Brooklyn, NY, June 26 — “What do we want?! BENEFITS! If we don’t get it? SHUT’EM DOWN!”

Hundreds of black and Latino hospital workers militantly chanted, sang and danced in a picket line surrounding Brookdale Hospital CEO Bruce Flanz’s house in this rich, mostly white town, about an hour north of the hospital’s site in Brooklyn. The picket was organized by Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), a local representing over 260,000 mostly black and Latino hospital and home healthcare workers in New York City. The workers were responding to Brookdale’s violation of its labor contract, which has forced the 3,500 hospital workers onto a more expensive health insurance plan in a racist, sexist campaign to break worker militancy and, ultimately, decertify 1199.

When Progressive Labor Party members spoke with Brookdale workers as they arrived to board the buses that morning, we met with very positive reactions. Almost every worker took a CHALLENGE, and we came away with more than a half dozen contacts. Since then we have followed up with them to plan meetings. As some of our new friends later told us, several Brookdale workers took stacks of papers on the buses with them, distributed them all, and held discussions about the Brookdale article (CHALLENGE 6/6) on the bus trip there and back.

The picket around the CEO’s house was highly militant. At the sight of the CEO’s sprawling house, the racist contrast between the living conditions of Brookdale workers and the bosses was blatantly obvious. One disgusted worker, her young daughter with her, yelled, “We’re fighting just for this [contract] when these people live like this?” Another woman worker began spreading a chant to burn down the boss’s house, before being discouraged by union marshals. The loudest and most popular chant, quoted at the top, was a call-and-response for the hospital to shut down.

Scabs Watch Out!

Class hatred for the bosses was stoked even further at the discovery of a scab standing in the CEO’s driveway, a man known only as “Martinez.” The workers crowded the edge of the property, taunting Martinez to step closer “so we can get a piece of you,” but the police and union marshals got the pickets moving again as the scab Martinez smugly raised his middle finger. A hospital worker from Jamaica warned: “Don’t you dare step back into Brookdale! I’ll be waiting for you!”

Over the past six months, Brookdale workers have shown a lot of bravery in the face of the bosses’ attacks. According to our friends inside the hospital, supervisors have been spying on workers who are organizing fight-backs. We’ve learned of two instances of spontaneous work stoppages across many hospital departments. Three weeks ago, according to several EMT and paramedic friends, the New York City Fire Department issued some unusual orders: no patients were to be brought to Brookdale. Last week, bosses at the cash-starved hospital suggested that another round of layoffs is imminent, a move that would criminally worsen an understaffing crisis.

While Brookdale workers have amply demonstrated their class hatred, the struggle’s outcome will be determined by the political line of their leadership. This is where Local 1199 represents a dead end. The sellout essence of the 1199 misleaders, from President George Gresham on down, betrays their militant appearance. Workers frankly admitted that while they want to strike, they don’t trust 1199 to support them. Some said defiantly that they should strike, “union or no union.” But apart from their spontaneous work stoppages, they have yet to follow the example of the Stella D’Oro workers, who took the lead in 2008 and spearheaded an 11-month, anti-sexist strike.

Brookdale’s workers need a mass base of support to battle their racist, sexist bosses. While 1199 talks tough and bills itself as the “largest local in the world,” it refuses to mobilize its quarter-million members in New York City in these workers’ defense. Recently the union leadership began talking about the need to get rid of Flanz and his entourage, to pave the way for a takeover of Brookdale by state officials. But these officials are the same “saviors” who have cut billions of dollars from health care and closed eight hospitals in New York City alone!

Boss-Union Hack Gang-Up

In reality, boss Flanz and hack Gresham are on the same side. Although they haggle over contract details in a show of collective bargaining, their argument is confined to how much can be taken from the workers in the current economic crisis, and how fast. Under capitalism, both bosses and unions serve one overriding goal: the exploitation of workers to generate maximum profits. The brutal workings of this system are most obvious when it targets black, Latino, and women workers, as at Brookdale. Through this super-exploitation, the capitalist ruling class pushes down wage and benefit levels for all. 

PLP’s message of fighting back is spreading, evidenced by the enthusiastic response to CHALLENGE and the many contacts we’ve made. These embryonic leadership collectives will serve the interests of the working class instead of playing off their fears — the strategy of 1199 and other unions, whose job is to keep the capitalist status quo in place.

