Progressive Labor Party says: Don’t Vote: Fight for Communism!
On Wall St., major financial houses are crumbling under the weight of billions of dollars in bad debt. The credit-mortgage crisis continues to wreak havoc as the strong bankers eat the weak in this unholy ritual of capitalist competition. But don’t look for millionaires jumping out of windows on Wall St. Instead, billionaire financiers will be gliding into retirement on multi-million dollar golden parachutes. These captains do not go down with the ship.
Meanwhile, workers’ houses crumble in Galveston, Texas from Hurricane Ike, and Houston, the fourth largest city in the US, is still without electricity more than a week after the storm. There will be no bailouts our "soft landings" for them or the millions of victims of recent hurricanes in Haiti, Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean.
The bosses’ government and the central banks have put together a bailout plan worth hundreds of billions of dollars to see them through this crisis. That money is our pensions, social security and so much more. Every dime is stolen from our labor. Yet for us, all they have is racist police terror, immigration raids, racist cutbacks, and poverty wages. More than 20 million are unemployed and almost 50 million have no health insurance.
With the presidential election circus in full swing, the prisons are full, the schools are collapsing and the bloodbath in Iraq is spreading to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama and McCain both approve of widening the war. They both preach patriotism and national service, and they both support every step taken by the racist rulers to navigate this financial crisis.
Workers should turn their backs on them and follow the lead of 27,000 Boeing workers who are on strike against the war making aerospace giant. Boeing made over $13 billion in profit during the last contract, a record $4.7 billion last year. Much of this blood money comes directly from the Pentagon. Last month Boeing landed a $659 million contract for 16 additional fighter jets, adding to their contract to supply the Navy with 460 Super Hornets through 2012. At the same time, Boeing is slashing wages through two-tier contracts and farming out work to poverty wage non-union factories, many of them in southern California.
This is the third strike against a war contractor in the last 18 months. In March ’07, over 7,000 black and white ship builders struck Northrop Grumman and the Navy for one month in Pascagoula, MS. Last winter, thousands of UAW members struck Navistar which produces armored vehicles for Iraq. The bosses produce the weapons for war by waging war on the workers at home. The difference at Boeing is the presence of an active PLP and the influence of revolutionary communist ideas on many of the strikers. Our communist politics can help build the revolutionary movement from Seattle to Los Angeles to Mississippi and beyond. That is the answer to the endless crises and wars of the racist profit system.
The bronze bull of Merrill Lynch may be on its back, feet in the air, but capitalism is far from finished. The bosses can survive any economic, political or military crisis, even defeat in war. What they can’t survive is communist revolution, when millions of workers, soldiers, marines, sailors and youth seize power through armed struggle, led by a mass PLP. The chaos of capitalism will only mean more foreclosures, layoffs, racist cutbacks, hunger and imperialist war, here and around the world, no matter who wins the White House. There is another road; the road to revolution for a society without any bosses or bankers: communism. It’s long and difficult, and takes a lifetime of commitment. But it’s the only road that leads to a bright future for the workers of the world.
Issued by Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and its communist Newspaper CHALLENGE. To contact us write to GPO Box 808, Brooklyn, NY 11202; e-mail:
