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Editorial: Canada wildfires - Capitalism the firestarter behind climate disaster
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- 22 June 2023 723 hits
Toxic air plagued much of the U.S. in early June as wildfires raged throughout Canada. On June 6, New York City experienced the worst pollution on record, beyond the “emergency” level set by the Environmental Protection Agency and nearly four times the level considered “unhealthy.”. Hypocritical calls by liberal misleaders like New York Mayor Eric Adams, to “stay home if you can'' were too little too late, as smoke darkened orange-hued skies. Most workers couldn’t heed Adams’ call, since no work means no pay–and the capitalist bosses weren’t about to lose profits to protect workers. Black and Latin workers in the poorest neighborhoods suffered the most as the choking air caused emergency room visits to soar, especially for those with asthma and other respiratory illnesses (Gothamist, 6/12). The dirty air crisis piled on the already poisonous effects of living under capitalism.
While wildfire smoke is unusual for New York, breathing toxic air is the everyday norm for much of the world’s working class. South Asia has nine of the world’s ten cities with the worst air and “persistently hazardous” pollution that causes an estimated two million premature deaths a year” (New York Times,, 6/15). Capitalism wreaks devastation on the working class every day. From non-stop deforestation in the Amazon rainforest to the proposed bulldozing of a forest in Atlanta to build a $90 million facility to train more killer kkkops, the rulers keep spreading the horrors of their toxic system. We cannot rely on a ruling class that kills us daily. We can’t trust our children’s future to the profit-mad monsters who caused climate change in the first place. Only communism, a system run to serve workers’’ needs, not the profit of a few, can change the conditions that lead to so much death and disease for the international working class!
Capitalist drive for profits = wildfires
“Wildfires” aren’t the natural disasters that the term might imply. Although lightning was the primary cause of the recent Canadian conflagrations, many of the burning trees were not in natural forests. Much of the devastated acreage was in industrial tree farms. Timber companies cut down forests that had been there for hundreds of years to “make space for commercial tree varieties and eliminate competition”(Earth Island Journal, 4/8/19). As usual, the drive for maximum profits led to the planting of profitable but “less fire-tolerant tree species, [making] it easier for fires to spread” (BBC, 6/12). Rising temperatures worldwide due to the burning of fossil fuels lead to drier conditions, making wildfires more frequent and intense...which in turn release more carbon into the atmosphere and cause even more global warming.
Protecting the health of the environment and humanity will never be society’s goal until capitalism is destroyed. Under communism, there would be no need to put workers’ lives in such danger. Without money and the drive for profit, all decisions–including environmental decisions–made would be based on the needs of the international working class.
Environmental racism is part of life under capitalism
The smoke that blanketed New York didn't spare wealthy neighborhoods. But like most environmental disasters, the most exploited workers in already neglected neighborhoods are hurt the most. The harm from smoke comes from tiny solid and liquid particles that are inhaled and trigger respiratory illnesses or worsen existing conditions. With already higher-than-average asthma rates, Black and Latin workers are among the most vulnerable to the hazardous impacts of the smoke. This, too, is not a natural occurrence.
Racist segregation, a criminal abomination created by the capitalist ruling class, has forced Black and Latin workers to live in neighborhoods cut through by highways and packed with industrial plants. “[B]lack and Hispanic communities in the U.S. are exposed to far more air pollution” and “neighborhoods once shaped by discriminatory housing policies…have more pavement, fewer trees and higher average temperatures — a combination that can lead to deadly heat illness” (Washington Post, June 2020).
During the wildfire crisis, the highest rates of emergency room visits related to asthma were in these areas (Gizmodo, 6/16). Historically Black and Latin neighborhoods–such as New York’s South Bronx, nicknamed “Asthma Alley”– have the highest rates of death and disease from asthma in the country. In New York, 80 percent of the people hospitalized with asthma are Black and Latin workers (Columbia University). Capitalism was already killing these workers! This smoke only made things worse.
Capitalism won’t solve climate change
Liberal misleaders like Adams and President Joe Biden would have us think that climate change denial is a new phenomenon pushed by a conservative fringe. But it was oil giant ExxonMobil, a bulwark of mainstream finance capital, that hired the scientists in the 1970s who found that fossil fuels were dangerous, and then paid them to hide their findings and misinform the public. They “were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks” (Scientific American, 10/26/15).
With Canada in the spotlight, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s hypocrisy stands out. In June 2019, Canada declared a national climate emergency. “The next day, it approved the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion… to move almost 600,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta to the port of Burnaby” (mronline.org, 6/23). The bosses’ promises at United Nations climate conferences to cut carbon dioxide emissions mean next to nothing.
