“If you’re looking for a bumper sticker to sum up how President Obama has handled what we inherited, it’s pretty simple: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” — Vice-President Joseph Biden, April 26.
Biden’s boasting of his boss’s supposed triumphs shouldn’t lure a single worker to the polls.
Murderer bin Laden is dead. But Obama’s war crusade on behalf of U.S. imperialism is killing millions of our sisters and brothers in widening U.S. war zones, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Africa. And preparations for armed conflict with China’s ruling class — a foe far deadlier than al Qaeda, the Taliban, or Saddam Hussein’s army — looms large on the bosses’ 2013-2017 agenda, whether Obama or Romney is fronting for them.
As for General Motors, Obama’s usefulness to U.S. corporate rulers hinges on his ability to slash wages to boost profits. His auto bailout, in reality, is part of a massive assault on workers’ living standards, enforced by sky-high racist unemployment and sharpening racist police terror. At $14 per hour — what’s left after a 50 percent wage cut— newly hired GM workers can’t afford to buy the cars they make. This is the model the bosses hope to impose on the entire working class.
Think Tanks Say ‘Armed Clash’ with China Possible Soon
U.S. capitalists’ sole-superpower status depends as much on their shaky control of Middle East oil as it does on their still dominant war machine. Obama’s bogeyman bin Laden, though capable of killing civilians en masse, posed a relatively minor threat to fuel routes from Saudi Arabia to Asia. Bin Laden hailed from a billionaire but non-royal Saudi family that the king and his kin had systematically excluded from their trillion-dollar oil racket. He got his start and training in President Carter’s CIA-organized, $40-billion jihad to topple Russian control of Afghanistan.
But later, lacking an army, bin Laden resorted to terrorism. He hoped to seize for himself the Saudi-owned oil giant Aramco, ExxonMobil’s longtime primary energy source, by creating fundamentalist Islamic rule that stretched to Indonesia. While bin Laden and his jihadist thugs failed to wrest control of oil from U.S. hands, nuclear-armed China, with its growing blue-water navy, may well succeed.
Every move that Beijing’s naval strategists make is aimed at curtailing U.S. dominance of oil flowing from the Middle East to the Far East. China is building bases in Pakistan and Myanmar, as well as aircraft carriers, anti-ship missiles and submarines. It is assembling Pacific “island chains” designed to deny U.S. Navy access to the region.
Obama understands the threat. That’s why he’s putting 2,500 Marines in northern Australia. It’s why he has staged invasion exercises on Philippines beaches facing China, and why Hillary Clinton was sent on an Asia tour to reaffirm mutual “defense” pacts with U.S. allies.
All this saber-rattling suggests a near-term use of force by Obama (or Romney) while the Pentagon still holds an advantage in weaponry. The Council on Foreign Relations think tank, which speaks for the main Rockefeller-led faction of U.S. imperialists, entitled its latest (April 2012) “contingency planning memo” as “Armed Clashes in the South China Sea.” Tellingly, one “possible scenario” has Rockefeller-owned ExxonMobil itself serving as the tripwire: “[A]n attack by China on vessels or rigs operated by an American company exploring or drilling for hydrocarbons could quickly involve the United States, especially if American lives were endangered or lost. ExxonMobil has plans to conduct exploratory drilling off Vietnam, making this an existential danger.”
‘Warrior-in-Chief’ Obama Is No Roosevelt in Mobilizing for War
Mouthpieces for U.S. rulers speak openly of limited “clashes” with China but dare not mention too loudly any plan for all-out confrontation. Given their inadequate military ground force, they are far from being ready for World War III against China’s huge army. On the other hand, they can still compensate using their advantage in nuclear weapons in any all-out confrontation.
Despite 9/11, imperialist U.S. bosses have yet to put either their fellow capitalists or the working class on a wartime footing. Warren Buffett is still begging for World War II-style “shared sacrifice.” He advocates higher taxes on the rich to help pay for the Pentagon’s war machine, a measure that President Roosevelt so successfully organized in 1941, which helped end the Great Depression. Meanwhile, the New York Times printed a mixed assessment of war-maker Obama from another imperialist, Rockefeller-funded policy factory, the New America Foundation.
Under the headline “Warrior-in-Chief,” NAF director Peter Bergen wrote, “[Obama] has completely shaken the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ that provided a lens through which a generation of Democratic leaders viewed military action. Still, the American public and [mass media pundits]… continue to regard the president as….a negotiator, not a fighter” (4/29/12). In other words, hacks in his party embrace Obama as a war leader, but he has yet to win the mainly working-class rank and file or even so-called intellectuals to the need for economic “discipline” to prepare for looming large-scale war.
In the U.S., however, Obama has proved a reliable suppressor of the working class. He presides over the world’s largest racist prison system, which now holds 2.4 million inmates. The Obama administration has presided over more racist jailings, stop-and-frisk detentions, and immigrant deportations than Bush ever dreamed of.
