his allies in the Mexican Congress who promise the U.S. control over oil and gas, since Spain has stepped in and is already savoring part of the energy pie. 
The rivalry between the imperialists is sharpening all around the world and reflects weakening U.S. domination and the strengthening of rivals like Russia, China and India. Control of the world’s oil safeguards U.S bosses’ continuing worldwide supremacy. Without that control, this goal will be illusive. In the Caucasus, the U.S. wants to break Russia’s fuel monopoly and thus assure a third major source of energy on the planet. This intensifies the rivalry between the two imperialists. 
Some Mexican capitalists don’t want to share with the U.S. or Spanish capitalists. That’s why they push nationalism to win worker support for their own control of the oil profits. Lopez Obrador is the spokesman for the nationalist capitalists. He may be willing to fight a civil war to defend this wealth against mainly U.S. bosses, not for the well-being of Mexican workers, but for higher profits and stability for Mexican bosses. That’s why he’s formed the FAP (Broad Progressive Front) in which an estimated 3 million people participated in mobilizations for the “peaceful transformation of the public life of Mexico,” in reality to support Obrador against the privatization of PEMEX. 
The actions organized by FAP mean that they have too weak a presence in Congress to achieve their goals there. That’s why they threaten actions against privatization to be carried out by workers in the different states of Mexico. But the politicians trap workers into trying to win reforms from various profit-hungry capitalists who only want the best deal for themselves, keeping the workers chained to capitalist exploitation. 
Mexico is a strategic ally of the U.S. Most Mexican oil and food sales go to the U.S. That’s why they have designed Plan Puebla Panama as a supplier of the wealth of Latin America to North America. Many U.S. manufacturers gain great profit by paying skilled Mexican workers so little. The most profitable industry is auto and lately aerospace in the north, mainly Chihuahua. In coming wider wars, these industries will play an important role, since they make weapons. 
Behind Felipe Calderon’s “war against drug traffic” is the militarization of the country. The U.S. bosses and their lackeys in Mexico will fight to protect their wealth like oil, natural gas, water, biodiversity, uranium, etc. from their imperialist enemies. They could also try to control any popular uprising by unleashing police terror against workers. 
Through the Alliance for Security and Prosperity of North America (ASPAN, a treaty made with ex-President Fox), the Merida initiative with Calderon, and recently the proposal to integrate Mexico into NORAD (North American Aerospace Command), the U.S. has entered a financial, military and energy “alliance” with Mexico and Canada, which is basically a proposal to focus on the strategic security of the U.S. in the face of wider war. 
There’s no good or lesser evil capitalist or imperialist. They all seek to live off the wealth created by the working class. Siding with either block of capitalists is the worst error workers could make. We need to build an alliance with workers, students and soldiers around the PLP and fight internationally to destroy this system. Communist ideas must illuminate our staunch struggle to end the nightmare of capitalism. Only a communist revolution can establish a society that finally ends individualism, sexism, racism, nationalism and exploitation. That society is communism and for that we’ll fight to the win. JOIN US! FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! 

Pacifism Hindered Calif. Mass Farmworkers’ Strikes

My experiences of many decades of organizing among farmworkers have shown me that pacifism causes despair for workers engaged in struggles, and even for pacifists themselves when reality hits them in the face.
In general, pacifists are religious believers, they hate violence particularly when it comes to labor conflicts. According to their religious dogmas, humans shouldn’t be the ones to decide about their lives. This is up to a divine being. In this way, they look good in front of their god and with the bosses, but not in front of their fellow workers in struggle. They believe that through sacrifices and suffering, even with hunger strikes, the bosses will get a conscience and will stop exploiting workers. Cesar Chávez, who was the leader of the United Farmworkers’ Union (UFWU), became famous with his hunger strikes and urged others to do the same during the strikes in the California fields from 1965-70. These mass struggles were almost lost because of Chávez’s pacifist philosophy. His pacifism didn’t only put a break in the the advance of the struggle, but also castrated it, taking away all its strength that could lead to victory in a shorter time. Thanks to the militancy of many strikers who didn’t think like Chávez, the strike wasn’t lost.
Most pacifists are not enemies of workers, but because of their fear of god and the bosses they think it is better to be a pacifist in the the struggle. But, when honest pacifists participate in labor conflicts and reality hits them in the face, they begin to change their attitude and end up joining the non-pacifists.
It happened in 1973 when the Calif. growers refused to renew the UFWU labor contracts and another strike erupted. And this one was rather violent. Then those who opted for pacifism (even preachers and priests) joined the rest of the workers, forgetting about non-violent strategies and took part in the struggle as if they had never been pacifist.
I think it is important to wage ideological struggle with workers involved in class struggle. We must bring to them the workers’ philosophy to distinguish between who are our friends and our enemies. We mustn’t fall in the anti-working class trap put up by politicians, bosses and even the same leaders which trust in the “justice” of the corrupt capitalist system.
A Veteran of the Fight-backs in Calif.

LETTERS

INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL SPREADS
COMMUNIST IDEAS

As reported in CHALLENGE (9/17), a PLP international communist school was held on a recent weekend in Spain with comrades visiting from France, local citizens and immigrant workers from Colombia, El Salvador, Brazil, Perú and other countries discussing ideas, experiences and the politics of PLP.
A good discussion began when a worker said, “In Brazil they want us to think that there are only two classes: the upper class and the middle class.” After talking it over, we all agreed that class struggle between workers and bosses is the moving force of history and therefore these are the only two real classes in any capitalist system.
Another good aspect was that people came to the meeting willing to talk to workers, students and soldiers, to share the communist ideas of the Party. Our group continues to include more workers who understand that we must wage an armed revolutionary struggle against the class enemy to destroy capitalism and to install a new system: COMMUNISM.
“In France, one month the transportation workers go on strike, then the next month the doctors strike, and next the lawyers,” said a friend from France. We responded that while capitalism forces workers to strike to get some crumbs, the union leaders use these struggles to build illusions among workers about the system. Nowadays, with the growing international crisis of capitalism and endless wars, the bosses and the sellouts leading the unions make it harder to get even minor reforms. Our job is to bring our communist politics to workers involved in these struggles (and all workers and their allies) and to show them that the only real solution is to fight to destroy the capitalist system building a mass revolutionary party to fight for communism.
The participants in the 3-day communist school came out satisfied with PLP’s line and politically moved forward. They found real answers to the problems facing the world’s workers, contrary to the false promises of the electoral parties and their politicians.
Workers all over the world need these meetings, because the schools and other institutions of this system only give us lies about communism. We need all the cadre of PLP to spread the Party’s ideas and win more workers. We’re now distributing more CHALLENGE newspapers in France and Spain. Continue to advance, comrades. The march is slow but we keep marching. LONG LIVE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION and the PLP!
Comrades in Spain

CHILD VICTIMS OF IMF/WTO RACISM

At the Awet Secondary School in Mbulumbulu, Tanzania, a seventeen year old girl was beaten by her headmaster. She had simply responded to his question about some students who were late to do a chore, and he slapped her on the side of the head, damaging her eardrum. This kind of incident is common at Awet. Last year, the headmaster beat a boy and locked him up for more than eight hours in a tiny closet. After that, the poor boy left the school and committed suicide. After a discussion with their American sponsors, the girl’s sister who was also beaten by the headmaster, has compiled a list of names of students who have been abused. The sponsors are writing a letter to the higher authorities demanding that immediate action be taken, and the girls have agreed to circulate it among their friends.
The IMF (International Monetary Fund) and WTO (World Trade Organization) make the rules that perpetuate oppression. The IMF loans money to the Government and then limits the degree to which it can subsidize the people’s basic necessities of life. And, the members of Parliament, primarily committed to increasing their own wealth, administer these policies.
The IMF forbids free secondary school education. Even the public secondary schools charge tuition (about $200/year), adding a terrible burden to parents who can hardly find jobs or a market to sell their crops. Children are regularly kicked out of school for non-payment of fees. In addition, a severe teacher shortage is driving up class size, to often 100 children or more. In order for conditions to change here, workers and youth must begin to understand how imperialism generates the obscene inequality between the rich and poor countries of the world. Revolutionary communist consciousness will enable workers, farmers, and youth to stop blaming themselves, their family members, their tribe, or their luck and begin to seek a collective solution to poverty. Building a new communist movement is humanity’s only hope for escaping the hell that capitalism creates for most of the world’s population.
Internationalist Comrade

CAPITALISM CHOOSES PROFITS OVER HEALTH

No matter how well I understand capitalism’s capacity for screwing the working class, and no matter how many times I think they’ve reached the absolute depths, the US government continues to find new ways to amaze. It is not enough that scandalous under-funding of government safety inspections of our food supply leaves the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) only able to inspect 1% of the meat supply-they now want to make sure no one else inspects the other 99%!
Creekstone Farms Premium Beef in Kansas had begun advertising that they were inspecting 100% of their cows for mad cow disease, but the competing beef producers have taken them to court to prevent them from doing it. Not to prevent them from advertising it, but from actually carrying out the inspections. No longer content with simply withholding funding for inspectors and thereby rendering laws requiring food inspection toothless, the administration, through some of its court appointees, has actually ordered the USDA to PROHIBIT Creekstone from inspecting their own cows for mad cow disease. The court has decreed that Creekstone doesn’t have the right to inspect their cows.
The reason the beef producers have acted is obvious: they don’t want the expense of inspecting their own cows to cut into their profits. But the reason the courts have backed them may be less obvious to many people. Despite their claim to be neutral and “above the fray, the courts, as well as the entire government, are set up to protect the profits of the other producers rather than the health of the entire population, both here and abroad where such meat may be exported.
The government, as Marx pointed out 150 years ago, belongs not to the people, but to the ruling capitalist class. If this outrageous and shameless act of harm to the public interest doesn’t nakedly expose the courts and the rest of the government for what they are, it’s hard to imagine what would. If we want a government that acts in our interests, we will eventually have to overthrow the power of the capitalist class with an armed revolution and replace their government with one that belongs to our class, the working class.
Saguaro Rojo

OLYMPIC GAMES—WHERE IS
SPARTACUS?

Too much talk about the Olympiad. The international big bosses never take a break from bemoaning Tibet, human rights, air pollution — a sign of the Western capitalist countries’ uneasiness about China. Well, we know that’s how imperialist rivals talk about one another. As if European governments were not guilty of the same violations.
What about recent laws in Italy against immigrant and gypsy communities? Construction of concentration camps in North Africa to keep Europe “safe” from “unwelcome intruders”? The Spanish oil company Repsol’s human rights violations in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia? The spirit of Fascism — sorry, I mean the true spirit of capitalism! — is more alive in Europe than ever.
But what about the Olympics’ sportsmen and sportswomen? You saw them march proudly like soldiers behind the flag, the ideal representation of the nation-state. I remembered the German proletarians being deceived by their own party, the socialist SPD, which encouraged them to fight for “their nation” against other fellow proletarians during World War I. Today the U.S. soldier is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for “democracy, freedom” — the greatest nonsense of Western ideology. We all know the real meaning of these words: the democracy of money, the freedom of profit and exploitation, blood becoming oil.
All the fallacies of the capitalist state could be seen in the athletes fighting like soldiers for the pride of their nation. Look at the swimming competition. On the surface it’s U.S. versus German swimmers. But look a little closer: it’s the manufacturer Speedo, sponsor of the U.S. team, against Adidas, sponsor of the German team. Do we need to say that Speedo is the #1 swimwear brand and Adidas #2? You see the swimsuits but not the miserable conditions of the working poor in the underdeveloped countries who make them. But Adidas and Speedo sponsor “the Olympic spirit.” What a joke!
Look at the soccer pitch. Brazil against South Africa...or Nike against Puma? The Olympic spirit of capital, and athletes as its models, the proletarians of this big circus, exploited in the arena to please the bosses, as Bush shakes hands with a Speedo executive while another world record is broken. A job well done!
The athletes of today could be the gladiators of ancient times, the cheap entertainment, or “bread and circuses” as the poet Juvenal called them, foisted on the Roman poor to gain political power over them. It’s the same today. And today, too, sports need their modern Spartacus.
A friend in Europe

REDEYE REDEYE

India’s Muslims Brutally
Repressed - NYT 8/27

India is usually tagged as a “rising superpower” or “capitalist success story” - that India since 1997 has been “stable, peaceful and prosperous”. But four million Kashmiri Muslims suffer every day the misery and degradation of a full-fledged military occupation. A report by Human Rights Watch in 2006 described a steady pattern of arbitrary arrest, torture and extrajudicial execution by Indian security forces. A survey by Doctors Without Borders in 2005 found that Muslim women in Kashmir, prey to the Indian troops and paramilitaries, suffered some of the most pervasive sexual violence in the world. Thousands of Muslims have peacefully demonstarted over the last 30 years against these injustices, but a brutal suppression of nonviolent protests will continue to radicalize a new generation of Muslims.

FBI Poised To Be US Gestapo
- NYT - 8/21

New guidelines would allow the F.B.I. to open an investigation of an American, conduct surveillance, pry into private records and take other investigative steps “without any basis for suspicion.” The plan “might permit an innocent American to be subjected to such intrusive surveillance based in part on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or on protected First Amendment activities”. The Justice Department is already expecting criticism over the F.B.I. guidelines.

Russian Invasion Echoes U.S. Acts
- LAT 8/14

Russia’s invasion fits perfectly into that most ancient of great-power traditions - asserting semi-sovereignty over its immediate neighbors. The United States even has a name for its right to intervene in its neighbors’ affairs: the Monroe Doctrine. And just as Russia moved to undermine a militantly pro-American government on its borders, so the United States moved to overthrow Castro at the Bay of Pigs and depose the Sandanistas in Nicaragua, and green-lighted an attempted coup against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in 2002.

LA: Immigrants Fear Red Cross
- NYT - 9/7

When Hurricane Gustav bore down on New Orleans, many immigrant workers feared that immigration agents would arrest them at Red Cross shelters. Staff members at the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice said they pleaded in vain for written assurances from the Red Cross that undocumented immigrants would be safe in its shelters. It asked the Red Cross to state in writing that its volunteers would be educated about the open-door policy, and that immigration agents would not be allowed to enter shelters for raids or investigations. With the storm rolling ever closer, and the authorities ordering people to flee, no letter came. More than a thousand people decided they could not take the chance of being picked up.

Voting Won’t End Nightmare for 20 Million Unemployed Workers

Voting for either set of warmakers — Obama-Biden or McCain-Palin — won’t end the nightmare suffered by over 20 million workers who are either unemployed, have given up seeking non-existent jobs or are working part-time because they can’t find full-time jobs. Capitalism marches on!
While the “official” jobless rate rose to 6.1% (highest in five years), this excludes the other two categories above, so the real rate is 16.8%. And because of racist discrimination, unemployment rates among black workers are double that of white workers, and 60% higher among Latinos.
This is a full-fledged recession, although — as the saying goes — if your neighbor’s out of work, it’s a recession; if you’re out of work, it’s a depression.
Still worse, inflation has been outstripping wages, so the so-called Misery Index — unemployment + inflation — is at 11.7%, the worst in 17 years.
Of the 600,000 jobs wiped out in August, there are nearly as many college graduates as high school graduates; the jobless are up among adults, many over 45, not just teenagers, as unemployment rose for the 8th straight month, the most sustained increase in 25 years.
Combined with this picture is the home foreclosure rate, triple three years ago and the highest in nearly three decades. Unemployment feeds the foreclosures, leading to a downward spiral for millions of working-class families. In the next four months, the airlines will lay off 36,000. State and local governments will continue to cut back because of lower tax revenues. And the shakiness of the banks, credit and stock markets are heading towards a “financial tsunami,” predicts the manager of the world’s largest bond market — as it was shown by the virtual nationalization of the mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mac. So the Treasury arranged a deal that throws Fannie and Freddie shareholders over the side, but promises to protect Wall Street and foreign creditors (from China, Japan, oil-rich Gulf emirate and even Russia). Without these big lenders, credit would dry up and the blow to the bosses’ economy could be historic. So, the feds couldn’t wait till after the elections. Neither Obama nor McCain opposed this huge robbery of workers’ tax money. Eventually it could cost $500 billion to save these mortgage giants.
With U.S. imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan and Iran looming?), trillions in workers’ and future workers’ income taxes are being sucked into the bottomless military pit the ruler’s system has created, while simultaneously slaughtering millions of workers internationally.
Meanwhile, Obama and McCain continue to spout “concerns” for the jobless and offer meaningless “programs” for stimulating the economy, even as the last “stimulus” of $160 billion this past spring failed miserably to ward off a deepening recession. And they still propose troop increases for Afghanistan and the Army in general, to funnel more billions down the drain to protect their oil empire against rival imperialists in Europe, Russia, Japan and China.
Not one U.S. president has ever ended unemployment because the profit system by definition cannot provide full employment. Capitalism operates on cutthroat competition. As one set of bosses wins the competition, another set loses and inevitably cuts costs to try to maintain profits by laying off thousands and millions of workers. With “globalization” permeating the capitalist world, Toyota wins and GM loses, cutting tens of thousands of jobs. Even the one GM department that was making money, GMAC (its financial arm) has just announced 5,000 layoffs.
We in PLP call on workers not to vote, instead to organize breaking with all these politicians and union hacks who are all serving the bosses. Instead of blaming immigrant or workers from other countries or even other areas for losing jobs, we must unite internationally. This unity is key to fighting for the only solution to joblessness and endless wars this racist profit system breeds: a workers-led communist society with no bosses, no profits, no wage slavery. That’s PLP’s goal. It’s a lifetime job. Join us.

