Follow Stella D’Oro Workers’ Lead Against Rulers’ Attacks: ‘Make the Bosses Take the Losses’
Oil $$$ Put U.S. Rulers in Iraq for the Long Haul
Howard U. Students, Workers Unite vs. Job and Service Cuts
Call for Teachers’ Strike vs. Fascist School Reform
Workers in Honduras, El Salvador Unite vs. Coup Bosses’ Attacks
Paraguay: Lugo Talks ‘Left’ but Intensifies Capitalist Exploitation
Bosses’ Education Reform: Use Schools to Strengthen Profit System
LETTERS
Joblessness ‘Recruits’ Workers on Both Sides of Bosses’ War
Book Reviews: Global Warming: Only Communism Can Save the Planet, Not Capitalist Schemes
Obama’s Afghan War Crucial to U.S. Bosses’ Global Control
- Teenagers bumped down, jobless
- A raw health deal for immigrants
- For profit, cheat the low-wagers
- Paul Robeson, noble anti-capitalist
- In poorest areas, sick dial 911
- US drove Sioux off sacred mount
- Insiders dumping their own stocks
Harper’s Ferry Raid Shows: Rely on the Masses to Change the World
Follow Stella D’Oro Workers’ Lead Against Rulers’ Attacks:
‘Make the Bosses Take the Losses’
NEW YORK CITY, September 12 — Stella D’Oro bosses told its workers this week that they will be thrown on the street and that their bakery will be closed — the brand and some machinery having been sold to Lance, a non-union company. It will make the products at a bakery in Ashland, Ohio.
Stella workers, having struck for 11 months in a fiercely militant struggle against wage-cuts, descended with their supporters on the otherwise silent Labor Day parade today. Their contingent of 350 filled a city block with banners, signs, and chants of “Keep Stella in the Bronx: Fight, Fight, Fight!” and “The Workers, United, Will Never Be Defeated.” Cleaners from Domestic Workers United and musicians from the Rude Mechanicals group made the chanters’ rhythms dance and sparkle.
The effect on workers marching past was electric. Eyes brightened, fists went up, the booming chants echoed from scores of marchers, especially the many ranks of construction workers walking behind or riding on their heavy rigs. Imagine those rigs surrounding the Stella plant, preventing any machines being moved out!
“Keep Stella in the Bronx” struck a real chord with New York workers who identify the Bronx as a working-class borough. If they didn’t know about the Stella struggle, they do now.
PLP’s Stella supporters helped build the action from within our own unions and mass organizations, and continued the flow of CHALLENGE sales and chants like, “Kick the Bosses in the Ass: Power to the Working Class;” and “Make the Bosses Take the Losses: Keep Stella Open.” PL’ers added the chant, “Whose Factory? Our Factory!” which attacks the essence of capitalism, and the internationalist chant in Spanish, “From north to south, from east to west, we’ll win the battle, whatever the cost.”
The workers are planning a September 25 march and rally from Wall Street, site of Lance’s banker, Goldman Sachs, to City Hall. PLP members are backing the workers as they absorb this heavy blow, helping them contact the Ashland workers to explain what happened here, and planning how to fight for their jobs.
The bosses’ laws protect their ownership of the means of production, enabling them to move around assets indiscriminately without any thought about the effect on workers. None of us is safe under their rule. The Communist Manifesto described this inevitable destructive effect of capitalism back in 1848: “Everything solid melts into air.”
But workers inevitably resist being discarded like a bad batch of cookies. We’re learning from such battles that the real war is against capitalism itself, and that our international revolutionary party can create an alternative, a communist society where workers rule and share all the value we produce. But for that to happen, we must melt capitalism into the air.
These are days of hard political debate and soul-searching struggle among the Stella workers themselves. Their communist party, the PLP, is among them with practical help and unbreakable friendships, with the ideas of CHALLENGE, and with trust in the working class.
It is workers such as this dynamic international group at a small Bronx bakery who will help make PLP a mass party able to destroy the whole rotten system.