Racist cops kill workers as freely as if slavery were still in force. Pay, pensions, health care, schools and housing are all on the chopping block. Racist police terror, compounded by massive unemployment and under-employment, acts as a brake on workers’ fight-back. But voting Obama in or out obviously can’t change anything for workers.
The electoral system established by the capitalists’ laws has always been a heads-they-win, tails-we-lose proposition for the working class. The rulers’ favorite ploy is to trick workers into voting for “the lesser evil.” The results: Lyndon Johnson expanded the Vietnam War; Jimmy Carter initiated the CIA-financed attack on Afghanistan; Bill Clinton killed a million Iraqis with sanctions and bombings; Obama attacked workers in the U.S. in the guise of saving their jobs. In each case, the bosses’ deception produced a Democratic victor who carried out the same policies advocated by the “hated Republicans.” Regardless of who gets the most votes, the bosses never lose.
Workers will get nowhere by kicking out one millionaire servant of the bosses or electing another. It’s the war-making, impoverishing, job-destroying racist profit system that has to go. Only the building of a mass, international Progressive Labor Party, woven into every class struggle, can achieve that goal. Only a communist revolution can erect a worker-run society without bosses and profits. Join us!
PAKISTAN — In almost every city and small town in Pakistan the working class aggressively held rallies, processions, meetings and seminars honoring May Day. Angry workers came out on the streets with red banners, chanting opposition to capitalism and the bosses. They were demanding jobs, increases in wages and social security and better working conditions. They exposed the fake leftist union leaders, saying, “The friends of the bosses are traitors to workers.”
Progressive Labor Party played a leading role, actively participating in the marches and distributing leaflets explaining how to get rid of capitalism and imperialist wars by organizing into an international, revolutionary communist PLP.
Workers chanted, “Down with capitalism”; “workers of the world unite”; “unite against exploitation, inequality and corrupt bosses”; “bosses are killers”; “east and west, PLP is the best”; “Asia is Red”; and “long live communist revolution.”
Speeches by PL’ers and friends exposed the capitalists and their puppet union leaders who are sabotaging the working-class movement. They’re preventing it from organizing against poverty, exploitation, price-hikes, unemployment, shortages of electricity and natural gas, corruption, injustice, target killing and terrorism. We accused these bosses’ puppets of misleading and terrorizing workers.
Bosses have their “own” union leaders, rigging union elections to elect their own puppets to leadership. To change the situation and to lead big struggles against the bosses we must be ready to face the state power used to rig this process. We must advance real communist leadership in the unions to lead militant struggles against the bosses as well as to expose capitalism as the source of our problems. Reforms cannot substitute for revolution. While winning leadership in the unions won’t change the capitalist system, it can effectively help win the working class into the PLP.
The Party also organized a march independently in one small town where young members and friends explained to workers and students that the bosses are trying to build a new party (as they’ve done in the past) to divert workers’ anger, spreading the illusion that this new boss-inspired party will bring change to the lives of poor people.
But voting for any electoral party, whether “leftist” or rightist, old or new, only protects the interests of capitalist bosses. We must fight to build the international revolutionary communist PLP to establish a communist society that will eliminate exploitation, poverty, racism and wars. No other party can do this.
DALLAS/ FT. WORTH, TEXAS — This year’s May Day was a huge success. Nearly 50 people attended PL’s annual May Day BBQ here. The highlight of the event was the speech-skit that young leaders and new members organized and performed in both English and Spanish. It got the audience engaged on a level not seen at previous May Day events.
We began with a reading of the history of May Day. The history was accompanied by images ranging from the first May Day to recent PL May Days.
Our program was performed as a four-act play.
In Act I, we demonstrated how capitalism exploits the working class. We used a pie and showed that if society was truly equal then the pie would be evenly divided among everyone — without the bosses. Young children in the audience participated and played the role of the workers. Once they got their even slice, the capitalist pig (who literally wore a pig mask) took the stage and declared that it was “time for my profits!” One by one the capitalist pig took their slices and left them with only crumbs.
In Act II, we showed the role of elections. The narrators proclaimed that capitalism is a dictatorship of the bosses which they hide with elections. Participants playing Romney and Obama entered. They shook hands with the capitalist pig who gave them money and U.S. flags. He then sent the politicians out into the crowd to steal cards that read “Medicaid” and “college readiness programs” from the audience. These social programs were added to the capitalist pig’s feeding trough. Obama and Romney told the crowd to blame immigrants and terrorists for the problems, but audience members yelled back “those are racist lies!”
In Act III we passed out posters among the crowd. Each one contained maps and graphics showing the history and impact of imperialism in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Audience members participated by reading about the horrors imperialism has brought to workers worldwide.