The Decision of a Lifetime

“How do things change?” a comrade asked in the summer project study group.
“It takes power,” I answered.
The idea is to unite the working class and overthrow the bosses. So here I am, rushing between cars on the parking lot of Atomic Denim, a garment factory in South L.A, to sell Challenge/Desafio. “I need more Challenges!” I yell to my fellow comrades. Workers consistently take the paper while moving quickly past us to get to work.
The boss and the secretary come out and yell as they snatch the Challenges out of two workers’ hands and throw them on the ground. “TRASH IT!” the secretary yells. A worker then whispers to a comrade, “Maybe you guys can bring little pocket cards with your message and contact info, so the bosses can’t see.”
I am really excited to see the workers accepting the literature as I watch them walk into the factory with their eyes glued to the Challenges.
We left Atomic Denim with about 150 Challenges and leaflets in the workers’ hands. We left with two police cars called on us because we were trying to organize the workers. We left with the bosses angry and most of all, I left feeling accomplished in my goal of reaching out to the working class.
So I think to myself, how can I break these imaginary walls that are separating my commitment from the Progressive Labor Party. How can these walls be broken? I’m thinking over and over.
I am fighting for the working class. I am sick and tired of the bosses exploiting the working class. I am revolutionary. I am an advocate of equality. Am I in full agreement with the PLP’s beliefs about communism? Am I willing to dedicate my life to PLP at this moment? The question has not yet been answered. I often hear of party members joining and then dropping out. One thing for certain, when it’s time for my commitment, I’ll be here, and here for good!
Daddy’s Girl

Baltimore Youth Learn:
There’s No Such Thing As a Good Politician

Representatives of Peer to Peer Youth Enterprises (a coalition of youth organizations employed by the city of Baltimore) shouted “ZERO DOLLARS IS NOT A NEGOTIATION!” in disappointment after meeting with Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon to ask for more funding.
After a Peer to Peer Youth Enterprises (P2P) Extravaganza, and a Sleep-Out titled Operation Occupation in front of City Hall, Peer to Peer organized a 5 day hunger strike.
P2P employes youth to pass on knowledge to their peers, involving groups such as the Baltimore Algebra Project, Baltimore Urban Debate League, Hip Hop Congress Baltimore, Wide Angle Youth Media and Kids on the Hill.
When Mayor Dixon asked P2P to work with her and compromise, students decided to suspend the hunger strike until negotiations were complete but left the meeting with zero dollars. Mayor Dixon said she’ll work with P2P youth but did not schedule another meeting. Even after many emails, phone calls, and press conferences where P2P demanded another meeting with Mayor Dixon for true negotiations, Mayor Dixon still never met.
This campaign for $3 million from Baltimore City budget for youth jobs in the knowledge based economy helped me to sharpen my understanding of class struggle and the role some youth play as flunkies for the capitalists.
When P2P youth organizers met with Mayor Dixon during the hunger strike, present in the meeting were members of her Youth Commission, the so called youth voice of the city where each young person represents a district of the city. This youth Commission holds no power and works as a front for politicians to say that they work with youth. The role of the Youth Commissioners in the meeting with the Mayor was to try to convince P2P organizers that we shouldn’t ask the Mayor for funding for youth employment but raise the millions of dollars ourselves through fundraisers.
The P2P campaign demanding three million dollars from the city budget is only a small investment in Baltimore’s youth. Three million dollars can employ up to 1,000 young people who will teach up to 6,000 young people.
After trusting that Mayor Dixon would negotiate and compromise, and after the City Council gave false hopes in finding three million dollars in the city’s budget, P2P decided to use this summer to build a larger base of supporters and build fundraising strategies.
A couple of PLP comrades are tightly involved in the Peer to Peer Movement. There are students in P2P who are fed up with the poor and racist conditions of Baltimore City and its politicians. The special thing about Baltimore is that a good number of youth have been involved in political struggle and truly want change, they just need to be introduced to the Progressive Labor Party’s ideas.
Believing that politicians will negotiate and compromise with students to gain economic justice and provide employment and quality education is a false hope under capitalism. All politicians are puppets to the capitalist class and workers are not yet organized enough to hold them accountable to their lies. To end this madness of unemployment and mis-education we need communist revolution and less conversations with politicians at City Hall.
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Workers Vote To Strike; Fight Warmaker Boeing’s Attack On All Workers

a href="#Democrats’ Lovefest Deadly for Workers">"emocrats’ Lovefest Deadly for Workers

What does Obama stand for?

a href="#At LA Rally vs. Police Murder PL’ers Expose ‘Good-Cop-Bad-Cop’ Misleaders">At L" Rally vs. Police Murder PL’ers Expose ‘Good-Cop-Bad-Cop’ Misleaders

Protesters Charge Cops With Racist Killing of Latino Worker

a href="#Mississippi Terror Raid: Workers Shouldn’t Be Suckers for Anti-Immigrant Racism">"ississippi Terror Raid: Workers Shouldn’t Be Suckers for Anti-Immigrant Racism

Bosses Turn Education into Schools for Imperialism

Racist Gentrification Sweeping Workers Out of Harlem

a href="#Pakistan’s Workers Fight Havoc Wreaked by U.S./Local Rulers’ Attacks">Pa"istan’s Workers Fight Havoc Wreaked by U.S./Local Rulers’ Attacks

Afghanistan: Tables Turning on U.S. Aggressors

LETTERS

Russia-U.S. Rivalry Sharpens War Threat, Intensifies Fascism

  • Putin Institutes Wartime Fascism
  • U.S. Bosses Hope Obama-Biden Can Spur War Effort

a href="#Obama’s Veep Pick Biden Has Imperialist Pedigree">"bama’s Veep Pick Biden Has Imperialist Pedigree

U.S., Russian, Chinese Rulers Battle In Beijing

  • Parading Elitism, Olympics Despise Working Class
  • Sportsmanship Gets A Capitalist Kick In The Face

Workers Vote To Strike

Fight Warmaker Boeing’s Attack On All Workers

Puget Sound, WA, August 30 —"Strike, Strike" reverberated down the Auburn plant aisles. Thousands or Boeing Workers marched outside negotiations near the airport chanting, "Out the Gate, in ’08." Seven thousand emptied the Everett complex for three days running taunting the company to "Paint the Lines," a reference to the green lines security traditionally paints around the factories to mark where picketers shouldn’t cross. These marches followed a month of Rolling Thunder: workers banging their tools making a deafening sound like thunder rolling through the plants, every hour on the hour. Boeing workers have taken matters into their own hands, forcing the union mis-leadership to recommend a strike Sept. 4.

This militancy did not arise spontaneously. For years, PLP helped lead mass rebellions in Boeing plants building Rolling Thunder, organizing mass marches and protest rallies as part of class struggle against the bosses and their imperialist plans for the aerospace industry. The union misleaders have tried to appropriate the tactics, but it got away from them. As IAM District President Tom Wroblewski lamented, "Once you get these guys up the mountain, it hard to get them back down again."

Workers should harbor no illusions that this militant activity alone can reverse the sharpening attacks on our class. Millions must be guided by communist, class-conscious ideas, organized by the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP), in order to truly change society.

Global capitalist competition causes the general trend to attack industrial workers, particularly younger, newer workers. The rising industrial and military prowess of Russia and China, the U.S. bosses’ main imperialist competitors, gives new urgency to the U.S. bosses’ need to retool and cut costs. In addition, the racist super-exploitation of subcontract workers, those working in a rapidly growing number of non-union, low-wage sweatshops, is changing the face of the aerospace industry.

Reject the "Kick Your Kids to the Kurb (KKK)" Contract! Strike!

Boeing is flush with cash at the moment, having made more that $13 billion in profit in recent years. The bosses, however, feel pressed to hold every penny as they look to the sharpening fight against their imperialist rivals. The union misleaders, meanwhile, are bickering over how much of this cash they can get to bribe older union workers to sell out the next generation.

Between 2006 and 2008, average Boeing wages have dropped $6/hour because of lower rates for new hires agreed to in prior contracts. This contract will lock in the trend of increasing exploitation, as nearly 50% of the Boeing workforce, those currently earning the highest wages, will retire in the next few years.

The tactics may differ, but in the end, aerospace workers will suffer the same fate as their class brothers and sisters in auto and other industries. More work will be subcontracted to the non-union shops; union workers will face lay-offs or lower pay in the current plants. We must not accept this contract. Workers must strike!

Workers Debate Dismal Future Under Capitalism

Progressive Labor Party called for a "United Aerospace Strike" in our well-received flyer at the airport demonstration. We included solidarity statements from Mississippi shipyard workers, Long Beach Boeing workers and L.A. subcontractor workers. Every statement warned of "losing higher-paid jobs to lower paid, non-union employees at an alarming rate."

The battle for the hearts and minds of the Boeing workers is as sharp as the sound of Rolling Thunder. The pro-capitalist union leaders offer ideas that will not challenge the bosses’ system. They blame the bad contract offer and the loss of union jobs on "this blatant example of corporate greed." That’s why they tried, and failed, to start the chant "Boeing’s offer is unfair, all we want is our fair share."

Workers debated the unions’ ideas for hours on the shop floor, with many rejecting the misleaders’ analysis. We built this factory with our labor, and our class, the working class, should control it!

As the bosses fled Rolling Thunder, we organized meetings of CHALLENGE readers in the plants. Riffing on the debates initiated during the Party’s July Summer Project, we discussed how bad ideas undermined the Chinese Revolution. We learned how Chinese revisionists –– misleaders who revised revolutionary ideas to take power back from the working class –– defeated the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s, and consolidated capitalism’s hold on China. They busted up the communal farms, sending the equivalent of the U.S. population into the new Chinese factories at dirt-cheap wages. The imperialist rivalry has never been the same.

Kick Capitalism To The Curb

We also discussed how capitalism reinforces racism, sexism and imperialism. We discussed how the dog-eat-dog capitalist economic base makes it impossible to mitigate, let alone eliminate, these divisions in the working class. "How can communism succeed when we are so divided against each other?" asked our friend.

We examined the different economic base in a communist system, based on the collective strength of the international working class and the slogan "from each according to their commitment, to each according to their need." We debated whether a movement guided by communist politics that smashed the ruling class and revolutionized the economic base could indeed change how workers interact with each other. The road to workers’ power is built on fighting these evils of capitalism right now in this contract battle. But many agreed that the final defeat of racism, sexism and imperialism requires a communist revolution.

Everybody agreed this was a long, hard fight, made doubly difficult by the defeat of the old communist movement. One friend said, "A light bulb turned on" when PLP members explained how concessions to the wage system made by the old movement doomed it from the start.

In the end, the choice was made clear: we could kick our kids to the curb or kick capitalism to the curb. We left these discussions resolving to sell more CHALLENGES, distribute PLP basic documents Road to Revolution III and IV, organize two PLP study groups and build our revolutionary forces. As we go to print it looks like we’ll strike on Sept. 4. Either way, the future is ours if we build these revolutionary communist forces in our industry and throughout the working class.

a name="Democrats’ Lovefest Deadly for Workers">">"emocrats’ Lovefest Deadly for Workers

In a spectacle worthy of rock stars, with 84,000 screaming fans and July 4th-style fireworks, the Democratic Party named Barack Obama and Joe Biden to its party’s ticket for the November elections. As we go to press, the Republican Convention has begun and will name John McCain and Sarah Palin (another "fresh face") as their candidates. Despite being bombarded by frenzied and non-stop media coverage of the campaigns, workers should understand that neither ticket offers anything to us except capitalist exploitation marked by endless wars, attacks on our living standards, and divide-and-rule racism against African Americans and Latinos. The Obama campaign, with its mass outreach to youth, black and Latin, and labor, dangerously misleads millions into supporting the ruling class.

Obama has captured the imagination of millions who want to believe that he will bring change that would help them in these tough times. But Obama has the same backers as President Bush and Dick Cheney! (See PLP Elections Pamphlet). He will serve the same interests! The rulers believe that Obama’s appeal will make the working class more enthusiastic about following U.S. rulers into continuing and expanding wars and inevitable cutbacks in wages, services, and social programs. Like Kennedy, Carter and Clinton before him, Obama represents false hope for change and is simply a front man for the ruling class, "fresh face" notwithstanding.

The Context: War for Control over Energy Resources

U.S. imperialists lead a declining empire that defines the limits of any president’s initiatives. U.S. power, while strong and doing great damage worldwide, is weakening relative to other rising powers including the European Union, Russia, China, and even some secondary capitalist powers like Iran and Venezuela that gain leverage by allying with the rising powers competing with the U.S. At the core of these disputes is control over the world’s energy resources, centered in the Middle East.

The Acceptance Speech and the Issues

Obama’s speech was standard liberal fare. His rhetoric was indistinguishable from his Democratic Party predecessors including John Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, John Kerry, or Bill Clinton. Like them, he promised improvements in all aspects of life (see box). Yet his predecessors have never achieved these goals and cannot because they interfere with the needs of the capitalists for profits. In fact, Bill Clinton dismantled the welfare program so that now the poverty rate has increased dramatically while welfare rolls have fallen drastically!

Obama is tied to the ruling class by a hundred strings, as demonstrated by his selection of long-term Washington insider Joe Biden for Vice-President and his coterie of advisors who all belong to ruling-class think-tanks and policy institutes like the Council on Foreign Relations that ensure the continuity of U.S. imperialism regardless of who is president.

Dissent and Protest

At the convention, thousands rallied to attack the Democratic Party for its failure to champion working-class interests to end the wars and achieve social justice. However, it’s an illusion to think the Democrats, a ruling-class party, would ever truly represent workers’ interest.

The Iraq Veterans Against the War demanded to address the convention around the need to incorporate their goals — an immediate end to the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, better care for returning veterans and reparations for the Iraqi people. Obama turned a deaf ear to these demands and others, relying on thousands of police armed with pepper spray, rubber bullets, and truncheons to threaten the demonstrators and move them far away from the convention, arresting over 130 and beating many. The cops did the same to protestors at the Republican Convention.

Where Do We Go From Here?

The Democratic and Republican conventions are clown shows to entertain and distract us while the country’s actual rulers, the rich capitalists, make sure that their every need is met by their faithful political servants in both parties. They use the political process, including the conventions, to deceive us into thinking that voting can significantly affect our interests. The ruling class wants to recruit millions of us into supporting U.S. imperialism by blunting our class-consciousness about our exploitation by the rich capitalists, bankers, developers and government officials. The working class should instead attack these elections for the shell game they represent, and build a militant, internationalist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist opposition to capitalism. This approach is not "on the ballot" in this election — revolution for workers’ power and communism can never be won through a ballot, but only through revolution and armed struggle.

