PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — The struggle of healthcare union workers in the General Hospital proves that capitalism can’t provide healthcare for the working class. This hospital is the only one in the country open to the working class. The workers in this hospital make miserable wages of $100-$125 monthly. That’s less than the country’s minimum wage!

To add insult to injury, the services this hospital provides do not meet the patients’ needs. Patients must pay before receiving any medical care. The few who are able to pay can’t even be treated properly because medical equipment is “borrowed” by the doctors for use in their own private practices.

The government ignores this hospital because the rich doesn’t use it; they go to private hospitals. The government does not provide the needed budget. Most of the budget goes to the training and maintaining of the national police who repress workers’ anger about their situation. In fact, despite the high numbers of residents that have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder due to the earthquake, only one percent of the budget funds mental care services. That is less than $10,000 for the whole country! 

The process to privatize this hospital has begun, similar to the privatization of schools that occurred in the 19^th century. The government began giving the public schools’ money to the Catholic Church so it could open the “Faith and Happiness” schools. This served to keep much of the working class illiterate in the same way privatizing the General Hospital will sentence more workers to death.

Workers at this hospital, along with university students, have organized protests, sit-ins, and press conferences to condemn the bosses’ neglect of this hospital.  This class struggle is important and courageous, given the extreme fascist repression and racism they face. This struggle also unmasks President Martelly’s unkept promises made during the election campaign to give healthcare to all, similar to Obama’s promises to extend healthcare to all.

During this struggle, the Health Minister stepped down and the hospital director was transferred to another hospital so that the workers would have a hard time directing their anger at someone specific and therefore deflating their struggle.

PLP brought a communist analysis to all of these struggles. We have exposed the unions’ misleadership of not fighting for the unity of these hospital workers with their patients. This has  allowed the bosses to continue dividing our class by not confronting the lies they push when they blame the union for all of the hospital’s problems.

 We have distributed Defi (CHALLENGE in Kreyòl) and exposed how the union misleadership helps the bosses make more profits off the workers. We have explained that capitalism, a system of profits, will never give our class the healthcare we need. Only under communism, a system run by workers to meet the needs of all workers, without bosses, their state and inequality, will we free ourselves from the murderous chains of this system.

The intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry between U.S. rulers and those of China, Russia, Japan and the European Union confronts the U.S. with a crisis both domestically and internationally. Ever fiercer global competition for markets, resources and trade routes is driving down U.S. profit rates. To protect and defend those profits, the capitalists’ lifeblood, they will inevitably wage a broader war. 

Obama’s value to U.S. capitalists lies in his readiness to expand U.S.-run military operations toward this goal.  Equally important is his ability to mislead and pacify workers by posing as a lesser evil than the Republicans. 

Obama deployed an additional 30,000 GIs in Afghanistan. He has launched death-raining drones over Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. He invaded Libya behind a NATO smokescreen. He maintains thousands of mercenaries in Iraq. His Army Special Forces assassinate U.S. enemies, including Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s leadership, all of whom the CIA trained in its 1980s war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. On the high seas, the U.S. Navy stalks and kills teenage pirates who were driven there by imperialists dumping toxic waste in their fishing waters, ruining their livelihood.

Obama has based U.S. Marines in Australia as a warning to China’s bosses over a pending contest for oil beneath the South China Sea. And his $60 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia fuel the U.S.’s proxy war with Iran being played out over Syria as the Pentagon arms its junior allies in the Middle East.

Mass-Murdering Mouthpieces Front for Obama

Accordingly, Obama’s ruling-class handlers are making war the cornerstone of his reelection bid. “Obama is preparing to emphasize an issue that few Democratic candidates have embraced in the past: national security” (New York Times, 4/7/12). Obama’s gang has recruited mass murderers from the Bill Clinton era as its ministers of propaganda: “In the coming weeks, Obama advisers plan to release a list of national security ‘surrogates’ — high-profile Democrats like former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Wesley Clark, a retired general — who will write newspaper op-ed articles, give speeches and take Mr. Romney to task every time he opens his mouth about foreign policy” (NYT, 4/7/12).

Albright was challenged on “Sixty Minutes” over her boss Clinton’s eight-year sanction policy denying food and medicine and destroying water purification facilities that killed a half-million Iraqi children. She replied, “We think the price is worth it.” NATO chief Clark, meanwhile, headed Clinton’s 1999 Kosovo blitzkrieg that wiped out thousands of civilians.

