A Challenge-Desafio series by Progressive Labor Party

(from the September 13, September 20, and November 1, 2000 issues of Challenge-Desafio, weekly newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist Progressive Labor Party)

Part 1: King Leopold’s Legacy: Imperialism and the Origin of AIDS

"I can choose to die of starvation now, or of AIDS later"—Prostitute in Harare, Zimbabwe

Reports to the 13th International AIDS Conference last month in South Africa described a holocaust of mind-numbing dimensions. Fifteen million have already died. Thirty-four million are HIV-infected, including 25 million in sub-Saharan Africa. HIV/AIDS will kill 67% of today’s teenagers in some African countries. Women are twice as likely as men to become infected. Thirty million African orphans are predicted by 2010, life expectancies dropping from 70 years to 30 in some countries. If neutron bombs were dropped on the dozen biggest cities of Africa, the damage could not be worse. International response to this crisis has been obscene. Bosses and politicians fight over drug prices and profits, while they spend much more on Viagra and baldness remedies ($333 million QUARTERLY earnings, according to Pfizer), than on all international HIV programs in sub-Saharan Africa ($600 million YEARLY of international aid for HIV/AIDS).

Though many see the AIDS pandemic either as a "natural" disaster or as a biological warfare conspiracy, it is actually rooted in the devastation imperialism has inflicted on African societies. This first of a series of articles on the political economy of AIDS will discuss where the HIV virus and the AIDS pandemic in Africa came from.

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Scientists have recently learned much about the origin of HIV. Like influenza and rabies, AIDS is a disease transmitted from animals to humans. The closest relatives of HIV are SIVs, viruses carried by apes and monkeys. HIV-1 most resembles a chimpanzee SIV, found in rain forests of coastal West Africa. HIV-2, a milder West African virus, is nearly identical to a monkey SIV. These viruses have lived in their natural hosts for millions of years and don’t make them sick. Among scientists, the currently favored idea of how the viruses jumped into humans is that people hunted chimps and monkeys for meat, and cut themselves while butchering.

HIV is relatively new to humans. The earliest verified HIV case was in 1959, in Kinshasa, Congo; African blood samples from earlier times are free of the virus. HIV exploded in Africa during the early 1970’s, just before it spread to the U.S. and Europe. Very early cases were found near the borders of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. From there it quickly spread to Zambia and Tanzania. Before the 1970’s, AIDS was as unknown in Africa as in the U.S.

HIV evolves rapidly. Its gene sequences accumulate mutations in a steady, clock-like manner. The more differences, the more time has passed since viruses had a common ancestor. By comparing the genes of currently circulating viruses, it is possible to make an informed guess as to when the common M type of HIV-1, the one responsible for the worldwide pandemic, began. The best guess is in the 1930’s.

HIVs not only jumped from animals to humans recently; they also did so OFTEN, at least four times. This is inferred from the fact that some HIV strains are genetically more similar to SIVs than to each other. So it seems that HIV is relatively easy to catch from animals, and that no special mutations are needed to make it virulent in humans. In fact, a lab worker recently developed AIDS from a monkey SIV after an accidental needle stick.

So, if the virus jumps easily to humans, why did the pandemic not start until the late 20th century? What changed that made repeated transfer to humans more likely and explosive growth a certainty?

Until the late 19th century, most Africans farmed and lived in rural villages. Then feverish land grabs among imperialists—seeking rubber, gold, ivory and diamonds—created the largest forced labor system since African-American slavery. For example, King Leopold II of Belgium seized the Congo and ruled it for years as his personal rubber plantation. Fifteen million Congolese died in this genocidal holocaust. Forced labor was the rule in colonial Africa. Copper mines in Katanga (Congo) rounded up miners from Zambia, Rwanda, Angola and Mozambique. Colonial armies drafted millions of Africans during both world wars. During the 1930’s, the French built a railroad through coastal West Africa, drafting hundreds of thousands of African laborers from distant locations and marching them through the rain forest under appalling conditions of near-starvation. According to one theory, it is here that Africans first were exposed to SIVs, as workers made desperate by starvation had to hunt apes as food.

Another theory places the origin of AIDS in the Belgian Congo and neighboring countries. In his thoughtful book, The River, Edward Hooper argues that HIV spread to humans through racist trials of polio vaccines. During the late 1950’s, Hilary Koprowski of Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute gave an experimental oral vaccine to over 300,000 Africans, using them as guinea pigs. Hooper suggests that Koprowski may have grown vaccine poliovirus in chimp cells contaminated with the SIV ancestor of HIV. Hooper’s ideas lack solid evidence, but they are being taken seriously enough to prompt testing of remnant vaccine stocks.

Whichever theory turns out to be true, it is clear that the crossover of the virus was a result of conditions created by colonialism. But what caused HIV’s later explosive growth?

Part 2: Imperialism Program for Africa: Billions in Profits, Pennies for AIDS

Starting in the 1960's, African societies changed from colonialism to rule by indigenous nationalist or fascist rulers allied with imperialism. For example, the Belgian Congo became Zaire. Patrice Lumumba was assassinated by the CIA. They installed Mobuto, a worthy successor to King Leopold in greed and bloodthirstiness. South Africa and Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) remained under fascist apartheid throughout this period. Armies of male migrant workers left the countryside for the newly-crowded cities, while their wives remained behind in remote rural areas. Prostitution became a major growth industry, some European companies even setting up whorehouses near their factories for their workers. A seemingly endless series of nationalist and inter-imperialist wars sent millions of soldiers and refugees all over central Africa.

Enslaved by the global market economy, conditions created by colonialism continued and worsened in "post-colonial" African societies. HIV spread like wildfire through populations ravaged by poverty, war, famine and disease. HIV spread to Europe and the U.S., and then to Haiti and Thailand, primarily through sex tourism, often child prostitution. Prostitution and dirty needles spread it to Latin America, India and Eastern Europe, centers of new epidemics. The IMF's (International Monetary Fund) stranglehold on poor countries caused massive unemployment, promoted prostitution, imposed cutbacks in health care and education and made life-saving drugs unaffordable.

Sexism kills, just as surely as--and combined with--racism. In Africa, traditional oppression of women has meshed with new, profit-driven forms of oppression. In southern Africa, married women often don't dare ask their husbands to wear condoms, and are pressured by relatives to stay unprotected for maximum fertility. Husbands are expected to have many sex partners while their wives are expected to be monogamous.

Some day the HIV pandemic will be known as one of imperialism's worst crimes. Rulers in both Africa and the U.S. claim that the situation is hopeless, and that millions are doomed. Yet the money it would take to provide effective prevention and therapy now ($100 billion yearly) is only a small fraction of what imperialists spent on wars against Iraq and Vietnam. It is an even smaller fraction of the profits they've made from African rubber, diamonds, gold, copper, oil and slave labor. In a few countries (like Uganda and Thailand) even simple prevention campaigns have had a big impact. So building a larger movement now, that refuses to accept rules protecting the bosses' profits, can save many more lives. Mass production and distribution of pirated anti-AIDS drugs, in collaboration with medical workers in Africa, can prevent transmission and provide treatment for millions.

A larger movement must also lead a sharp and prolonged struggle against sexism in order to transform relationships between men, women and children, ending prostitution and sex slavery. It must fight to end the super-exploitation of migrant labor. These goals can only be achieved through the revolutionary destruction of capitalism. The experience of once socialist China in eradicating prostitution, syphilis and drug addiction (which have all returned in now capitalist China) shows that revolutionary communism can, even in poor societies, solve massive public health problems.

Sources: Hahn, B.H. et al. (2000); Korber et al. (2000); Science 287: 607 Chitnis et al. (2000), AIDS Res. Hum. Retroviruses 16: 5-8; Gao et al. (1999) Nature 397: 436-441; Hooper, E.M. (1999) The River; Schoofs (2000) "The Agony of Africa" (at http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/africa) ScientificAmerican, January 2000; New York Times, 6/28/00 and 7/9/00. Recommended background: A. Hochschild King Leopold's Ghost; W. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; B. Davidson, "The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State"

Part 3: Apartheid Continues: AIDS and South African Capitalism

"That mother is going to die and that HIV-negative child will be an orphan. That child must be brought up. Who is going to bring the child up? It’s the state, the state. That’s resources, you see."—Parks Mankahlana, spokesperson for South African president Thabo Mbeki, explains why his government won’t provide nevirapine to prevent mother to child transmission of AIDS. The government would rather have the child die of AIDS than use state resources.

During the recent AIDS conference in Durban, South Africa (SA), Pres. Thabo Mbeki questioned whether HIV causes AIDS, and invited a group of crackpot "AIDS dissidents" from the U.S. to serve on an AIDS panel. The South African AIDS calamity is part of a general catastrophic failure to improve workers’ lives since the end of apartheid. International corporations and banks, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, together with South Africa’s reconfigured post-apartheid black and white ruling class, have preserved the worst features of apartheid.

In 1991, a CIA document predicted 45 million HIV infections by 2000, the majority in Africa. (Present over 50 million people are believed to have been infected; 19 million have died.) Faced with these figures, the U.S. rulers cold-bloodedly debated whether it was "worth" it, from a military standpoint, to combat AIDS. One security official commented, "Oh, it [AIDS] will be good, because Africa is overpopulated anyway." This became the unofficial line of USAID, the State Department’s international "aid" agency, and of the World Bank. When it became obvious the U.S. didn’t face a runaway heterosexual epidemic, further action was shelved. The World Health Organization, the Center for Disease Control and the UN all actively resisted paying for AIDS prevention.¹ People who believe HIV is a CIA plot are wrong about the facts, but they’re right that capitalists consider millions of African workers expendable.

Why has Mbeki lent an ear to HIV deniers? The initial quote above suggests he’s trying to save money by preventing the birth of HIV-negative orphans. Last year Mbeki’s government refused to spend nearly half of the money in its AIDS budget and blocked the purchase of relatively cheap drugs that prevent maternal transmission of AIDS. Or Mbeki, by appearing stubborn, may be jockeying for a better deal in international aid and drug prices. Either or both of these cynical motives would be consistent with Mbeki’s role in the "new" South Africa.

Liberals praise SA’s "peaceful transition" from apartheid, as though power had actually changed hands in 1994. Power never changed hands. The heroic struggle against apartheid was co-opted to smooth the re-entry of SA’s biggest bosses into global capitalism. By 1990, the more powerful, "forward-looking" wing of the SA capitalists were frustrated by a recession brought on by international sanctions. Led by Harry Oppenheimer (owner of de Beers diamonds and SA’s gold mines), they made a deal with leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) to dismantle the surface aspects of apartheid, while leaving its base in super-exploitation intact.² By assuring stability, Mandela and Mbeki made SA safer for capitalism.

Mandela, of course, was a hero to millions, and had spent 30 years in prison for defying a fascist court. Like Mandela, Mbeki was a leader of the ANC, then influenced by the SA Communist Party. In 1970 Mbeki visited the Soviet Union for military training. By the 1990s, Mbeki had morphed into a business technocrat. According to a pro-ANC commentator, "Mbeki had been the darling of South Africa’s business community for years, a champion of the type of neo-liberal economics that pleases cheerleaders for globalization. A close friend of the Clinton Administration, Mbeki was considered a man ‘we’ could work with."³

When Oppenheimer died this year, Mandela and Mbeki eulogized him in glowing terms. But Oppenheimer was apartheid’s biggest profiteer, notorious for racist wage differentials and appalling working conditions. Oppenheimer’s gold mines set the pattern for migrant industrial labor that first spread the AIDS pandemic. Men were recruited from all over SA to work in the mines and housed in single-sex hostels. Their wives had to stay behind in the so-called homelands. The bosses encouraged prostitution, and men who became infected with HIV took it home to their wives in remote rural areas.