Oil $$$ Put U.S. Rulers in Iraq for the Long Haul
Most everyone has come to understand that the U.S. rulers’ invasion of Iraq was all about oil. But not even the oil barons knew just how much was up for grabs. Now it’s revealed that Barack Obama has 8.2 million reasons not to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq anytime soon. That’s how many barrels of oil companies like Exxon Mobil claim they can pump every day — if it ever becomes safe for them to operate there.
Stunning production targets emerging from Iraq’s ongoing oilfield licensing talks with major firms put it on a strategic par with oil kingpin Saudi Arabia. The rising stakes underlie the recent upsurge in Iraqi factional violence and guarantee not only a permanent U.S. military occupation but future deadly “surges” to help Exxon & Co. realize their goal. Production today stagnates around 2.3 million barrels a day (mbd).
Invading Iraq was the brainchild of U.S. Big Oil. Occupation plans took shape in a high-level joint project of the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the James A. Baker Institute, imperialist think-tanks both closely linked to Exxon Mobil and J.P. Morgan Chase. Just before the 2003 invasion, the CFR-Baker cabal issued a report, “Iraq: The Day After,” promising that “U.S. and allied military forces will quickly occupy, control, and protect oil fields” in order to “achieve more significant increases — say, to 6 mbd by 2010.”
When the Bushites bungled the invasion by sending too few troops, the liberal, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists blamed renegade neo-cons like Cheney and Rumsfeld for launching a misguided “war of choice.” But U.S. imperialists cannot afford to walk away from the 8 mbd windfall that new technology makes possible.
Saudi Rulers Unreliable Allies for U.S. Rulers
Controlling 8 mbd of Iraqi crude would sharply reduce U.S. dependence on shaky Saudi Arabia as the world’s sole “swing producer,” meaning a country having enough spare capacity to adjust production in an economic or military crisis.
But Saudi royals rule a powder keg. Though they profit from the most lucrative long-term deal in capitalism’s history, serving as Exxon’s biggest oil supplier, their 30 million subjects receive nothing from this bonanza. They sympathize more with al Qaeda and Hamas than with Washington. Prince Turki al-Faisal, former chief of Saudi intelligence, in an op-ed piece in the NY Times (9/13/09), said it would be unwise for his country to normalize diplomatic relations with U.S. ally Israel. The prince fears that Saudi workers’ anger at Israel’s concentration-camp treatment of Palestinians may dethrone his oily dynasty.
So Exxon Mobil-led groups have bids in for 6.3 mbd, or almost four-fifths of Iraq’s potential [See Table]. Meanwhile the U.S. war machine remains ever poised to invade Saudi Arabia to prop up its ruling princes if the masses were to rebel. The Pentagon has massive bases to the north (Iraq), to the east (Bahrain and Qatar), to the west (Djibouti) and to the south (Diego Garcia).
However, Exxon & Co. shouldn’t start counting their Iraqi chickens just yet. Iraq still has no national law governing oil contracts. And no sooner had Iraq held its first oilfield auction in June, “the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government condemned it as unconstitutional.” (Energy Intelligence, 9/7/09)
More ‘Surges’ On The Agenda?
Fighting among rival Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, and attacks on U.S. bases have intensified since the oil projects were revealed. The NY Times (9/13/09) suggests that U.S. troops may have to seize the streets again: “After the withdrawal of most American combat forces from Iraq’s cities on June 30, violence has remained a constant, with attackers able to plant and detonate bombs....seemingly with impunity.”
U.S. rulers and their allies are ready to worsen an already sickening equation: over one million dead Iraqis and more than 4,000 dead GIs “in exchange for” eight million daily barrels of crude.
We need a sharpening fight against U.S. imperialism — in the shops and unions, the communities and churches, among GIs, and in all mass organizations — to mount militant battles against the U.S. bosses’ deadly goals. Out of these class struggles, tying the mountainous racist and economic attacks on the working class to the need to exterminate the profit system, we can build a mass PLP that can lead a communist revolution to destroy capitalism and its endless oil wars.
Howard U. Students, Workers Unite vs. Job and Service Cuts
WASHINGTON, D.C., Sept. 4 — Over 300 Howard University students, CHALLENGE readers and workers protested the administration’s plan to cut services and jobs, and hike tuition. Workers from SEIU Local 32BJ joined in the rally in support of the students and also demanded that the University stop its plan to contract out union jobs.