What does Obama stand for?

• JOBS — Obama promises "more jobs," ending outsourcing of jobs overseas. But Obama cannot defy the laws of capitalism. They dictate that capitalists must drive for higher profits to survive and therefore seek out the lowest wage markets, whether they be in China, Mexico or Latin America, as the Japanese and European automakers do in seeking lower wages in the U.S.

• WAGES — Obama promises help for "hard-working Americans." But again, capitalism dictates that U.S. bosses must drive down wages to be able to compete with rival bosses worldwide. So they "outsource" jobs to subcontractor shops from across the southern U.S. to California, jobs which pay $10 an hour, less than half of what workers in unionized factories like Boeing earn, leading to mass layoffs and mass unemployment.

• UNEMPLOYMENT — Because of the above two factors, capitalism must create a "reserve army of unemployed." No president in history has ever ended unemployment because it’s built into capitalism’s drive for maximum profits which leads to "bubble-bursting" recessions and depressions.

• RACISM — Obama promises to "bring people together" while blaming victims, not racism, for their misery. But Obama won’t withdraw the 100,000 cops that Clinton put on the streets, cops who daily attack and murder black and Latino workers and youth. Again, Obama’s capitalism cannot function, and has never functioned, without the hundreds of billions in super-profits that the racist super-exploitation of black and Latino workers rakes in for the bosses.

• THE ENVIRONMENT — Obama promises to "be free of foreign oil in ten years." (!) But U.S. capitalism needs to control that foreign oil as a lever in its battle with imperialist rivals in Europe, Russia, China and Japan. Obama promises to put money into non-polluting energy sources, but he doesn’t tell us that no modern army or industry can exist without oil. You can’t drive a tank or fly a jet fighter on wind power.

• A DRAFT — Obama promises to "rebuild our military to meet future conflicts." How? With the current depleted and exhausted U.S. Army? It can only be done by drafting millions, which Obama aims to accomplish through the back door of "National Service." This would supposedly give youth a "choice" of "public service" or military service, and promise undocumented immigrant youth citizenship in exchange for becoming cannon fodder in his endless "future conflicts." Where else will he get the troops he wants to put into Afghanistan?

• FASCISM — Obama complains about the Bush assault on civil liberties, but meanwhile votes for the latest Bush bill to tap an untold number of phone calls in the name of "national security." And he hasn’t uttered a word about repealing the fascist Patriot Act. The rulers need such laws to put down potential rebellions by workers and youth fed up with all the attacks on their lives.

• WAR — Obama promises to gradually withdraw most (not all) troops from Iraq, but wants to enlarge the army by at least 92,000, sending more soldiers into Afghanistan to continue the killing of thousands of civilians in order to protect proposed oil pipelines in that area of Asia. And Obama’s pledge to handle "future conflicts" by definition must maintain and expand the hundreds of U.S. military bases throughout the world upon which U.S. capitalism depends to control the flow of oil. In defending his ability to be "commander-in-chief," Obama proudly cites all the past U.S. wars that have seen Democrats in charge.

And Obama’s opponent, John McCain, is just as much a loyal servant of capitalism on every one of the above issues.

a name="At LA Rally vs. Police Murder PL’ers Expose ‘Good-Cop-Bad-Cop’ Misleaders"></a>"t LA Rally vs. Police Murder PL’ers Expose ‘Good-Cop-Bad-Cop’ Misleaders

LOS ANGELES, CA. –– The working class is no stranger to racist killer cops, especially in the recent multiple murders involving the LAPD and LA County Sheriffs. PLP members attended a candlelight vigil for Christian Portillo, who was gunned down by the murderous cops in Lennox. Recalling PLP’s response to Sean Bell’s murder in New York, we decided to bring revolutionary politics to these events and received positive responses from the working class there.

As the vigil progressed, there was a call by community leaders for a march toward the Sherriff’s office that was to remain calm and collected. White flags were passed out along with signs calling for an end to police murder. Similar to the misleaders in New York, leaders of this march called for exposing the "bad" cops and respecting the "good" cops. These misleaders called for peace and increased participation in the system. Once Party members saw reformist politics leading the march, we mobilized to circulate more CHALLENGES and literature. One comrade began chanting "Policia cochina, racista y asesina!" (Police, pigs, racist and murderous!) that was warmly received and picked up by our working-class brothers and sisters.

The workers’ anger, especially that of Christian Portillo’s brother, grew. The march became a picket line and eventually PLP pushed to move down the block in front of the Sheriffs’ station. PL members’ chants got louder and more militant. Then, Portillo’s brother tacked a flier attacking these racist murderers on the station wall. One comrade took a bullhorn and gave a speech linking the murder of Christian Portillo to the capitalist system that would continue to flourish with reformist politics. This comrade called for workers to fight back and join our fight for communism. At the end of the march, the misleaders continued their call to work within the system. Another comrade jumped on the bullhorn and gave another speech in Spanish reminding the crowd of the 1992 rebellions in response to the Rodney King beating. He called for joining PLP and building for communist revolution on the job, in the schools, and in the streets.

The most important lesson we learned is that we should never underestimate our class. Our initial hesitation to be militant at a vigil based on the fear of being seen as "opportunist" (taking advantage of the situation) was wrong. The actions of the working class in Lennox and especially some of the Portillo family members reminded PL’ers of the responsibility they have to build the fight for communism. PLP made contacts here and will continue to build the relationships needed for the long-term fight for revolution! Only revolution will end these brutal police murders and the terror that is capitalalism! J

Protesters Charge Cops With Racist Killing of Latino Worker

Workers PLP met at the Lennox vigil (above) called and invited us to another rally which we attended in Compton the next week against the police killings. Family members of the several victims of racist police terror actively led chants, as they continue being under police surveillance and intimidation. The rally got support from cars passing by and honking.

PLP members led the chant "Black, Brown, Asian, White — to smash racism we must unite!" Later, when Christian Portillo’s sister spoke, she echoed these sentiments, saying that we all need to unite against racist cop terror. Portillo’s friends and family all took CHALLENGE and were interested in reading it along with our leaflet linking the racist police murders of Portillo and Kevin Wicks in Inglewood with the rulers’ drive to make the working class pay for their wars and economic crisis. One person we had met at the first rally asked us for the new CHALLENGE. She had read the previous one and liked it. She noted that this was the sort of thing that started the civil war in El Salvador. We agreed and could see why the Summer Project which just ended was so important.

By expanding CHALLENGE networks and organizing workers in the factories, in the military and in schools, PLP is laying the basis to lead the fight against racist police killings around revolutionary communist politics and to build the fight to end racist terror once and for all, not with dead-end reforms but through the long term fight for communist revolution.

a name="Mississippi Terror Raid: Workers Shouldn’t Be Suckers for Anti-Immigrant Racism">">"ississippi Terror Raid: Workers Shouldn’t Be Suckers for Anti-Immigrant Racism

LAUREL, MISSISSIPPI, August 28 — The Gestapo-like raids carried out by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cops struck again, arresting 595 workers employed by Howard Industries, world’s largest manufacturer of electrical transformers employing 3,000 workers in southeastern Mississippi. And the traitorous AFL-CIO applauded the raid! (See below)

In May, ICE carried out a similar raid, arresting hundreds of workers at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. These raids are terrorizing many small towns nation-wide. At the same time the Laurel raid was taking place, a rumor of an ICE raid in Perry, a small Iowa town 100 miles from Postville, was panicking the Latino community, 25% of Perry’s population.

Hundreds of heavily-armed ICE agents raided Howard Industries’ Laurel and nearby Ellisvile facilities. They arrived in unmarked cars and white vans, sealed the plants and rounded up "suspect" workers, questioning them in mobile trailers.

Just as the Nazis used yellow stars to identify Jews, Latino workers were segregated from other workers. U.S. citizens were given blue armbands to divide them from immigrants. Agents wearing flak vests stopped motorists driving near the plant and told them to leave the area.

The raid’s blatant fascist-like racism shocked many. An immigrant rights group in Jackson, the state capital, criticized the raid, saying families with children were involved. "It’s horrific what ICE is doing to these families and these communities," said Shuya Ohno, a spokesman for the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance. "It’s just hard to imagine that this is the United States of America." (NY Times, 8/27)

A woman entering a local church with four small children said several of the youngsters’ parents had been detained. The woman, a translator for many of the families, said: "I don’t like this at all. I don’t understand it. They have come here to work. It’s very sad."

But this is exactly the U.S.A. today, a country led by a ruling class which needs more racism, more fascist terror. The raids’ aim is not really to deport all undocumented workers, or even to find those guilty of "identity theft" as ICE claims. The goal is to terrorize immigrant workers, and all workers, so they accept super-exploitation, rotten working conditions, more social service cutbacks and get used to the kind of mass terror that the bosses and their police agencies will use against ALL workers who refuse to swallow these conditions. These attacks will continue no matter who’s elected the next President.

Plants like this one here will become more important for the bosses’ war machine as it gears for wider wars, from Afghanistan to the Caucasus. The ruling class realizes that the U.S. population is changing. According to Census figures, in several decades most U.S. workers will be immigrants, Latinos or blacks. So racist super-exploitation will be needed more than ever to keep the bosses’ super-profits rolling in.

But this also becomes a contradiction for the bosses: they need those workers they’re terrorizing for their war plants and their military. So, while we might hear a lot of empty talk about "the end of racism" — "after all," they tell us, "look at Obama" — the opposite is happening.

This makes it primary for PLP to organize among these factory workers, and all workers and soldiers, to win them to fight racism, understanding that capitalism cannot live without racist exploitation. All workers must see these ICE raids as an attack against the entire working class. The AFL-CIO did the opposite here. Rather than unite the workers and organize them all, it pitted unionized workers against immigrant workers.

Robert Shaffer, regional AFL-CIO official, applauded the raid, saying he’s complained for a long time about how companies in southern Mississippi hire undocumented immigrants, disgustingly adding the racist comment that the region "looks like a little Mexico." The same union traitors who, because of their pro-boss sellout politics, have failed to organize millions of workers — citizens or immigrants — nationwide, are now blaming the victims for their own failures.

Workers who fall for this racist trap are cutting their own throat. We must defend our fellow immigrant workers when the bosses attack. Our motto should be, "All for one and one for all; same enemy same fight, workers of the world, unite!"

Bosses Turn Education into Schools for Imperialism

From metal detectors, cameras and police presence to eroding union protections for teachers, trends in education point to a tightening control that is part of a growing fascism in society. Workers and youth organizing in movements to oppose an accelerating cascade of budget-cut assaults will come up against these physical and coercive elements of the police state. Through sharp, vigorous and patient organizing inside such movements, communists can win masses of workers and youth to see growing fascism not only as cause for despair but as cause for revolution.

Capitalist education always serves to teach the big ideas needed so that the ruling class can pursue its aims with minimal resistance from the workers. The Cold War education of the 1950s produced a society that mostly accepted a vicious anti-communist war in Vietnam at considerable cost in lives and absorbed its costs for ten years. As the Cold War heated up again under Reagan in the 1980s, brutal wars in Central America and huge cuts in social spending ensued. A U.S. population won to anti-communism tolerated these attacks. The (unexpected) reward for U.S, imperialism was the collapse of the Soviet Union, its main competitor. During the Cold War U.S. schools taught young-people anti-communism so they would not protest the rulers’ war plans.

Today U.S. imperialism faces a situation that is both similar and different. New competitors are rising, and as CHALLENGE has emphasized, control of Mid-East oil is key to dominance in the coming period. What teachers are asked to teach about the Mid-East matters. The ruling class needs U.S. schools to win over future workers to U.S. imperialism.

In New York State all high school students must take Regents exams in several subjects to graduate. In Global History students have been asked to write about the "positives and negatives" or the "differing viewpoints" on imperialism. These topics do more than force thousands of students to argue for imperialism on test day. Because topics tend to be recycled, these questions also exercise enormous influence over teachers who care deeply about preparing their students for examination and graduation. Teachers frame their treatment of imperialism in similar terms. Teachers are pressured to avoid teaching imperialism as the racist and genocidal system that it is. Like slavery and the Holocaust, imperialism has no positive characteristics. This moral stance is impossible when teaching to the test.

This past June, question #41 reads:

"In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait. The United Nations response led to the Persian Gulf War of 1991. This response is an example of:

Détente
Empire building
Totalitarianism
Collective Security

In classrooms, where the struggle for literacy is desperate, teachers tempted to speak about U.S. imperialism are discouraged by such a question. The "correct" answer was choice #4. The test’s writers want Americans to understand Desert Storm not as an exercise in U.S. imperialism but "collective security." But even more alarming than the right answer is the wrong one, specifically choice #2. Teachers who focus on actual history are in trouble. The history is clear:

The U.S. developed relations with the Saudis after World War II, calling the oil reserves of the Mid-East "a stupendous source of strategic power and the greatest material prize in the history of the world" Carter proclaimed his doctrine of U.S. dominance in the Mid-East in 1980 and created a "rapid-reaction force" designed to invade the area. Reagan transformed this force into Centcom, which has grown under every president and directed three major wars in fifteen years.

This history points to choice #2, imperialism. Teachers who speak in terms of U.S. imperialism run the risk of "confusing" their students and maybe even costing them the one point they need in order to graduate. The prospect is terrifying enough, especially to new teachers, to dampen a real critique of U.S. imperialism. Additionally, the teacher-training taboo of never "sharing your view" finishes off many a good lesson about the true role of the U.S. in the world before it ever begins. No doubt the rulers have the good old-fashioned witch-hunt in their arsenal for teachers who refuse to toe the line of U.S. patriotism in class, and they will use it again as they have in the past. Next to these exams, however, the Cold War persecution of teachers was crude and perhaps even less effective in terms of the levels of conformity achieved.

Luckily, working class students can and do respond to real history teaching. Facts, a veteran PLP member used to say, are stubborn things. Several students informally surveyed on this question after the exam knew to stay away from choice number two even though they knew it was correct. In class, the teacher led discussions to ensure they understood the purpose of the test and what the testers were looking for. In fact deconstructing an exam this way actually makes test prep easier: "always pick the choice that makes America look good."

When the "positives-of-imperialism" question reas its ugly head, we have an opportunity to raise important ideas among teachers and students about growing fascism, the role of education and the needs of U.S. imperialism. This article was discussed with several teachers and students in the base of PLP at a school where we’re active for suggestions prior to publication. We must take every chance the rulers give us to build our movement for communist revolution.

Racist Gentrification Sweeping Workers Out of Harlem

HARLEM, NEW YORK CITY, August 19 — Several weeks ago, the Record Shack, a legendary 35-year-old music store on 125th St in Harlem, was suddenly evicted. The owner was not even allowed inside to get his personal possessions; his goods were brought to a Yonkers storage facility that’s asking $12,000 for their return. The landlord is a local church, The United House of Prayer, that has been selling off its ample property to the highest bidders, including banks and chain stores, that are invading the rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood. Last weekend, as on many past Sundays, local activists rallied outside the shuttered music store, demanding its re-opening and condemning the landlord church.

Harlem, home to many poor and working-class African-Americans and a major cultural center, has already been cut in half. That is, housing affordable at the average Harlem worker’s $20,000 wage and to small black-owned businesses are being displaced by luxury condos and upscale stores. What are being labeled "subsidized units" in the new buildings are pegged at incomes of $40,000-$60,000. Going, going, gone are affordable apartments and small businesses.

Resistance to gentrification has been constant, from students and residents uniting to oppose Columbia University’s takeover of West Harlem, to a militant Movimiento por Justicia in East Harlem, to several groups in Central Harlem. There have been demonstrations large and small and several actions, uniting all the groups. Unfortunately, severe weaknesses pervade the struggle.