The capitalists’ wars by definition perpetrate mass murder. The Pentagon trains GIs in racist demonization of Arabs and Muslim workers to be better able to win them to become indiscriminate killers. A thousand U.S. military bases encircle the globe, the bosses’ springboard for raining racist terror on the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and Latin America. The imperialists’ slaughter of workers around the world is inextricably linked to racist murders within the U.S. It gave a blank check to George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, who fatally shot Trayvon Martin; to the shooters who mowed down three people in the black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma; to the KKKops in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and other major U.S. cities. 

Obama v. Romney: How Best to Serve U.S. Imperialism?

The shouting match between two sets of war criminals, the ones advising Obama and those behind Republican challenger Mitt Romney, has already begun. In late March, Obama was overheard promising Russian president Medvedev “more flexibility” after the November elections in talks on nuclear weapons. Romney & Co. pounced on the chance to question Obama’s militarism in National Interest magazine. Calling Obama’s Iraqi and Afghan military drawdowns “premature,” they criticized Obama for betraying weakness not only to Russia but to Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. 

The president’s brain trust fired back in a letter in Foreign Policy magazine to re-establish Obama’s credentials as warmaker-in-chief. They declared that he was indeed prepared to use “military action, to prevent the Iranian regime from obtaining a nuclear weapon.” 

The Obama bunch then took Romney to task for calling Russia “our number one geopolitical foe.” They lectured him like a schoolchild for forgetting growing archrival China: “Do you believe there are other entities that pose greater challenges to American economic and strategic interests in the 21st century?” Even more tellingly, they likened Romney to the ineffectual George W. Bush and his go-it-alone approach to intensifying worldwide conflict without seeking allies and rubber stamps from the United Nations.

Regardless of Romney’s misstep in ranking the U.S. rulers’ lengthening list of geopolitical foes, he is clearly calling for a major U.S. naval buildup in the Pacific. But even though Romney’s camp consists of diehard imperialists who serve top contributors like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, it nevertheless disagrees with Obama on two big points on war mobilization: allies and taxes. A closer look at the signers of the two camps’ position papers suggests a replay of the policy divide between the two very different U.S.-led wars in Iraq: the on-the-cheap, go-it-alone invasion model of 2003, favored by tax-cutting Romney, versus the spare-no-expense force advanced by Chief of Staff Colin Powell under George H.W. Bush in the 1991 ouster of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

Highlighting Romney’s list of signatories are alumni of the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century: Eliot Cohen, Robert Kagan, Dov Zakheim. They belong to the U.S. capitalist faction that cooked up the 2003 invasion under George W. Bush. That war’s occupation force numbered less than 200,000 and represented only four nations — 148,000 from the U.S.; 45,000 from the United Kingdom; 2,000 from Australia; and 194 from Poland. As neo-con War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at the time, “You fight with the army you have.” Today these on-the-cheap hawks favor letting Israel bomb Iran.

Obama’s endorsers, on the other hand, embrace Powell’s “broad coalition, wielding overwhelming force” a strategy that required higher taxes for the first Gulf War genocide. The Pentagon coordinated 750,000 troops from 34 nations to oust Saddam’s forces from Kuwait, though it could not get the green light — or the financing — to unleash this force to invade and occupy Iraq.

The present pro-Obama supporters hail mainly from the ultra-militarist Center for a New American Security (CNAS), which is advised by serving officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard. Obama’s defense undersecretary and CNAS founder, Michele Flournoy, was the first to sign the letter to Foreign Policy. Virtually, all the rest have ties to the CNAS. The group’s biggest current project is to enlist India’s billion-plus population in a pro-U.S. military alliance against China.

In order to mount the widespread wars contemplated by U.S. imperialists to protect their worldwide interests in energy and minerals, they will need higher taxes to be drawn from both the super-rich and the working class. That’s the reason for the recent massive cuts in budgets for schools, health care, social services and wages — federal, state and local.

Turn Obama’s War Against Workers into A War Against Capitalism

Obama’s high-priced militarization requires a war on U.S. workers. It’s the primary reason for the job cuts and wage freezes against hundreds of thousands of government employees and teachers, and the looming cuts of Medicare and Medicaid. The ruling imperialists’ war plans leave next to no funding to help tens of millions of unemployed, plunging them into poverty. And there’s a direct link between the Obama camp’s bloody international ambitions and the enforcement of racist terror against black, Latino and immigrant workers. By intimidating and super-exploiting these groups, the capitalists can force white workers to accept lower wages and health benefits. And by dividing groups of workers, the rulers also forestall rebellions against their rising fascism.

So the path is clear for communists in the Progressive Labor Party, our friends in the shops and unions, in the schools and on the campuses, in the churches and the communities, and especially among the soldiers, and among all militant anti-racist workers and youth: Organize and lead class struggle in all areas where our class is under attack, in every city and country where PLP has a base.