The Howard University Student Association (HUSA) raised 13 demands, including the firing of the executive leadership in the Office of Student Affairs due to their efforts to censor students; a public, transparent budget so students could see just how real the supposed deficit is; improvements in on-campus housing facilities; expansion and upgrade of the computer network; and a recycling plan to comply with the law and to reduce global warming.
Administrators refused to meet with the protestors, some of whom decided to march into the administration building to confront these bosses despite the HUSA leadership’s effort to stop them. The campus police shoved and kicked some of the students, including militant members of the Political Education and Action Committee (PEAC), to keep them out. Hard to believe that the new president’s slogan is “Students First!”
The economic crisis is hitting universities hard, and they in turn are hitting students and workers with big tuition hikes, cuts in services, layoffs, contracting out union jobs, and a more repressive atmosphere. The source of the economic crisis is the capitalist system with its single-minded focus on maximizing profit at the expense of everyone else. The universities’ role is to actually serve these capitalist interests.
During the same week that the protest occurred, Howard University announced a $2.5 million grant program from the Director of National Intelligence to develop a curriculum that will feed a pipeline of students into the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies. This effort to provide more agents for imperialism complements the existing Howard University ROTC programs. ROTC enrolls almost 200 Howard students per year by bribing them with scholarships to become the executioners of workers and students in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars are waged so that U.S. corporations can continue to dominate world oil markets and pipelines and maximize their profits. Military officers and intelligence agents are hit men for U.S. imperialism!
The struggle that heated up this week must begin to join with workers and students around the world to eliminate the source of the vicious attacks they face from profit-hungry imperialists across the globe. A concrete step these students can take in this process is joining the PLP.
Call for Teachers’ Strike vs. Fascist School Reform
LOS ANGELES, CA, Sept. 14 — At the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) area union meetings last week, some teachers called for a strike against the attacks on students and teachers, showing that “education reform” is fascist and part of the rulers’ moves to prepare for wider war.
On August 25, the Board of Education voted to turn over up to 200 lower-performing schools and 51 new schools to charter school operators. This is fascist reorganization of the local school system by a U.S. ruling class that is in an on-going war and an era-defining economic crisis. After years of neglect this school reorganization is a qualitative shift as the bosses attempt to create a school system that will produce technically-trained and patriotic young workers to join the military and future war production. PLP needs to work among these youth who are future workers and soldiers, key forces for revolution.
This school reorganization is also being pushed in Obama’s so called “Race to the Top,” where his education secretary Arne Duncan, has proposed a competition for $4.35 billion in federal grants to carry out “school reform.” States like California, where teachers’ unions had won laws that prohibit tying teacher evaluation and pay scales to student test data (so called “merit pay”) will be ineligible for these funds. But Duncan was in Sacramento recently to help State Senator Gloria Romero’s bid to change the law to make California eligible. And the LA Board of education just voted to enter the “Race to the Top” competition, also agreeing to tie teacher evaluations to test scores. These tests emphasize patriotism. Tying test scores to teacher evaluations is a way to enforce teaching patriotic lies and allow administrations to get rid of higher-paid older teachers while hiring younger teachers for lower wages and benefits.
In the face of the current attack, UTLA leadership is urging teachers to write local proposals to do school reform themselves. While the union pays lip service to organizing the Charter Schools, they are not even trying to organize all teachers, including charter employees, into the same bargaining unit. UTLA President Duffy, loyal servant of capitalism, calls on teachers to get involved in so-called grass roots school reorganization such as the innovation division, “i-design.” Such reorganization would be done to meet the ruling class’s needs, but would have to be approved by the school board and probably require a corporate partner. This is not grass roots; it’s doing the bosses’ patriotic work to remake the schools to better prepare students for war, to defend a system of exploitation, racism and war. Local school control means teachers working with students and parents to administer their fascist system. We can’t unite with those who oppress us, exploit us and send us off to war!
