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More Cannon Fodder for Pentagon Obama ‘Frees’ Women for Imperialist War
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- 30 January 2013 75 hits
Liberals are celebrating President Barack Obama’s lifting of the ban on women in combat as a “triumph for equality” (New York Times editorial, 1/25/13). But the reality is just the opposite. Obama’s move is actually aimed at strengthening U.S. imperialism, which depends for its existence on racist and sexist exploitation and Pentagon-planned mass murder. Putting women on the front lines expands the war-makers’ supply of working-class cannon fodder. And it builds nationalistic support for a war machine that now pretends — as the Times deceitfully claims — to honor “fairness and equal opportunity.”
The U.S. ruling class wants people to buy the illusion that capitalism can defeat sexism. In fact, capitalism is the root cause of sexism. The interconnection between the two can be seen on several levels:
Given the fact that 75 percent of the victims of U.S. imperialist wars are civilians, women in combat — soon to be full-fledged members of the war machine — will take a lead role in the mass killing and brutalization of other women. Exhibit A is ex-General Janis Karpinski, the first woman to lead U.S. troops in a combat zone. She was the commander of 17 Iraqi prisons, including the infamous Abu Ghraib, where both female and male prisoners were routinely tortured and abused by male and female soldiers.
The rulers are using Obama’s initiative to mask the historical truth that women are victimized by the special oppression of capitalism. Women are disproportionately among the most poverty-stricken workers. They generally get paid lower wages — or none at all in raising children as the next generation of future workers for the bosses to exploit. Bill Clinton’s vicious welfare reform threw hundreds of thousands of women and their children into poverty and homelessness.
Black, Latino and Asian women suffer from triple oppression: as workers, as women and as victims of racist discrimination. These workers are mercilessly exploited and even burnt alive in the garment factories of Bangladesh (see pag 8).
Capitalist culture degrades women as sexual objects and leads to violent physical attacks and sexual harassment in the streets, on the job and in the home. Masses of women in India are taking to the streets to fight capitalist culture and its justification of rape in what the U.S. media refers to as “the world’s largest democracy.”
But the U.S. military is no slouch itself when it comes to rape. Obama’s War Secretary, Leon Panetta, admitted that one in three women “will experience sexual assault” during their stint in the armed forces (British Guardian, 1/24). Given that 200,000 women are on active duty, the number of victims would exceed sixty thousand.
These attacks on women would be no isolated incidents. They are a symptom of the intrinstic sexism in the military, which stems from the sexist nature of capitalism — a system breeding the oppression of women and the gendered division of workers. Workers, women and men, must fight these assults with a vision to win all workers to communism.
Equal Opportunity Genocide
Obama’s ploy supports the capitalist myth that integrating the power structure is progressive. Again, the opposite is true. Ending the combat exclusion will enable Annapolis- and West Point-trained female officers to rise higher in missions for mass killing. In the future, women will command more than fighter jets. They will run entire genocidal invasions on behalf of U.S. imperialism.
Obama’s apologists assert that putting more women in charge will somehow curb rampant sexual assaults within the ranks: “Allowing women to get the benefits of serving in combat positions…might make things better because it will mean more women at the top of the military, and that, inevitably, will mean more attention to women’s issues” (NYT, 1/24/13). But at its core, the military’s rape scandal stems from its own glorification of violence and the profit system’s exploitation and degradation of women in general.
Contrast Obama’s “triumph for equality” for women with his military surge in Afghanistan and his use of remote-control drone warfare, together responsible for the deaths of hundreds — if not thousands — of women and their children. Weigh it against Obama’s mass detention and record deportation of undocumented women, ripping them away from their children. This is fascism in action, and women are among its most vulnerable targets.
Pentagon Troop Shortage? Enter Women
The continuing instability in Iraq and Afghanistan reveals that U.S. forces, however lethal, are not yet large enough to control even mid-sized countries. U.S. rulers hope that widening women’s combat roles will open the door to bringing back the draft — this time for both sexes. “The Pentagon’s decision…is expected to reopen a legal debate: Should women have to register with the government so it knows where to find them in the event of a new draft?” (Washington Post, 1/27/13).