All the groups suffer from a major focus on politicians. They rightly denounce the sellouts like ex-mayor Dinkins and Rep. Charles Rangel, and Harlem’s traitorous City Council representatives, but then hope to elect new politicians who say they will fight in the people’s interest. No few individuals can turn around the basic fact that the government’s role is — first and foremost — to protect the flow of profits, and also to control uprisings by the governed. But this obsession with elections means that debating the merits of individuals, or listening to politicians’ speeches occupy many meetings.

Much activity is focused on a few people attending meetings of political bodies and hoping to influence their outcome. Although protesting at politicians’ offices or events can be good focal points for mass actions, the major effort must be to build mass activity and expose the role of politics in a capitalist society. We need more mass actions such as gathering to stop evictions, or we could occupy renovation projects.

Nationalism is the other major stumbling block to building a mass campaign. At the August 3rd Record Shack demonstration, some people wanted to boycott other businesses owned by the Church, not a bad tactic, but on the basis that they were run by Jews or Koreans; they chanted "Buy Black." This slogan ignores the fact that the evil landlord is himself black, as are many other Harlem oppressors.

It was possible to have a discussion with a few demonstrators about how racism is used to super-oppress and divide people, but nationalism serves to maintain those divisions and hide the underlying class divisions. When we all mass in large numbers with militant actions, then we’ll really see which side people are on and allow us all — workers and students of all backgrounds — to fight together.

Some anti-gentrification movement fighters do see that capitalism, based on endless greed for profits, and built on racism, is the problem. By distributing CHALLENGE and having continuing discussions, we must try to win them to join the Party for the long struggle ahead and not become defeated by our current inability to turn around gentrification.

a name="Pakistan’s Workers Fight Havoc Wreaked by U.S./Local Rulers’ Attacks"></">Pa"istan’s Workers Fight Havoc Wreaked by U.S./Local Rulers’ Attacks

After only five months, Pakistan’s new coalition government has sunk into a seemingly unstoppable political and economic crisis: rapidly-rising inflation, increasing challenges from Islamic extremists and U.S.-India condemnation of Pakistan as a very serious threat to capitalist world security.

On August 18, the latest in a long line of U.S.-backed military strong men, President Pervez Musharraf, stepped down rather than face impeachment. While commentators predict his resignation heralds a new era, the chaos continues: a suicide bombing kills 30; another leaves 70 dead; one coalition partner resigns from government; thousands flee their homes during the biggest battle of the "war on terror" between the Pakistani army and the Taliban; president-to-be Asif Ali Zardari, leader of the Pakistani People’s Party (PPP), declares, "The world is losing the war on terror."

Meanwhile, working-class anger at the rising cost of living — wheat flour, a staple, increased 26% in one month and transportation 14%, following last year’s jump in consumer prices of almost 20% — government corruption and general insecurity led to nation-wide protests. In Karachi, Pakistan’s Telecommunication Company workers struck in May, taking over the company’s headquarters until July 28 when they won higher wages.

On-the-job actions erupt in textile factories, the cement industry, among teachers, hospital and other government departments as more workers demand wage increases to offset increased living costs. Critically affecting the government’s military plans, 3,000 Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority (Defense Ministry) workers, paid on a daily basis, are demanding pay increases and permanent jobs, now given to relatives and friends of army officials.

The PPP-led government blames Musharraf’s nine-year dictatorship for worsening conditions, claiming he left a "mutilated" economy with a large trade deficit and a government budget deficit up 75%. But their "poor people’s budget" follows Musharraf’s policies that blatantly benefit Pakistan’s ruling class and the U.S., which is insisting on the deregulation of Pakistan’s economy. More privatization of public resources is planned, tax breaks on stock-market profits are extended two years and large tracts of land are reserved for foreign investors to develop agribusiness. Subsides for food, fuel oil, electricity and fertilizer are slashed over 25%.

With a nod to the painful poverty of its 168 million people — 70% exist on less than $2/day, 60 million are "food insecure" (according to a UN report) — the government trumpets its $507 million program to provide $15 per month, medical insurance and job training for 3.3 million desperately-poor families. This contrasts starkly with a military budget of $4.7 billion.

Since 2002 the army has also received $10 billion from the U.S. to fund Pakistan’s military participation in the "war on terror" against the Taliban in the tribal belt along the Afghan/Pakistani border. But despite these billions, the insurgency has grown and the U.S. believes that the funding — paid in cash — is going elsewhere. In Pakistan it’s no secret that it lines the pockets of top military officials, who use the war as a cash cow and want to keep it alive.

The root of Pakistan’s current problems is U.S. bosses’ need to use it as part of their goal of world domination. In 1978, President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, (now an Obama foreign policy advisor) devised the "Bear Trap," a plot to defeat the U.S.’s main imperialist rival, the then Soviet Union, by drawing it into a war between the Afghan pro-Moscow government in Kabul and the wealthy landowners and religious zealots opposing it. The plan (in Brzezinski’s words, "to give the Soviet Union its Vietnam"), involved the creation, funding and training of an Afghan mujahaddin army in Pakistan.

This led to a 12-year jihad that became the U.S.’s largest covert action, (estimated cost, $40 billion (The Nation, 2/15/99) the bulk coming from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia). It inflicted religious intolerance on the secular societies of Pakistan and Afghanistan, perpetrated some of the most brutal acts of terrorism and became the breeding ground for the Taliban and the al Qaeda terrorist networks now operating in 80 countries.

Today the U.S. claims factions in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence are aiding the Taliban’s resurgence. But the latter’s strength is also growing because the Pakistani army is weakening. Soldiers see the officers’ corruption and plunder and are demoralized. Desertions are rising. Many rank-and-file soldiers are reluctant to fight in a war overwhelmingly targeting civilians. Bloody confrontations, like the recent one killing many civilians and making 300,000 homeless, strengthen the Taliban’s position.

"Why is our government bombing us from the air," shouted one refugee. U.S. air strikes from over the border in Afghanistan or from secret CIA bases in Pakistan that kill more villagers than terrorists intensify the anger.

Caught between the army and the insurgents, people in the tribal areas are either coerced or voluntarily join with the Taliban. They do have an alternative: join with other workers in building PLP which is fighting the cause of all this misery, capitalism.

(Next, Part II: India, the U.S. and inter-imperialist rivalry over Pakistan, Kashmir and Afghanistan and the projected "balkanization" of Pakistan.)

Afghanistan: Tables Turning on U.S. Aggressors

The "victory" claims of U.S. rulers when they invaded Afghanistan in 2001 have turned around. Not only is Osama bin Laden still at large, but the Taliban and its allies are now launching coordinated assaults on U.S. Army bases and an attack that killed ten elite French paratroopers. No wonder Obama and McCain are advocating troop increases in Afghanistan. At stake is a proposed oil pipeline running from Kazakhstan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.

The seven-year occupation has devastated Afghans. Thousands of civilians have died from U.S./NATO air attacks, bombs, missiles and police fire, intensifying hatred of the imperialists. Poppy cultivation and corruption have soared. Poverty, homelessness, skyrocketing food prices, 75% illiteracy — this and worse is the lot of the average Afghan, the result of U.S. "liberation." With over 80% of women affected by domestic violence, Afghanistan has become the most dangerous place in the world for women.

All this has become fertile ground for Taliban and al Qaeda recruitment.

In the face of this devastation, Afghans have protested. Hundreds demonstrated against rising food prices; at a teachers’ rally for wage hikes, students set 45 vehicles ablaze and attacked the cops. Angry street demonstrations protested the U.S.-puppet agreement to maintain permanent U.S. bases in Afghanistan.

All this is linked to the instability in bordering Pakistan, a Taliban base.

LETTERS

Latest Victim of Racist Cops: The Mayor!

I attended a rally in Berwyn Heights, Maryland, near the University of Maryland in Prince George’s County. Over 100 people from the University and neighborhood gathered to protest this latest victim of the County’s police – the MAYOR!

On July 29th, the SWAT team of the Sheriff’s Office broke down his door, shot his dogs, cuffed him and his mother-in-law, and interrogated them for 90 minutes as they lay next to the bloody dead dogs on the floor of their living room. The cops claimed they were tracking a delivery of drugs (30 pounds of marijuana) to their home.

I arrived at the rally carrying CHALLENGES and a sign that read "Indict the Killers of Ronnie White - Stop Police Terror" to link this latest episode of police terror with the lynching of Ronnie White, a young man killed in his jail cell after his arrest on suspicion of killing a police officer (see Challenge July 30, p. 3).

I encountered ten students from the University who had organized an earlier rally against the Berwyn Heights attack. They were eager to read our communist newspaper and wanted to organize a bigger demonstration against police brutality at the County Executive’s office. Two of their leaders joined us and the People’s Coalition for Police Accountability a few days later to discuss the use of state terror to control workers, how to fight for a more equitable system, and next steps in the campaign against racist police brutality.

Many people at the rally commented on the sign and the connections between the two attacks. One elderly white man commented that he used to be a "law-and-order man," but after seeing a resident cuffed, tasered, and insulted with racist comments, he changed his attitude. Some residents appeared to have had more sympathy for the dogs than for the dozens of workers –– mostly black and Latino — who have been brutalized by this police force for decades.

The responses from black and white workers about these two attacks are paving the way for reviving significant multi-racial organizing against police brutality in the County. As capitalism’s economic crisis deepens, more police brutality is likely as the ruling class tries to intimidate and control workers who are increasingly angry over their deteriorating quality of life. Now is the time to fight back!

Red organizer

Worker Agrees: He Gets 5%, Boss Gets 95%

Early one morning, ten comrades went to distribute leaflets and CHALLENGES in an industrial area in Los Angeles. Afterwards we approached two workers eating breakfast and gave them a leaflet and a CHALLENGE. We described the key role workers play in industry, how the boss exploits us and how the workers are the basis of all production. One comrade explained why the bosses need unemployment, and always pay lower wages, comparing the minimum wage to those of Boeing workers.

One worker agreed, saying he gets paid the minimum while every day the bosses demand more production. The other worker said he had no complaints; he received a good wage producing parts for cars because he’s paid for his skills. I asked him, "How many pieces do you produce in a day?" He replied, "About 80 to 100." I asked, "How much does each piece cost?" He answered "$400."

I said take 80 pieces as a minimum, multiply that by five days a week, and then by four for a month of production and then by the $400 each piece costs. He was quiet for a while and then said it was a lot of money. I noted that his wages covered about 5% of his total production and that the other 95% went to the boss. Finally he said, "It’s true; they’re exploiting us when they just give us crumbs and the boss keeps most of the value of the production. And I thought I wasn’t exploited!"

I’m a student from Mexico who participated in the Summer Project to further PLP’s activities in the factories and to use these experiences to spread communist ideas to other workers.

A young comrade from Mexico

International PLP School in Spain

A three-day international PLP communist school was organized here in Spain, including friends from France, workers of Spain and immigrants from Brazil, Peru, Colombia and El Salvador living here and others.

A Brazilian said that back home people are told there are only two classes: the "high" and the middle class. This led to a good discussion about class struggle and how capitalism worldwide is trying to deny the contradictions of the only two classes in society: the working class which fights the exploitation by the capitalist class.

The school was a positive development for the international growth of the communist PLP. We will write more soon.

PLP’er in Spain

a name="Summer Of Communism: Teachers’ Role in Uniting Workers, Students">">"ummer Of Communism: Teachers’ Role in Uniting Workers, Students

I’m a NYC high school teacher who just spent two weeks in the Los Angeles Summer Project. I had a great time working with older and younger comrades and friends. We all learned from one another, figuring out how to get CHALLENGE/DESAFIO to thousands of workers and students, to get contacts and start the process of winning those workers to the Party.

We talked a lot about the worker-student-soldier alliance (WSSA), bringing different groups in the working class together to fight capitalism. The power of the WSSA is far greater than its parts — none of them alone can really stop capitalism in its tracks, but together we can.

Early in the Project a comrade presented the history of the Party’s work in the 1960s and ‘70s to build a WSSA, including in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). I met the party through this work, which seemed the most logical and strongest work we could do to stop the war in Vietnam. Students alone couldn’t shut the system down. But, I learned, united with workers we had a lot more power!

I began to think about the work teachers do. It seemed to me that there are two aspects of WSSA needed in that work. We should try to build an alliance between our students and local factory and military workers — that’s what we discussed in the Summer Project. We also should forge unity between our own students and their teacher, who are also workers.

Most Party teachers work to win our students. We all have friends on staff who know about this. The staff we are friendliest with and closest to are the most committed to our students. But because teachers are trained to think of themselves as professionals, they are mostly not struggling to organize these students and their parents as fellow workers. Changing this would build real working-class unity in the schools and make clear that the enemy of good education is not parents or teachers, but capitalism. This won’t happen by itself — we need to struggle as hard with our friends and colleagues as we try to do with students.

That’s a big fight, which would expose the main contradiction in the school system — between the capitalist school system and the working-class students and their families.

In struggle,

One of many red teachers.

Are Radical Solutions Essential?

Recently I spoke to a group of religious humanists on the topic, "Our Future: Are Radical Solutions Essential?" I outlined the dire threats and conditions most of the world’s working people and their friends face. I declared that the U.S. presidential campaign would never confront these issues.

I cited three authors whose work can be useful in these discussions. First, I summarized Jared Diamond’s "Collapse," which concludes with an analysis of how twelve inter-related ecological/economic factors could well make the earth largely uninhabitable if not corrected in a reasonable time. Two — global warming and deadly competition for energy and water — are already at the root at expanding imperialist conflict. Michael Klare’s "Resource Wars and Oil Wars" makes very clear the dominant role multi-national profit wars play in this growing carnage. The morning I spoke, the Georgia-Russia war had just begun and my sources easily proved that the U.S.-UK financed BTC pipeline was at the heart of this deadly conflict.

I also read much of an op-ed piece by Israeli historian Benny Morris (NY Times, 7/18) calling on Israel to bomb Iran extensively by the end of the year, saying if this attack didn’t end the Iranian nuclear program, Israel "would have no choice" but to launch nuclear strikes that would slaughter millions in the Middle East. I then quoted both Obama and McCain assuring Israel that they support "all options being left on the table" and that both want to widely expand the U.S. imperial war machine.

Finally I recommended reading Joel Kovel’s "Enemy of Nature" which brilliantly attacks capitalism as the root of exploitation, ecological collapse and wars.

The audience so appreciated this candor and clarity that they rose for a standing ovation. Most of those attending will probably vote for Obama as the "lesser evil," but the main lesson is that many liberals are open to intense criticism of capitalism and the electoral system that helps preserve it.

Aging but Active Red

The Relationship of Workers to the Party

In a Sept. 3 letter, Red Coal (RC) insists that workers should have the right to strike and protest "government" policies in a communist society. Rather than banning strikes, RC asks, "Shouldn’t we have more faith in the workers? Shouldn’t we have more confidence in the power of communist ideas?" RC further states that strikes are necessary especially to protect job safety.

Under capitalism a strike (for example against unsafe working conditions) is one of the workers’ weapons against racist, sexist capitalist exploiters. In a communist society safety would be the first consideration on any job while any risks in emergencies would be shared equally, unlike a capitalist system where profits and class privilege are primary.

If workers struck in a communist society, it would indicate that they thought the working-class leadership of the communist party had become class enemies like capitalists. Arguing that strikes may be necessary under communism indicates a lack of confidence in communist ideas by implying that the working class shouldn’t trust or need the Party.

Because of uneven economic and political development (the richest one-fifth of the world’s population accounts for 86% of private consumption while the poorest one-fifth accounts for only 1.3%), some minority sections of the working class may feel that they have needs that are contradictory to those of the majority. In such cases, PL’s commitment to egalitarianism and internationalism must prevail over more selfish, national, racist and sexist ideas.

Many small and large struggles, even wars, may take place because of this. If communism is to prevail, the Party must give strong, principled leadership to the working class. This doesn’t have to mean that the working class will be alienated from political power because working-class ideas and leadership will constantly be sought after and developed by the Party until eventually everyone will become communist organizers.

I hope that comrade RC will ask his Party comrade about the possibility of getting into a study group and discussing the relationship of workers to the Party.