PL’ers and CHALLENGE readers around New York City have been circulating petitions and flyers to spread the word about Brookdale. In days following the picket in New City, one friend of PLP was conducting blood pressure screenings in another borough. He made available a stack of anti-racist leaflets that denounced the Brookdale bosses. One person getting her pressure checked read the leaflet and exclaimed, “My sister works for Brookdale! What can we do here to help?” She took several leaflets and contact information was exchanged. Wherever we are, we can meet people and deepen our ties.

PLP fights for both the short-term and long-term interests of the working class. By strengthening CHALLENGE networks while we build support for the Brookdale workers in our own workplaces, we are both sharpening the local struggle and moving toward our ultimate goal, a communist revolution.

To combat a growing host of global warring enemies, U.S. rulers increasingly require loyalty, both from international allies and from the masses at home. This wartime need underlies the rotating episodes of two ongoing “true-crime” sagas: the cases of Dominique Strauss-Khan, the ousted head of the International Monetary Fund, and Whitey Bulger, the Boston gangster recently captured after 16 years on the lam.

In both cases, the capitalist media boasted of “proof” that U.S. courts protect the downtrodden from the mighty and inexorably punish the guilty. But make no mistake. The bosses aren’t merely distracting workers with media circuses here. These cases have implications far worse than these two criminals’ misdeeds.

Manhattan D.A. Vance Uses Strauss-Khan Assault to Serve U.S. Imperialism’s Class Interests

On May 14, IMF boss Strauss-Khan was arrested for sexually assaulting a New York hotel housekeeping worker, a story that grabbed headlines around the world.

But on July 1, New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. declared there were “too many inconsistencies” in the hotel worker’s testimony. Saying he now “had no case” against Strauss-Kahn, Vance freed him from house arrest and returned his bail money.

But Vance’s flip-flopping had accomplished U.S. rulers’ goal: It forced Strauss-Kahn’s resignation as head of the IMF. Why? Strauss-Kahn’s original sin was pushing for a new currency to replace the dollar as the IMF instrument for indebting poor nations. This proposed “basket money,” originally designed as a combination of the dollar, the British pound, the euro, and the Japanese yen, would now expand to include China’s yuan. Beyond devaluing the U.S. dollar (by enabling countries to buy the new currency instead of U.S. Treasury bonds) and thereby threatening the dominance of the U.S. ruling class, the new currency would also enhance the influence of China, the United States’ chief economic rival.

Vance is no Johnny-come-lately. He’s a chip off the old, imperialist block; his father, Cyrus Vance, Sr., was the Secretary of State who helped President Jimmy Carter draft the “Carter Doctrine” in 1980. This policy declared Mideast energy a “vital U.S. interest” to be defended by military force, laying the groundwork for U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

While there’s no evidence that Strauss-Kahn was a victim of a sting, his inability to keep his pants up — following a long line of similar “indiscretions” — was a gift that U.S. bosses used to eject him from the IMF, check his assaults on the U.S. dollar, and damage his chances to become the next president of France.

French President Sarkozy Cozies to U.S. War-makers, Arms Libya Rebels Following Strauss-Kahn Flap

Now U.S. rulers have sharpened their focus on “coalition-building.” Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner blessed the choice of French economist Christine Lagarde, a member of Sarkozy’s pro-U.S. Union for a Popular Movement party (UMP), to run the IMF. Lagarde had for years headed the law firm of Baker & McKenzie, a leading U.S. imperialist force in the Middle East and North Africa.

Steve Dunaway, of the Exxon Mobil/JP Morgan Chase-controlled Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think-tank, spelled out Lagarde’s latest pro-U.S. duties: “She has to demonstrate that the IMF will not automatically rubberstamp European decisions and be a convenient piggy bank to help Europe finance the debt crisis in some euro-area countries” (CFR website, 6/29/11). Sarkozy called the selection of this U.S. stooge “a victory for France.”

Immediately following Lagarde’s coronation, Sarkozy began flying arms to the anti-Qaddafi, U.S.-leaning Libyan rebels. These shipments go beyond the UN’s resolution on Libya but delight Obama and the Pentagon.

Freeing Strauss-Kahn supposedly humiliated Vance and allowed French rulers to save face in the eyes of the world. No longer would superpower U.S. bosses hold the 2012 French presidential elections hostage. But despite having to reverse himself, Vance’s push for a premature indictment will help war-bent U.S. imperialists at the French polls. It has clearly weakened the Socialist Party’s challenge to Sarkozy, whoever their candidate may be. “Strauss-Kahn’s possible return has thrown the Socialist party’s primary race into disarray” (Guardian, UK, 7/3/11).