Liberal Congressman Charles Rangel of Harlem is once again touting his Universal National Service Act, “known as the ‘draft’ bill, which requires all men and women between ages 18 and 25 to give two years of service in any capacity that promotes our national defense” (CNN, 1/ 26/13).
With respect to current and future foes, U.S. rulers have technologically superior arms but numerically insufficient armies. The administrations of Clinton, Obama and the two Bushes killed millions of Iraqis and Afghans with invasions and sanctions. But in the absence of a full-blown U.S. occupation, Iraq’s Iran-leaning Maliki regime is hindering what Exxon Mobil views as its right to dominate the country’s oil production. And as Taliban attacks mount in Afghanistan amid a dwindling U.S. presence, the U.S.-backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas super-pipeline remains a pipedream.
Economic Draft Won’t Cut It
Less than 1 percent of the U.S. population — mostly unemployed youth unable to find jobs — now “volunteers” for service. U.S. rulers know that confronting Iran and planning for a potential world war with China will require vastly greater numbers of recruits. Obama & Co. are not counting on legions of newly empowered GI Janes to willingly rush to imperialism’s rescue. What they’re really planning is a doubling of the draft pool, an item long on the bosses’ agenda. General Willard Paul, the Army’s World War II manpower czar, foresaw a global postwar clash between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In 1947 he asked Congress to create a permanent women’s military corps in all service branches: “We must have the full use of the total personnel of the nation.”
Yes, working-class women do belong in combat — when the fight is against capitalism. Millions of heroic women, both communist-inspired Soviet soldiers and underground partisans across Europe, helped crush Hitler’s Nazis. Millions more women were essential to the Chinese communists’ fight against the Japanese fascists and the Vietnamese defeat of the U.S. invasion. Though the communist parties of these periods had weaknesses in both theory and practice that eventually led them to restore capitalism, these women’s titanic achievements still stand as a beacon for workers throughout the world.
A Mass Party for Working-Class Emancipation
Our struggle today is not against our class sisters and brothers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran or China, whom Obama and the bosses behind him want us to slaughter. Instead, our fight must be waged against the profiteers and politicians who would lead us into killing and dying. Their goal is to maintain their profit system and dominate the world’s resources. The principal means to their end is the exploitation of the world’s workers, women and men both.
In working toward the inevitably violent overthrow of the war-for-profit ruling class, the Progressive Labor Party strives for the absolute equality of women and men. Once capitalism is destroyed and replaced by a communist society, run by and for the working class, we will be able to eliminate the sexism and racism that stem from the profit system. Production and distribution according to need — without bosses and their exploitation — will achieve a true “triumph of equality.”
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Back the Bus Strikers! Fight for Job Security vs. Billionaire Mayor
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- 30 January 2013 80 hits
NEW YORK CITY, January 25 — “We are not going to back down or give up! We will see this thing through to the end!” exclaimed a striker as school bus drivers and matrons continued to brave the freezing cold on the picket lines. The spirit and militancy of the workers are unmistakable. They see clearly what they’re up against and are determined to stand up to billionaire Mayor Bloomberg and the bosses who are trying to void the job security provisions in their contract, won by a strike in the 1970s. They hail from all over the world, including Latin America, the Caribbean and Europe. Many have a deep understanding that workers need to fight back.
Almost every worker on the picket line will agree that while they might have seen a strike as a last resort, now that it’s on, they’re in it to win it! At one of the major sites, cars and trucks are honking all day in support as workers from local stores brought coffee to the workers. The weather has become dangerously cold, but the struggle continues!
The Bosses’ Media Lies
The media, including the liberal New York Times, has vilified them, portraying them as lazy or uncaring. A Times editorial (1/22) applauded Bloomberg’s declaration “that the next round of contracts…will not include job security,” which the billion-dollar Times corporation says is a good thing. The NY Post ran a front-page article attacking the strikers with the headline “BUS TARDS!” They’ve been bashing the strikers by spreading a big lie that “greedy” union workers cause the big difference in cost between workers here and those in other cities. While there may be differences in pay rates, the really big difference in cost results from the “no-bid” contracts billionaire Bloomberg has handed out to “connected” bus companies. These contracts often serve only a few students and cost the city more.