A Comrade

a name="‘Lincoln’ Review Lacked Historical Context"></">‘L"ncoln’ Review Lacked Historical Context

The article on Lincoln (CHALLENGE, 9/3), while not untrue, lacks historical rigor. Lincoln was clearly a racist, anti-Indian (in fact, when mobilizing the Union troops he had to call many of them back from fighting Indians in the West) and would have permitted slavery to remain intact (though he was against expansion), if the Union would be preserved.

The article reveals things about Lincoln that appear personal. But more important, he was against the expansion of slavery because he supported the expansion of industrialization and wage labor. However, within the Republican Party he was in the center at best, maybe even tilted to the right. During the Civil War, the radical Republicans, who opposed all slavery, were beginning to flex their muscles and by the end of the war they were becoming a dominant force within the Republican Party.

Lincoln remained a moderate until he was assassinated. His plans for "reconstruction" would have left the Southern ruling class intact but without slavery. Lincoln’s plans for black people would have left them at the mercy of their former owners. Clearly, that was a racist position. While ultimately "radical reconstruction" failed to truly change black and white relations, its programs went much further in dealing with the questions of the Southern ruling elite and racism.

The article doesn’t give any historical background. Even the title is incorrect; Lincoln was not pro-slave. He was racist and his opposition to slavery was primarily against its expansion, and holding the Union together. Expanding industrial capitalism, especially out West, was his major goal.

CHALLENGE should be more careful in dealing with historical issues. The real story of U.S. rulers needs no exaggeration to be condemned and thrown into the racist trash-bin of history.

P.M., History Teacher

Russia-U.S. Rivalry Sharpens War Threat, Intensifies Fascism

Russia’s onslaught into Georgia, a major strategic setback for U.S. rulers, shifts the imperialist rivalry into a new, more dangerous phase. The U.S. war machine no longer holds a monopoly on invasion and must now contend with the restored might of Moscow’s 1,200,000-strong nuclear-armed forces. For example, Pentagon planners targeting Iran will have to raise their estimates of needed troops and figure out how to get them.

Eight years ago, the top-level, Clinton-appointed Hart-Rudman commission formulated far-reaching plans for maintaining U.S. global supremacy into the 21st Century, including militarization under a domestic police state. Its foreign policy chapter stated, "It is a critical national interest of the United States that no hostile… [predominant power] arise in any of the globe’s major regions, nor a hostile global peer rival or a hostile coalition comparable to a peer rival." On Russia, Hart-Rudman warned against political developments that Putin in fact later led, "A form of Russian national socialism [fascism — Ed.], emboldened by a revived form of pan-Slavism, could do enormous harm over all of Eurasia and beyond" ["harm" to U.S. ruling-class interests ––Ed].

Putin Institutes Wartime Fascism

Former KGB agent Putin’s success in reorganizing Russia into an imperialist power contrasts sharply with Bush’s failure to carry out Hart-Rudman’s recommendations. Putin has mercilessly disciplined pro-U.S. political dissenters and businessmen. Alexander Litvinenko, a KGB turncoat who criticized the Kremlin from London, died horribly in 2006 from a Russian-sourced radioactive poison. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, ex-chief of the former oil giant Yukos — which he tried to sell to Exxon Mobil — rots in a Siberian jail, his latest parole bid summarily denied. Putin ended regional elections and effectively nationalized major industry, especially energy, which Russia wields as a weapon.

The soaring price of oil, partly due to the U.S.’s Iraq fiasco — which has been far from meeting predicted oil production goals — has helped immensely to strengthen oil-exporting Russia. But mostly, Putin & Co. have stirred up a nationalist fervor for resurrecting the old Russian empire. The Russians have a big head start in moving to an imperialist wartime footing, stemming from both good and bad periods of their past.

From World War II, they retain the collective memory of the red-led mass mobilization against their Nazi enemies — the greatest single undertaking in history. In the late 1980s, the now state-capitalist Soviet rulers opted for open capitalism, crushing all workers’ past gains, and the old Soviet Union imploded. U.S. capitalism chose this as an opportunity to install a "new world order" with only one superpower — the U.S. This worked for a while, but the U.S./NATO war against Russian ally Serbia became the turning point for Russia’s bosses. The latter needed justification to get back at the U.S. and the recent U.S./NATO-inspired independence for Kosovo — taking it away from Serbia — fit the bill. Following Georgia’s invasion of its two northern pro-Russian autonomous provinces, Moscow turned around and recognized their independence.

Russia’s bosses have used nationalistic patriotism to influence workers to accept worsening living conditions and tight government social control. Pensions are down, the former communist-led healthcare system is in shambles, wages go unpaid for months, and prostitution and Mafia-type crime are rife.

Bosses’ nationalist and profit drives, whether from Moscow or Washington, run counter to the interests of the international working class, including Russia’s workers.

U.S. Bosses Hope Obama-Biden Can Spur War Effort

U.S. rulers, on the other hand, thought they could counter Russian influence in the old Soviet bloc without committing U.S. ground troops. They banked on bribes instead, through election-fixing "revolutions" in Georgia and the Ukraine among others, financed by Rockefeller ally and billionaire George Soros, and massive arms shipments to two-bit pro-U.S. leaders like Georgia’s Saakashvili.

While the Bush gang tortures and murders "detainees" in its worldwide prison camps and terrorizes immigrants at home, it has failed to enact the society-transforming fascistic measures outlined in Hart-Rudman and other strategic proposals. These include a thorough revamping of education "in the national interest," a top-to-bottom centralization of law enforcement agencies, and a systematic indoctrination of elected officials to support the rulers’ military priorities.

To their dismay, only the Homeland Security Department proposal has been established, and that is pretty disorganized although able to carry out terroristic anti-immigrant raids. (See page 3) In addition, instead of ruling-class-imposed discipline, economic chaos reigns domestically. Bankers, bent on doing whatever they please, got rid of their nemesis Eliot Spitzer, the rulers’ supposed Sheriff of Wall Street. Financial crises mount. U.S. rulers are counting on "Change" candidate Barack Obama to initiate the mobilization they need. Their new situation regarding Russia explains why Obama chose arch-imperialist draft supporter Joe Biden as his running mate. [See adjoining box and article on Conventions, page 2]

Russia’s newfound militarism is already damages U.S. influence far beyond Georgia, Agence France Presse reported (8/17/08). "President Hugo Chavez said...that Russian President Dimitri Medvedev wants to send a Russian naval fleet to visit Venezuela." And Russia is increasing its arms sales to U.S. foe Syria. We don’t say that World War III will start tomorrow. We do, however, recognize that chances for a global flare-up have risen qualitatively, without counting either China’s inevitably destabilizing role or Europe’s ambiguous loyalties. The rulers’ power grabs constantly increase the risk of deadlier wars.

All this U.S. capitalist economic anarchy and faltering trillion-dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have come down hard on the U.S. working class while killing millions of workers abroad. Wages are down, prices and unemployment are up, racist policy brutality and Nazi-like immigration raids are intensifying. The only road to reverse such assaults — in both the U.S. and Russia, as well as worldwide — it to build a mass international Progressive Labor Party that aims to establish a profit-free communist society without exploitation, unemployment, racism, sexism and capitalist borders.J

a name="Obama’s Veep Pick Biden Has Imperialist Pedigree">">"bama’s Veep Pick Biden Has Imperialist Pedigree

Joe Biden voted for the Iraq war and the fascist Patriot Act. He wants to send U.S. soldiers as "peacekeepers" to fight pro-China forces in Darfur. He now sponsors a bill that would send $15 billion in aid to Pakistan’s yet-to-be-named next dictator. Biden’s ruling-class mentor is Leslie Gelb, former NY Times editor and head of the Rockefeller-financed Council on Foreign Relations. Together they wrote a major policy paper on Iraq which proposed partitioning it into three autonomous regions, a plan that foundered on the inability to apportion its huge oil reserves.

In 2005, Biden told NBC News, "The United States will ‘have to face’ a painful dilemma on restoring the military draft as rising casualties result in persistent shortfalls in US army recruitment (Agence France Presse, 6/12/05). "It’s just a reality," Biden said.

Olympic Flame Foretells Imperialist Inferno: U.S., Russian, Chinese Rulers Battle In Beijing

Every four years the bosses get their chance to parade nationalism with the Olympics games. Gold medals for hypocrisy should go to the rulers of every country that sent athletes to Beijing, with the U.S., China, and Russia taking the lion’s share. This "peaceful gathering of nations" served as yet another battleground in an imperialist rivalry that has just escalated to a new level of armed conflict. Russia’s premier Putin actually took advantage of the opening ceremonies to tell Bush to his face "War has begun," in Georgia. By the time the games closed, Russia’s emboldened military was threatening pro-U.S. Ukraine and Moldova with the Georgia treatment.

U.S. pundits used the event to accuse the Chinese of hosting "totalitarian games...a showcase for a dictatorship" (Boston Globe, 8/24/08) and made comparisons with Hitler’s Nazi extravaganza in 1936. But U.S. bosses’ gripe with China has nothing to do with "human rights" (as they claim) and everything to do with its support for anti-U.S. forces in Darfur, Burma, Zimbabwe, Iran, North Korea and elsewhere. In Beijing, Bush muttered about China’s "repression," while the U.S. war machine continued to commit crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan. We can expect more carnage before the rivals reconvene for the London games in 2012. Not only are Russian bosses feeling their imperialist oats, but the Pentagon has elevated Africa to a theater of war, like the Middle East, by setting up its new Africa Command. And the U.S. Navy has re-established its Fourth Fleet, charged with patrolling Latin America, just as Russian warships plan to visit Venezuela. World rulers may well have to take a wartime Olympic break, as they did in 1916 (during World War 1), in 1940 and 1944 (during World War II).

Parading Elitism, Olympics Despise Working Class

Another side of Olympic phoniness is elitism. The remarkable athletic feats witnessed at Beijing hardly reflect general physical fitness back home, especially in the U.S., with its sickening youth culture of junk food and video games. For every Michael Phelps, there are millions of U.S. children who never even learn how to swim. Competitive sports in the U.S. are open almost exclusively to affluent families that can afford to enroll in year-round leagues and hire private coaches. Parents dreaming of scholarships, endorsements or are selfishly living their lives through their children, push them to the brink and over. Olympians mainly represent a select few of these few, lucky survivors of this over-training, which causes participants, particularly girls, grave injuries like ligament tears and concussions at epidemic rates.

The Olympics were born of inter-imperialist rivalry. A French nobleman, Baron de Coubertin, started the modern Olympic movement to rouse French youth to fitness following his country’s humiliation in a war with Prussia in 1878. The Olympics were built as a playground for ruling classes to compete with each other, even implementing until the 1970s a no-professional rule that barred athletes who accepted pay for athletics. They used this rule to limit participation by working-class athletes. Anti-working class racism permeated the Olympics, especially during the reign of its pro-Nazi president, Avery Brundage (see box this page).

The amateur rule would be thrown out during the 1970s because many imperialist countries could not compete anymore with nations with state-sponsorship of athletes. The Soviet Union briefly ran a sports program that both served the majority of its youth and produced world-class athletes. But Soviet leaders went the all-elite route when they fully embraced capitalism in the post-Stalin era.

Sportsmanship Gets A Capitalist Kick In The Face

Finally, there is the seldom practiced ideal of "fairness" and "sportsmanship." Olympic organizers set the tone for cheating at the opening by hiding a talented seven-year-old singer backstage while a "prettier" girl lip-synched for the cameras. The U.S. media jumped all over this "outrage." But how much different was it from Hollywood’s exploitive starlet system or the viciousness of "American Idol"? Underage Chinese gymnasts and doped Ukrainian weightlifters were sure to follow. Kicking a biased referee square in the face, a Cuban takewondo competitor showed exactly how fair and sportsmanlike the games actually are. The prevailing ethic at Beijing wasn’t the fair play of friendly sport but the win-at-all-costs mentality of capitalist warmakers.

Sure there were some thrilling Olympic moments. But if they result only in patriotic chants for one country over another they are deadly for the international working class and lead straight into the plans of the rulers for wider wars and more capitalist exploitation. A better competition for workers to take sides in is Progressive Labor Party’s long-term struggle to eliminate the profit system, and the imperialist wars it generates, through communist revolution.

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(To our readers: This is a 3-week issue of CHALLENGE)

U.S.-RUSSIA FIGHT SHARPENS . . .OIL FUELS GEORGIA WAR

Russian and U.S.-backed Georgian forces have killed thousands of civilians as they battle for oil routes and political dominance in the republic of Georgia that was part of the southern region of the former Soviet Union. (Georgia broke away from Russia after 1991.) Fighting began on August 8 when Georgia launched an offensive to regain control of the South Ossetia region from pro-Russian separatists. Moscow responded by sending in troops and tanks and shelling cities.
“War started today,” Russian premier Putin boasted to George Bush at the Beijing Olympics (Bloomberg, 8/08/08). Bush, leader of “the world’s sole superpower,” could only mutter feebly about “supporting Georgia’s territorial integrity.” A day later, 4,000 Russian troops landed in Abkhazia, another breakaway Georgian province. Russia’s Black Sea fleet steamed to the Georgian coast threatening a blockade.
RUSSIA COULD GRAB MAJOR
U.S. PIPELINE
Putin’s moves in Georgia endanger the centerpiece of U.S. rulers’ efforts to counter Russia’s expanding energy-based imperialism. The new U.S.- and British-financed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, one of the world’s largest, runs through Georgia, skirting South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Opened in 2006, operated by British Petroleum, and owned partly by Chevron, it carries more than one million barrels of Caspian crude per day to Western Europe and the U.S. through the Turkish port of Ceyhan on the Mediterrean (see map).
Strategists in the Clinton administration chose the BTC route in order to bypass Russia and Iran. Its Ceyhan terminus sits conveniently close to the U.S. Air Force’s vast base at Incirlik, Turkey. But the U.S. has nevertheless proven supremely incapable of protecting its BTC lifeline. Russian troops reportedly fired on it in Georgia. And Kurdish rebels in Turkey had shut it down temporarily a week before by setting it on fire.
GEORGIA’S EMBATTLED PRESIDENT TOOL OF LIBERAL U.S. BOSSES
The fighting in Georgia is one for control of the world’s energy resources. U.S. rulers’ struggle to control Georgia is aimed at preventing their Russian rivals from replacing the U.S. as the world’s main energy controller. But oil and gas are only part — though a very big part — of an even larger conflict between U.S. and Russian rulers over political and military control of the former Soviet nations now outside Russia.
Expanding NATO throughout the former Soviet bloc and installing a shield of nuclear missiles there, aimed at Russia as well as at Iran, are vital U.S. goals. But ever since they boosted the anti-Soviet “Solidarity” movement in Poland in the 1980s, U.S. rulers, lacking a military home field advantage, have focused on buying elections in the region.
Billionaire swindler and Rockefeller ally George Soros has led the charge, bankrolling anti-Russian, pro-U.S. “color revolutions” in the old Soviet sphere. Its aim was to oust pro-Russian governments in Georgia (its banner was Rose) and in the Ukraine (Orange). Soros helped engineer Mikhail Saakashvili’s 2003 defeat of Georgian president and ex-Soviet Politburo member Eduard Shevardnadze. “It’s generally accepted public opinion here that Mr. Soros is the person who planned Shevardnadze’s overthrow,” the Toronto Globe and Mail said at the time (11/26/03). The Kremlin responded to these U.S. “victories” by curtailing gas supplies to Ukraine and Georgia, which hastened the present crisis.
The U.S. liberal establishment molded Saakashvili. He graduated from Columbia Law School and practiced at the prestigious Wall Street firm Patterson Belknap, which counts the Rockefeller Foundation as a top client. Soros personally presented Saakashvili with his Open Society Award. Consequently, Georgia under Saakashvili proved a staunch U.S. ally, until the Russian onslaught. Georgia just recalled 1,000 troops it had aiding the U.S. in Iraq back to its new home fronts.
NEXT PRESIDENT WILL HAVE TO
RESTORE DRAFT
U.S. rulers understand that two-bit proxies like Georgia can’t ultimately prevail in global conflicts with rising powers like Russia (or China). And with the shortcomings of their present “volunteer” military — who enlisted mostly because of economic hardship — U.S. rulers won’t be able to intervene to protect their interests. Therefore, they will need a draft, which will likely begin in the form of a “National Service,” part of which will lead especially working-class youth into the military.
A May 5 report issued jointly by the liberal Brookings Institution and the Army War College concluded that the “impact of fighting long wars using an all-volunteer force needs to be looked at more closely.” Both Obama and McCain will restore a “National Service” draft because, if they don’t, they will be as powerless against emerging imperialist rivals as is Bush.
Desperate for wider wars, U.S. rulers bombard the youth they will soon draft with dead-end, pro-capitalist patriotism. Russian bosses use Nazi-like nationalism, while Georgian misleaders count on meaningless racism and“ethnicity.” It’s all a trap. The only way out of the profit system’s endless wars is a mass communist-led revolution of the working class. This is Progressive Labor Party’s goal.