More layoffs and foreclosures are coming, so patriotic education reform will take on more importance for the bosses. A trade union response to this attack is totally inadequate. PLP calls on teachers, students and parents to organize a strike against the fascist reorganization of public schools. Organizing such a strike, based on expanding CHALLENGE networks, builds the unity of parents, teachers, and students to prepare us for the struggle to get rid of the capitalist system and build a communist society.
Workers in Honduras, El Salvador Unite vs. Coup Bosses’ Attacks
EL SALVADOR, September 13 — Recently at a meeting of teachers from El Salvador and Honduras, the latter (a member of the federation of Honduran workers) thanked the Salvadoran workers for their working-class solidarity in the face of the current crisis besetting workers in Honduras following the coup that ousted Manuel Zelaya. Zelaya is a millionaire member of the Honduran bourgeoisie who opposed trade deals with the U.S. and its allies, instead veering towards the Russian and Chinese imperialists through Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.
The teacher from Honduras told of the temporary reforms financed by Chavez (to expand his influence in the region), enabling Zelaya to raise teachers’ wages to $1,000 a month (as compared to $500 a month for a teacher in El Salvador); afternoon snacks at schools; free uniforms and notebooks, among other measures. This has put Zelaya in conflict with sections of the Honduran ruling class, who were angered by Honduras joining ALBA (Chavez’s trade alliance) and Petrocaribe (Chavez’s oil alliance).
In Honduras they barely had time to cry for Roger Vallejo Soriano, a 38-year-old teacher shot in the head last July 30th during a demonstration protesting the coup, when another teacher, Martin Florencio Rivera, 37, was stabbed 25 times and killed after having participated in a wake for Soriano. All this is part of the brutal repression carried out by the security forces of the government of Roberto Michelleti.
Soriano was a victim of the on-going attacks by the police and the army, along with rapes of women. The teacher who spoke at the meeting was sprayed with cancer-causing chemicals when she participated in the marches.
In response to a PLP comrade’s question about the lessons drawn from this brutality, workers from Honduras replied: “We definitely must organize much better against the attacks of the system; we’re certain that the international bosses, including those in El Salvador, were involved in this coup.”
Said a PLP comrade, “If the bosses are organized, why can’t the international working class be organized for our own interests.”
This story reminded us of the massacres teachers in El Salvadoran suffered in the 1970’s and 1980’s. A PL teacher who participated in these struggles and saw the army and police kill many teachers in front of their students related his experiences in the teachers’ resistance in El Salvador and invited the teachers from Honduras to organize with PLP internationally to resist the bosses’ attacks.
The teachers and the international working class must see that the return of Manuel Zelaya, another capitalist exploiter, or any other capitalist president, will not end our problems. Those who exploit and kill the workers continue in power. There’s no reason to keep electing them.
The working class must fight for power by building its international party to organize for communist revolution, not continue supporting the murderous, rotten capitalist system. We must spread our networks of our revolutionary communist newspaper CHALLENGE internationally, to organize at work, school and in the fields to fight for a just system, communism. That’s how we can avenge the deaths of our class brothers and sisters.
Paraguay: Lugo Talks ‘Left’ but Intensifies Capitalist Exploitation
PARAGUAY — One year after taking power, “Leftist” President Fernando Lugo’s promises have proven to be empty. Liberation can only come when the latifundistas (large agricultural capitalists) are expropriated, imperialists are expelled, industrial capitalists overthrown, and workers seize power through revolution with communist goals of equality and collectivity.
Since he led no revolution and workers did not take power, Lugo, like all capitalist politicians, maneuvers among the U.S. and European imperialists, the Bolivarian Bloc, and the Brazilian ruling class to try to cut deals for the Paraguayan capitalists and landowners. These deals have all deepened the exploitation and oppression of workers in Paraguay.
He has made health care free in public health centers, begun to develop limited social programs for children, and attempted to cut a better deal with Brazil over the price it pays for energy from the jointly-operated Itaipu Hydroelectric plant. But these reforms pale next to the severe exploitation workers face in Paraguay.
Soy, Sesame and Capitalist Poison
Paraguay is the 6th largest producer of soy in the world. The players in the sesame and soy game in Paraguay are the small rural farmers, Paraguayan and Brazilian Agribusiness, large landowners (Latifundistas — 2% of the population owns 70% of the land!), and major U.S. companies including Monsanto, Cargill and Syngeta.