The critical back story is that Strauss-Kahn’s Socialists oppose French integration into NATO’s U.S.-dominated military command. Incumbent president Sarkozy had rejoined this coalition in 2009, also to the delight of Obama and the Pentagon. By arresting Strauss-Kahn and then releasing him, DA Vance did maximum damage to Sarkozy’s Socialist Party adversaries without making Strauss-Kahn a martyr, which might have drawn anti-U.S. (and anti-Sarkozy) forces out to vote.

What gets lost amid the sensational headlines is how Strauss-Kahn’s sexism exemplifies the pervasive attacks on women under this system.  The IMF is a huge force for the oppression of working-class women worldwide; women are doubly affected by the austerity measures forced upon the most exploited countries. These women are super-exploited by the lowest incomes and murderous medical “care.” They are victimized by mass rapes in imperialist-inspired wars over diamonds in central Africa.

Regardless of Strauss-Kahn’s future, or which ruling-class faction calls the tune at the IMF, this is the hard law of capitalism: maximum exploitation for maximum profit.

While the Strauss-Kahn circus has played out on a worldwide stage, U.S. rulers have pitched the Bulger drama to a domestic audience. On June 22, the FBI at long last collared fugitive gangster and “rogue” FBI collaborator Whitey Bulger. Bulger had served as an FBI informant and was protected by his handlers even as he was accused of 19 murders, a fact that has given this police-state agency a black eye for two decades.

On one level, the hype over Whitey’s capture forms part of a ruling-class effort to publicly rehabilitate the bungling, corrupt FBI and win greater support for the burgeoning wartime U.S. police state.

On a deeper level, busting Bulger represents a profound shift from the ideology of the 1970s. While U.S. capitalists still rely on racist big-city police departments, and still protect KKK-Nazi groups to mislead white workers, they’ve needed to shift their emphasis from locally-oriented gutter racism to massive, patriotic, national racism and global genocide, often under the leadership of black politicians like Obama and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

Whitey and his “legit” politician brother, Billy, reached the height of their power at the end of the Vietnam War era. As part of a Defense Department shutdown after the war, the main Rockefeller-led liberal bosses wiped out thousands of better-paying jobs in redundant shipyards in South Boston, Charlestown, East Boston, and Quincy.

The predominantly white workers there quickly turned against liberal Kennedy & Co., their former protectors. No longer able to win over workers with federally-sponsored employment, the liberals set the Brothers Bulger to organizing white workers to blame — and fight — black workers. Liberal Judge W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., who lived in a lily-white Boston suburb, provided the tinder: school desegregation.

Desegregation is, of course, a good thing. But Boston’s liberals turned it into a school-shutting vehicle to divide the local working class. Billy Bulger, Democratic Party president of the Massachusetts State Senate, made anti-busing speeches, while Whitey fed drugs to racist thugs. This was the anti-busing crowd our Party fought and smashed in 1975, in our genuinely anti-racist Summer Project (see plp.org).

Now the liberal war-makers need white South Boston enlistees willing to take orders from Obama and their black sergeants to kill Arab and Asian workers. (This facade of a “multi-racial” power structure masks U.S. rulers’ continuing racist super-exploitation of black workers through higher rates of joblessness and imprisonment — along with worse pay, education, medical “care,” and housing.) They require allegiance to a national patriotism, not to a two-bit racist ward boss or drug lord.

So the Bulger Klan is essentially history. Whitey now faces the rest of his life in jail. Meanwhile, brother Billy had been bought out of politics by Governor William Weld with a cushy academic job as president of the University of Massachusetts. But Billy was forced to resign after it emerged that he’d recommended a corrupt FBI agent (Whitey’s in-house protector) to be Boston’s police commissioner. Now he stews in retirement (on a $200,000 annual pension.)

The Strauss-Kahn and Bulger sideshows aim at getting workers to kill and die for U.S. imperialism, against our class interests. We have the opposite goal: to expose and attack the sideshows’ billionaire puppet-masters. Alongside building our communist party, PLP, this is an essential step toward the revolution that will ultimately eradicate the profit system and the wars it ceaselessly spawns.

BROOKLYN, N.Y., July 1 — ”I feel like I am back in my country under the dictatorship of Noriega.” So spoke one Panamian-born Clara Barton High School staff member after hearing that some teachers would be “excessed” from the school (and moved to another building) after a year of sharp struggle. One of them has been an outspoken fighter in the school and a champion of student rights. It’s no surprise that the administration has been scheming how to discipline or get rid of outstanding teachers who have challenged the racist regime of Principal Forman.