LA Summer Project Builds Communist Leadership for Future

Over 100 international workers, soldiers and students participated in our Summer Project here with the goal of strengthening our organizing efforts amongst industrial workers and soldiers. We have distributed over 8,000 CHALLENGES and over 15,000 leaflets in the past three weeks at factories, transit divisions, hospitals, schools and military bases. Our communist message was enthusiastically welcomed and over 50 people gave us their contact information to get involved.
The Project specifically focused on the opportunity that exists to organize workers in the concentration of subcontracted aerospace shops found in southern California. These non-union, mainly immigrant, workers play an important role in war production and for this reason must play an important role in the long-term struggle for workers’ state power. Industrial workers and soldiers are central both to capitalism and to the fight to destroy it and build communism, workers’ rule.
Summer Project volunteers met workers from a garment shop where the Party has maintained ties for many years. We asked about the conditions in the factory. The workers questioned the volunteers about the kinds of class struggle they organized back home in the places where they worked. The workers eagerly provided specific details about conditions in the plant including a recent work stoppage on the factory floor. The years of friendship, and the distribution of CHALLENGE, with these workers laid the basis for this vigorous discussion.
As a result a communist leaflet was produced and passed out at the factory. As the volunteers distributed the literature an angry boss came out to snatch it from us. One taller worker, who just received literature, held his CHALLENGE and leaflet high so his boss could not grab them. This young leader inspired us all to distribute more literature. In learning from the working class we are also having a concrete effect on our class brothers and sisters by influencing the class struggle, on a modest but significant level, with communist politics.
Another key aspect of the Project was to start building the worker-student-soldier alliance. At LA colleges and high schools we passed out a leaflet that linked police brutality to the nature of capitalist exploitation in the factories. At one high school, a parent approached and asked what we were distributing. The comrade gave the parent a leaflet and a CHALLENGE. They discussed the problems of elections, then the police, and how they are systematically used to terrorize black and Latino youth. The parent was enthusiastic about our presence and encouraged us to return. At the same high school, a student who got the paper then asked for five more to distribute to his friends and gave us his contact information.
Students Discuss Communist
Revolution with U.S. Marines
Our visit to a Marine base in California was preceded by political discussion within the Project about the true nature of the lives of soldiers in the bosses’ military. More experienced comrades shared their experiences in working on military bases in order for the younger comrades to feel confident when distributing CHALLENGE to soldiers and marines. Engaging marines in conversations about the role they can play in turning the guns around on the capitalist system, not workers of other nations, and fighting for working-class power instead of imperialism, was a valuable learning experience.
Project volunteers found that many marines do not agree with the U.S. imperialist agenda in the Middle East. The majority of these young marines come from the working class and joined the Marine Corps because they needed a job. Despite the bosses’ intense ideological effort throughout their military training to win these working-class youth to racist, fascist ideas, many soldiers we met were not only open but eager to discuss communist revolution. Five of them gave us their contact information and want to keep in touch. Many thanked us for being there. One young marine came to have lunch with us. We got a better response to CHALLENGE and to GI Notes than we’ve gotten here before. The response shows that we need to do this much more often.
Investing in a
Communist Future
Young comrades provided communist leadership in all aspects of this Summer Project. Bridging language barriers, students and workers discussed that students come from the working class and unity between students and workers is important to building the communist movement. A group of new comrades described their participation in a community organization that focuses on education. Collectively we discussed the contradiction between reform and revolution and how they can fight to strengthen the revolutionary communist side of that contradiction in the community organization.
The Summer Project has shown the potential and openness of workers to communist politics in the face of the bosses’ proclaiming it dead. Whether Obama or McCain is elected the intensifying rivalry between imperialists and widening wars means more attacks on workers in the form of an increase of police terror and exploitation at the workplace. These sharpening conditions make workers, students, and soldiers open to talking about alternatives to capitalism. The Project inspired all who participated to return home committed to increase their own organizing of class struggle on the job. Our goal is to turn our Summer Project experiences into a lifetime commitment to serving our class.

Veteran PL Farmworker’s Inspiring Stories of Battles in the Fields

LOS ANGELES, CA, August 9 –– After another day of CHALLENGE sales, house visits, and study groups, L.A. Summer Project volunteers took a trip through history when one of the main PL organizers of the migrant worker struggles, Epifanio Camacho, hosted a “carne asada” (BBQ). With the smell of collectively-prepared barbeque in the background and under a large shade tree, PLP volunteers squeezed into Camacho’s yard, many unsure of what to expect.
Camacho began speaking of the political work in Delano of organizing workers, comparing it to birds spreading seeds. In Delano, often workers from Mexico would learn communist politics and then return home where the lessons and politics they learned could one day bear fruit. This is one way that communism spreads around the world. Camacho fielded questions from PL youth and former Delano Project participants alike, opening up discussions that are still echoing through the Summer Project
Camacho spoke about his experiences working with Cesar Chavez, the misleader of the United Farm Workers Union. When asked if he thought Chavez, who would regularly turn workers over to immigration officers and make deals with bosses behind the workers backs, should be given a holiday, he instantly said, “Hell no!” He told stories of how Chavez went on a hunger strike to stop violence against scabs (the bosses canonized him in the media). Later Camacho told how he and the workers of his town organized a demonstration against the fascist police who were terrorizing and killing workers. The militant demonstration was held in the police station were the workers threatened to burn the station down if they did not stop the fascist attacks. This action chased out the cops –– almost 20 years ago –– and they never came back. His stories were inspirational to everyone.
Just like the work in Delano sent seeds of communist thought through Mexico, so will the L.A. and Seattle Summer Project participants spread the lessons we’re learning and the excitement we’re building through CHALLENGE sales, study groups, and collective living across the country when we return to our home cities.
(Camacho’s memoirs are on PLP.org)

Aerospace Workers Need
United Strike vs. Warmakers

WICHITA, KANSAS, Aug. 4 — Over 100 striking Machinists closed down the Hawker-Beechcraft plant here today with mass pickets. Earlier, 4,700 workers in IAM (International Association of Machinists) Local Lodge 733 (Wichita) and 500 in IAM Local Lodge 2328 (Salina, Ks.) voted 90% to reject the new contract and 89% to strike the same day — the first strike since 1984.
Everyone’s wondering how this relates to a possible strike early next month at Boeing because the issues are so similar. Even IAM International President Buffenbarger had to acknowledge the obvious: “It looks like workers are not going to take it anymore,” he admitted. The “rolling thunder” — the militant deafening banging every hour, on the hour — that has already started in the Boeing plants indicates he may have got it right.
Like Boeing, Hawker wants to separate new hires from veterans with cuts in earned time off, cuts in two job codes that will affect new hires and hidden costs in medical benefits for new hires. A veteran machinist Terri Holloway said: “If we don’t fight for the new people, they’re going to get the old people next.”
None of this should come as a surprise as Hawker was recently taken over — with the union’s blessing — by Onyx (in partnership with Wall Street Investment bankers Goldman Sacks). Onyx is the same outfit that grabbed Boeing’s Wichita plant and immediately cut wages.
To add insult to injury, Hawker leaked a secret plan to develop a final assembly plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. The threat (and fact) of moving more work to low-wage areas in the U.S. and Mexico has changed the face of aerospace. Narrow trade unionism has become a sick joke.
Aerospace is crucial to the bosses’ imperialist ambitions. As challenges to U.S. rulers’ dominance mount daily (witness Russia’s incursion into Georgia and China’s emergence during the Olympics), the bosses are determined to reindustrialize on our backs. War becomes the more likely option and we’re going to fund that war machine with our lives and livelihoods. In 2001, the Pentagon called for “competitive outsourcing” (Aerospace Daily, 2/3/2001). Now they want to build a “southern aerospace corridor” — taking advantage of low wages in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama caused by years of racist super-exploitation.
As expected the bosses’ servants in the union mis-leadership wave the American flag. We, on the other hand, wave the red flag of communist class-consciousness. Same enemy, same fight, workers of the world unite!

Angry Homecare Workers Must Sack Union Hacks, Bosses’ Politicians

NEW YORK, NY, Aug. 7th –– Eleven thousand members of Local 1199 Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare Workers East attended a rally at Madison Square Garden to support 30,000 homecare worker members in their struggle for upgrading pay and against the growing threat to their medical benefits. Their contract expires December 31. As PL’ers distributed all the CHALLENGES newspapers we had to eager and angry workers, it was clear that the workers were ready to fight.
The reasons for their anger were clear. Many of the agencies that employ them are run for profit. They typically skim off half of their state- and city-funded budgets for “administrative expenses.” The average homecare worker, almost exclusively minority and immigrant women, gets about $8/hour while providing lifesaving services. (As CHALLENGE has pointed out before, these workers receive no extra pay for overtime hours and less than their hourly pay when they stay overnight.)
The system under which tens of thousands of the elderly and infirm are cared for in this city makes it clear why we must smash capitalism. The bosses’ system places little value on the lives of those who no longer produce profits for them and therefore spends as little as possible on their care.
Homecare workers have suffered racist exploitation from their bosses and less than full support from the SEIU 1199 leadership. The union leaders refuse to unify them and prepare for a massive strike. On the contrary, this rally was dominated by speech after speech from politicians like Governor Patterson who is planning a $1 billion cut in the state budget. Also featured were Senator Schumer and Congressman Weiner who are busy urging war on Iran. Each of these politicians promote cutting workers’ living standards to pay for U.S. imperialism’s economic and war needs. SEIU leaders are lulling healthcare workers into believing we have no power other than in our union’s political endorsements. In the face of capitalism’s growing economic crisis and war in the oil-rich Middle East and Caspian regions, this is deadly poison for the working class.
Progressive Labor Party and its paper, CHALLENGE, must organize the working class to make a communist revolution. How do we get there? By stepping up the struggle with bosses every day, not allying with them, by getting involved in the daily problems faced by our friends and co-workers, by reading and circulating CHALLENGE participating in discussion groups, and joining the PLP to make egalitarian communism the main issue of the day!

From California to Seattle:
Volunteers Help Connect Boeing Workers

LOS ANGELES — “I have the paper,” said a Boeing worker as he drove from the parking lot, “but I just wanted to stop and thank you for being here.”
During shift change at this plant that builds military planes, students and teachers from the PLP Summer Project here distributed 120 copies of CHALLENGE and 500 leaflets, a reprint of the CHALLENGE article, “Bosses’ Imperialist Dogfight Sets Stage for Boeing Contract Fight.”
Men and women, younger and older, black, Latin, Asian and white workers took the literature. They were especially interested in the article since it was written by Boeing workers in Seattle.
Another worker exited his car to tell us that the bosses in his section had called a meeting earlier today “to get out misinformation about the contract fight.” He thought they were trying to use SoCal Boeing workers as pawns to pressure Boeing workers “up north” to settle on the bosses’ terms.
One guy took a bunch of leaflets to distribute in the plant — “I’m on the inside!” he said. Later he came out to say, “I’ve hooked you up!”
A Summer Project volunteer introduced CHALLENGE to another worker as “a communist paper” and he took it eagerly. This led to a long conversation about racism, exploitation and fighting back. The volunteer then asked, “Do you have a friend who thinks like you do, who might also like a paper?” When the worker said he had, the volunteer asked, “How many friends like that do you have?” The worker took five papers and gave her contact information to stay in touch with the Party.
Conversations were difficult because many workers were in cars and also because — as one volunteer noted — “these people looked more tired than anyone I’ve ever seen come out of work.” Almost nobody was hostile or even unfriendly. A student leafleting for the first time at such a plant, felt it was “good practice” but also said a discussion of the leaflet before-hand would have better prepared us for conversations.
This was a modest, very inspiring example of how PLP can unite workers around our newspaper and our Party. Through the leaflet and the work of the Summer Project, SoCal Boeing workers now have a connection to Boeing workers in Seattle.
We’ll try to strengthen this connection by continuing to come to Boeing, following up our contacts, making more contacts and building ties with the anti-capitalist workers who are reading our literature. We’ll try to win some to join PLP and build it “on the inside.”

Attack Hacks’ ‘Anti-War’ Hypocrisy at AFT Convention

CHICAGO, July 15 — A growing anti-war sentiment filled the ranks of the 3,000 delegates to the biennial American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Convention here. However, the union mis-leadership, which pretends to be “anti-war” and has backed anti-war resolutions, undermines any member attempts to organize against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, much less the capitalist system which causes them.
The AFT Executive Council presented a resolution to make the “spread of democracy and human rights in the world a major tenet of American foreign policy.” It urges the AFT to “increase funding for programs to assist pro-democracy organizations, political parties and workers organizations that are struggling in opposition to repressive regimes.”
A delegate countered that the U.S. has a sordid history of promoting U.S. corporate interests in the name of “democracy and human rights” while supporting repression of workers and student movements in countries allied to the U.S. A second delegate explained how the U.S. CIA had overthrown the Mossadegh government in Iran when it nationalized its oil, and in the 1980’s had encouraged and assisted Saddam Hussein to attack Iran resulting in a seven-year war where over one million died.
A major goal of outgoing AFT Pres. McElhenny and incoming Pres. Weingarten is continuing to lead union members into the arms of the Democratic Party.
Hillary Clinton was an invited speaker and Barack Obama spoke later via a satellite hook-up. PLP’ers distributed hundreds of CHALLENGES and issued three Party leaflets. We explained that both the Democrats and Republicans represented parties of capitalism and imperialist war. Another leaflet analyzed the role of the public schools under capitalism and exposed the so-called school reform plans that various sections of the ruling class are advocating.
Our literature was well-received by the delegates. We had many productive discussions with members of our delegations as well as with new contacts from other locals. These kinds of ties are important and we’ll make a serious plan to follow them up.
One of the convention’s bright spots was the development of the AFT Peace and Justice Caucus. The Caucus broadened its discussions to include school-based issues as well as anti-war issues. In four programs rank-and-filers gave presentations about the problems in their schools and the fight-backs over them. Anti-racist and internationalist sentiments were strongly expressed.
The Caucus has good potential but contains major contradictions. At organizational meetings some felt the AFT leadership can be “worked with” and even “pushed to the left” by progressive rank-and-file forces. But opponents of that view, including PLP’ers, see AFT “leaders” like Weingarten as firmly in the bosses’ camp. These “leaders” are staunch anti-communists and supporters of U.S. imperialism. In fact, in her inaugural address Weingarten said that sometimes when she doesn’t know what to do, she thinks, “What would Al say,” referring to Albert Shanker, former long-time president of the UFT and AFT.
PLP’ers remember well Shanker’s support of the U.S. rulers’ imperialist invasion of Vietnam and his organizing racist boycotts against parent involvement in NYC public schools.
(Next issue: From Shanker to Weingarten — Supporting U.S. imperialism.)

