The Daura oil refinery in Baghdad, Iraq.Given the continuing long-range threat posed by China’s and Russia’s bosses to U.S. rulers, now add the menace of these two rising powers to U.S. plans for control of Iraq’s oil wealth. Chinese and Russian companies scored big in mid-December’s second round of bidding for Iraqi oil fields. This opens yet a new front in the imperialists’ energy dogfight.

Already within Iraq, “The dispute among Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens and other minority groups over the oil city of Kirkuk and a resource-rich area of northern Iraq remains a stark obstacle to long-term stability.” (NY Times, 12/20). Imported al Qaeda fighters and Iran’s nearby armed forces (which seized an Iraqi oil well on December 17) also stand to frustrate U.S. bosses’ dreams of pumping 12 million barrels a day of Iraqi crude.
Now their Chinese and Russian competitors will seek to protect their new Iraqi claims with military muscle in the face of the U.S. occupation. The ink on China’s and Russia’s oil contracts had barely dried when their ally Iran grabbed the Iraqi well.

The raid underscored the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran bloc’s strategic advantage. To occupy Iraq, the U.S. war machine must continually mount massive 7,000-mile air- and sea-lifts. Iranian troops can literally walk there. In addition to support for Iran’s conventional forces, China’s and Russia’s new pres- ence in Iraq increasingly leads them to back Iran’s blossoming nuclear weapons program, to enhance ally Iran’s position as a regional power.

The Pentagon’s response entails permanent bases both in Iraq and Afghanistan, an outpost against foes China, Russia, Iran and wildcard Pakistan. Baghdad’s deals with China National Petroleum Corp. and Russian Lukoil and Gazprom made even more crucial for U.S. rulers Obama’s Afghan surge of 30,000 more soldiers (and up to 56,000 mercenaries, says the Washington Post, 12/18).

Inconvenient Truth of ‘War for Oil’ Forces Obama to Cut China, Russia in on Iraq Spoils

In order to seize Iraq’s oil, the U.S. invasion slaughtered over a million Iraqis, and maimed and made homeless mil- lions more (including four million refugees). Two think-tanks, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the James Baker institute, both linked closely to Exxon Mobil, cooked up and spread the lie of Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” to “justify” the 2003 invasion. A pre-war joint CFR-Baker report salivated over a post-war treasure-trove of six million barrels a day (an estimate now doubled).

So why — with over 200,000 U.S. troops (including mer- cenaries) in his country — did Iraq’s U.S. puppet leader Maliki let China and Russia in on the game? Firstly, Obama and his U.S. capitalist handlers dread a worldwide public opinion revolt against their heavy-handed Iraq tactics, especially among workers in Saudi Arabia, Exxon Mobil’s single biggest oil source with an increasingly restive population of 35,000,000. The millions of Saudi workers get nothing from Exxon’s Saudi arrangement, the most lucrative ongoing deal in capitalism’s history.

Lately, the CIA-aided Saudi Air Force has been busy counter-attacking growing anti-U.S. militant groups on both sides of the Saudi-Yemen border. “Obama administration officials say that any hint of rigged awards, in which U.S. companies hauled in the lion’s share of oil contracts, would do far more political damage by undermining U.S. credibility abroad.” (Energy Intelligence report, 11/30) Secondly, Iraq let the Chinese and Russians in also because the U.S. has been unable to ex- ercise full control, not even pacifying, let alone conquering, the country.

Norwegian-U.S. Petro-strategic Love Match — Source of Obama’s 'Peace' Prize — Hits Rough Patch

Several aspects of the Baghdad oil field auction underscore U.S. weakness in Iraq. Petrostate energy ministers and Big Oil CEOs actually had to walk the last mile to the auction because suicide car-bombers had made driving too risky. None would bid on licenses for major fields amid conflicts still raging in Sadr City and Nineveh. And Norway’s rulers — whose government-owned Statoil stands to profit so much from Obama’s surging Afghan war that they awarded him the Nobel Prize (see CHALLENGE, 12/9) — double-crossed him.