Life for SA workers has become ever more desperate. Apartheid still rules in the townships, where red-lining (racist housing practices) and loan-sharking have deepened the housing crisis. As formal apartheid ended, South Africa was already in debt slavery to the IMF and World Bank. "Structural adjustment" programs forced dismantling of the public health system and provoked mass unemployment (and prostitution). As a good businessman, Mbeki cheerfully enforced the "belt-tightening."⁴

These actions fueled the skyrocketing AIDS epidemic. Despite warnings from SA physicians and scientists, Mandela ignored the growing HIV danger, scuttling even safe-sex messages when he was advised that it would be political suicide to mention AIDS. From 1990 to 1999, HIV infection increased from 0.8% to 22%, until today SA has over 10% of the world’s infections.⁵

Most drugs used to treat HIV are vastly over-priced and out of reach in the developing world. As an HIV-positive SA judge said recently, "On a continent in which 290 million Africans survive on less than one U.S. dollar a day, I can afford monthly medication costs of approximately $400 per month.…I am here because I can pay for life itself. To me this seems a shocking and monstrous iniquity."⁶

Gore Pimps For Pfizer

Pfizer’s fluconazole is used to treat cryptococcal meningitis, a brain infection in people whose immune system has been weakened by HIV. In 1997, South Africa tried to buy an equivalent drug from Thailand at 1/20^th the cost, challenging World Trade Organization patent rules. Al Gore acted as Pfizer’s pimp, threatening trade sanctions if SA didn’t respect patents. Recently, Clinton-Gore, drug companies and Mbeki have been performing a complicated dance. The U.S. has backed down somewhat, as Gore pretends to campaign against "big drug companies" in the election follies. Drug mult-inationals have started to offer South Africa special deals and give-aways, none of which has yet materialized.⁷

The decades-long struggle against South African apartheid, which was led by millions of SA workers and students, inspired the world. Many of the most committed leaders were black and white communists, but their goal was "black majority rule." They believed that fighting for socialism and then communism would have to come at a "later stage." This reformist and nationalist "stage theory" undermined the possibility of workers’ revolution and is now contributing to tens of millions of deaths. AIDS and poverty holocausts in South Africa and the rest of the world can only end with communist revolution.

1. Gellman, WASHINGTON POST, 7/5/2000, p. AO1

2. Patrick Bond (July 2000), "A Political Economy of South African AIDS" (http://www.zmag.org/AIDspage.htm)

3. Danny Schechter, "Mbeki’s Muddle.

4. Patrick Bond (2000) Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa

5. Jon Cohen (2000) SCIENCE, 288: 2168-2170

6. Speech by Edwin Cameron, Durban conference, 7/10/2000

7. Chirac, et al. 8/5/2000 — AIDS: patent rights versus patients’ rights, The Lancet, volume 356, number 9228

Capitalism After September 11

Table of Contents:

Oil War and Racist Police State

Oppression of Women From Kabul to Washington

American Public Health Association Resolution Opposing War in Afghanistan

Major General Smedley Butler, U.S.M.C.: 'I was a racketeer for capitalism'

Imperialism Makes War Inevitable

Racist Ideology Justifies War

The terrorist attacks that murdered thousands of workers and others in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania have given the U.S. ruling class an excuse to launch its latest war for world domination and to begin governing with an iron fist on the domestic front. At the heart of the agenda is the control at gunpoint of oil supplies in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Oil isn’t crucial to U.S. bosses simply because the U.S. now imports over half of the fossil fuels its own economy uses. Oil is the lifeblood of every capitalist economy and governs its ability to field an army. Capitalism needs maximum profit. This means that U.S. imperialism’s ability to retain "super power" status depends on dictating the supply, transportation and pricing of oil, over-riding the rules of all other countries.

Every war in which the U.S. has been involved since 1991 reflects this contradiction. Bush Sr. slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi workers in 1991 to prevent Saddam Hussein & Co. from challenging the regional supremacy of U.S. oil companies. U.S. sanctions since then have caused the death of a million or more Iraqis, mostly children, for the same purpose.

From 1979 to 1989, the Carter, Reagan and Bush, Sr. administrations ran a proxy war against the former Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan — a war which, as Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted, the U.S. provoked by organizing Islamic fundamentalists to invade six months prior to Soviet intervention. This CIA-funded army later gave rise to the same Taliban that Bush Jr. is now trying to smash. Osama bin Laden, the U.S. demon of the moment, functioned as a CIA contract employee for the duration of this war.

In 1999, Clinton bombed the former Yugoslavia for three months to prevent Russian and German oil companies from building pipelines free from U.S. and British control. The immediate issue was the pumping and marketing of Caspian region oil. The longer-range issue remains the control of all oil and gas supplies, from the Caspian and the Middle East throughout Central Asia. U.S. imperialism’s stated goal is "full-spectrum dominance," total energy supremacy.

Bush Jr.’s war in Afghanistan is a further bloody step in this direction. It was planned well before the events of September 11. One can see that the logistics alone — of moving 80,000 military personnel, as well as ordinance, supplies, airplanes, aircraft carriers, cruise missile ships and battleships — would require months of preparation. In fact, two U.S. aircraft carriers were stationed off the coast of Pakistan on September 11.

The bosses themselves spilled the beans a few days before that date when the U.S. Energy Information Agency published a report that began: "Afghanistan’s significance from an energy standpoint stems from its geographical position as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea. This potential includes the possible construction of oil and natural gas pipelines through Afghanistan…"

The heinous terrorist acts of September 11 gave the rulers an excuse to launch a war they had already plotted anyhow. As Bush and his advisors have repeatedly warned, this war has no end in sight. Far more than Afghanistan is at stake. U.S. imperialists, led by Rockefeller’s Exxon Mobil, need to grab the profit bonanza that can come from fueling the East Asian energy boom anticipated over the next decade or so. The grander strategic design is nothing less than U.S. control of the entire Eurasian land mass and the sea-lanes that serve it.

The bosses have camouflaged their imperialist was plans as a crusade against "global terrorism." They are using the September 11 attacks as an excuse to move rapidly toward the consolidation of a police state on the home front, which they are disguising as a "Homeland Defense" operation.

As the articles in this pamphlet show, this move was also planned long before September 11, by a Clinton-appointed commission of top Democrats and Republicans — the Hart-Rudman Commission —which admitted that only a catastrophic loss of life on U.S. soil could serve to "galvanize" the population for the needed war effort.

Whoever may have funded, trained and aided the September 11 attackers, the attacks themselves play directly into the big bosses’ hands. The same is true in the case of the ongoing anthrax atrocity, which appears to be homegrown, very possibly the handiwork of neo-nazi groups within the U.S.

The anthrax attacks give the bosses a further excuse to pass laws extending the control of their state apparatus over every aspect of life. In the name of "protecting" us, they are preparing to jail people who rebel against their policies, to open our mail, tap our phones, spy on our Internet use, restrict our travel, make torture an acceptable method of "interrogation" and ruthlessly suppress class struggle against them. As usual, racism, in the form of scapegoating Arab and Muslim workers, provides this attack with its cutting edge.

The "war against terror" is in fact a plan — which parallels the plan for imperialist war — to launch a reign of terror against the U.S. working class and eventually against those would organize our class to rise up and overthrow this rotten system. Our Party will therefore — sooner rather than later — become one of the rulers’ primary targets.

They have temporarily won a large number of workers to back them. We must not underestimate the advantages they enjoy. But the imperialists’ strength is only one side of reality. It also contains the seed of its opposite.

U.S. rulers are the biggest wholesale murderers in history. Their terrorism against the world’s workers has earned them the mass hatred of hundreds of millions in every corner of the globe. At the moment, this hatred is most clearly expressed in the self-defeating form of nationalism and religion. But workers can ultimately be won away from these deadly errors.

The rulers are also finding that it’s easier to bomb and kill from the relative comfort of the air than to conquer and hold hostile ground. Their war in Afghanistan isn’t going brilliantly, and their immediate plans to invade most of formerly Soviet Central Asia and maintain bases there is sure to encounter many similar difficulties.

Their Middle Eastern oil empire stands on very shaky ground. They have already lost Iran. The biggest prize — Saudi Arabia — is a potential powder keg, as the corrupt, bloody, U.S.-backed House of Saud faces a serious internal threat from rival bosses sick of seeing Exxon Mobil et al. gobble up the lion’s share of Saudi energy profits.

A U.S. invasion of Saudi oil fields looms as a distinct possibility, with no guarantees of victory. Despite U.S. imperialism’s great "success" in murdering Iraqi workers and children, Saddam Hussein continues to hold power and to maneuver oil deals with Exxon Mobil’s Russian and French competitors.

The so-called "coalition" Bush brags about is a fraud. U.S. imperialism’s only semi-reliable ally is Great Britain, and even the British bosses aren’t fully trustworthy, because British oil firms have interests that conflict at times with those of the U.S. majors. The only real coalition in the present war is the growing tactical unity of imperialists who want to stop the U.S. from extending the present war into Iraq.

The bosses continue to bicker within their own ranks. The fighting is fueled by partisan interests that aren’t easily resolved. As the economy moves deeper into recession, the rulers are arguing bitterly about how to deal with the downturn. They don’t agree whether on whether or not to use the anthrax attacks as an excuse to attack Iraq, and that argument also reflects partisan interests.

The ruling class hasn’t yet managed to unite fully on its plans for a police state. It will eventually do so, probably after a sharp, potentially violent internal struggle.

But the need for a police state reflects a deep political weakness: ultimately, capitalist rule must depend on terror.

In other words, U.S. imperialism has many weapons at its disposal and can, for the foreseeable future, continue inflicting horrible damage on the international working class.

But it also can be defeated. Our job as a revolutionary communist Party is to ensure this defeat by winning workers and others into the PLP and becoming a force to be reckoned with. This goal is both necessary and possible.

It will take a long time. We must never allow ourselves or our class to become discouraged by the size of the task before us, by the obstacles we face, by our present relative weakness, or by the ruthlessness of our class enemy.

We can take heart from the history of great revolutionaries who preceded us. We can learn from the valiant Soviet Red Army, which crushed Hitler’s racist Nazi beasts. We can absorb many vital lessons from the exemplary heroism of Chinese communists in World War II, who turned a strategic retreat into an unstoppable wave that crushed both Japanese imperialism and U.S.-supported Chinese fascists. We can derive inspiration from the impoverished Vietnamese workers and farmers who ground the mighty U.S. into the dust not so long ago.

All these magnificent revolutionary efforts met defeat, not because the enemy outside was too powerful, but rather because of the old communist movement’s own internal political weaknesses. Instead of winning workers to fight for communism, the leaders of this movement sold the workers short and led them back into the trap of capitalist values and politics.

We do not have to repeat this fatal blunder. The PLP and the working class can take heart from the inspiring examples set by our forerunners and at the same time win workers to see that communism is the only purpose worth fighting, dying and living for.

As this oil war develops, many other contradictions will sharpen. Eventually U.S. imperialism will have to confront its biggest rivals for world supremacy. We can’t predict the timetable, but war between the U.S. on one side and China, Russia and virtually every other imperialist on the other, will eventually erupt.

What will result from it? Only two solutions are possible: either a new world imperialist order with more war, terror and death for us, or else a world organized on the basis of fighting to destroy the profit system. The road ahead forces us to make this choice. Our Party must learn to help workers see that our class really has no choice other than the struggle for communism, however long it takes.

Oppression of Women from Kabul to Washington

Laura Bush’s Nov. 17 speech "championing" the rights of Afghan women shows how hypocritical bosses are. When it comes to oppress women, U.S. bosses are number one at home and overseas. Mass cutbacks in health care, welfare, education, etc. in the last two decades under Reagan-Bush Sr., Clinton and now Bush Jr. have driven deeper into poverty millions of women (particularly black and Latin) in the U.S. The continuous bombing and embargo against Iraq have caused the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, particularly the children of working class women. And when it comes to Afghanistan, the U.S. new allies, the Northern Alliance, is no different from the Taliban in treating women as sub humans.

"Women might also remember back 20 years when the U.S. was supplying arms" (New York Times, 11/19) to the same thugs that became the Northern Alliance.

Then, when the NA turned against each other and killed tens of thousands in their turf wars, the U.S. allies in the Pakistani and Saudi rulers decided to form what is now the Taliban to defeat the warring warlords. For many years, the U.S. did not see anything wrong with Taliban who they now paint as "worse than Hitler."