Bloomberg is giving a weekend crash course to train scabs to break the strike. He is ready to sacrifice safety by replacing drivers and matrons with decades of experience in helping children with special needs.
The other big lie is that these workers don’t care about the students. Nothing could be farther from the truth! In fact, much of the discussion on the line is about how various students are doing.
PLP Welcome Here
PLP members have been greeted enthusiastically from the strike’s first day when a group of high school teachers and students marched up to the picket line chanting, “Same Struggle, Same Fight! Workers and Students must Unite!” Each time we joined the line, the strikers cheered our group for the solidarity we brought to them. We were quickly made to feel welcome by this international, multiracial group of men and women who, in many instances, have worked for decades in the student transport industry.
As the strikers clapped for us, we in turn clapped for them and told them their willingness to fight back helped all workers, ourselves included. This led to a good discussion of the current period. Those of us who are retired pointed out that the bosses, especially Governor Cuomo, have been threatening to get rid of pensions, so eventually we’ll all be under the gun. In small groups and in one-to-one discussions, we all agreed that throughout the U.S. there’s a general attack by bosses on our class.
We’ve distributed CHALLENGE each day that we picket and asked the workers what they thought we should write about the strike in upcoming editions. Many were angry about attacks on them by the media and politicians. They said reporters came to do interviews but turned off their tape recorders when strikers didn’t say what the reporters wanted to hear. One worker was furious that billionaire Bloomberg — who violated the term-limits law to buy a third term — was saying the strike was illegal. We’ve had lots of opportunities to discuss communism and why we think class struggle is a necessity but that revolution is what all workers need worldwide.
Support the Strike; Stop the Scabs!
Many strikers are awaiting a decision by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to see what direction the strike might take. But, of course, the NLRB is notorious for taking the bosses’ side.
We in PLP call on the entire international working class — union members, employed and unemployed, and students — to support these workers by raising money, getting support resolutions passed in their organizations, joining the picket lines, bringing food and coffee to the strikers and, most important, bringing revolutionary communist ideas to the struggle.
BROOKLYN, NY, January 18 — This past weekend, teachers and students gathered together for PL’s annual winter Communist School. The purpose of the School is to help current and future members understand how PLP can fight against capitalism to win a better world.
On Friday, the first day of the School, participants viewed a screening of “The Central Park Five,” a film about racist police intimidation and arrest. It documents the story of five black teenagers who were falsely arrested for raping a white woman in 1989. Although there was not a shred of evidence against them, the cops used physical and psyschological abuse and the prosecution pushed through with false testimony and threw the kids in jail.
‘Can the Police Really Do This?’
One of the Central Park Five, Yusef Salaam, was there to answer questions regarding his trial and time in jail. Most of the students expressed shock and disbelief at the film. A student from Brooklyn Technical High School asked “is this really possible? Can the police really do this?” The reality of racist policing came as a surprise to most of the students, who have not had to come face-to-face with the cops just yet as the hundreds of thousands of stop-and-frisk victims of police terror have.
Shantel Davis’s family was also at the screening. The tragedy of this young woman, who was murdered by the police on June 14, 2012, is ultimately a continuation of the ordeal brother Salaam went through 24 years ago. The film exposes the truth about how the police function in our society: a force that keeps the working class — particularly black, Latino, and immigrant youth — submissive and docile. As part of our anti-police murder campaign, this film was crucial in bringing students to our side.
The next day we gathered for a study group on the state of public education under capitalism today. Students and teachers alike shared stories about layoffs and cuts, the harms of standardized testing and the massive policing of our schools. We discussed how testing acted as an obstacle for working-class students on the way to a high school diploma. One student mentioned that he’s failed the trigonometry exam, putting his graduation in jeopardy even though he has already been accepted to a four-year university. Another student explained that while she understands the material she’s taught, the pressure and time constraints of the tests don’t allow her to express that.