In Opposing Imperialist War:
GI’s Must Fight Racism, Sexism

In late August, Veterans for Peace (VFP) and Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) will have their national conventions with military families participating. These groups’ leaders put their hopes on politicians to end the war in Iraq. But all politicians represent the interests of capitalism — profit wars, racism, and sexism. The Progressive Labor Party is organizing to fight the ruler’s agenda, not with false hopes of change from elections, but by building an international communist movement to smash imperialism and its racist, sexist warmakers.
While some activists honestly feel fighting racism is a distraction to the goal of ending the war, anti-racist unity helped anti-war troops contribute to the collapse of U.S. ground forces in Vietnam. A majority of Vietnam-era GI rebellions centered on fighting the racism against black and Latin soldiers along with fighting against the war. Fighting the military’s anti-Asian racism was also vital to building solidarity with “the enemy” which led to US troops fragging — killing — gung ho patriotic officers, rather than killing and dying for U.S. imperialism.
Today, fighting racism is still crucial to fighting imperialism. Limiting the argument to the Iraqi War being bad because U.S. troops are being killed supports U.S. rulers’ racist agenda of having troops see Asian, Arab, and Muslim workers as subhuman. The wars, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, are wrong because they’re killing our class brothers and sisters, not just U.S. troops. Liberal “anti-war” politicians, like the 13 congressional democrats who wrote a support statement to anti-Iraq war troops, condone the racist anti-Muslim lies and support the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
Even though many in the U.S. military honestly believe in the ideas of national honor and pride in the US constitution, the history of US ruler’s racist terror — from slavery and the Indian wars to recent police murders, raids against immigrant workers, and the murder of millions in Iraq and many thousands in Afghanistan—contradicts these “patriotic” ideals and proves they are a lie. But instead of winning and developing anti-racist activists through education and action, some IVAW leaders want to appeal to a patriotism that makes unity with the ruler’s politicians more important than unity with workers worldwide.
Many anti-racists aren’t duped. Black youth are resisting enlistment and black troops are opting for support jobs in part because of the memory of Vietnam-era racism, which led to disproportionate higher casualties among black and Latin soldiers.
Within IVAW, members have raised and led fights against the racist nature of imperialism. But some IVAW leaders say they don’t want to alienate “middle America” by talking about racism. The leadership dropped a planned panel on “racism within the military” during the group’s Winter Soldier testimonies. IVAW’s active membership, like other military peace groups, remains mostly white. This poses no problems, however, if you want to capture the spotlight of the racist media and reach racist politicians, instead of building a multi-racial movement to fight imperialism.
Like racism, sexism aids imperialism. Capitalists win male troops to kill and die for profits using a sexist macho warrior role. The U.S. military’s tolerance of sexism within the ranks leads male troops to direct anger and lack of control over deployments into seeing female troops as “walking mattresses” or sexually attacking fellow troops instead of the bosses. Sexism within IVAW led, in part, to the formation of the Service Women’s Action Network, a liberal feminist veterans organization. Uniting working-class men and women to fight sexism is among PLP goals.
The unity of multi-racial male and female working-class troops against the military’s racism and sexism will lead to a stronger movement that can land a powerful blow to imperialism and recruit to PLP.
Caption to Picture:
NYC, August 8 — Relatives and friends of Juan Alcantara, a GI killed iin Iraq a year ago, marched in Upper Manhattan today. Alcantara was an Immigrant from Dominican Republic raised In Upper Manhattan. Like many immigrant and other working class youth, he joined the military to escape the "economic draft" (lack of decent jobs in civilian life). His mother and relatives blame the Bush gang and the oil war for his death..

All Workers Must Oppose Anti-Immigrant Racism

NEWARK, NJ, August 3 — A multi-racial and international group of 32 people met here today to discuss the fight against anti-immigrant racism. The unity of black and white citizens and immigrant workers (from Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala and El Salvador) is the best way to confront this growing form of racism which affects the entire working class.
An immigrant described the police harassment of day laborers waiting for jobs in an area of Orange, NJ, as “muy malo” (very bad). Elsewhere in New Jersey, homes have been raided and immigrants dropping off their children at school have been issued multiple traffic tickets up to $5,000! This summer two town councils proposed that landlords rent only to people with documentation.
One town, Bound Brook, has since dropped the resolution. The other, Middletown, has tabled it. But with hundreds arrested at factories lately and the racist murder of Luis Ramirez in Shenandoah, PA, by six white youth, we felt the urgency to meet and decide on action.
We noted that criminal bosses aren’t arrested for paying dirt wages and physically abusing workers. Because capitalism is based on exploitation of workers, this kind of racist super-exploitation is “legal.” The racist media tries to divide us by blaming the victims — undocumented immigrants — for the bosses’ attacks through the subprime crisis, mass wage and service cuts, and endless wars. Immigrants have historically been the targets of this ruling-class strategy. One woman recalled that her Italian father, who had no documents, suffered similar racist attacks.
In the early stage of the bosses’ “War on Terror” in Dec. 2001, when Middletown teachers struck, the media labeled them “the enemy of children and parents” because “educators’ benefits must be sacrificed” for the bosses’ war efforts; 228 strikers were arrested.
A woman speaker asked us to picture a world without borders based on a society without social inequalities: communism. During the discussion, one man reading CHALLENGE commented, “This paper is very important.”
A social worker from a family-help center said we need to reach out to communities. Members from three churches spoke, too. One Unitarian related what she learned at her June General Assembly: that Boston and Connecticut churches have e-mail chains ready to respond to attacks.
If the tabled anti-immigrant proposal isn’t rejected in Middletown, we plan to go door to door to relate what long-time residents have in common with immigrants and look to demonstrate wherever a resolution is passed.

PL Youths’ Red Ideas Greeted
At International Festival

ATHENS, GREECE, July 30 — Seven PLP youth representing our international party participated in the Resistance 2008 Festival, a worldwide gathering of thousands of young students and workers, hosted by the fake leftist Communist Organization of Greece (KOE). Our young comrades gained much experience in fighting for PL’s revolutionary communist politics internationally — helping develop new political leadership for PLP. We also fulfilled our aim of making many contacts among workers locally and from elsewhere, all seriously interested in our Party. These comrades come from different areas and work backgrounds. Some have been in PLP for a long time while others joined the Party within the last few years.
We distributed hundreds of CHALLENGES and several thousand special supplements, as well as hundreds of PLP’s document “Road to Revolution 4” and recent issues of the Communist Magazine. While there were many fake leftist groups present, most of the participants were young Greek students and workers. While unable to speak Greek, we managed to advance our ideas among many of them.
We hit the ground running to spread our ideas. Our tables displaying all our literature and banners was one of the most popular. We worked nonstop talking to new people and always had a group of people hanging out and chatting!
We fought for international working-class unity against nationalism, explaining that nationalism builds false loyalties to capitalists instead of being loyal to the working class across all borders. It is another tool, like racism, to divide the world’s workers. We were also the only group to advocate the dictatorship of the proletariat. This put us at odds with the festival, which supported the Maoists in Nepal and their leader “Prachanda” who is fighting for unity with local capitalists. Almost everyone we spoke with was interested in our ideas, even if they disagreed.
At our scheduled panel discussion on the final day, the seats were full; chairs were added three times for the overflow audience. After a KOE member spent 20 minutes criticizing our ideas on nationalism, a comrade drew applause with a powerful response that used the history of what nationalism produced in Africa and elsewhere, saying Nepal is currently following that path. We also explained why we fight directly for communism since socialism retained too many remnants of capitalism (like the wage system) and led to the return of open capitalism in the former Soviet bloc and China.
We adapted to the fact that most people didn’t speak English and that parts of the festival were dedicated to non-political events like rock concerts. So each night we distributed our literature to the concert-goers. At one point, the hundreds gathered were all reading CHALLENGE, not even paying attention to the band!
We were also fortunate in meeting a young Greek airport worker moments after landing. She took a day off to accompany us to the festival, translated our literature and banners into Greek and helped explain our ideas to those Greeks who didn’t speak English. She is very supportive of the Party and is being struggled with to join us and help build PLP in Greece.
Racism was much more prevalent in Greece and Western Europe than we expected. Our nonwhite comrades were constantly ID’d while whites weren’t. One comrade was ID’d three times by three different cops within about three minutes, while they searched for “illegal” immigrants. On the trains the police challenged the comrade’s passport for “authenticity.”
In one southern Italian city, swastikas and Nazi propaganda were plastered all over the walls. In Paris, we encountered and supported a strike of immigrant workers who were demonstrating right across from the Champs-Elysees, the main tourist drag. We tried speaking for a while in our broken French and bought them all lunch.
Our trip has built confidence in ourselves and in each other, trusting the collective and carrying out decisions in a disciplined way (both personally and politically) as well for each comrade to make decisions consistent with our goals when they were on their own and under various pressures. We internationalized our perspective of the working class. Almost all of us made separate groups of friends with whom we plan to stay in touch and collectively recruit to the Party
While the U.S. ruling class is making long-term investments in Obama and building new weapons of war, we made a long-term investment in our movement, by solidifying young comrades and laying the groundwork for the growth of PLP.

South Africa General Strike
Shows Power of Workers

PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA, Aug. 6 — A massive general strike shut down this country’s economy today as tens of thousands of workers marched against rising fuel and food prices. Today’s nationwide strike, which followed several regional ones, was called by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), under pressure from nearly two million members.
The Mail and Guardian (8/7) said, “The South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union...reported that 93% of its members had not gone to work....Gold mining operations...were affected substantially, with AngloGold Ashanti saying no shafts were operating while Harmony and Gold Fields said its operations were limited. Volkswagen’s...factory in Uitenhage...halted production, and Toyota South Africa closed its Durban plant for the day, as did Mercedes-Benz...in East London. Many...schools had been closed...”
Masses marched in many cities. In Pretoria, thousands marched to the Union Buildings, giving a memorandum of grievance against soaring electricity prices to Labor Minister Membathisi Mdladlana. Some 6,000 workers marched in East London, while about 5,000 took to the streets in Mthatha. The closure of Mercedes-Benz’s East London plant and other automotive factories in the province had the most obvious impact on the Eastern Cape economy.
This massive strike again showed the power workers have to shut down any modern economy. It is the road workers and their allies worldwide must follow to fight the bosses’ growing attacks in this age of economic meltdown and wars. Such an action is also one way to counter the recent racist pogrom fueled by lies blaming immigrant workers from Zimbawe, Mozambique, and elsewhere for the rise in prices and lack of jobs for all.
But much more is needed. The plight of workers won’t be solved by changing one politician or union misleader for another. For many years the COSATU leadership supported the African National Congress (ANC) government led by Mbeki and whose IMF-imposed austerity measures worsened workers’ lives here. COSATU, along with its allies in the “Communist” Party, which also supported Mbeki, are now backing the presidency of Jacob Zuma, who until 2005 was one of Mbeki’s deputy vice-presidents.
Zuma supported the privatization of Eskom, the government-owned electric utility. The recent electricity price rises are supposed to help Eskom, whose failing system has caused blackouts affecting capitalist operations like the gold mines. Privatization didn’t go through because investors realized that Eskom’s current sad state won’t be profitable.
The power struggle between different factions of the ruling ANC for control of state power, and the fruits of their being the main servants of local and international capitalists, again show that workers’ fight-back cannot limit itself to backing one set of bosses (such as African nationalists like the ANC) as the past militant anti-apartheid struggle did.
Many workers and youth in South Africa consider themselves pro-communist and revolutionary, but they must realize that the ANC-“C”P-COSATU leaders are far from that. The best lesson to draw from general strikes like today’s is to turn them into schools for communism, and rebuild a red-led workers movement. But this time it must break with all capitalists and fight for the only society capable of freeing workers from capitalism and its racism — communism.

LETTERS

More Letters from LA Summer Project

We’ve participated as students and teachers in the Los Angeles Summer Project, leafleting factories where many workers ask us, “Why are you communists? Why fight for this if you are students?” We answer them by talking about the power they have as a working class to stop the means of production. That sparks workers’ interest in our ideas. They say, “Yes, the bosses steal from them, and that we have to eliminate this system of exploitation.”
We’ve also participated in anti-racist demonstrations and others protesting exploitation of workers. Many workers came up to us asking for literature, then read it, triggering conversations.
In study groups we’ve learned to relate dialectical materialism to our lives, about how to build CHALLENGE networks, and how to win people so that together we can fight for communism. In discussing political economy we’ve heard comrades’ stories about bosses’ repression existing in many countries.
I’ve recognized the importance of working in factories and building an alliance among workers, students and soldiers. This Project has motivated me even more to continue fighting for communism together with the international working class.
A youth from El Salvador
 
I’m an industrial student volunteering for the Summer Project. After job searching that took about a week I got my first job as an assistant forger, which is pressing and heating metal. On my second day of work, I had my first chance to have a political conversation with a co-worker, that went something like this:
“So, how do you feel about making weapons for war?” I asked a young co-worker.
He said, “I don’t care, as long as we make some money off of it...Why? Were you in the army?”
“No,” I responded, “I just hate the war; we’re helping the government kill poor people like us, and for what, oil?”
“Well I’m not for the war either!” he said. “But what can we do?”
“Exactly, what could we do?”
He stayed quiet and we went back to work.
Although he didn’t respond to this question, this conversation shows my attempt at figuring out the internal contradictions of my co-workers.
This was just the first conversation of many where I will attempt to figure out how to reveal to my fellow workers the true nature of this racist imperialist system and how to build an urgent and long-term fight against it.
Industrial student
 
What a great morning! It was our first time –– for the six volunteers from my city –– at an aerospace factory.
The first worker I spoke with was somewhat hesistant. He refused CHALLENGE and the flyer. He said he likes equality and the goals of communism but feels that it’s too risky to stand up against the bosses, that it puts a worker’s family into too much danger, and that things didn’t turn out well in the Soviet Union. He didn’t want anyone to see him with the paper.
Shortly, a bolder worker approached. I offered CHALLENGE, saying that our communist newspaper explains how Obama is no better than McCain, that both really support ongoing war in the Middle East to benefit the oil companies. He agreed and explained that they’re just like Bush and Cheney. Then he pointed to the factory, saying, “yeah, just like the bosses here, just out for themselves.” After taking CHALLENGE, he said, “Good luck.”
When I introduced the paper to a group of three workers, one asked, “Why are you here in particular?” I explained that we want to organize and fight against the low wages in the non-union aerospace factories where work is contracted out from the major companies like Boeing. At some point, the aerospace workers have to be prepared to stop work and refuse to make parts for the bosses’ wars. I compared the situation in aerospace to something similar during the Civil War.
Prior to the Civil War, cotton from the South was being sent to England to be made into cloth. But many of the English textile workers hated slavery and refused to process cotton from the U.S. They wanted to help weaken the Confederacy and support the fight against slavery, even though some of them would probably end up losing their jobs.
One of the three workers said “Excellent!” He told me that he agrees with communism, and gets mailings from another (supposedly) Marxist organization. With warm comradely enthusiasm, we exchanged phone numbers, so we can get together and talk more about Progressive Labor Party.
At another moment, a boss from the factory came out and shouted, “Stay off the property!” I told him that I had just stepped across the grass for a few workers who wanted the flyer. He responded arrogantly, “No one wants the flyer!” and I shot back, “You can’t speak for everyone!” Obviously unable to stop us, and unable to stop workers from understanding reality, he just repeated, “Well, stay off the property,” and he walked back in.
All in all, at this one small factory, 70 workers took CHALLENGE this morning.
Facts are stubborn things. The bosses will try their best to keep us ignorant, but millions of workers will master political theory, communist philosophy and revolutionary strategy. Today was a small, but important step in that process. What a great Summer Project!
Original R

Rising Struggle Among Young Workers

I was recently reprimanded at work for using my cell phone next to the vending machine during a break. The head boss, who spends most of his time in an air-conditioned office while us workers sweat away on the job, was the one who screamed at me. Though several of my co-workers assured me that it was nothing to worry about, the words of another worker stuck in my head.
That morning during the carpool to work, when I asked this coworker how he thought we’d be affected by the other layoffs in our industry he reasoned, “Well that’s why they’re trying to fire people over bullshit and they are using the early buyout program on older workers at the top of the wage-scale.” The new workers they’re bringing in are supposedly “temporary” and receive no benefits or wage increases like us other workers.
I told another worker that I felt like I had a target on my back ever since I was called into the head boss’s office a short time ago for attending an anti-racist demonstration before work. Going to such a rally in uniform was a “fire-able offence [sic]” he said and, “he didn’t know what was going to happen to me.” While the head boss told me to keep the incident to myself I decided that if I was going to get fired for fighting racism, as many of my coworkers ought to know about it as possible. Lots of workers took my side and several seemed impressed that I, a white worker, would attend a rally against police brutality. One worker felt it was a clear expression of the racism often present on the job.
I discussed with my coworker who I’d told about the target on my back the possibility of a union making conditions better. He, also a young worker, was quick to point out the corruption and profiteering present in many unions and cited a previous job where the union did nothing to defend low seniority workers. The failures of the reformist trade union movement and the past communist movement make the path ahead a difficult one, but this same worker helped provide some direction.
At the end of our shift we were assigned extra work. This worker went to the main office, complained and sat down refusing to work. Several minutes later he rejoined me and another worker who were carrying out the task, since he felt bad for leaving us to do the work alone. As we walked back to the car afterwards he explained what he had done and I told him that the next time he had better include me in any plans to stop work. “I’m down!” We questioned if any boss could not play favorites and I reasoned, “it’s just good cop, bad cop; the whole system is rotten.”
I believe firmly in the PLP’s objective of organizing industrial workers. We make this society run and we can shut it down. I look forward to expanding my CHALLENGE distribution on this job and the next and struggling towards a new, communist society.
A Young Worker

Strikes Under Communism?