According to a just-published book, Bin Laden, the Forbidden Truth by two French intelligence analysts, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, this is the same Taliban that the White House began bargaining with in January, offering political recognition and economic aid in exchange for the delivery of bin Laden.

The last meeting took place in August, five weeks before the September 11 attacks. The book’s authors say that up until that time, the U.S. government saw the Taliban "as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of an oil pipeline across Central Asia" from the rich oil fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.

U.S. rulers weren’t so worried about the enslavement of Afghan women at that time!

Interestingly enough, the Taliban had even hired a PR representative in Washington to help these negotiations along, one Laila Helms, whose uncle is none other than Richard Helms, former director of the CIA.

• The Northern Alliance, Bush’s "liberators," is the same crew that, as the mujahedeen, took Kabul in 1992 — supported by the U.S. even then — and proceeded to "legislate the first limits on women’s rights" (Counterpunch, 11/16) while killing 50,000 people in four year of maneuvering for power.

These "freedom fighters" have now taken control of 80% of Afghanistan’s heroin trade. "Many of those mujahedeen," reports the Times, "now make up large parts of the Northern Alliance, America’s current ally," being fundamentalists who "despised" the actions of, "The Soviets [who] built schools and educated women."

• The NA warlords are so hated that the Revolutionary Association of Afghan Women wrote in Counterpunch (11/19): "Thousands of people who fled Kabul during the past two months were saying that they feared the coming to power of the NA in Kabul much more than being scared by the U.S. bombing."

Novelist John Ringo wrote in the NY Post (11/20): "There are plenty of Pashtun women who would love to get their hands on a…{NA} soldier for a while. They have been sharpening their knives for 10 years…It is better (for these women) to wear a burqua than to be raped and murdered."

The Taliban, the Northern Alliance, U.S. bosses — pick your poison.

Opposing War Is Good for Public Health

The resolution below was passed by the governing council of the American Public Health Association at its recent national convention, attended by about 12,000. Prior to the convention there had been limited discussion by email. At the convention, there was mass leafleting about the war and oil and many copies of the resolution were distributed. The leadership had Bush’s Secy. of Health and Welfare Tommy Thompson and Surgeon General David Satcher as main speakers. The resolution passed with almost no opposition and is now official organization policy. Although the APHA may not publicize it, others can and will.

‘I was a racketeer for capitalism….’

(Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, United States Marine Corps)

"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

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Imperialism Makes War Inevitable

The profit system impels groups of capitalists to defend or capture resources, markets and the exploitation of workers from each other, ultimately by going to war. To compete successfully, each capitalist must fight for maximum profit and control against rival capitalists.

To keep its super-power status, the U.S. ruling class is fighting to control the world’s most important resource, oil — its supply and shipment, via pipelines and oceans. The U.S. ruling class’ major imperialist rivals, China, Russia, the European Union and Japan, are dependent on this oil or need to control it. Since it represents the lifeblood of these capitalist rivals’ industries and armies, they will spill the blood of millions of workers to obtain and control it. That’s the logic of the murderous system of exploitation for profit.

The war in Afghanistan is part of the build up to another world war. Globalization is just a euphemism for modern imperialism. Each ruling class is fighting for its own interests, and trying to win workers to identify with those interests (which the bosses call "patriotism" and the "national interest").

These brutal wars for profits cannot be ended by replacing one politician with another or by hoping for "more enlightened" policies from governments controlled by the ruling class that owns all the factories, mines, mills, mass media and resources of the society. Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, will always lead to war.

The role of communists is to organize workers and soldiers to turn these imperialist wars into revolutionary struggles to crush capitalism. The world’s workers need communism, where we’ll organize production and technology to meet the needs of the international working class.

Racist Ideology Justifies War

The following is part of a leaflet put out by Progressive Labor Party students who participated in a West Coast conference early in Nov. to build an anti-war movement.

"Underneath all the attacks capitalism uses against the workers is RACISM. Without racism how could the bosses convince workers that the deaths and super-exploitation of workers overseas is acceptable?

The ruling class needs racism to portray all Arabs as terrorists so soldiers will kill and die in the Middle East. Racism was essential to the attacks on welfare and social security. Black and Latin workers will be the first workers laid off in the declining U.S. economy in the U.S. The universities are some of the main places in which racism is taught, promoted, and practiced.

Most of the racist ideology that the ruling class puts into practice can be found in our own classrooms. Many community colleges, where most students are black, Latin, or immigrants and come from a working class background, are not suited to accommodate their student bodies. They lack the proper funding to build and maintain adequate facilities.

And they are increasingly becoming overcrowded because racist attacks on Affirmative Action have made universities more inaccessible to black and Latin students. In response, army recruiters have taken the opportunity to target community college students.

At the universities much of the same is occurring. Many state colleges are active recruiting ground for the armed forces and the KKKops. In education classes we are told that, for whatever reason, the working class and especially blacks and Latins can’t learn.

On top of this, history, philosophy, and social science classes teach that imperialism and capitalism are the best of all systems. Cultural classes leave out most of the contributions of blacks, Latins and women, even though, sometimes they will throw in a Black studies or women’s studies course on the side for those who already reject the most disgusting aspects of racism and sexism.

This, however, is not even the worst. Most schools teach classes that specialize in Nazi propaganda. Classes in "Sociobiology" or "Evolutionary Psychology" are popping up again on campuses around the country. These courses teach that everything from intelligence to violence to sexism to patriotism is all part of the genetic code. These nazi courses excuse racism and imperialist war as a necessary part of humanity while they libel all those incarcerated in the racist jail system as genetically inferior or deviant.

These same courses tell us that people in the US are "civilized" and people in the Middle East are "barbarians". These are the ideas that the universities teach us and these are the ideas that the ruling class uses to justify their horrific attacks on the international working class.

Progressive Labor Party encourages students everywhere to fight racism and imperialism. Students on every campus should organize actions against army recruiters, ROTC, and racist ideology being taught in schools.

By focusing on racism while still attacking imperialist oil war and lay-offs we can expose how our schools are complicit with the ruling class’ imperialist actions. More importantly, however, we can draw the connection between racism on our campuses and imperialist war and show they are both part of the capitalists’ attack on workers of the world.

We must use our struggles against racism and imperialism to point out the fundamentally murderous nature of capitalism. The only way to end war and racism for profit is to get rid of the racist profit system!

The solution we have before us is to build a mass communist Progressive Labor Party to tear down capitalist relations and to build the egalitarian communist society where workers will produce to meet the needs of the international working class, not for capitalist warmongers’ profits."

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(All References on request)

Item: On July 24, the day after California Gov. Pete Wilson got the U. of Cal. Board of Regents to outlaw affirmative action, the leader of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations, Richard Butler, praised Wilson for "beginning to wake up" to Aryan views. (New York Times, 7/23/95).

Item: Richard Herrnstein, co-author of The Bell Curve, with his last racist dying breath proclaimed, "Whatever else this book does, it will destroy affirmative action in the universities." (Peter Brimelow, in The Bell Curve Debate, p. 373).

Item: One hundred twenty-five years ago racists attacked the Reconstruction era Freedman's Bureau as "an agency to keep the Negro in idleness at the expense of the white man." (Eric Foner, Reconstruction)

Item: The anti-affirmative action crusade in California is being spearheaded by National Association of Scholars (NAS). Over the past few years the NAS has received millions of dollars from the five leading right wing foundations: Lynde and Harry Bradley (which also paid "Bradley scholar" Charles Murray to write The Bell Curve), Adolph Coors, John Olin, Smith Richardson, and Sarah Scaife.

Affirmative action consists of procedures to identify, recruit, or promote qualified members of disadvantaged minority groups and women in order to overcome the results of past discrimination and to deter employers from engaging in discriminatory practices in the present.

Conservative opponents of affirmative action often deny its achievements, while liberal defenders often deny its limitations. As we review the origins and history of affirmative action, we will show that affirmative action was obtained through militant multiracial struggle and produced real gains and benefits for working class and middle class women and men of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. We will also show that affirmative actionwas a reform devised and implemented by the government and corporations within the framework of a declining U.S. capitalist system. We think that the history of affirmative action reform demonstrates the inadequacy of reformism and the need for a revolutionary communist strategy to destroy racism.

Affirmative action was not designed to alleviate the terrible conditions faced by most black, Latino, and women workers. For example, the Urban Institute recently estimated that 53% of black men aged 25 to 34 are either unemployed or earn too little to lift a family of four from poverty. (Roger Wilkins, "Racism Has Its Privileges," The Nation, 3/27/95). Affirmative action is a limited reform designed and carried out by the capitalist class in a declining capitalist society. Affirmative action has not reduced poverty, reduced unemployment, raised wages or even kept them from falling. Affirmative action has not prevented capitalists from eliminating jobs, converting full-time jobs into part-time or temporary jobs, or relocating production in low-wage areas. Affirmative action has not prevented politicians and capitalists from cutting school budgets, closing schools, raising tuition, cutting grants while increasing interest rates on loans, and firing teachers. Affirmative action and other anti-racist reforms under capitalism demonstrate that reform can barely make a dent in the problem of racism. Only communist revolution makes it possible to eliminate poverty, provide work and education for everyone, and establish an egalitarian society.

We believe that the cry of "reverse discrimination" put forward by racist conservatives is essentially a myth, created by politicians and their capitalist backers, for the purpose of scapegoating racial minorities. It is capitalists, not blacks, Latinos, immigrants, women, or "angry white men" who are responsible for the worsening problems working class and middle class people confront. (The "working class" is the class of people who do not own businesses and who must work for the capitalist class in order to live. The working class includes both blue collar and most white collar workers, as well as part- time, temporary, unemployed, retired, and disabled workers, welfare recipients, and their families. Those who are labeled as "lower class" or "underclass" are not below or under but are part of the working class. The "middle class" is not the working class but the class of people in the middle between the working class and the capitalist class. The middle class consists of small business and franchise owners, managers, supervisors, administrators, planners, and independent and semi-independent professionals, such as doctors, lawyers, research scientists, professors, and engineers.)

The capitalist ruling class, the wealthiest one percent of the U.S. population, is the class that controls the economy, both political parties, the mass media, and the universities. Racism is crucially necessary to the ability of the capitalist class to exploit the working class economically and control the working class politically. Ever since the days of slavery, capitalists have depended upon racism to extract maximum profits from the labor of African, Native American, Latino, Asian, and European workers. Ever since the days of slavery capitalists havefostered and exploited racist divisions as a necessary divide- and-rule strategy for political domination over the working class.

During the 1960's U.S. capitalists dominated the global capitalist system. U.S. rulers could afford to make small anti- racist concessions to head off the growth of a more revolutionary anti-racist movement. Since the 1970's, however, U.S. capitalism has greatly declined both internally and in its international position. The entire world capitalist system is in a long term crisis of "overproduction," which means that capitalists are struggling to sell what workers produce. Competition for markets between U.S., European, and Asian capitalists is rapidly intensifying, dissolving the anti-communist alliances of the Cold War period.

U.S. capitalists are forced by the crisis of overproduction and sharpening competition to drive down their costs every way then can. They must cut back the welfare state reforms that they set up during the thirties and the sixties to undercut the growth of revolutionary communist movements. Corporations have destroyed or weakened labor unions, down-sized their work forces, moved operations to low wage countries, and replaced full time with part time and temporary workers. Capitalists are drastically cutting back welfare programs, unemployment insurance, health care, housing assistance, education, environmental protection, social security, and medicare.

These cutbacks hurt all workers, but most cutbacks have a racist impact and fall most heavily on black and Latino workers. The capitalists cannot impose these cutbacks without greatly increasing their promotion of racist ideas. Racist ideas justify the cutbacks with stereotypes of undeserving beneficiaries; racist ideas fool some whites into thinking that cutbacks will only hurt somebody else. Racist scapegoating encourages whites to blame blacks, Latinos, and immigrants for worsening conditions that capitalists are inflicting on the entire working class. Racist ideology justifies police brutality and increased incarceration of minorities, and it justifies the expansion of the police state to suppress future revolt against intensifying racist oppression. The capitalists' attack on affirmative action is a key element in this broader racist offensive. Diverting anger over joblessness and a capitalist system in decline away from the bosses and onto other workers is a crucial aspect of capitalist control over the working class.