This struggle began in 2007, when several Clara Barton teachers volunteered to accompany students to help rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. After PLP teachers organized a few very successful trips with parent support, the teachers involved received “warning letters” in their files. The school community was outraged when the principal and assistant principal of security attacked us for the trip.

We realized then that only a racist could oppose our efforts to respond to the genocide that was taking place in New Orleans. As one parent involved said of the volunteer effort, “It was the best thing that my son ever did in his life.”

New Orleans: Students Got Real Education

By supporting workers who were being brutalized by capitalism and racism in New Orleans, Clara Barton students got a powerful lesson in class struggle. This was real education. It’s also the kind of learning that the New York City Department of Education (DoE) doesn’t want them to get.

Since then, the principal and his lackeys have insisted that any activities involving teachers and students outside of the school represent a violation of a chancellor’s regulation — unless approved in advance by the principal. As we’ve pointed out, this ridiculous policy could never be put forward in a more affluent or elite school; it was a racist insult to the entire Clara Barton community. As predicted in CHALLENGE (6/22), the despicable, racist principal lived down to his reputation. The day after the term ended, two PLP teachers — both among the most effective and committed in the school — received a “U” rating, for “unsatisfactory.”

The response in the building was immediate. About 40 teachers attended an emergency union meeting called the next day. After a discussion ranging from the imminent excessing and Forman’s relentless harassment, the teachers endorsed a resolution demanding that the principal remove the U ratings. They also considered withdrawing their contributions from a union-sponsored fund to show that they were dissatisfied with our union leadership’s weak response to this attack. Finally, it was proposed that the staff rate the principal. There is no question that he would get a U!

We have not backed down since this fight began, and we ended the term with a bang. At graduation, one of the targeted PLP teachers was honored by the students as the principal hung his head. In front of hundreds of parents and students, the student speaker thanked the teacher for teaching her about Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, W.E.B. DuBois, and Paul Robeson.

On behalf of the senior class, she went on to say that she would rate this teacher an A+. There were cheers and loud chants in favor of the PLP teachers. Many students and some staff at the ceremony wore buttons on their gowns, with a slogan aimed at both Forman and the DoE: “Schools Not Jails.”

The same spirit prevailed at a staff meeting later that day, where numerous teachers condemned the excessing and U ratings. One PLP member addressed the principal and demanded to know why she was given a U rating for helping her students learn about the world. She received enthusiastic applause from many teachers when she ended by telling the administration, “Shame on you!”

As we left the meeting, some teachers were shaken after being told on the spot that they would be excessed. There was disagreement about whether we should attend the end-of-term staff party. After a year of harassment and a barrage of investigations (reportedly more than 30 in all), some teachers felt we should not be at any party with the administration. But we agreed that when under siege, it’s vital to show up everywhere and be a thorn in the administration’s side. This turned out to be the right course, since many of the staff — despite some political disagreements — support us and wanted to party with us, not with the principal.

At the party, a PLP teacher stressed the need to make our attack against racism front and center in every struggle. It was followed by a talk by the person who’d coordinated the party, a former student of a PLP’er. After calling for staff members to fight for their students and to change the world, she sang “Man in the Mirror.”

Hearing lyrics that encouraged people to “take a look at themselves” and “change their ways,” and for all of us to fight back, many staff members realized that the song was directed at Principal Forman. It was electrifying to hear this strong, clear voice belt out the song as many of us gathered in a circle and held hands. It was a great show of solidarity!

The Power of PLP’s Ideas

Our battles have shown that the ideas of Progressive Labor Party are powerful; they’ve had a profound effect on many people in the school. Speakers at both graduation and the staff party spoke about the need to fight for our students and a better world. For Forman, of course, these remarks fell on deaf ears; he stayed on his cell phone, his back turned to the speakers. But many others heard the message loud and clear.

The seeds we have planted in this school are starting to grow. Many good people have stepped forward during this four-year struggle. We see  that people will follow communist leadership and that they are open to communist ideas. We need only the discipline to put our views forward boldly and consistently.

We are also seeing more clearly that the administration’s vicious attacks reflect a broader reality: Capitalism cannot provide an education for our youth. Only when workers, students, and parents gain state power will we be able to provide a genuine education for everyone. But we can get a good start in learning more about these ideas at PLP’s Summer Project in New York, July 11-16.