In the Iraq auction, Statoil, teamed as junior partner with U.S. enemy Russia’s Lukoil to win a major oil field. Obama retaliated by accepting the “Peace” prize from Norway’s King Harald with a Hitlerite rant extolling profit-ensuring wars: “The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” Obama pointedly reminded his oil-soaked majesty that Norwegian troops serve under U.S. command in Afghanistan. Simultaneously, U.S. pressure got former Statoil advisor Kai Eide booted as top UN officer in Afghanistan.

Yet, U.S. rulers (and their British allies), as oc- cupying invaders, do enjoy certain advantages in Iraq. In underpublicized first-round bidding in June, Exxon (U.S.), BP (British), and Shell (British-Dutch) won rights to the biggest Iraqi fields. Exxon & Co. also won bigger profit margins, crucial in capitalist competition: “The [Lukoil-Statoil] partnership will earn 56¢ a barrel. ... Exxon, with minority partner Shell, will receive about 93¢ a barrel.” (Energy Intelligence, 12/13) And the Western firms hope Chinese and Russian firms’ lagging oil-technology skills will make them miss contractual production quotas.

Letting China and Russia into Iraq hardly rep- resents a U.S. olive branch. In fact, it brings the “world’s sole superpower” closer into head-on conflict with a strengthening rival alliance. Emergence of a World War III is sped up as ongoing regional oil wars become more deadly.

For the international working class, building an anti-imperialist war movement with a revolutionary outlook becomes more urgent. PLP’s leadership among masses of workers, soldiers and students, in factories, barracks, unions, schools and churches is even more vital now. We need to organize to destroy the billionaires’ profit system and its endless wars.

An Athens youth fghts back this past summer in Greece.The year 2009 started off with newly-inaugurated Barack Obama sending 21,000 troops to the war in Afghanistan, and caps off with him committing 30,000 more, plus 56,000 mercenaries. Obama dealt with this year’s crisis in time-honored capitalist traditions. He bailed out banks and auto-makers while calling on the working class to make sacrifices “for the greater good.” He proclaimed this year a ‘Year of Service’ while announcing these troop increases in Afghanistan, making clear why the ruling class needs our service.

PLP has been saying for several years that the U.S. ruling class is heading deeper and deeper into a crisis it cannot control. This year the rulers could not mask their difficulties anymore. While few would use any label harsher than “recession,” all media — from the stuffiest newspaper to the trashiest talk show — were comparing this year’s financial disasters to the Great Depression of the 1930s, calling this period the “Great Recession.”

The capitalists’ crisis devastated the lives of many workers. Over 30 million are now unemployed in the U.S. Like the increasing foreclosures and homelessness, jobless rates disproportionately affect black and Latino workers, reflecting the racism built into the capitalist system. U.S. prison rates exceed those of any other nation, and figures continue to rise. Young workers are increasingly forced to look to the military to support themselves, being sent to kill and die to rescue U.S. rulers’ imperialist dreams. Attacks on immigrants are rising, including the firing of all “undocumented” workers by the supposedly non-sweatshop garment manufacturer American Apparel.

Obama continued the plans of his predecessors in many areas, including extending plans for anti-student education reforms under the direction of new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. He presided over the increasingly racist divisions of the Chicago public schools. Across the country budgets were slashed for schools, hospitals and city services.

No media pundit or politician will ever say that we would be better off under another system, but this year was unique in its revelations about the low point capitalism has entered.

Fighting Back

While the need for revolutionary leadership is clear, in many places around the world workers have stood up and rebelled. The year began with a general strike in Greece. Students protesting the police murder of a teenage boy were joined by millions of workers in a general strike. Tens of thousands of workers, teachers, students and farmworkers defied Mexico’s rulers’ using the swine flu to ban May Day marches and took to the streets in Oaxaca, Puebla and other cities.

There were widespread student strikes throughout Austria and Germany. Workers brought the French department of Guadeloupe to a halt several times throughout the year as the capitalists were unwilling to meet their demands. In France, attempts by workers to copy the rebellions of Guadeloupe were channeled by unions into single-day strikes. A current strike of over 6,000 undocumented workers in France has lasted over two months, inspiring the French labor movement and a march of 10,000 to the Immigration Ministry in Paris.

In the U.S., teachers, students and workers showed their anger at the system which is increasingly unable to meet their needs. Los Angeles teachers went on a one-hour work stoppage against the wishes of their union leadership. Washington, D.C. bus drivers imposed a work slowdown. Recently, University of California students took over administration buildings protesting budget cuts, enduring attacks by police.