During the 1930's a similar global capitalist crisis and intensification of racism led to the rise of fascism in many countries and to World War II. Fascism is capitalist rule by the most violently racist, nationalistic, sexist, and anti-communist methods. Capitalist rulers abandon their facade of democracy when they need a much more repressive fascist system in order to drive down the living conditions of the working class and mobilize society for aggressive war. The Progressive Labor Party believes that the United States is in the early stages of fascism and preparation for a third imperialist world war. We can destroy fascism and imperialist war only by building a multiracial international working class party--the Progressive Labor Party--to replace capitalism with an egalitarian communist society.

We put forward in this pamphlet a revolutionary communist strategy for building a mass multiracial movement against racism, fascism, and war. This movement must be multiracial because racist and nationalist divisions are the main weapons the ruling class uses to keep us weak and make themselves strong. Multiracial and international unity is the main weapon the working class must forge to defeat the ruling class. We believe that the struggle against racism must be guided by a revolutionary rather than a reform strategy. We believe that it is impossible to stop racist attacks on affirmative action by merely calling for a "level playing field." It is an illusion to believe that this capitalist system will ever create a level playing field. Capitalists own the "playing field;" capitalists make the "rules," the laws; and capitalists own and control the "referees," the government. When workers compete with each other on any playing field, capitalists always win and the working class always loses. The working class must level the entire capitalist system, not just the playing field. The only affirmative action that can eliminate inequalities of social class, race, and gender is a communist revolution.

During the first phase of the anti-racist movement of the 1950's and 1960's, the primarily Southern Civil Rights Movement, black workers and students and their white allies organized massive waves of demonstrations, boycotts, sit-ins, and voter registration drives. They faced beatings, arrests, and murders at the hands of police, sheriffs, and the KKK. The Federal Government's inaction exposed the U.S. throughout the world as a racist society and radicalized civil rights activists. SNCC leader John Lewis tried to give a speech at the 1963 March on Washington condemning the Kennedy administration for its failure to protect civil rights workers in the South, but the march leadership censored the speech (Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists). Just as workers' sit-down strikes during the 1930's forced the ruling class to recognize labor unions, the Civil Rights Movement forced the ruling class to dismantle its jim crow system of legal segregation and to pass civil rights, voting rights, and other legislation.

The second phase was a period of nationwide black rebellion and revolutionary organization from the mid-1960's through the early 1970's. The Civil Rights Movement had achieved important victories, but the majority of blacks still faced racist conditions of poverty, unemployment, policy brutality, and segregated schools and housing. Urban blacks rose up in over 600 rebellions in every major U.S. city between 1964 and 1970. Black parents and students organized militant protests in schools and colleges to demand equal educational opportunities. Black workers and students also participated in massive protests against the U.S. Government's imperialist war in Southeast Asia.

The Johnson and Nixon administrations responded to thesemilitant protests with both greater repression and further reforms. Amidst racist calls for "law and order," Johnson and Nixon increased the level of repression by sending National Guard and Army divisions into black communities, developing FBI counter-intelligence programs to attempt to infiltrate and destroy militant organizations, and allocating billions of dollars to triple the size of urban police departments, provide riot training, and equip them with everything from tear gas to SWAT teams.

While the ruling class was beefing up this apparatus of repression, it also instituted further reforms. Affirmative action was one of these reforms. It was based on Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in hiring for jobs. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was formed to administer the Act, and in 1968 the EEOC instructed businesses with Federal Government contracts to take "affirmative action" to increase employment of black workers. Affirmative action was soon expanded to cover admissions to educational institutions, and separate programs were established to set aside a small percentage of Government contracts for minority businesses. In the early 1970's affirmative action coverage was expanded to include Latinos, Native Americans, women, and handicapped persons.

As a result of affirmative action, minority and women workers gained access to jobs from which they had been almost totally excluded. Substantial job gains occurred in the building trades and in city, county, state, and federal government agencies. The percentage of black fire fighters nationwide, for example, increased from 2.5% in 1960 to 11.5% in 1990. The Los Angeles fire department was 94% white and 100% male in 1973; in 1995 the LAFD is 26% Latino, 13% black, 6% Asian, and 4% women. Affirmative action also increased employment of black workers in the steel and textile industries. In the steel industry programs were established that increased access of black workers to skilled jobs. In the southern textile industry affirmative action opened up jobs to black women for the first time. Although concentrated in lower paying factory jobs, black women earned three times as much as they had previously earned as domestic workers. (Gertrude Ezorsky, Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action, 1991. p. 48).

Studies demonstrate that employment of minority and women workers has increased more at companies that have affirmative action policies than at companies that do not. Moreover, incomes of black and women workers at affirmative action companies average five to six thousand dollars higher than at non- affirmative action companies. Minority and women workers are more likely to hold professional and technical jobs at affirmative action companies. (Cedric Herring, "African Americans, the Public Agenda, and the Paradoxes of Public Policy: A Focus on the Controversies Surrounding Affirmative Action," Presidential Address at Annual Meeting of Association of Black Sociologists, Washington, DC, August, 1995.) Minority enrollment in colleges, graduate, and professional schools also increased substantially during the late sixties and the early seventies. The percentage of black adults with college degrees increasedfrom 5% in 1960 to 12% in 1990. Similarly, the proportion of black households with an annual income of $50,000 or higher rose from 5.2% in 1967 to 12.1% in 1991. (Andrew Hacker, Two Nations).

Interestingly and significantly, it has been shown that white males have also benefitted from affirmative action. The very same studies that show that blacks and women have benefitted from affirmative action also show that the incomes of white males employed at affirmative action companies are higher than the incomes of white males at non-affirmative action companies. Moreover, studies have shown that "when affirmative action brings whites into greater contact with people of color it enables whites to see that people of color are intelligent and hard working. Indeed, it is white men who work where there are no provisions for affirmative action" who are most racist in their attitudes. In sum, affirmative action has produced "higher incomes, better jobs, and more co-worker acceptance." (Herring, 1995.)

White working class youth have also benefitted because affirmative action expanded educational opportunities during the late 1960's and early 1970's. Black college enrollment increased by 95% between 1967 and 1972, rising from 370,000 to 727,000, but during that same period, white enrollment increased from 5.9 million to 7.5 million students. In New York's City University system, the majority of the students entering under new "open admissions" policies were working class whites.

This consistent pattern demonstrates that many black workers benefitted from affirmative action, and that white workers benefitted at the same time. These results show that anti-racism has often immediately and concretely benefitted both black and white workers. When capitalists cannot use racist divisions to lower wages, all workers benefit. When blacks and whites work together, white workers and professionals are more likely to discard racist stereotypes and unite in class solidarity with black workers in struggle that benefits all workers. Affirmative action thus helps to provide a basis for the multi-racial unity that is essential for fighting against any aspect of capitalist exploitation. When that multi-racial unity is combined with revolutionary communist leadership, the working class can take power away from the bosses and establish a communist society.

From the very beginning affirmative action was a reform that was designed and implemented by capitalists and their political servants within the framework of capitalist control over the working class. Affirmative action began in the construction industry, where craft unions belonging to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) were 99% white. (By contrast, industrial unions formed under communist leadership during the 1930's by the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO) included several million black workers in their ranks.) In 1969 Pres. Nixon and the big construction companies adopted the "Philadelphia Plan," a plan for increasing black employment on federally funded constructionprojects. By expanding the pool of skilled black construction workers, the Philadelphia Plan increased the percentage of non- union labor on federally funded projects from 20% to 40% and substantially lowered construction craft workers' wages and benefits. The politicians and bosses increased the number of white and black workers competing for what soon became a shrinking number of jobs. If white workers had included black workers in their unions on an equal basis from the beginning, white and black workers could have united to defend union wages and benefits and to demand enough jobs for all workers. The racist union leadership played right into the hands of the bosses' anti-union strategy. (Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty, 1994, Chap. 3.)

Since the mid-1970's affirmative action has been carried out in a declining and decaying American capitalist economic and political system. The capitalists' divide-and-conquer strategy applied under Nixon as the "Philadelphia Plan" has now become part of a plan to incite racist conflict over a shrinking pie, an American plan for fascism!

• Since the mid-1970's median family income for blacks has declined from 64% of white median family income to 58% today.
• Since the 1970's real income levels of the working class have declined by 20%. Younger production workers' wages have fallen 30%.
• Throughout these two decades unemployment rates for black workers have consistently been two to two and one-half times as high as those for white workers, regardless of educational levels.
• In the early 1970's blacks were only four percent of the college professors, three percent of the physicians, and two percent of the scientists and engineers in the U.S. and the percentages are the same today.
• Since the beginning of the 1980's, nearly all gains in real income have gone to the richest one percent of the population. This top one percent increased their income by 75% during the 1980's, from $312,206 to $548,970.
• Within the white population and within the black population income distribution has become much more unequal. The rich capitalists of every racial group have gotten richer, while the poorest workers of every racial group have gotten poorer. Black workers were particularly hard hit during the early 1980's by Reagan-era cutbacks that targeted programs serving large numbers of blacks. White workers, including many college trained white collar workers were hard hit during the post 1989 recession by massive corporate down-sizing and restructuring. (Farai Chideya,Don't Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation about African Americans 1995; Andrew Hacker, Two Nations, 1992; Thomas and Mary Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics, 1991.)

There are other anti-racist reforms that politicians andcapitalists have transformed into strategies for perpetuating or increasing racism. For example:

School desegregation was implemented through busing plans that exempted wealthy suburban communities and private schools and desegregated deteriorating under-financed urban schools. Racist politicians instigated violent "anti-busing" movements and imposed budget cuts for schools and city services. Schools were rapidly re-segregated through a combination of tracking programs and "white flight" from urban public schools. When racist politicians in Boston launched a violent anti-busing campaign in 1974-75, the Progressive Labor Party and International Committee Against Racism (INCAR) organized a multiracial effort to defend integration and to demand better schools.

Desegregation of housing was promised by the 1968 Housing Act, but this act, passed by Congress while soldiers protected them from the rebellions triggered by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., was a political compromise between liberals and conservatives in which no means of enforcement was included in the law. (Massey and Denton, American Apartheid ). Meanwhile, red-lining (bankers drawing red lines on maps to designate white and black areas of a city) and blockbusting (using racist fears to convert areas from white to black) made bankers and speculators rich, fleeced both white and black workers, and created new patterns of segregated communities.

Death penalty laws were declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 on the grounds that they were applied in an arbitrary and capricious manner (that is, applied mostly to blacks). Laws were rewritten in most states and approved by the Supreme Court, and a handful of whites were executed in the late 1970's to demonstrate that things had changed. Since the early 1980's states have reverted to the old racist pattern. A majority of the population on death row is black or Latino, and statistical analysis shows it is between 5 and 13 times more likely that the death penalty will be imposed when a black kills a white than when a white kills a black or when killer and victim are of the same race. The Supreme Court acknowledged this statistical pattern in a 1987 case but ruled that it did not matter. Under this criminal justice system, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

These examples show that the ruling class employs many methods to weaken or destroy anti-racist reforms: (1) Making white and black workers compete for a dwindling number of jobs; (2) making desegregation of schools and housing merely a transition to resegregation; (3) passing anti-racist laws without putting any teeth into them; (4) doing away with racist laws and then replacing them with similar racist laws; and (5) inciting racist "backlashes" against anti-racist reforms. All of these methods have been used against affirmative action. The result is that there is very little of affirmative action left.

A California pro-affirmative action activist accurately wrote that "over the past twenty years the U.S. Supreme Court has already chopped the scope of affirmative action programs down to a stump. (Van Jones, "What Is the Campaign Against Affirmative Action Really About/"Third Force, May/June, 1995).