As oil profits soar, in large part due to the war in Ukraine, trillions of dollars are being invested worldwide in fossil fuel infrastructure (NYT, 4/6). These plans are making a mockery of the UN’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, never mind their members’ “commitment” at the Paris Agreement in 2015. “Temperature rises over 2 degrees could bring catastrophic and potentially irreversible impacts, including pushing three billion people into chronic water scarcity” (CNN, 1/30). As the world’s imperialist superpowers ramp up to the next world war, they will keep doing whatever it takes to protect their profits and power.
Under Biden, laughably called the “first climate president,” oil production has increased to record levels. In March, “the Biden administration approved a massive drilling project in Alaska that could generate the same carbon emissions each year as adding two million gas-powered cars to the roads” (Smithsonian Magazine, 3/22). This Willow Project praised by oil execs is supposed to “secure energy independence” from Russia–the capitalists’ code for sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry.
The liberal bosses calling for the Green New Deal, the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, or other UN climate goals continue to pose them as solutions to the capitalist-created climate crisis. But global bosses have no real plan to “save the planet.””. Their master plan is to prepare for world war. As of 2019, the U.S. military was “the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world” (The Guardian, 11/21). Capitalism can never combat climate change.
Burn down capitalism with communist revolution
Communism is the only system that can! In a system run by and for the working class, the profit-driven causes of climate change will wither away. Unfortunately, the damage caused by capitalism won’t be undone overnight. But we will reorganize the way we work and the way we power our world. We will organize to protect the working class by moving workers away from vulnerable coastlines, increasing green spaces, and converting to clean energy sources. When “natural” disasters strike, our priority will be to save and protect lives. Join Progressive Labor Party and organize for communist revolution to build that world!
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Racist NYC Schools contract prove need for workers’ power
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- 22 June 2023 785 hits
NEW YORK CITY, June 16—“Worker unity is stronger than any law!” This was one Progressive Labor Party (PLP) member’s message during a recent UFT (United Federation of Teachers) town hall about Union misleader Michael Mulgrew and KKKop-Mayor Eric Adams’ new tentative agreement (TA) contract for UFT members. A group of comrades joined other education workers to sharpen the criticism of the contract proposal and make plans to fight back. Capitalist education will never meet the needs of working-class educators or students. It is designed to train young people to be exploited in the workforce or serve as cannon fodder in the next imperialist war.
Instead of seeing ourselves as pawns in the bosses’ profit game, imagine a mobilized working class confronting the city bosses and demanding what we need. Instead of waiting for the union to negotiate our demands away, we could be building a revolutionary movement to wrest power away from the bosses ourselves. A hundred thousand working-class educators, over a million working-class students, and add their working-class families: WE ARE MIGHTY!
Union misleaders are class collaborators: “Fair Deals” impossible under capitalism
While UFT leadership is trying to pressure workers to vote yes on the proposal, dangling so-called “raises” and “bonuses” in our faces and threatening the possibility of an even worse deal if we don’t go along for the ride, we must be clear on the truth: The contract proposal is nothing other than a viciously racist attack on educators, students, and their families. It does nothing to address the recent underhanded assault on workers’ healthcare (see box) or the overcrowded classrooms, woefully inadequate mental health services, and rampant racist segregation that systematically deprive primarily Black and Latin students. Instead, it serves to further divide teachers and families and placate education workers into accepting a raw deal.
Throughout the nearly year-long contract struggle, UFT leaders have exposed themselves as lying, racist, class-collaborators. Mulgrew may brag about his 500-member negotiating committee, but the UFT’s function, like that of all unions, is to make a deal it can “sell” to its members. They can have 500 or even 1000 members on the “negotiating committee” and congratulate us on our “hard work” and “activism,” but the fact is, this contract is a result of backroom deals with the city, being sprung on us at the last minute and rushed to a vote during the last two weeks of the school year.
This is the role of unions under capitalism: keep the workers in line and “manage” the class struggle for the bosses, as well as push them to vote for the Big Fascists’ pro-Wall St./U.S. imperialist agenda. To accomplish this, they bribe, sweet talk, deceive, manipulate, obstruct, divert, pacify, steamroll, threaten, and try to wear us out until we capitulate. But communists in PLP and many of our class sister and brother educators are saying NO!
Bosses’ contracts and laws serve only the ruling class
The contract does nothing to address students' abysmal learning conditions. Mulgrew’s claim that new state laws will protect smaller class sizes is a proven lie. Not only does the recently passed law allow for numerous exceptions–including lack of space, “over-enrolled” programs, a shortage of licensed teachers, and schools in “severe economic distress"–but the bosses already break their own laws whenever it suits their interests. One school’s administrators recently packed 42 kids (8 more than the current law) into a PLP teacher’s classes. Only when the comrade united with other teachers and fought back did the local bosses take measures to reduce the class size. Meanwhile, thousands of other NYC students are forced to remain in overcrowded classrooms.