Most inspiringly, in the Bronx, this summer marked the end of the 11-month strike of Stella D’Oro cookie factory workers. This prolonged battle has taught thousands much about the strength of workers fighting sexism, racism and oppression in staunch defiance of scabs, police terror and unscrupulous bosses. These workers did not give up the fight, even after they returned to the factory floor. Finally the factory was closed and moved to another state. The collective they built still stands together, contacting the workers in the new factory to let them know about the struggle. Several have joined the Party, committing to fight the whole capitalist system, no matter how the cookie crumbles.

In Memoriam

In 2009 Progressive Labor Party celebrated the lives of several anti-racist, working-class heroes whose lives inspire our work as communist organizers. In the autumn many members and friends traveled to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, to honor the raid by John Brown’s integrated force of principled fighters. John Brown and his comrades, including runaway slave Harriet Tubman, who led hundreds to freedom, get short shrift in the history books, often even derided as mentally ill. But we recognize that they knew that only armed insurrection could fix the problems of slavery and stood up for what was right. Their bold actions changed their world.

This year we lost honored friends and comrades including Joseph Furr, Helen Jones, Sylvia Dick Gomez and Lee Simon. We memorialized former CHALLENGE/DESAFIO editor Luis Castro, who was an example to many of us of how to lead the life of an internationalist fighter against racism and imperialism, a dialectical materialist studying the world from a scientific viewpoint and a comradely participant in collective struggle.

Remembering the lives of these working-class brothers and sisters, both in our own lives and in history, can motivate us all to work hard for the future they dreamed of and carry their legacies forward in the coming year. In 2010 and on, we call on our members and friends to distribute more CHALLENGES and bring more coworkers and friends the ideas of the Progressive Labor Party to win more fighters for communist revolution.
Our New Year’s resolution must be to get involved in, and to lead, class struggle to battle the attacks of the rulers, from budget cuts and unemployment to police terror and the increasing wars abroad, with the goal of winning workers’ power — communism.



A mural of Archbishop Romero in El Salvador.El Salvador — This is the story of a comrade, an ex-commander in the FMLN guerilla army, who met the PLP through an old ex-fellow combatant with whom he shared many wartime experiences. His old friend related PLP’s communist ideas to him, how other workers internationally were organizing in the working class with PLP’s line. This gladdened him, but first he began reading CHALLENGE regularly before participating in discussions.

He was invited to several PLP club meetings but decided to take some time before actually joining due to all the experiences described below. Currently he attends meetings punctually. Initially he listened carefully to the analysis. His level of participation and responsibility in the armed struggle and his analysis of current events make him very prudent.

He has brought his wife (another ex-combatant) to recent meetings. He has been very honest and correct politically, open about his contradictions — the illusion in elections and the stages theory of es- tablishing communism, using Cuba’s example, and has helped the club to better explain PLP’s politics. His subordinates in the war in El Salvador were very approving of his participation in PLP. They asked him to write his history for CHALLENGE and he agreed, saying that he would try to write as honestly as possible about his life and his understanding of PLP’s politics:

Part I
I was born in the Department of Morazán. We lived in extreme poverty. In my village there were 85 houses, of tile with wooden walls, with approxi- mately 5 to 8 people per family in each. The situation was critical since we had no income. We lived by planting corn, beans and sorghum.

My father died when I was 3. I grew up alone with my mother who was accompanied by another man. When I was 8 I didn’t go to school because I had to work so my family could eat. That’s how most people lived in El Salvador. I made half a co- lon a day (20¢US). My mother was, and is, very religious. Luckily she still lives with us today.

In 1974 Miguel Ventura came to our village to take charge of the Catholic Parish. I liked how he discussed the bible’s themes and related them to our lives. He talked a lot about farm workers and the way our people lived in general.

In 1975, he sent two catechists (lay people who help teach the bible) to explain the gospel. I liked to accompany them. They assigned me, as a community leader, to motivate area youth for this religious movement. One day that year, the idea arose about the necessity to organize around other ideas because the bible alone could not help us. The church then was called “subversive,” especially because we exposed the injustice toward the farmworkers and the whole working class in the country.