Our participation in these struggles will enable us to carry out our most crucial task: to win masses of workers and youth to understand that our only way out of the hellish profit system is a communist revolution. Our aim is a society run by and for the working class, the producers of all value. Building our Party is therefore the order of the day.

Join PLP and march on May Day!

BROOKLYN, NY, April 6 — “Who are we? Trayvon!” was chanted repeatedly by students and teachers picketing the John Jay campus here protesting the racist murder of black teenager Trayvon Martin. This was among the many actions angry high school students and teachers organized as news of his death reached the campus. As many of the black and Latino students have been targets of previous racist attacks, we were able to sympathize with Trayvon’s parents. No one could defend killer Zimmerman as it became clear that racism was a major cause of this murder.

The student government, the debate team and the school newspaper confronted racism, with teachers conducting lessons on the case; students making and distributing posters throughout the campus’s four schools; announcements were made in classes and posted on Facebook calling on students to a picket line outside the school.

Some principals were supportive but others opposed this action, threatening their students by holding assemblies warning them about participating. One black principal released her students early out of fear.

The original idea was to stand outside of the school and lock hands in Trayvon’s memory. But the protest flowed naturally from previous picket lines protesting the segregation involving the new school the Department of Education introduced into our building (see 2011 CHALLENGES). Racist attacks created by the capitalist system are affecting our lives every day so we must stand together and fight the divisions it heaped upon us and on the working class.

Even though this was a half day, students showed commitment by coming to school, creating posters and encouraging their peers to join the protest. This united the school community which was fighting not only for justice in  Trayvon’s case, but against racism in general as well.

When we chanted back and forth in front of the school, the cops surrounded us, but the students didn’t back down, making it clear what we think of their racist tactics. Students wore black hoodies in memory of Trayvon, while knowing that Trayvon is not the only victim of racism in the class struggle. The action caught the attention of the neighborhood. Some encouraged and congratulated us for our courage while others crossed the street to avoid us.

We’re aware that such racist attacks could happen to any of us; we all go to a school in a predominately white, middle-class, neighborhood. However, the more we fight such racist attacks the more we’re able to open people’s eyes and show them how these attacks are caused by the system we all must fight against.

But this will not stop here. We’re continuing to encourage our classmates to come to rallies and protest the racism in all the class struggles facing us every day. Attending the May Day march on April 28 is a great way to continue this fight.

ORANGE COUNTY, NEW JERSEY, March 31 — “Bail out the people, not the banks!” 

”You can’t rob the bank, but the bank can rob you!” 

“Don’t evict  Susie Johnson: Shame, shame, shame!”  

These were just some of the vigorous chants heard on a quiet street in Orange, NJ when 35 committed protesters managed to block the eviction of an 80-year-old woman who has been a victim of predatory lending. The sheriff’s deputies were powerless to carry out their appointed task of removing this elderly woman, suffering from diabetes and incipient Alzheimer’s disease, from her little house.  

The financial records of Mrs. Johnson’s mortgage were “lost” in 2004.  She asked again and again to have the paperwork restored to her. Without her being informed, her mortgage was then bundled and moved from bank to bank. Although she obtained a reverse mortgage, this was snatched from her (that’s right — she was not allowed to make payments on it!) and sold by Wells Fargo to Chase. Mrs. Johnson was informed a year ago that she was being evicted for nonpayment.

Sexist, Racist Eviction

These kinds of scams are depriving millions of people in the U.S. of their homes. The pattern of predatory lending is especially sexist and racist: black women are five times as likely to have been offered predatory loan contracts than equivalent white men with identical financial profiles.  This is not to say that most white men — other than those at the top — are benefiting from the system either.

The protesters outside Mrs. Johnson’s house came from a range of organizations participating in the New Jersey “Coalition for jobs, peace, justice, and equality.” Various labor unions, tenants’ rights organizations, anti-foreclosure groups, women’s organizations, and civil rights groups are working together around a series of demands seeking to protect the working class — especially in urban centers — from the ravages of the current financial situation. There is definitely no end to the “recession” in Newark and its nearby suburbs. 

The coalition displays a number of the weaknesses and contradictions that accompany liberal formations.  While people generally distrust the government, there are plenty of illusions that a “good sheriff” will not carry out his/her duties, if enough popular pressure is applied. 

The “banks” tend to be separated out from the rest of the capitalist system. But the people in the coalition are a multiracial group of committed activists. When one speaker spoke about the long-term as well as immediate goals of our movement — including establishing a social system whose purpose is to produce fully realized human beings rather than profits — she received warm applause. 

PL’ers need to root themselves in movements like this one in New Jersey, to participate in the struggle for immediate gains, to make friends, to build a movement that can target capitalism as the “real enemy” of the great majority of the world’s people.