• The Supreme Court in the 1978 Bakke case made "quotas" illegal. The consequences of that decision can be clearly seen from the following fact: "No federal contractor has ever been debarred from doing business with the federal government because it did not meet its goals. In fact, contractors regularly fail to meet their yearly goals. (Zaida I. Giraldo, Dir. of Affirmative Action, CSU Chico, "What Everyone Should Know About Affirmative Action," Peaceful Action, May, 1995)
• The Supreme Court in the 1989 Richmond, VA, vs Croson Co. declared most "set-aside" programs illegal, even when their intent is to remedy previous exclusion.
• The Supreme Court in the 1989 Wards Cove Packing Co. decision shifted the burden of proof of discrimination onto minorities, even when there is a demonstrable disparity in employment. In other words, even when companies have hired no minority workers in the past and are hiring virtually no minority workers in the present, those who are denied jobs have the burden of proving to a court's satisfaction that they were personally discriminated against in order to justify creating affirmative action procedures!
• While the Supreme Court was "chopping down" affirmative action, it had plenty of help during the 1980's from Reagan appointees Clarence Thomas, head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,.and Clarence Pendleton, chair of the Civil Rights Commission, both of whom were sworn enemies of affirmative action. Thomas drastically cut back class action suits, reduced staff, shifted the burden of proof from employers to employees, allowed the backlog of cases to grow to 46,000 and processing time to increase to 10 months. Complicit liberal Democrats did nothing to prevent Thomas from sabotaging the EEOC, just as the liberal Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee refused to attack his racist record during his Supreme Court nomination hearings.

Affirmative action today thus cannot require any positive results (quotas); past and present exclusion of minorities cannot be accepted as evidence of discrimination; an impossible burden of proof is on the individual worker or student; and monitoring and enforcement agencies have been virtually destroyed. Under these circumstances the claim that minority workers and students "enjoy special preferences" at the expense of whites would be laughable if it weren't such a dangerous fascist lie!

Attacks on affirmative action come in many disguises. Below are our analysis of and answers to the most commonly heard arguments against affirmative action.

1. People should be hired or admitted to universities on the basis of merit, not racial preference. This is actually an argument in favor of affirmative action that has been hijacked by opponents of affirmative action.

   The "merit" argument is mainly based on the notion that standardized test scores measure who is most qualified for admissions to college and hiring for jobs. Standardized tests, from the SAT's and the ACT's used in college admissions to the "blue books" and "red books" that were used for hiring police and fire fighters were created with conscious discriminatory intent and have always been racially and class biased. They do not measure motivation, talent, self-discipline, and do not predict ability to do the work. They have served as racist and class biased devices of exclusion, perpetuating the inequalities in educational opportunity that minority and working class students face.

   The merit argument also conveniently ignores the university programs of special preference for upper class children that have existed for centuries. "Legacy" preference for the children of alumni is the true example of special preference for the less qualified. A recent study found that, during the past 40 years, one-fifth of Harvard's students have received admissions preference because their parents attended the school. Affluent white legacies are three times more likely to be accepted to Harvard than other applicants. Similar patterns prevail at such other Ivy League schools as Yale, Dartmouth, and the Univ. of Pennsylvania.

   Although Ivy League administrators had claimed that legacies were well qualified, the U.S. Dept. of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) found that "the average admitted legacy at Harvard between 1981 and 1988 was significantly less qualified than the average admitted nonlegacy." The OCR study concluded that at most elite universities during the eighties the legacy was by far the biggest piece of the preferential pie. At Harvard, a legacy is about twice as likely to be admitted as a black or Hispanic student...marginally qualified legacies outnumbered all black, Mexican-American, Native American and Puerto Rican enrollees put together." (John Larew, "Who's the Real affirmative Action Profiteer?" Debating Affirmative Action, Nicolaus Mills, ed., New York: Delta Books, 1994).

   Equally hypocritical were the Univ. of California Regents who in July, 1995, voted to abolish affirmative action. While they voted to exclude thousands of fully qualified black and Latino students from the University of California system, they conveniently took no action to end the annual admission of the more than one thousand mostly athlete "special admits." As Tom Hayden and Connie Rice noted in The Nation ("California Cracks its Mortarboards," 9/18/95), "winning Rose Bowls was important enough to the Regents to merit an exception to their strict academic standards."

   Two recent studies show that black workers continue to face the traditional racist pattern of "last hired and first fired." First, "a 1990 Urban Institute study utilizing pairs of black and white job applicants with identical credentials found that in 476 hirings in Washington, DC, and Chicago, "unequal treatment of black job seekers was entrenched and widespread, contradicting claims that hiring practices today either favor blacks or are effectively color blind. In 20 percent of the audits, whites were able to advance further through the hiring process than equally qualified blacks....A similar study using Hispanic job applicants found them discriminated against 29 percent of the time in San Diego and 33 percent of the time in Chicago." ("Affirmative Action: Yesterday, Today, and Beyond," Reginald Wilson, American Council on Education paper, May, 1995, p. 17). Second, a study by the Office of Personnel Management of the Federal Government found that "Black federal employees were more than twice as likely to be fired than their white, Hispanic, or Asian counterparts." Blacks were 52% of the workers dismissed during 1994, according to the study by sociologist Hilary Silver. (Reported in the New York Times, 4/20/95). These studies show that current hiring and firing decisions are based on white racial preference rather than merit and therefore demonstrate the continuing need for affirmative action.

2. Affirmative Action has achieved its objectives and is no longer needed. If an "objective" of affirmative action is to guarantee "equal opportunity," the studies of hiring and firing cited above demonstrate that this objective has not been achieved. If an objective of affirmative action is to promote greater equality of occupational and educational attainment between blacks and whites, the facts show that racial inequalities are at least as great as they were during the 1960's.

   The Federal "Glass Ceiling Commission" in its 1995 report found that white men, who make up 43% of the work force, hold over 95% of all senior management positions. White men are also 80% of tenured professors and 97% of school superintendents. African Americans are only 4% of middle management and college teachers, 3% of all physicians and lawyers, and 2% of all scientists and engineers. On the other hand, black workers are 30% of nursing aides and orderlies, 25% of hotel maids and domestic workers, 23% of prison guards and security guards, 22% of janitors, and 25 to 30% of all unemployed workers and "discouraged" workers who have given up on finding a job. Even black workers with college degrees have an unemployment rate more than twice as great as their white counterparts! (Andrew Hacker, Two Nations, 1992, chap. 7.)

   Wage gaps between black and white workers, which narrowed somewhat between the mid 1960's and mid 1970's, have steadily increased since then. Following the same pattern, black-white differences in college attendance and graduation rates declined from the mid-sixties through the mid-seventies, but have been widening for the past two decades. At the same time, as college costs have escalated, the federal government shifted most student aid from grants to loans, which has disproportionately prevented lower income blacks from attending college. Racial disparities in wages and in college attendance reinforce each other. For the past twenty years the differential between wages paid to college graduates and non-college graduates has grown substantially larger.

3. Affirmative Action amounts to "reverse discrimination." This argument has gotten a lot of publicity but it has little if any substance. A recent report for the Labor Department prepared by law professor Alfred W. Blumrosen found fewer than 100 reverse discrimination cases among the more than 3,000 discrimination opinions handed down by Federal district and appeals courts from 1990 and 1994. The courts found discrimination" in only six cases and provided appropriate relief. The study concluded "that the problem of 'reverse discrimination' is not widespread; and that where it exists, the courts have given relief. Nothing in these cases would justify dismantling the existing structure of equal opportunity employment programs." (New York TimeS, 3/31/95). We therefore conclude that "reverse discrimination" is a myth that serves the ideological purpose of scapegoating. It diverts the anger of white men, who have experienced declining economic opportunities, away from the capitalist bosses onto blacks, Latinos, immigrants, and women.

4. Affirmative action is divisive. We do not think affirmative action is divisive. By integrating work places and schools and by concretely demonstrating to whites that minorities and women can do any job whites can do, affirmative action has historically reduced the divisive racist attitudes of whites and created more of a basis for multiracial unity. Affirmative action is not divisive, but the way that the ruling class has implemented affirmative action in a declining capitalist society that is producing fewer jobs and educational opportunities has been divisive.

   A large majority of whites continue to support affirmative action, according to a New York Times article, "Affirmative Action and the Voter," by liberal pollster Louis Harris (7/31/95). According to Harris, when California voters were told that the "California Civil Rights Initiative" would abolish affirmative action, only 31% supported it, while 56% opposed it. Many expressed outrage that politicians were trying to fool them with phrases about "preferential treatment."

   Those whites who mistakenly think that minorities are receiving unfair advantages and taking away their jobs and educational opportunities have not spontaneously come to think this way. The ruling class is spending a lot of money to try to fool people with the California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI). The CCRI was initiated by leaders of the California Association of Scholars, the state chapter of the National Association of Scholars (NAS). Over the past few years the NAS has received millions of dollars from the five foundations that have for decades been the biggest supporters of right-wing racist causes. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, The Adolph Coors Foundation, the John Olin Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation gave $620,000 to the NAS in 1993 alone. These same ruling class foundations gave millions of dollars to academic Nazis Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, who in The Bell Curve advocated that the government "rescind all anti-discrimination legislation" and abolish affirmative action.

   It is no accident that some working and middle class people do not clearly understand that the capitalist class is to blame for their increasing problems. The ruling class has spent a fortune trying to make sure that angry whites are angry at everyone but the rulers themselves. It is therefore misleading to assert that, when there are hard economic times, white people tend to blame black people for their problems. This view lets the ruling class off the hook and mystifies racism as something white people just have. In fact, in hard economic times, workers are likely to blame their bosses for laying them off, denying them unemployment insurance, closing their schools and clinics, and denying them access to health care. For the ruling class, it is a matter of life and death to get a lot of working and middle class people to fall for racist scapegoating. Otherwise, millions of working and middle class people will join the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party and put an end to capitalism and racism.

5. Affirmative Action only helps middle class blacks. This argument is false and is used to discredit affirmative action by implying that it helps those who are already privileged and thus do not need an extra break. Middle class blacks commonly experience racist discrimination and mistreatment and therefore need the protection of affirmative action. Most of the black people who have benefitted from affirmative action, however, are working class. They are workers in city, state, and federal governments, construction workers, and other skilled blue collar and white collar workers. They are students from working class backgrounds who would otherwise be excluded from colleges and universities. Only a small minority of the beneficiaries of affirmative action have been lawyers, doctors, and small business people, but their visibility is often used to convey the false impression that affirmative action has mainly helped affluent blacks.

   It is also important to point out that the few highly visible wealthy minorities are neither working class nor middle class but members of the capitalist ruling class. Their attainment of their positions has had little or nothing to do with affirmative action. The ruling class has admitted a few black capitalists, managers, military officers, politicians, and academics into its ranks in an effort to maintain control over a working class made up increasingly of racial minorities. Ron Brown, Clarence Thomas, and Colin Powell provide a phony facade of fairness and credibility for a racist White House, Supreme Court, and Pentagon, while neo-conservative academics Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Stephen Carter, and William J. Wilson put a black face on racist arguments against affirmative action.

   The ruling class was also forced to increase the number of minorities serving in positions of social control. During the 1960's the criminal justice system and many other institutions were exposed as racist instruments of repression. The ruling class has modified these institutions so that they can be used to protect the system of inequality and exploitation. In law enforcement, for example, affirmative action tripled the number of black police from 24,000 in 1970 to 64,000 in 1990. Blacks made up 41% of all new police officers hired between 1970 and 1990. The Progressive Labor Party is opposed to demands for more minority or women bosses, politicians, generals, cops, and administrators, because we want to get rid of all bosses, politicians, generals, cops, and administrators. We support affirmative action for the working class. We do not support demands that can only help the ruling class control the working class.

6. Affirmative Action only helps white women. Affirmative action has probably helped white women more than it has helped African Americans, but neither blacks nor women have even come close to gaining equality with white men. There are three times as many white women in the U.S. as there are black people. There are far more white women college teachers, physicians, and other professionals. White women are far more dispersed throughout all social classes than are African Americans, who are more disproportionately concentrated in the most exploited sections of the working class. Half of the capitalist class consists of women, nearly all of whom are white. Because women and men commonly marry each other, women and men are not nearly as segregated from each other as people are by race.