The ruling class knows that teacher-student-parent unity could threaten to destroy them. That's why they do everything they can to sow divisions. The TA would also phase in new forms of remote work that will further isolate students, educators, and families. One change will deemphasize parent engagement time and parent-teacher conferences, potentially making them fully remote. This will make it more difficult for teachers to build meaningful relationships with families. A major expansion of virtual learning included in the contract proposal opens the door to use more online programs instead of real instruction, further decaying the quality of education for hundreds of thousands of students and contributing to the racist fast-foodification of learning, while also paving the way for larger class sizes.
Even on its face, the proposed pay “raises” do not even keep up with inflation and are actually a pay cut. Even worse, there continue to be union educators like paraprofessionals, mainly Black and Latin, who are making nowhere near enough money to survive in the city. Many of these educators are forced to take on second jobs or choose between basic needs like food and rent.
Can’t get mired in dead-end reforms; fight for communist revolution!
MORE (Movement of Rank and File Educators) is one opposition caucus in the union that has raised criticisms of UFT leadership, taking a “social justice” stance that includes pro-student positions against “racial segregation” and spotlights the interests of the mostly Black and Latin paraprofessionals and other non-teaching titles that the city has already tried to outsource. Although MORE has provided some useful inside information and caught the union leadership in their duplicity (doubletalk) multiple times, their criticisms of the contract abandon their most powerful antiracist arguments.
Educators and students in Oakland launched a more pro-student mass struggle when they went on strike in May with a list of “common good” demands (see CHALLENGE, 6/21). Strikers demanded not only better pay for teachers, but also increased staffing for school nurses, librarians, and counselors, as well as school building improvements and the opening of unused school properties to unhoused and housing insecure students. While this struggle has the potential to build class consciousness, it still relies on the limitations of reform. Educators, students, and their families need MORE than that!
That’s exactly the problem with fighting only for reforms. As long as we are fighting over crumbs, we will be missing the big picture: the need to unite with our students and their families to take on the whole capitalist system. Workers need STATE POWER!
As the U.S. bosses prepare for world war with China, they are pushing the working class to make even more sacrifices to preserve U.S. imperialist power. This means worsening conditions in schools, as well as pay cuts and cuts to healthcare for workers across the board. The working class has no choice but to fight for a completely new system: communism. We need a revolutionary communist party, PLP, to get there.
We communists plan to continue fighting tooth and nail alongside our students and their families, as well as struggling with our fellow educators over our revolutionary line, helping to advance the class struggle for workers’ needs and build workers’ unity. We need to continue to work inside groups like MORE to better mobilize workers for the many fights ahead.
Labor misleaders sellout NYC workers
In 2018, the New York City Municipal Labor Committee (MLC)—a coalition of labor unions representing some 390,000 city workers—made an unprecedented backroom deal that assaulted workers’ health care. The leadership of the unions in the MLC collectively agreed (without any union members’ approval or input) to save the city $1.1 billion dollars from 2019-2021 and then $600 million per year, in perpetuity (permanently)! As part of that deal, this year city bosses and the unions are jointly forcing retirees to join a misleadingly named “Medicare Advantage” plan instead of their previous healthcare plans. Medicare Advantage is a private Preferred Provider (PPO) program run by Aetna that will place limits on which doctors workers can see, forcing them to get pre-approvals, and may restrict available treatments. Lower quality healthcare plans are now forecast for next year for all active members of MLC unions.
French army prepares for coming war
Economist, 6/18–In 2021, a year before Russia invaded Ukraine, General Thierry Burkhard told The Economist that the French army had to “harden” itself and prepare for “high-intensity war”, possibly on the European continent. One hypothetical adversary was Russia. Today, the former head of the army is France’s top soldier, in charge of all its armed forces…For 17 days in April and May General Burkhard led a full-scale division-level exercise in eastern France, on land that the great powers fought over more than a century ago. In his office in Paris, where a print featuring Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s most senior general, hangs opposite a portrait of Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, General Burkhard reflects on the lessons emerging from the exercise and from the war in Ukraine. “A high-intensity war is fought on a completely different scale,” he says. “I probably underestimated that.” During two decades of counter-insurgency in Afghanistan and the Sahel, the death of ten soldiers was a “national tragedy, and rightly so,” says the general. “That is what is happening in Ukraine every half hour—for weeks on end.”
China bringing South China Sea to the Gulf of Mexico
Al Jazeera, 6/20–China has been negotiating the creation of a new joint training facility on the Caribbean island nation of Cuba, creating concerns it could lead to the stationing of Chinese troops in the waters off the U.S…discussions between the two countries are in advanced stages, but had not concluded…officials from the administration of President Joe Biden have been trying to discourage their Cuban counterparts from finalising the deal. The latest report came days after the Biden administration confirmed that China has maintained surveillance operations in Cuba for years, which were upgraded in 2019.