In a discussion with a long-time Party comrade about toleration or repression of dissent in a genuine communist society, the question arose: what is dissent? I would emphasize that fascists, racists, pro-capitalist elements, etc. would not be considered as dissidents and the workers’ state would have to act accordingly. But what about a group of workers protesting a certain government policy and want to present a position paper on the question? Assuming that all of the workers are devoted communists and may have a good point, I think they should be allowed to voice their opinion and have the right to publish their views, even if it disagrees with the majority.
What about strikes? Should workers have the right to strike in a communist society? The comrade said strikes would not be legal in this society, and though I can see where he’s coming from, I’m not sure that I agree with that position.
If communism is really based upon workers’ power, then workers should have the right to voice their views on this question. Otherwise it would seem that this would be imposed from above and would only alienate segments of the workers.
Of course, my view on this stems from the fact that I grew up in the coal fields and that some of my family worked in the mines. The right to strike was and is very important to coal miners. I cannot see them giving up the right to strike when they feel that it is necessary, especially around job safety.
The fact that strikes are illegal won’t prevent workers from striking if they feel the need to do so. Of course, not all strikes are the same; some might be clearly reactionary and would have to be dealt with. But some strikes might be progressive so the workers’ state would have to investigate the workers’ reasons for striking and make the necessary changes.
A person might argue that in a communist society there will be no need for strikes, but if this is true, then why have laws against them?
I think there should be an attempt by the workers’ state to explain to workers why it’s not a good idea to strike. The question of communist consciousness will need to be resolved. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to pass a law banning strikes — this would be an admission that everything is not going well.
Again, I don’t like the idea of imposing this position on the workers, as if they were unruly children and would strike every chance they got.
Shouldn’t we have more faith in the workers? Shouldn’t we have more confidence in the power of our communist ideas?
Red Coal

Red Eye on the News

Plenty of big-biz $ backs Obama

In an effort to cast himself as independent of the influence of money on politics, Senator Barack Obama often highlights the campaign contributions of $200 or less....But records show that one-third of his record-breaking haul has come from donations of $1,000 or more: a total of $112 million, more than Senator John McCain....
Many...come from industries with critical interests in Washington. (NYT, 8/6)

Russia war is payback to US

Even as American and European leaders were demanding, begging and pleading with Russia to halt its advance into Georgia....Many experts in foreign policy say that one reason Russia responded so forcefully to Georgia’s attempt to take back South Ossetia is that the United States and Europe had been asserting themselves in Russia’s backyard, alienating Moscow by supporting Kosovo’s bid for independence.
Beyond that, Russia has also been angry about American plans to put a missile defense system in Poland, and by American moves to encourage Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO....
“It’s difficult for them not to see us as hostile....” (NYT, 8/12)

Nuke-free area (except Israel)

The security council’s offer to Iran claimed...to bring about a “Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.” But like every other such document, it made no mention of the principal owner of weapons in the region: Israel. According to a leaked briefing by the US Defence Intelligence Agency, Israel possesses between 60 and 80 nuclear bombs. But none of the countries demanding that Iran scraps the weapons it doesn’t yet possess are demanding that Israel destroy the weapons it has....
If Iran builds a bomb, it will do so for one reason: that there is already a nuclear-armed state in the Middle East, by which it feels threatened. (GW, 8/1)

Obama wants you to serve US

....While McCain has made only vague pledges to support AmeriCorps, Obama last week used a speech in Colorado Springs to highlight his pledge to spend $3.5 billion to bolster AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, the Foreign Service, and launch an Energy Corps....
“I’m not going to tell you what your role should be....But I am going to ask you to play your part, ask you to stand up; ask you to put your foot firmly into the current of history”. (NYT)

Desperate Haitians eating dirt

Haitian women mould clay and water into hundreds of little platters and lay them out to harden in the sun....These platters are not to hold food. They are food....
....The cakes have become a staple for entire families. It is not for the taste and nutrition –– salt and margarine do not disguise what is essentially dirt....They are the cheapest and increasingly only way to fill bellies.
“It stops the hunger,” said Marie-Carmelle Baptiste, 35, a producer....She did not embroider their appeal. “You eat them when you have to. (GW, 8/8)

Anti-Latino hate crimes up

FBI figures show a 35% rise in hate crime against Latinos over the past three years....“Post 9/11 we immediately launched into a nativist attitude. Then as the economy began to falter, attitudes have hardened.”
The federal government is doing its bit....
The message being propagated by Congress, the White House, local legislators and the more rabid elements of the media seems to be getting through: “illegal” immigrants are of little value, and should be treated accordingly. (GW, 8/8)

‘Honest Abe’ Lincoln Was Viciously Pro-Slavery

Lerone Bennett, Jr.’s book, “Forced Into Glory” (1999), convincingly documents how most historical accounts have wrongly described Abraham Lincoln as a fighter against slavery. His work also shows that Lincoln was intensely reactionary, making decisions which, contrary to legend, returned many blacks to slavery.
Bennett insists that Lincoln had a life-long commitment to racism. In 1853, as one of 11 managers of the Illinois State Colonization Society, he advocated colonization of all blacks to Central or South America. In 1857 he urged the Illinois legislature to appropriate money for colonization. Three months after signing the Emancipation Proclamation, he sent 450 blacks to an island off the coast of Haiti where 100 died within a year. In April 1865, Lincoln summoned General Benjamin Butler to the White House about the “possibility of sending the Blacks away.”
Bennett documents consistency, from Lincoln’s 1836 vote against black suffrage to his 1865 support of the Louisiana constitution which gave the vote to Confederate veterans but not to black veterans of the U.S. Army.
In 1847, as an attorney representing a slave-owner, he asked two judges to send a black mother and her four children back into slavery. The white judges rejected Lincoln’s plea and freed the family. Lincoln’s law partner, William Herendon, took cases of slaves, but Lincoln never did.
Bennett challenges those who excuse Lincoln’s attitude, saying the few exceptions in the racist climate of the 19th century are out-spoken abolitionists like Wendell Phillips or the militant John Brown. But men like Lyman Trumbull, a known opponent of the pro-slavery Kansas-Nebraska Act, were elected to the Senate over Lincoln. In 1853, 22 Illinois legislators stood against the Negro Exclusion Law, but not Lincoln. Members of Lincoln’s cabinet spoke out for Negro suffrage. Politicians from Mid-West states led the fight against Negro exclusion and black laws. Other politicians took stands for instant emancipation, confiscation of rebels’ land and for use of black soldiers.
Bennett critiques the Gettysburg Address for avoiding pressing issues of the day. The lynchings and burnings of blacks in NYC that very year weren’t mentioned. Lincoln never uttered the words Confederate, South or slave.
Bennett describes how each of three drafts of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation reacted to a more progressive Congress. Congressman Daniel Gott called for a ban on the slave trade in the nation’s capital. Lincoln then wrote his first draft, a bill for gradual and compensated emancipation in D.C., stating that all persons now within said District lawfully held as slaves should remain such.
In September 1861, Lincoln revoked General Fremont’s blanket emancipation of all the slaves in Missouri. Intense criticism caused him to write his second “emancipation” draft, proposing gradual emancipation but total compensation for slave-owners in Delaware, with two timetables for ending slavery: 1893 and 1914!
In 1862, when General Hunter decreed that all slaves in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida should be freed, Lincoln revoked it, re-enslaving one million people! Criticism was again levied at Lincoln, so Congress urgently signed the Second Confiscation Act saying that all rebel property, including slaves even 1,000 miles from a battlefield, could be seized. Lincoln countered on July 22, allowing 60 days warning for the South, and only for gradual, compensated confiscation.
That July, Congress also authorized the use of black soldiers. Lincoln told a delegation of Midwesterners in August that he would rather resign than use black soldiers to kill white men.
Ultimately, the Proclamation “enslaved and/or continued to enslave over half a million slaves, more than it ever freed,” because there was no power to effectively free slaves in rebel states. The border states, with an additional 556,540 slaves, were excluded because they weren’t in rebellion. Also excluded were large sections of Tennessee, Louisiana and Virginia controlled by federal troops — 396,863 slaves — some already wage workers. In January, 1863, slaves totaled four million. By February 1865, two months before the war ended, 3,800,000 blacks were still enslaved.
What did Lincoln do on race issues? He volunteered three times for the war to ethnically cleanse Illinois of Indians. He maintained the brutal treatment of black soldiers and their unequal pay. When William Walker, a black soldier, protested, Lincoln condemned him to the firing squad. He made sure 38 Indians hung for rebelling against his administration’s genocidal strategy. But when Confederates massacred hundreds of blacks, women and children at Fort Pillow, Lincoln did nothing.
Bennett’s work is well-researched and relentlessly exposes Lincoln’s reactionary policies. He also directs sharp criticism at modern biographers for perpetuating the racist hypocrisy of Lincoln’s heroic image as “the freer of slaves.”

SUMMER OF COMMUNISM
LETTERS FROM LOS ANGELES

For several days I’ve been immersed in the Los Angeles Summer Project, part of multi-racial teams rising early to distribute thousands of CHALLENGES and leaflets at aerospace plants, garment factories, bus barns, high schools and a trade school. The response has been terrific. We debrief daily on workers’ responses to our ideas and our conversations with them. Many contacts have been collected, and follow-up visits are held regularly.
I discussed with one young student at a trade school (which feeds into the aerospace industry) how communism would be completely different from the way things are set up under capitalism. Everyone would work out of commitment to the welfare of the working class, and people would receive according to need. He asked what about someone who wouldn’t want to work. I said this wouldn’t be much of a problem. Most people want to contribute to society and get the good feeling from helping others (which has motivated about a million people to go to New Orleans as volunteers, helping with reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina). He said he would read CHALLENGE carefully.
This is one of many worthy experiences I’ve had in building the Party this week. Long live PLP and the fight for communism!
A Comrade
 
“What you are talking about, communism, I think it sounds good but do you really think it can happen, I mean what makes you think it’s possible?” asked a young white Marine after him and his partner were presented with a GI Notes military newsletter and a CHALLENGE.
“I’ll tell you what makes me think it’s possible,” responded one of the volunteers. “It’s because of the tremendous potential power that we have. You and military folks just like yourself run things, the brass and other top military officials don’t do shit. They can’t do anything without us. You are on the ground and you make things happen. Same thing in the factories, the workers run them and make all the production. This is where our tremendous power lies. Imagine soldiers and workers fighting together for a world in which we make revolution against the war-makers and the whole bosses’ system.
“This has happened in the past.There was a worldwide crisis of capitalism that eventually led to World War I. During this time period millions of soldiers rebelled, mutinied and organized resistance while workers struck, led mass protests and organized general fight-backs. With Lenin’s and other Bolsheviks’ communist leadership...in Russia a revolution took place and for the first time in history the working class was running things. The same took place in China, with Mao and other communist leaders during and after World War II.
We think that with the situation in Iraq and the growing imperialist rivalry going on with Russia, China and the U.S. could very well develop into a global conflict that will ultimately start a World War III. This is one more reason why individuals like yourself are very important because once we understand the tremendous power that soldiers and workers have we can once again challenge the world’s rulers and finish the job that these great revolutionaries started.
The young Marine had an intent look on his face and with CHALLENGE in his hand said, “Wow, I had never really thought about it that way, I really can see what you are saying, but I think that since we have been children we have been taught different ideas of things. I think it’s going to be very difficult,” he said. “Difficult yes, but not impossible,” I responded. “Yeah, I agree,” he said. As we said goodbye, the Marine gave us his contact information and said, in an encouraging and heartfelt manner, “good luck, keep it up and I wish you the best.”
Summer Project Volunteer
 
“You should go across the street and distribute the papers to the workers at that factory too because they are really exploited there,” said a worker we talked to today. This took place at one of the many CHALLENGE sales outside of factories as part of the PLP Summer Project. This particular worker is a machinist at a small subcontracted factory of Boeing/ Northrop Grumman. Part of his job is making the skeleton for military planes.
This worker had trouble making the connection to his own exploitation because he felt that he was skilled and that he was making enough money. However, he clearly saw how the planes he makes are sold for millions and how these companies profit from his labor. He had heard that the factory across the street was notorious for pushing their workers hard for very low wages. He advised us on the best times to reach the workers during their shift, he was aware of the multitude of workers who have to struggle everyday to survive.
He considers himself lucky to be making $100,000 a year, but as we continued to talk with him, we were able to show how he was exploited too. He works 65 hours a week, 6 days a week and is constantly under pressure to work faster. In fact, recently his boss held a meeting in which he told the workers that if they didn’t produce faster, the bosses would have to let people go. We related this speed up and fear tactics to police brutality, the war and cut backs in healthcare.
We told him about an unarmed Latino man named Christian Portillo who was shot recently by the police, as well as Kevin Wicks who was also killed by them. The worker then told us about how he is constantly profiled. He was even pulled out of his car at gun point while wearing his work uniform. This reveals the racism that many Latino and black workers face. He has gotten used to being pulled over and considers it just a part of life. As we talked more about police brutality it became clearer and clearer to the worker that these scare tactics are not only used by the police but also by his factory bosses as well.
Then we talked about the cutbacks in health care, and he told us a story about his wife.
She was so sick that he had take off from work to take care of her around the clock for a year. This resulted in their losing their home and getting into debt.
He understood on a very personal level that workers are only a few paychecks away from ending up homeless and in debt. This was helpful in revealing the myth that a middle class exists, because there are workers who live more comfortably but they do not own the means of production. They are exploited. We hope to go back to this factory and find this worker and ask what he thought of Challenge.
A project volunteer
 
Besides the daily political work at the Los Angeles Summer Project, we also laugh, love and even cry. Here is what the international communist PLP family produces.
After a day of political activities, I gave a presentation to a group of local and international volunteers about how I joined PLP and described the Party’s work in my area of Mexico. I didn’t know many of the volunteers I was speaking to, but I know that despite our different backgrounds we have much more in common. So once we were all together as a communist family, in spite of our superficial differences, my heart was beating faster. “Was this because I was nervous, or happy?”
Happiness is something you want and need. I feel proud and that is happiness.
I feel I love my comrades — but why? Because my heart beats faster for my class, my life and my communist Party. I am PLP, I am a communist.
A Communist Youth from Mexico
  1. CHALLENGE, August 13, 2008
  2. CHALLENGE, July 30, 2008
  3. CHALLENGE, July 15, 2008
  4. CHALLENGE, July 2, 2008

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