The agrochemical and biotech companies are helping the latifundistas force peasants off their land by legal tricks and poisoning crops. How? The majority of the soy produced in Paraguay is based on Monsanto Corporation’s transgenic seeds that are genetically modified for resistance to the herbicide glyphosate. Massive spraying of glyphosate kills everything else, including small farmers’ crops. Lugo’s solution? Ban such spraying 100 yards from waterways, wetlands, roads and populated areas. But this barely touches the problem of the small farmers, and may even be reversed given the power of the latifundistas and their imperialist allies. In 2008, the soy production rate was twice what it was in 1998. The major effect of the soy planting is that it has effectively displaced thousands of rural farmers who plant subsistence crops. Activists have begun to occupy big farms and have mobilized in the streets of Asuncion to fight against the expansion of soybean plantations.
Corruption, Courts, Cops
The Paraguayan Supreme Court judges were appointed over decades by the Colorado party (the fascist party that had historic ties to Hitler) and is both corrupt and powerful. The judges refuse justice to workers. For instance, they have been deaf to the appeals and demonstrations of workers seeking justice in the Ycua Bolanos case. This involved a fire at a supermarket whose owners (Coloradoans) ordered their security guards to lock the doors, killing over 350 people. President Lugo has opposed the appointment of another Coloradoan, Lovera Canete, to the court, but has declared he will not veto the right-wing Senate’s appointment of him.
Even more shocking, however, to Lugo supporters, has been Lugo’s decision to allow fascist Sabino Augusto Montanaro to re-enter Paraguay. Montanaro fled when the Alfredo Stroessner dictatorship fell in 1989 because he feared retribution due to the torture and murders he ordered of Political Military Organization (OPM) fighters, Paraguayan Communist Party members, and their allies. In fact, Montanaro was directly responsible for the assassination of the guerilla column Mcal Lopez. Lugo puts out the welcome mat for this fascist trash? Not the mark of a friend of the working class!
The Way Forward
Workers in Paraguay have a long way to go in the class struggle. Lugo misleads workers into the arms of latifundistas, capitalists, and imperialists, weakening the resistance to exploitation in the same way that Obama’s popularity is misleading many workers into supporting imperialist war in Afghanistan.
Instead of supporting these phony leftists and building false hopes that sooner or later demoralize our class, we must build a revolutionary communist movement for change based on workers’ power, rather than on wishful thinking that a charismatic leader will deliver when the state apparatus is firmly in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Joining with PLP members around the world would be an important step in this process in Paraguay.
Bosses’ Education Reform: Use Schools to Strengthen Profit System
Every September, parents send their children back to school in the hopes that they will learn, grow and prepare for bright futures. But the capitalists who run the public school systems have their own racist plans for our children. As the economic crisis deepens and inter-imperialist rivalry over the worlds’ resources expands, the capitalist bosses become more and more entrenched in their own problems. Desperate to bail out their crumbling financial system and to prepare for more military conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the U.S. bosses spend billions. Shamelessly they continue to steal from the working class to save themselves and their system.
The current budget crises affecting U.S. school systems is a clear statement of capitalist priorities. These cuts are strangling a school system that was already failing our class’s children. In big cities where the majority of students are black and Latino, and families are already disproportionately suffering from unemployment and low wages, the cuts will be the worst.
In Los Angeles, classes will average 42 students. In NYC the school budget has been slashed by billions. This is forcing larger class sizes and cutting anything the Dept. of Education considers non-essential: art music, foreign language, sports, and after-school programs. In Chicago, where Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan honed his skills at cutting services to black and Latino students, many reading coaches, after-school and tutoring programs were eliminated. In San Antonio, schools full of black and Latino students are being shut down.
Washington, D.C, with a nearly all-black public school system, has been in the forefront of the bosses’ reform experiments, even as students continue to suffer. There, cuts are leading to layoffs of teachers as well as less money for vouchers and charter schools. While the schools are slashed, not a dime has been cut from the billions of dollars in interest going from the education budgets to the banks.