   Nevertheless, it is important not to overstate the benefits of affirmative action for white women or to exaggerate the differences between racism and sexism. While a minority of white women have entered and advanced in previously all male fields, most white women have experienced an overall decline in their status since the mid-seventies. Sixty percent of white adults who live below the official poverty line are women. Nearly one- fourth of white families are single-parent families headed by a woman. The vast majority of white women workers are occupationally segregated in low paying sales, office, service, and production jobs, many of them part-time, temporary, and without benefits. Although the "glass ceiling" keeps women out of the highest levels of the corporate hierarchy, the "sticky floor" keeps the majority of white women and women of all races at or near the bottom of the system of capitalist exploitation of the working class.

7. Affirmative Action unfairly stigmatizes qualified minorities. This is surely one of the most hypocritical arguments invented by opponents of affirmative action. In the first place, racists have always "stigmatized" minorities and regarded them as "unqualified." It is precisely because of such racist assumptions that affirmative action is necessary. Secondly, white people have been receiving preferential treatment in the U.S. for hundreds of years without being or feeling "stigmatized" for it. Wealthy whites do not seem eager to eliminate legacy programs at elite universities or any of the special privileges they enjoy in this capitalist society.

8. "Race specific" Affirmative Action should be replaced with a class based form of Affirmative Action that will have broader support and benefit disadvantaged people of all racial backgrounds. This has become the line with which people pose as progressive defenders of affirmative action and "champions of the poor of all races" while working to destroy what is left of affirmative action. It is therefore the most insidious argument against affirmative action. William J. Wilson (The Declining Significance of Race, 1978, and The Truly DisadvantageD, 1987) and the Edsalls (Chain Reaction, 1991) have been praised by the ruling class for writing books setting forth this argument. U Cal. Santa Cruz faculty member Dana Takagi has refuted this argument by explaining why class is not a proxy for race. Just as there are class differences within every racial group, there are racial differences within each social class. For example, working class white students score higher on "standardized" tests than working class blacks and Latinos. Working class whites score higher than working class Asians on the verbal portions of standardized tests. Class based affirmative action would therefore favor whites over blacks, Latinos, and most Asians, which is what racist critics of affirmative action desire. Politicians who advocate replacing race with class have no real desire to direct more assistance to low income people, regardless of race. In fact, they are cutting back all programs that provide such assistance. They may promise that they will take from black workers and give to white workers, but they will actually take from all workers and give to the bosses. The end result of destroying affirmative action will be just like the end result of every other racist attack. It will hurt black workers first and hardest, but it will soon hurt the entire working class! (Dana Takagi, "We Should Not Make Class a Proxy for Race," Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/5/95). Takagi has also exposed the fallacy of the racist myth of Asian Americans as a "model minority" that has "made it" without affirmative action. Asian American face racist exploitation and have not "made it." Many Asian Americans have benefitted from affirmative action by gaining access to jobs previously reserved for whites. The "model minority" myth is used to attack affirmative action by claiming that the U.S. is a "meritocracy" in which everyone has the opportunity to get ahead.

"New" Democrats have been pursuing a political strategy guided by this racist notion of replacing race with class. They argue that Democrats have catered to the "special interests" of blacks and the "underclass" by supporting affirmative action, welfare, and other social programs. Democrats can only win elections, according to this racist logic, by appealing to the "forgotten middle class." Democrats have thus embraced the racist ideology put forward for years by the Republicans and made that ideology the mainstream of U.S. politics. The results are becoming obvious: Republicans and Democrats, who are both financed and controlled by the same capitalist class, are joining together to destroy what is left of affirmative action, welfare, public education, health care, and pensions. Soon after that they will drastically cut back social security, medicare, and medicaid.

Why then does Pres. Clinton pose as a defender of affirmative action? He is worried that if he ends affirmative action altogether it will be virtually impossible to get black and Latino workers and students to retain any faith in the U.S .system. It will be very hard to convince them to register and vote for Democrats or for anybody. He fears militant revolt and wants to preserve a tiny fragment of affirmative action. Clinton also want us to continue to regard Democrats as a "lesser evil" protecting us from the Republicans and all their fascist friends. Liberals will not protect us from fascism and World War III any better than they have protected our jobs, our wages, our schools, our welfare system, our neighborhoods, or our families. They are only trying to protect the ruling class.

Pres. Clinton, in his July 19, 1995, speech urging that we should "mend, not end" affirmative action, put forward pro- capitalist reasons for retaining affirmative action that are entirely different from the reasons why workers and students should support affirmative action. Clinton said that affirmative action has made "America stronger." He applauded a "growing black middle class," claimed that "women have become a major force in business and political life," asserted that "police departments now better reflect the make-up of those whom they protect," and that "a generation of professionals now serve as role models for young women and minority youth."

We reject all of these arguments. We do not want to make America (that is, the capitalist bosses) stronger or help them compete more profitably against other bosses. Workers do not benefit by helping "our" bosses compete with the bosses of other workers. The black middle class is not growing but shrinking because of corporate down sizing and Clinton's program of "reinventing government" by eliminating the jobs of government workers. Becoming middle class cannot be the solution for exploited workers. Most workers cannot become middle class under capitalism. Workers cannot solve their problems by rising out of their class but by rising up as a class against their exploiters. A few women have become bosses and politicians, but, like all bosses and politicians, they are enemies of working and middle class women. There are more black police than there used to be, but police departments are still overwhelmingly dominated by racist white cops like Mark Fuhrman, and all cops protect the racist ruling class, not the community. Professional role models are a cruel hoax for a majority of working and middle class youth today, because the capitalist system offers no opportunities and no future. Professional role models help the ruling class peddle the lie that you can get ahead if you work hard.

As communists we have no use for Pres. Clinton or the rest of the Democratic and Republican Parties. Both parties are financially controlled by the capitalist bosses and are racist enemies of the working class. Our program of action is therefore not to try to elect "better" politicians in 1996 or restore a Democratic majority in Congress. We understand that many of the most dedicated anti-racist fighters support the Democratic Party to some extent and see it as a vehicle for opposing the growth of fascism in the U.S. We as communists in the Progressive Labor Party will actively participate in any organization where there are masses of anti-racist activists. Our goal, however, is to win people to the understanding that reformist strategies to combat racism cannot succeed. Only communist revolution can enable the working class and its allies to destroy racism and exploitation.

1. Build an anti-racist movement that is multiracial.
2. Oppose further attempts to destroy what is left of Affirmative Action.
3. Oppose all forms of scapegoating whenever we encounter them.
4. Speak out against the use of racist books and articles in college courses.
5. Speak out against professors and administrators who spread lies of racial inferiority.
6. Oppose the use of standardized tests as instruments of racist exclusion.
7. End tuition for public higher education, restore funds that have been cut from education budgets, and restore the primacy of grants over loans, so that students do not accumulate massive debts in order to get a college degree.
8. Oppose racist cuts in other social programs, such as AFDC, Food Stamps, Medicaid, School Lunches, Environmental Protection, Medicare, and Social Security.

   Most importantly, it is not enough to demand the redistribution of a shrinking number of low paying, temporary, and part-time jobs, thereby playing into the hands of capitalists who are down sizing and pitting workers against each other. Instead, in order to unify the working class so that we will be able to defeat the capitalist ruling class:

9. Demand jobs with living wages and benefits for minority workers and for all those who need them.
10. Demand a shorter work day (six hours work for eight hours pay) without loss of pay for workers, in order to force the bosses to create millions of new jobs.

Brimelow, Peter. 1995. "Restoration Man." In The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions. New York: Times Books.
Chideya, Farai. 1995. Don't Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation about African Americans. New York: Plume Penguin.
Edsall, Thomas & Mary. 1991. Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, & Taxes on American Politics. New York: Norton.
Ezorsky, Gertrude. 1991. Racism and Justice: The Case for Affirmative Action. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
Giraldo, Zaida I. 1995. "What Everyone Should Know About Affirmative Action." Peaceful Action. May, 1995.
Hacker, Andrew. 1992. Two Nations: Black and White, Separate Hostile, Unequal. New York: Scribners.
Haydon, Tom and Connie Rice. "California Cracks Its Mortarboards." The NatioN, 9/18/95.
Herring, Cedric. 1995. "African Americans, the Public Agenda, and the Paradoxes of Public Policy: A Focus on the Controversies Surrounding Affirmative Action." Presidential Address at Annual Meeting of Association of Black Sociologist. Washington, DC. Aug., 1995.
Jacoby, Russell and Naomi Glauberman, eds. 1995. The Bell Curve Debate.
Jones, Van. 1995. "What Is the Campaign Aganist Affirmative Action Really About?" Third Force, May/June, 1995.
Kissack, Glenn. 1995. "The Five Sisters of Right-Wing Philanthropy." Personal communication to author.
Knapp, Peter and Alan Spector. 1991. Crisis and Change: An Introduction to Marxist Sociology. Chicago: Nelson Hall.
Massey, Douglas and Nancy Denton, 1993. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.
Mills, Nicolaus, ed. 1994. Debating Affirmative Action. New York: Delta Books.
Quadagno, Jill. 1994. The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Steinberg, Stephen. 1995. Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy. Boston: Beacon Press.
Takagi, Dana. 1995. "We Should Not Make Class a Proxy for Race." Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/5/95.
Wilkens, Roger. 1995. "Racism Has Its Privileges," The Nation, 3/27/95.
Wilson, Reginald. 1995. "Affirmative Action: Yesterday, Today, and Beyond." Washington, DC: American Council on Education paper.
Wilson, William J. (1978). The Declining Significance of Race. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
-----. (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Zinn, Howard. 1964. SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Boston: Beacon Press.

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The news is full of tragic, shocking stories of the flight of refugees from the Middle East and Northern Africa. In Syria alone, more than four million workers and their families have fled during four years of civil and imperialist war. More than eight million are internally displaced, trapped between the Syrian government and ISIS—capitalists fighting capitalists. As these migrants look for safety, U.S. and Russian bombs continue to fall in the big powers’ ongoing struggle to control Middle Eastern oil and profits.

From its beginnings, capitalism has treated workers’ labor power as a commodity to be bought and exploited. Individual workers are discarded when they no longer serve the bosses’ needs. Borders are ignored whenever they get in the way of profit. When Saddam Hussein becomes an unreliable petro-dollar partner, the U.S. invades and occupies Iraq. The Soviet Union annexes Crimea to reclaim strategic naval bases. China builds unmapped islands to dominate shipping lanes and host missile bases in the South China Sea.

With a call to arms against “terrorists,” real or imagined, U.S. finance capitalists—the most murderous gang of terrorists in the world today—use their media and politicians to demonize refugees and immigrants. Once again, the bosses are blaming their victims. Refugees are workers forced to leave their homes because of capitalist crimes against the working class: inter-imperialist war, mass poverty and unemployment, racist and sexist violence. As workers, we must show our solidarity with refugees and unite with them in struggle, regardless of where we happen to live within the artificial capitalist lines called borders.

Five hundred years ago, millions of Black African workers and their families were kidnapped and shipped to the Americas. Hundreds of thousands died in the horrific conditions of the ocean crossing. Brutal slavery awaited those who survived. Merchants and bankers in London and New York financed this genocidal slave trade. Their high return on investment became the basis of many early capitalist fortunes.

Once their ill-gotten fortunes were consolidated, the U.S. rulers’ next step was to expand their control across the North American continent. A genocidal military campaign drove millions of Native Americans from the land they had lived in for centuries, with small numbers of survivors pushed into reservations without the means to sustain themselves. In Central and South America, expedition forces from European centers of capital forged a similar path of destruction.

Capitalism has never stopped moving workers by force, violence and wars of aggression. From colonial Europe to 21^st-century inter-imperialist rivalry, the bosses’ competition for profit has continually redrawn the boundaries of the globe. In the bloody process, countless millions of workers have been terrorized, pushed out, shipped out, kidnapped, and driven far from their places of birth.