Fair elections? Not so fast say New York Democrats
New York Times, 6/8–For generations, deep-pocketed donors have called the shots in New York State politics, leaving ordinary voters with less power and less of a voice in their government. Incumbent lawmakers are bankrolled by moneyed special interests and are routinely re-elected with little competition, and there has been no real alternative to the traditional system of big campaign contributions influencing candidates and politics. A law passed in 2019, one of the most promising New York campaign reforms in decades, was supposed to change that…But this week, in the final days of the legislative session, the Democratic lawmakers who dominate the capital are preparing to severely weaken those reforms. The changes proposed by lawmakers would protect incumbents and discourage challengers — the opposite of the program’s goal…“They don’t want to be primaried,’’ said John Kaehny, the executive director of Reinvent Albany…“They know the public match will mean they will get more primary opponents, and so they’re making it harder to run. It wrecks the core idea of the program, which is to make these races more competitive.”
Medical supplies in short supply
BBC, 6/7–Experts say the U.S. is currently suffering one of the most severe shortages of chemotherapy drugs it's seen for three decades. As of this week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said over 130 drugs were in short supply, 14 of which are cancer treatments…Experts say a myriad of factors have contributed to the shortages, which this time have heavily affected two front-line therapies - carboplatin and cisplatin - used to treat a host of cancers, including head and neck, gynaecologic and gastrointestinal cancers…As a result, some providers have been forced to extend the time period between patients' chemotherapy sessions, while some patients have had to drive several hours to get treatment at different cancer centres…While the medications are cheap to manufacture, pharmaceutical companies are not incentivised to do so because they don't bring in large profits, said Dr Karen Knudsen, CEO of the American Cancer Society. The drug shortage issue has also worsened as U.S. life expectancy has increased, meaning more people are becoming ill with cancer.
New York City, May 31—Almost 1,000 retired city workers from former blue-collar workers to clerical, teachers, professors, librarians, nurses, social workers, EMTs, firefighters and more packed the sidewalk outside of City Hall in the continuing struggle against forcing 250,000 retirees into a privatized for profit medicare coverage known as Medicare Advantage. Chants like “healthcare is a human right, fight fight fight” reflected the understanding that health insurance companies are not in business to provide healthcare; they are in business to make profits! Progressive Labor Party says that only in a communist society will healthcare be provided to all based on need rather than on ability to pay. Only then will hospitals, prescription drugs and medical care be free of the profit system.
The retiree health coverage struggle has been going on for over two years. The city bosses led by former KKKop Mayor Adams would like us to give up and accept a September change in our benefits. A gang of high paid labor misleaders called the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC), who act on behalf of the city bosses, cut this deal in secret meetings where retirees have no say. Many of the MLC leaders earn hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, many times more than the workers their unions are supposed to represent. These bought and paid for “leaders” will never give up their cushy union positions to fight for workers.
The Medicare Advantage plan shifts costs to retired workers. New copays for retirees may add up to $1,500 per person per year for healthcare costs. This affects lower income retirees (mainly Black and Latin and women) the most, making it a racist and sexist plan. It will force many retirees to choose between needed medical care and high cost medicine or the costs of housing, food etc.
Although the tactics of filing court cases, asking local city council politicians for support and threatening to vote out Mayor Adams builds faith in the system, getting our hands dirty doing the work of the mass movement allows PL’ers involved in the struggle to raise communist ideas with our friends in a number of union retiree groups and build ties with current workers who we call retirees in training.
The strike had two types of demands that addressed conditions for teachers and students. OUSD is one of the lowest paid districts in the Bay Area, had difficulty recruiting and retaining teachers, teachers and staff could not afford the cost of living in the areas where they worked, schools with the largest population of low-income Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled/special needs students had the most unmet needs, had unhoused families & deteriorated School Building/physical plan.
One teacher said, “the school’s buildings are old and in need of renovation, that there’s lead in the soil and a rat and mice infestation in the classrooms, and that they’re concerned about lead in the water.” Years of school closings in these neighborhoods, Charter school privatization and Real Estate Profit-motivated displacement had increased these disparities and overcrowding.
1) Education workers address economic gains for the workers: wages, hours, benefits, retroactive payment for frozen wages, $5,000 signing bonus, more support staff such as Nurses, librarians, Councilors; especially needed for the most marginalized students and underfunded schools. OUSD whined about a cost of $70 million (ABC 7 News, 5/15).
2) “Common Good” demands expressing class solidarity: four were covered in Memorandums of Agreements (MOUs) which addressed the most marginalized students: a) School property used for unhoused and housing insecure students, b) shared governance for community schools, c) support for Historically Black Schools, and d) processes for school closures (CNN, 5/15).