The Blame Game
Standardized testing is a rulers’ tool to use in the blame game. “Poor test scores” are the cause of student failures, teacher firings and school closings. When these events happen, everyone starts pointing fingers at each other. The parents turn against the teachers, blaming them for not putting enough effort or not teaching the kids correctly. Teachers are convinced parents are to blame, citing problems at home for widespread letdowns. This keeps the students, teachers and parents at odds with each other, making it more difficult to fight back when their school goes on the chopping block.
Standardized testing also acts as a way to maintain ideological control of the student body. The bosses push their ideology with every exam they publish, complete with nationalism, racism and anti-communism. Events such as Nat Turner’s slave rebellion are never mentioned. The complex history surrounding World War II is boiled down to the U.S. and its allies liberating Europe, and the Russian winter beating the Nazis. The truth that the Soviet Red Army lost tens of millions to smash the fascists is never mentioned. Teachers often have to choose between teaching the bosses’ lies or teaching reality at the risk of having their students fail the exams.
School to Prison Pipeline
We also discussed the prison pipeline many of our schools have become. The number of men and women incarcerated in the U.S. has risen to 2,400,000. The sight of dozens of cops in school lobbies, metal detectors, and kids in handcuffs are a growing sight all over NYC, where there are 5,200 School Safety Agents alone.
The purpose of the School is not only to help teachers and students understand our current situation, but also provide an image of where we communists want to take education. To do this, the participants read a report by William H. Chamberlain, a journalist working in Moscow in the 1930s, on the state of Soviet education. The differences in teaching style, organization and form were striking. In Moscow, “…the pupils receive tasks in each subject, requiring from a week to a month for completion. They are then left free to carry out these tasks as they see fit… Sometimes the teacher was in the room, sometimes not, but the students were left almost entirely to their own resources.” Multiple-choice tests were absent from Soviet schools, for the educators then knew that “marks are proverbially an unreliable gauge of students’ ability” and it was more important to develop a student’s critical thinking, interests and personality rather than hammer in the rules of grammar and punctuation.
Education was not limited to the schoolhouse either. Classes would be conducted in factories, in peasant collectives, in office buildings. In the Soviet Union, the working class received a quality education. Despite all the capitalist ideas within socialism that prevented it from ever advancing to communism, all young people were entitled to a thorough education.
The Soviet’s anti-sexist, anti-racist education system created tens of thousands of chemists, doctors, engineers, and anti-fascist soldiers, all of whom were also trained in politics, philosophy and literature. The development of workers who can not only read, write and calculate, but also analyze and critique for the benefit of society as a whole, is the foundation of communism. That’s the world PLP is fighting for. Join Us!
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Bosses’ Racist Legal System Gun Aimed at Working Class
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- 30 January 2013 75 hits
A Brooklyn, NY church held a forum on the issues related to the mass incarceration of black and Latino youth and workers. It was a follow-up to reading Michelle Alexander’s widely read book The New Jim Crow. Over 100 people heard a panel of community leaders and activists present their experiences with the realities of this systematic, racist attack on black and Latino communities.
In short, with the excuse of a “war on drugs,” the bosses set in place a system of what seems like “colorblind” laws such as the Rockefeller Drug Laws, mandatory sentencing, and policing methods like Stop-and-Frisk and community policing. But, because these policing tactics are carried out almost exclusively in black and Latin communities, the racist outcome is many thousands of people being terrorized, arrested and fed into the criminal justice system.
Once in the system, the racist application of the Rockefeller Laws, mandatory sentencing and the unchallenged discretion of the prosecutor, hand most of these defendants outrageous prison terms. In many cases, these are minor infractions for which a white person wouldn’t even get a reprimand.
A panelist that helps felons re-establish their lives after prison discussed the hardships encountered after release. The stigma of “felon,” the new codeword for race identity, results in a lifetime of racist discrimination. Employers, landlords, lending agencies and government programs use the “felon” status to deny jobs, housing, loans and government assistance. How can anyone survive like this? It’s no wonder 66 percent of ex-felons return to jail within three years.