In the final Act we declared the need for a party to organize the working class to put an end to capitalism and imperialism once and for all. We declared that CHALLENGE is a weapon against the bosses’ racist and sexist ideas. We handed out CHALLENGES to the audience and asked them to join us in the fight against capitalism. At that moment dozens in the crowd stormed the stage and attacked Obama, Romney and the capitalist pig, beating them with rolled-up CHALLENGEs.
We ended our performance with a history and singing of the Internationale.
While not all of the people we invited could attend, we did give several new workers CHALLENGE as part of the process of inviting them to May Day. In all about 20 new workers received CHALLENGEs for the first time! In the weeks and months ahead we will continue to discuss the ideas of the Party with these new readers and bring the message of May Day to them!
LOS ANGELES, April 28 — “This was the best May Day in 30 years!” exclaimed a veteran comrade at the end of the Los Angeles May Day dinner. Over 100 people — workers, students, unemployed and retirees — came to Progressive Labor Party’s celebration of the international workers’ day. This great turnout reflected months of visiting students and workers in their homes and workplaces and involving them in class struggle.
The evening began with a comrade reviewing the history of May Day. She explained not just the beginnings of our workers’ holiday, but also how she became involved in PLP when a contingent of hundreds of janitors joined our May Day March in 2000. They were disillusioned in the sellout “Justice for Janitors” campaign by the Service Employees International Union. This point was especially significant, since the SEIU is once again mobilizing and misleading thousands of local janitors into campaigning for the Democratic Party in this year’s elections.
Following this inspirational speech came amazing original poetry, beautiful singing and speeches from workers involved in a variety of struggles. A bus system worker spoke alongside a student about fighting back against racist attacks on transit workers and riders.
Campus workers and students stood side-by-side while speaking of their struggle to end contracted work, or “in-sourcing,” and how they fought against the overt racism of union and campus misleaders. These workers, who are mainly Latina, have shown the determination of the working class and the power of unity and a fighting attitude, even though we understand that any reform victories will be yanked away as soon as the bosses have an opening.
An original poem explored the current world situation and the working class’s need for a new movement based on class consciousness and revolutionary communism. The world-situation speech reiterated these points, pointing out the continuing war in the Middle East as a product of capitalism. The speaker noted that the racist budget cuts in the L.A. school system have eliminated early childhood and adult education programs, and related them to the austerity measures destroying the lives of workers across Europe.
She condemned the racist killings of Trayvon Martin in Florida and Kendrake McDade by cops in Pasadena, California, along with the murder of an Iraqi woman in El Cajon, California, by unknown Nazi types. These killings reflect the capitalist system’s need for racism and brutality to divide and intimidate workers. The speech ended by contrasting the disempowering pseudo-democracy of capitalist elections with the empowering fight for communist revolution.
Our night ended with a rousing call for participation with the PLP May Day contingent in the May 1st Occupy March and the singing of the Internationale. A young participant stated that May Day was “pretty cool” and that the speakers “have a strong point that they want to get across to the world, and I would want to be a part of that.”
The May Day dinner was a huge success. The participation of these workers represents great potential for growth of our Party. Now comes the hard part: the long-term political work. By making communist politics primary in all of our struggles, we can convert this potential into new PL’ers and new communist leaders for the working class.
TEL-AVIV-JAFFA, ISRAEL-PALESTINE — Thousand of workers, dressed in red and carrying red flags and banners, marked May Day today in central Tel-Aviv-Jaffa with an energetic march. Slogans and chants called for a revolution. PL’ers in Palestine joined these workers and handed out leaflets explaining why a communist revolution is the only way forward.
We distributed CHALLENGEs and leaflets in Hebrew, which were welcomed by the marching workers who were open to our political analysis.
Phony leftists who are “revolutionary” in words and reactionary in actions dominated the bulk of the march. They called for “price controls,” “public housing” and “socialism,” essentially meaning to keep most of the capitalist system in place with minor reforms, or, at most, returning to 1950s Israeli state capitalism.
We, on the other hand, explained the need for an egalitarian communist system based on the principle of “from each according to commitment, to each according to need.”
When the march reached its rally point, however, two groups of anti-communists attacked us. The first one, a libertarian capitalist group raising the symbols of the U.S. Tea Party, attacked us only verbally by claiming that “communists, especially Stalin and Mao, killed 100 million people”; in reality, unlike the brazen lies these bosses’ spokesmen were spouting, Stalin’s Red Army saved the entire human race from the Nazi butchers in World War II; Mao transformed China from an imperialist colony to a workers’ state.
The second group of anti-communists, however, were far more violent. These were the Kahane gang (the Israeli equivalent of Neo-Nazis) who waved Israeli flags and shouted ultra-nationalist slogans. When the demonstrators, including ourselves, shouted them out, the riot cops stormed us — they wouldn’t touch their fascist buddies — detaining several leftists and beating them viciously.
All in all, while small in numbers, we made an impact on the May Day activities here. With hard work we will organize a much larger contingent next year.