During World War II, representing the interests of German capitalists like Gustav Krupp¹, Nazi rulers ripped millions from their homes and moved them to concentration camps, where most were either killed outright or worked to death in another racist genocide. Meanwhile, U.S. rulers illegally forced up to 120,000 workers and children of Japanese descent—the majority of them U.S. citizens—into “internment camps,” concentration camps by any other name. Japanese rulers of the era were no less barbaric, driving millions of Korean, Chinese and other Asians from their homes, often in murderous death marches.

Since 1994, when President Bill Clinton signed his mass incarceration bill into law, the U.S. criminal injustice system has seized from their communities millions of workers, mostly Black and Latin men. Generally caught up in minor drug offenses, these kidnapped inmates are exploited by a prison-industrial complex. Their slave labor feeds the profits of private-sector detention corporations like GEO and CCA, popular investment firms like Vanguard and Fidelity, Dell Computers, and Victoria’s Secret. Industrialized food companies like Aramark receive millions for supplying maggot-infested meals. The current prison and jail population in the U.S. stands at 2.2 million, by far the largest in the world—58 percent higher than the per-capita detention rate in Russia, and nearly six times the rate in China.²

While racism has played a leading role in modern capitalist slave oppression, sexism is close behind. Each year, millions of women and young girls are kidnapped by sex traffickers to generate profit from the depravity of the rich and powerful.

Agricultural Imperialism

Imperialism devastates the economies of poorer countries and drives farmers and workers from their homes in a desperate struggle for survival. Subsistence farmers are driven out of business by cheap, subsidized, mass-produced imports from imperialist countries. Farmers are forced into the cities in search of scarce jobs; the resulting labor surplus allows the capitalist bosses to cut wages even more. In China alone, 300 million agricultural workers—nearly the size of the U.S. population—have moved from the country to the cities over the last 30 years. Another 350 million may do so in the future, desperate to seek even underpaid jobs in vast international factories.⁵ Meanwhile, Chinese factories are closing as international corporations shift to even cheaper labor sources, like Vietnam or Central Asia.

In recent years, corporate giants like Monsanto have flooded poor countries with genetically modified seeds to increase farming “efficiency” in the short run. Over time, however, the new seeds bankrupt subsistence farmers who cannot afford them. They, too, become a part of the ever-growing, worldwide, unemployed reserve army of labor.

Millions of these ex-farmers have emigrated to the U.S. and Europe. Even when able to find work, they are subjected to racist scapegoating. Once again, capitalist politicians and their media blame the immigrants for the oppressive conditions produced by capitalism.

Fighting Back

Throughout the history of capitalism, the bosses’ kidnappings, enslavement and exploitation have been met by working-class resistance. Hundreds of slave revolts, the Underground Railroad, and the multiracial raid on a federal armory at Harpers Ferry inspired the Union troops who ended open slavery in the South. Despite limited weaponry, Native American populations fought back against capitalist expansion and won many battles.

PLP supports immigrant struggles worldwide, welcoming our brother and sister workers as we fight to overthrow the capitalist system that oppresses us all.

Capitalist Impoverishment and the Migration Crisis

Today, the entire world is capitalist. That includes Russia and China, where early attempts to build communist societies made tremendous progress in liberating workers from exploitation, but ultimately failed for reasons explored in other PLP literature (see Road to Revolution III at www.plp.org). The capitalists have merged and consolidated to the point where the 500 largest multinational corporations account for up to 40 percent of world income. By 2016, the richest 1 percent of the world’s population is projected to amass more wealth than the other 99 percent.

Corporations, aided by government policies dictated by the bosses, strive to lower wages by any means necessary. Over the last twenty years, with the collapse of the socialist revolutions in the Soviet Union and China, the number of workers available for “free market” exploitation has more than doubled, from 1.5 to 3.3 billion. This “over-supply” of workers (from the bosses’ point of view) has allowed them to lower wages until 630 million workers now earn less that than $1.25 a day, while another 205 million are unemployed. Accelerating impoverishment has impelled growing numbers of workers to migrate, internally or internationally.²

CAPITALISTS NEED RACISM AND NATIONALISM

For capitalists to retain the loyalty of workers amid deepening oppression and poverty, the populace must be weakened and divided by racist and nationalist ideas. Every nation preaches patriotism, the concept that workers must be loyal to their own country’s rulers. Instilled from earliest childhood, patriotism helps the bosses exploit the working class and fight wars with worker-soldiers while minimizing resistance. It teaches workers to regard their working-class sisters and brothers in other countries as enemies. The logical unity among workers of all nations is undermined by nationalist ideology.

Racism and religion are used to further divide workers, both within their own country and between countries. By fostering divisions between Black and white, Shiite and Sunni, Hutu and Tutsi, Catholic and Protestant, Dominican and Haitian, Arab and Jew, bosses mislead workers into blaming—even killing—each other over the problems caused by capitalism. Meanwhile, the capitalists are generally willing to unite when their interests are threatened. A case in point: The alliance of ten Western and Asian nations that attacked the Soviet Union after the 1917 revolution. Another: The alliance to fight Nazi Germany between Western capitalist governments and the socialist Soviet Union.

RACISM, NATIONALISM AND MIGRATION

Racism and nationalism define the current refugee crisis. Nations are artificial creations that would not exist under communism. Eventually we will have one world where the working class rules in its own interest and shares all resources, according to need. When goods cannot be produced locally, they will be shared and distributed equitably. By contrast, wealthy capitalist nations today sell their resources at a profit to the highest bidder, or to manipulate alliances. In addition, they control the resources of poorer nations, often through deals with local ruling classes. Or they simply seize those resources directly, as in the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

National boundaries are very useful to capitalists. When workers are forced to move by capitalist-created conditions, the bosses’ politicians and media portray them as a foreign and frightening horde, an image that feeds patriotism and the bosses’ push for inter-imperialist war. In the current period, capitalist propaganda in the U.S. and Europe stokes fear of Muslim workers from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa, in particular.

The refugees are fenced with barbed wire, beaten and mistreated, abandoned in squalid camps, and forced to live without work or services or rights. Sometimes these atrocities gain the backing of a misguided portion of the native working class, though many workers do what they can to aid and welcome refugees.

Most discussions distinguish between external migration, from one country to another, and internal migration within a country. But the distinction is artificial. National borders are inventions of the ruling class, developed over thousands of years of class-divided societies to separate peoples with different languages and religions. Today, borders are used by the capitalist classes to divide workers from each other. They foster antagonisms that impede our unity to fight for a better life, and, eventually, to overthrow the bosses of all countries.

As of the end of 2014, 59 million migrants were forcibly displaced by conflict, violence, human rights violations, and natural hazard-induced disasters—the highest level ever recorded.³ Of that number, 19 million were refugees, migrants who’d fled to another country—14 percent more than in 2013. (For perspective, there were 2.4 million refugees worldwide in 1975.) In 2015, according to the United Nations, forcibly displaced workers and children likely “far surpassed” 60 million, including 20 million refugees fleeing war—most notably in Syria—and persecution.

Flight from conflict is in itself deadly. Since 2000, the International Organization for Migration has recorded 40,000 migration-related deaths. It’s become routine to learn of overcrowded boats sinking and drowning hundreds of refugees, to see photographs of bodies washing up on the shore.

Tens of millions of workers have been displaced by development projects, including dams, roads, mining, urban clearance or deforestation. (An estimated 10 million a year are forced to move by dam projects alone.) These migrants, estimated at up to 100 million in the 1990s, usually remain in their home country but are rarely, if ever, adequately compensated. The number forced to flee natural and man-made disasters is unknown. A study by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists found that 3.4 million have been physically or economically displaced by projects funded by the World Bank, their lands seized and their livelihoods obliterated.

By 2020, according to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, there will be 50 million climate migrants.⁶ Drought will force millions to flee their land to the slums of large cities. A rising sea level will make coastal lands uninhabitable. Storms will destroy homes and farmland in many parts of the world.⁷

EFFECTS OF MIGRATIONS IN SPECIFIC AREAS

The Middle East

Today’s news is dominated by the plight of Syrian refugees. The civil war in Syria, part of a broader competition between the U.S. and Russia, has displaced more than half the country’s pre-war population and created more than 11 million refugees. More than 4 million have fled to Europe, with the rest left in Syria under horrific conditions. While the capitalist bosses define the conflict as one between democracy versus dictatorship and terrorism, it actually began—and continues to be—over oil. Syria’s geography is critical to pipelines that can carry oil to the Mediterranean and Turkey and then to Europe.  Imperialist nations have plunged Syria into a nightmare of civil war and terror. The Syrian working class finds itself forced to choose between living in a war zone and crossing dangerous waters to refuge—only to be denied food, water and shelter by many European countries.

How did all of this come about? The present conflict in Syria traces to 2011, when the U.S. began funding rebels against President Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Russia and Iran. The Russian alliance planned a gas pipeline from Iran’s giant South Pars field through Iraq and Syria, with a possible extension to Lebanon, and eventually to Europe, the target market. Meanwhile, U.S. and European oil bosses had proposed a competing pipeline from Qatar through Syria and northward to Turkey, but Assad opposed it. These competing pipelines became the basis of the proxy war now raging in Syria and victimizing millions of working-class men, women and children.

Since September 2015, Russia, the only foreign power with military assets openly deployed in Syria, has been waging an intensive air campaign at the request of Assad’s government. Most the strikes by the Syrian government are against rebel militias backed by the U.S., Turkey and the ruling sheikhs of Saudi Arabia, though some strikes have targeted ISIS and Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, ISIS receives funding from a network of private donors in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. The result is a frontless proxy war with tens of millions of workers caught in the middle.

In sum, the forced displacement of Syrian refugees results from the objective needs of the capitalist profit system.  This is the recurrent nightmare of imperialism. It will continue until capitalism is smashed.

THE UNITED STATES

As of 2012, the U.S. contained 41 million people born in other countries, or 13 percent of the total U.S. population. Nearly half of these immigrants were naturalized citizens. Of the 22 million non-citizens, 11 million were undocumented. It is estimated that half of the undocumented have overstayed their visas, with the rest crossing borders illegally.⁸ While these numbers may seem large, we should note that the U.S. had a proportionately larger immigrant population—nearly 15 percent—in 1890.

In 1960, 75 percent of the U.S. foreign-born population came from Europe, as compared to 12 percent today. The largest current bloc of immigrants (26 percent of the total) comes from Mexico, followed by other Latin American countries and Asia. Contrary to capitalist media propaganda, fewer than one in five immigrants live in poverty. They use social services no more than the native-born population, and have a significantly lower crime rate.

In 2013, of the 11 million undocumented U.S. immigrants, 52 percent were from Mexico, down from 57 percent in 2007. Of these, 62 percent have been living in the U.S. for 13 years or longer, 88 percent for more than five years. They are employed at a higher rate than the general population. Hundreds of thousands have citizen relatives in the U.S. but would have to leave and wait 10 years before re-entering the country to qualify for a green card. Nearly 4 million have children who are citizens and 20 percent have a spouse with citizenship or legal status.⁹

Right-wing politicians and media, along with state-protected militias like the Ku Klux Klan and Minutemen, use naked racism against immigrants to build loyalty to the U.S. and create antagonisms within the working class. By blaming crime, unemployment, failing schools and terrorist threats on the undocumented, they scapegoat the most vulnerable workers and protect the real enemies of workers everywhere: the capitalist bosses.

But even more dangerous are mainstream liberals like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, whose job is to mislead workers while serving the dominant finance capital wing of the U.S. ruling class. In his first term as president, from 2009 through 2012, the Obama administration removed more than 1.5 million immigrants, either stopping them at the border or deporting them from inside the U.S.¹⁰ Nearly all (98 percent) were Latin American or Caribbean nationals.

In response to an angry backlash, the Deporter-in-Chief promoted the DREAM (Development, Education, and Relief for Alien Minors) Act. Stalled—at least temporarily—by Republicans in Congress, Obama’s legislation would have offered a path to citizenship to younger undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and agreed to enlist in the military or complete at least two years of college. (For many, the latter option would be a practical impossibility.)