Through questions about some of the themes in the bible, we understood that we live under a capitalist system that causes tremendous poverty and repression, and that the military only defends the interests of the rich. We then understood that we had to organize ourselves in groups and fight to change the situation. We also understood there were sectors of workers who were already organized.

One sector was Popular Leagues of the 28th of February (LP-28), and another was FAPU. These groups included university students. The right-wing government oppressed the working class, the students and the churches because it saw these groups were organizing to demand their rights. In 1975, through Miguel Ventura, we organized the Revolutionary Peoples’ Army (ERP) to which I belonged.

We organized with youth and older people. Our orientation with people was to form committees. This helped us coordinate the movements with both political and military preparation. One theme included topics like the international and national political situation. We also learned to use weapons — pistols, 22-caliber rifles and shotguns some neighbors owned.

In 1976 the organization asked me and six youth to join the army as infiltrators. Our mission was to learn the army’s policies, its military tactics using its different weapons and then to take some weapons and ammunition.

If needed, we could desert with all the assigned equipment, but it was better to stay in the army and serve our time. I served two years and then left with plenty of experience. When I left, my friends asked about everything I had learned about the military and the army’s political preparations.

Two months later the armed forces had an operation in our department of Morazán. They came to my house and took me and two other comrades away, detaining us for three days. They tortured me but didn’t kill me because they thought that I would give them a lot of information. On the third day they released me but continued to hold my comrades for a year. I went home to tell my mother I was free but that I had to leave because the army would come look for me to kill me. I told my family that when they came for me to say they hadn’t heard from me since the day I was captured.

A month later, the organization decided that six of us should go to Nicaragua because the Sandinista Liberation Front was in a critical phase of the war there. They were concentrated in the mountains and preparing to destroy the Somoza government and his army, that it was necessary to gain this useful experience because after Nicaragua was liberated, El Salvador would follow.

I asked when will I leave here and they replied, “This has to be done quickly.” Shortly we were in Honduras and then passed to the mountains of Nicaragua. Three of us, including me, were sent to the northern zone at Estelí. The other three were sent to the capital, Managua.

(Next issue: Part II; the battles in Nicaragua and El Salvador and moving from the reformist FMLN to the revolutionary PLP)

U.S. troops patrol the business district in Sar Hawza, Afghanistan.At West Point on December 1, Obama announced a major “jobs program.” He’s sending 30,000 more troops (and as many mercenaries) to “work” in Afghanistan. His coming force of over 200,000 (including “battlefield contractors”) must perform several critical tasks for U.S. imperialism. One is securing the ground for a gas pipeline planned to bypass both Iran and Russia (see below). Another involves spreading combat operations into neighboring Pakistan.

But Obama’s ultimate goal is making Afghanistan a strategic beachhead against the rising strength of U.S. rivals, Iran, China and Russia. Afghanistan borders Iran to the west and China to the east. To the north lie Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, former Soviet states that Putin is determined to reunite in a new Russian Empire.

At Stake for U.S. Rulers: Afghan Pipeline to Spoil Iranian, Russian Gas Dominance

According to the NY Times (12/2/09), “The bulk of new combat forces approved by President Obama would be sent to southern Afghanistan, an area including Helmand and Kandahar Provinces.” It just so happens that the proposed U.S.-funded Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline route runs right through Helmand and Kandahar.

Raja Karthikeya, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank which aided Obama’s lengthy Afghan deliberations, wrote, “Tapping into the energy resources of Central Asia (for example, through the trans-Afghanistan or TAPI pipeline) would help cater to [India’s and Pakistan’s] energy demand and also reduce their disproportionate dependence on the Middle East” [that is, Iran]. India and Pakistan already get the bulk of their gas imports from Iran. And a proposed Iran-Pakistan-India gas line, competing head to head with TAPI, is much closer to completion.

Obama also wants TAPI, and the armed force to guarantee it, to thwart Russia’s efforts to control Turkmen gas exports.

Obama couldn’t mention U.S. rulers’ blatant pipeline profit motive. But he had plenty to say about preventing Islamic militants from taking over nuclear-armed Pakistan. And two days later the Times (12/3/09) reported, “The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal area.”