Another panelist, a Harlem woman, described numerous acts of police harassment and brutality. Many residents, especially males, are repeatedly harassed by Stop-and-Frisk tactics. One heinous police action forced children in a public play area to stand line-up style as a bright light was shined in their eyes so that a pick-pocket victim might recognize the criminal. This would never happen or be tolerated in more affluent areas.
Why is this happening? Who benefits? Some panelists answered: Prisons are big business. In some places, prisons are the biggest or only employer in economically strapped towns. Industries use prison labor and pay them almost nothing, thus making bigger profits. The federal government gives law enforcement agencies military equipment and financial incentives to fight the “drug war” in the inner cities; the more they arrest, the more they get, including confiscated stuff.
All this is true, but one panelist hit it home: capitalism needs class distinctions and segregation to control the working class; to keep the working class from uniting and fighting back. The bosses need scapegoats like black and Latino youth and undocumented immigrants to blame for the misery we suffer under capitalism. The bosses need unemployed workers to keep the wages of all workers down.
Several reform solutions were offered, like putting more money into education, job training, housing, better mental health services and childhood intervention. But we’ve heard this before. These reforms are not the solution. We need to work for multiracial unity in the working class, build PLP and build for revolution to throw off the chains of capitalism.
NEW YORK CITY, January 16 — “Red Cross, Double Cross. Red Cross, Double Cross” chanted Sandy survivors and supporters, including Progressive Labor Party members and friends, as they picketed the New York City headquarters of the Red Cross for the second time. Five weeks ago, Far Rockaway evacuees whom we had met at a shelter had been placed in Manhattan and Queens hotels with no funds for food, clothes, or other supplies. After demonstrating at the Red Cross, assistance was obtained for one month. Now it had run out and people were desperate.
In all its ads to raise money, the Red Cross claims to help Sandy survivors. In reality very little of the money raised goes to help the working-class victims and survivors. Much of the money remains in the Red Cross coffers and pays the salaries and perks of administrators. One of the former heads of the Red Cross is Elizabeth Dole, wife of former U.S. presidential contender Bob Dole.
During our action, several Red Cross spokespeople told us no more aid would be forthcoming. “We already helped you enough, we don’t do housing,” they said. However, after this hard-hearted statement showed up on several TV stations, the red-faced Red Cross had second thoughts, and some victims did begin receiving monetary and housing aid.
Two and a half months after the devastation caused by Sandy, there are still at least 3,500 families in hotels in New York and New Jersey and 800 single adults living in fleabag hotels and single room occupancies. FEMA, New York State, New York City, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and other “non-profit” agencies are still shuffling them like a deck of used cards among shelters, hotels and motels. Families are being promised apartments in City Housing, but none have yet been moved. Low-income apartments listed on FEMA’s website turn out not to be available to FEMA applicants.
The Sandy survivors we know and their children are now in hotels and motels in Queens and Manhattan. They have been promised a) assistance in finding affordable housing and medical care, since they are unable to get to their regular medical facility, b) accessible schools for their children, and c) financial assistance and case workers to help them navigate through the myriad of red tape.
They have received promise after promise, nearly all of which have proven meaningless. Instead the politicians and “non-profits” are paying hundreds of dollars per night per family for one hotel room. This benefits the corporate hotel owners who can keep their hotels full and the money flowing even when the tourists are not there. Of course there are NO cooking facilities in these rooms. In most cases even the normal microwaves and refrigerators are removed before the survivors are allowed into the rooms. Therefore, all food must be bought ready-to-eat which, especially in midtown Manhattan, is impossible on any working-class income.
But these survivors and their friends are uniting and fighting back. This demonstration at the Red Cross was part of an ongoing struggle, including actions at FEMA and other government offices. We must unite the struggles of Sandy survivors, striking school bus drivers and matrons and all members of the working class. The politicians and the billionaires they serve are terrified of our unity.. They use racism, sexism, religion, and nationalism to keep us divided. We, the working class, are many and when united we are strong. With our unity we can continue our struggles. More importantly, we can build a revolution to destroy this entire system of capitalism where the handful of billionaires live off our blood, sweat and tears. We can build a communist world of collectivity and sharing run by the working class.