In the meantime, the Obama administration initiated an executive policy called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which offers approximately 2 million undocumented immigrants renewable two-year work permits and exemption from deportation. Despite the superficial anti-racist appearance of the DREAM Act and DACA, they were created to meet a desperate need for the capitalist ruling class: an expanded pool of cannon fodder for the broader imperialist war the rulers are actively planning.

Further, the super-exploitation of immigrants, as well as of women and Black and Latin workers in general, is essential to the capitalists’ pursuit of maximum profits. Black, Latin and women workers get paid less than 80 percent of white male workers’ wages for comparable work—an annual ruling-class theft of $4 trillion a year,¹¹ or about 20 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product.

LATIN AMERICA/CARIBBEAN

More than 40 percent of all immigrants to the U.S. are from Latin America, including Mexico. During and just after World War II, an acute shortage of farm labor threatened profits in the American West. More than 400,000 workers from Mexico, along with smaller numbers from the Caribbean and Honduras, were employed legally under the Bracero Program, which guaranteed growers a basic supply of labor. It also stimulated a sharp increase in super-exploited, unauthorized immigration, due to the dramatic wage gap between the U.S. (where agricultural workers lived in poverty) and Mexico (where they might be starving). In 1965, when the Bracero Program ended, the U.S. bosses engineered a new law to limit legal immigration from the entire Western Hemisphere to 120,000 a year. When this number proved inadequate for the growers’ requirements, illegal immigration increased dramatically.

In the 1970s, a U.S. recession closed hundreds of unionized industrial plants and spurred the growth of a low-wage, no-benefit service economy. As global capitalism entered yet another crisis, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund bosses imposed austerity on Latin American workers, creating even greater pressure for immigration—increasingly of whole families.⁸

In 1994, passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) spurred even more immigration from Mexico to the U.S. Subsidized American corn flooded and undersold the Mexican market, driving two million Mexican farmers out of work. Mega-corporations like Walmart opened shop in Mexico to take advantage of new tax and duty exemptions, forcing small local businesses to close. NAFTA generally lowered wages near the border, leading many families to send members into the U.S. interior to seek higher wages.¹² The “free trade” widely hailed in the bosses’ media was free only for the capitalists. NAFTA intensified wage slavery for workers in both Mexico and the U.S.

Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S. protected corporate investments in Central America by orchestrating the rise of violent military dictatorships in Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Protest movements were crushed. In Mexico, Central America, and the Dominican Republic, with the cooperation of their junior capitalist partners, the U.S. erected huge assembly plants called maquiladoras to manufacture goods using raw materials from the U.S. This accelerated the loss of better-paying industrial jobs in the U.S. and expanded low-paying jobs in the target countries. By 1990, poverty rates in Central America reached nearly 60 percent. In 2006, U.S. rulers passed the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement, widening the scope of NAFTA-type policies and super-exploitation. As a result, more than 200,000 displaced workers have been forced to move into the maquiladora zones. At the same time, prices of food and other essentials rose by up to 16 percent. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of Central American migrants in the U.S. grew to 3.1 million, almost as many as the number from Mexico.

Another immigration factor is the “war on drugs.” Originating in the 1980s under Republican President Ronald Reagan, it was driven by CIA-promoted drug use in U.S. inner cities, which generated profits to fund the fascist death squads in Nicaragua. . In the 1990s, under Democratic President Bill Clinton, the so-called war on drugs was used to justify the mass incarceration of unemployed workers, disproportionately Black and Latin. (During Clinton’s eight years in office, the federal/state prison population rose by 673,000.⁴) Internationally, the U.S. bosses pushed their “enforcement” policies into the Caribbean and as far south as Colombia, enabling them to tighten their military control over those countries. In 1994, at the same time that NAFTA was displacing thousands, the U.S.-Mexico border was heavily militarized. Since that time, more than 6,000 people have died trying to cross. More recently, the Mexican ruling class has fortified their southern border, making emigration from Central America even more hazardous. But while the “war on drugs” succeeded in terrorizing workers, it failed abjectly in its stated mission. Drug consumption in the U.S. is now estimated at 62 percent of the world market; opioids (including heroin and prescription pain relievers) killed more than 28,000 people in 2014.⁵ The drug cartels have grown even more powerful and violent; the murder rate in Central America doubled between 2000 and 2012. The surge in violence explains the recent wave of unaccompanied young immigrants risking their lives to come to the U.S., desperate to escape drug gang recruitment and killings.¹³

In 2010, after Haiti was struck by a disastrous earthquake, the U.S. temporarily halted deportation of 30,000 Haitian immigrants but barred any additional newcomers. Despite millions pledged in aid, little has been built in Haiti except for new maquiladoras. Tens of thousands fled to look for jobs in the Dominican Republic, which is busy deporting them—along with more than half a million Haitians who have lived in the DR for decades but now find themselves targeted by blatant racism.¹⁵ During the Clinton administration, Haiti was coerced into lowering its tariffs on imported food, which displaced thousands of Haiti’s rice farmers. After the earthquake, when food prices skyrocketed, it was impossible for the country to feed its people.

AFRICA

Of the approximately 17.8 million refugees and displaced persons from Africa as of December 2014 (according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), 55 percent have migrated within the continent, often from landlocked areas in conflict, to coastal areas in a search of jobs and security. The most common destinations are South Africa, Ivory Coast, and Kenya. Most internal migrants in Africa lack legal protection. They are subject to human rights and sexual abuse, and suffer from poverty and exclusion from the main society.

As in other parts of the world, the crisis in Africa stems from a long history of imperialist exploitation. By 1914, 90 percent of Africa was controlled by various European powers: France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Britain. Although most states gained formal independence after World War II, they remained economically dependent on their former colonial masters. In the 1990s, the World Bank intervened increasingly in Africa; in the 2000s, both China and the U.S. made big investments in the continent. AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command, was established in 2007; its first operation was the coup in Libya. While there is only one acknowledged U.S. military base in Africa, a 2013 investigation by TomDispatch found military involvement in 49 of 53 nations, including the offshore islands.¹⁶

Petroleum reserves in Libya, Sudan and Nigeria led self-serving national governments into alliances with Western and Chinese oil companies, to the detriment of local populations. In 2011, when oil prices were cresting and the Chinese capitalists were maneuvering for a bigger share of the pie, the Libyan government was overthrown by a U.S.-inspired coup. Three years later, according to the UNHCR, there were nearly 400,000 Libyan refugees and internally displaced persons. Although there is no more work to be found in the shut-down Libyan oilfields, migrants from the south still come, hoping to reach Europe from the northern coast. Smugglers charge extravagant fees for transport on flimsy, overcrowded boats, and thousands have drowned. In 2014, 68,000 North Africans arrived in Sicily, primarily from Eritrea, Mali, Nigeria, and Gambia.¹⁷

The Horn of Africa, containing Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, is of vital importance to U.S. energy interests. Beyond being one of the largest unexplored regions for oil and gas, it borders the Red Sea, which connects the oil-rich Persian Gulf nations to Europe and Asia. This explains U.S. involvement in wars in Somalia and Ethiopia since the 1970s. Most recently, resurgence of conflicts in the Central African Republic, Mali, northern Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan have displaced millions, pushing more young men north toward Europe. Recent mayhem in northern Mali threatens to tip the country back into civil war, while camps in Mauritania and Burkina Faso overflow with refugees from a previous round of fighting.¹⁸

Global warming, a pathology of capitalism, also plays a role. The Sahel, an east-to-west strip south of Libya and Algeria, has been suffering the most severe drought of the past 100 years. As many as 2.5 million people have been driven to migrate, mostly north through Libya.¹⁹

ASIA

According to the United Nations, Asia accounts for 3.5 million refugees, 1.9 million internally displaced people and 1.4 million stateless people. The majority are from Myanmar and Afghanistan,²² which was left divided and unstable by the 2001 U.S. invasion. By mid-2014, Afghani refugees numbered 1 million in Iran and 1.5 million in Pakistan. Another 700,000 are internally displaced. In Iraq, even before the recent siege by ISIS, 1.9 million Iraqis were either transborder refugees or internally displaced.²³

One of the largest 20^th century migrations occurred in 1947-8 between India and the newly created state of Pakistan (then East and West Pakistan, but now Bangladesh in the east). People of different religions and cultures had coexisted in the area for centuries. But when the Indian rulers gained nominal political (though not economic) independence from Britain after World War II, more than fifteen million people migrated, with Muslims rushing north as Hindus fled south. Ethnic and nationalist passions were whipped into a frenzy of bloodshed; as many as two million died.²⁴

Today, the U.S. is still the world’s leading super-power, though China and Russia are gaining. U.S. capitalist bosses continue to manipulate the rulers of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh for cheap labor and markets and to “fight terrorism” in U.S. interests. Poverty has led at least 12 million Bangladeshis to migrate to India in search of better pay. By 2005, at least 25 million Indians had migrated to Europe, England, the U.S. or Asia.²⁶ By 2015, 8 million Pakistanis had fled violence, persecution or poverty. Twenty-seven percent of the population said they wished they could leave.²⁷

JOIN THE PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY

Migration is just one manifestation of the misery that world capitalism rains down upon the workers of the world. Without wars between competing ruling classes and their proxies, without racist and sexist exploitation of labor, there would be far less migration. In decades to come, life as we know it may well be destroyed by the next big war between imperialist superpowers. We have no choice but to overthrow the profit system, seize state power and impose a dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what we call communism, a society based on equality, sharing and production for workers’ need rather than bosses’ profit. We must be prepared for struggle with revolutionary potential to erupt anywhere in the world. And we must build smaller struggles along the way, to train ourselves as active participants, as leaders and as thinkers. Always we must emphasize working-class unity.

We have a world to win—a world without borders. without racism or sexism, without migrants or refugees or deportees.

1. Raul Delgado Wise “The Migration and Labor Question Today: Imperialism, Unequal Development, and http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/

2. Forced Migration,”Monthly Review 64, no. 2 (June 2011)

3. New York Times, 6/24/15

4. http://www.forcedmigration.org/

5. http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175959/tomgram%3A_pepe_escobar,_inside_china's_%22new_normal%22/

6. Harsha Walia, https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/the-making-of-the-migration-crisis/, 6/20/15

7. Michael Klare http://www.opednews.com/articles/Michael-Klare-Post-Apocal-by-Tom-Engelhardt-120807- 134.html,

8. David Guttierez http://www.nps.gov/history/heritageinitiatives/latino/latinothemestudy/immigration.htm

9. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/report/2014/10/23/59040/the-facts-on-immigration-today-3

10. Washington Post, 4/21/14

11. Bureau Labor Statistics, Sept 23,2014, Economic Releases, Table 3 at bls.gov

12. Tanya Golash-Boza, http://www.scribd.com/doc/28994034/The-Immigration-Industrial-Complex-Why-We-Enforce-Immigration-Policies-Destined-to-Fail-Read-Version-above-for-better-quality-http-www-scribd-c

13. Justin Akers Chacón, http://sandiegofreepress.org/2014/07/central-american-refugee-children-forced-on-a-dangerous-journey/

14. http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/other-side-fence-changing-dynamics-migration-americas

15. http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/400-Haitians-Deported-from-Dominican-Republic-in-September-20150913-0019.html

16. Nick Turse, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/us-military-bases-africa?page=1

17. The Guardian, 1/16/15

18. The Economist, 3/31/14

19. Anthony Watts, http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/12/climate-change-blamed-for-dead-trees-in-africa/

20 Mnar Muhawesh, http://www.mintpressnews.com/migrant-crisis-syria-war-fueled-by-competing-gas-pipelines/209294/

21. http://al-awda.org/learn-more/faqs-about-palestinian-refugees/

22. http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/page?page=49e487cd6&submit=GO

23. http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/refugees

24. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/the- great-divide-books-dalrymple

25. Ali, Tariq, The Duel –Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, Scribner, New York, 2008, pp 29-34].

26. Daniel Naujoks, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/emigration-immigration-and-diaspora-relations-india,

27. Huma Yusuf, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/world/90118/pakistan-terrorism-emigration-ISI,