Obama’s West Point speech referred obliquely but unmistakably to his readiness to wage war on Islamists for that grand prize of energy resources, Saudi Arabia. “We will have to be nimble and precise in our use of military power. Where al Qaeda and its allies attempt to establish a foothold — whether in Somalia or Yemen or elsewhere — they must be confronted by growing pressure and strong partnerships.” Recent pirate attacks off the coast of Somalia starkly dramatize the strategic position of Somalia in commanding shipping lanes for Saudi crude. And Yemen sits on the Arabian Peninsula itself, just miles from the vast Saudi oil fields.

Another topic Obama omitted was Afghanistan’s geo-strategic importance. The Pentagon hopes to make its Bagram base and 30 others in Afghanistan — like Ramstein in Germany, Okinawa in Japan, Bondsteel in Kosovo and its string of bases in Iraq — a vast outpost of U.S. military might aimed directly at potential foes in a Third World War. The rulers of Iran, China and Russia are all targeting Afghanistan’s vast mineral riches and its geo-strategic position.

Obama Lies, Workers Die

Balancing this lie by omission in his West Point manifesto, Obama openly fabricated history on behalf of U.S. imperialism. He said, “Unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination. Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations. We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours.”

But the unvarnished truth is the U.S. Constitution was founded on oppression, enslaving millions of Africans and on genocidal wars against Native Americans. Through its War of Independence it shifted slave-trading and slave-holding profits from Britain to Boston, New York and Virginia.

Today the U.S. war machine has a half million troops in 737 overseas bases in 130 countries and a 300-plus-ship navy to help Exxon Mobil and JP Morgan dominate captive foreign “customers.” U.S. troops not only effectively occupy Iraq and Afghanistan but maintain 50,000 troops and six bases in South Korea, six military bases in Japan-Okinawa and 50,000 troops on 16 military bases in Germany.

President Jimmy Carter made seizing other nations’
vital resources — especially oil — an official U.S. doctrine, as U.S.-led invasions of Kuwait and Iraq (twice) prove. And U.S. imperialists have long used racism to target “others,” from nuclear genocide at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to further anti-Asian racist atrocities in Korea and Vietnam to the anti-Islamic indoctrination of today’s GIs.

Obama Invokes World War II ‘Sacrifice’ that Led to U.S. Rulers’
Global Supremacy — but
Can’t Yet Enforce It

Obama said, “Since the days of Franklin Roosevelt, and the service and sacrifice of our grandparents, our country has borne a special burden in global affairs.” But since Kennedy’s assassination, deep partisan differences have made it very hard for presidents to coerce the entire U.S. capitalist class to act in the interests of its imperialist wing. It has been more than four decades since Kennedy, seeking capital for his Vietnam War, forcibly reversed U.S. Steel’s price-hikes.

For now the Obama administration allows obscene bonuses for Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan bankers. Although U.S. imperialism’s wars require tapping into their trillions, these bankers don’t seem to want to “sacrifice” for the long-term class interests of U.S. capitalism.

As for winning the working class to sacrifice for this same U.S. imperialism, insufficient communist leadership in the working-class movement eases Obama’s assault on jobs and wages, the harshest since the Great Depression.

Furthermore, Obama finds it difficult to restore the draft. Ultra-liberal and ultra-imperialist (they go together) NY Times columnist Frank Rich, lamented this problem (12/6/09): “We’d need a minimal force of 568,000...to fight a proper counterinsurgency in Afghanistan” but “the president conspicuously left unmentioned...the draft.” Imperialist U.S. rulers must find a way to restore it despite widespread anti-draft sentiment persisting since the Vietnam War era.

Danger and Opportunity

The full-scale military mobilization Obama and his masters are aiming for holds both danger and opportunity for the working class. Pay cuts, police-state racist terror, and forced, deadly overseas deployments await us. So do openings for us to organize militant anti-imperialist, anti-racist, pro-worker actions against these attacks.

We can expose the war-makers’ profit motive and help build a new international communist movement. Mass-murdering U.S. imperialists will likely launch global war someday. This would create the conditions for a working-class revolution, but that’s not automatic. It depends on PLP doing our job of winning masses of workers, soldiers and students to communism. Everything we do today comprises the necessary building blocks towards that future.