The attacks on working-class students are driven by the current crisis of the capitalists. In the 1950’s, the U.S. had emerged victorious from World War II and was launching the Cold War. U.S. bosses had the money to build huge factories that produced steel, autos, airplanes and factory equipment. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space, the U.S. bosses drove to invest in education for the “Space Race.” Now the U.S. is a power in decline. Those higher-paying industrial jobs are almost all gone. And the school systems with working-class students, always the poorest, are being gutted.
Capitalists view our children only as fodder for the bosses’ system. To the extent the bosses do care about educating working-class youth it is to have a politically loyal, skilled workforce to exploit. Technical education and patriotism are being pushed for black and Latino students. The advocacy for technical education reflects the growing need the ruling class has for skilled workers like engineers, drill press operators, and machinists, jobs needed for war production. Developing curriculum for the schools to create a workforce prepared for war is often masked by rhetoric saying the U.S. “needs to compete” with international rivals.
President Obama’s speech to school children on September 8 urged them to “set high goals, knuckle down in their studies and persevere through failure.” (NYT 9/9/09) Many parents embrace hard work and perseverance for our children but the subtext of the speech is that if children don’t succeed in life, it must be their own fault because they did not work hard enough. This idea ignores the reality of the capitalist world. No matter how hard school children work, they will not be allowed to all become doctors or lawyers. They will not even all have jobs. Capitalism relies on a pool of unemployed workers to keep wages low. In the current crises, unemployment is even higher; teaching workers to blame themselves prevents them from blaming the true cause of unemployment — capitalism.
Capitalist schools spend much time dividing students into different groups. Tests are designed to magnify differences and assign arbitrary cut-offs, so children get sorted into different programs from gifted and advanced placement to prison-like dumping schools. Capitalist schools prepare a select few to steer towards the elite professions. The majority of students are left to fight for low-paying jobs or join the military (see letter, p. 6).
“Tough Choices, Tough Times,” the report of the rulers’ New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, proposes that capitalism’s divisions be further entrenched in the schools by forcing students into a defined path after the tenth grade, either college-bound or vocational. Obama wants school children to knuckle down in their studies and persevere through a system that is failing and that fails to offer them the future they deserve.
This latest economic crisis and the quagmire of constant war have left the rulers in a political bind. Individualism is a cornerstone of capitalism and since the anti-war and anti-racist rebellions of the 60’s the U.S. bosses have championed the politics, the art, the music and the philosophy of “me-first.” Schools collaborated with a curriculum rich in the stories of individual success and national progress as the result of individual “can-do” spirit or single-minded pursuit of individual success in the face of great odds.
The fact that the Nazis were defeated by the Soviet communists has been written out of history books. The bosses rewrote the truth of racism in the United States as the fiction of enlightened individuals struggling to champion the ideals of individual freedom. Slavery became an unfortunate “mistake” rather than the conscious policy of 250 years of racist rule codified in colonial law and the Constitution and enforced with ruthless violence that continues to define U.S. society today.
Obama tried to shift the message of individual success when he told students, “Don’t give up on yourself, because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.” National service has been a part of the Obama campaign since the beginning and now Obama is calling on schools to teach children to serve their country and to be inspired to sacrifice for the good of the nation. But it’s not “their” country, it’s the bosses’.
Obama and the rest of the ruling class know that the schools have been failing our children for a long time. They cynically use their own failure to meet workers’ needs as a rallying cry for reforms. Many of these reforms have won the support of parents and teachers who hope that they will improve education; but none of these reforms will change the fundamental problems of a system that doesn’t care about working-class children. After years and years of education reform plans, 39% of children in the U.S. live in families earning less then the amount needed to meet their basic needs. (Center for Children in Poverty) Capitalism cannot educate the majority of children, and for the bosses it is not a principle whether students learn to accept inequality in a large school or a small one.
Reading CHALLENGE in the last few years, one can see many examples of fighting against anti-working-class attacks in the schools: from high school students protesting budget cuts and walking out against police brutality, to college students demonstrating against a pro-torture professor and developing a Freedom School when summer session is cancelled. The Progressive Labor Party is not training students to calmly accept the life capitalism has in store for them. We want students to learn real history and real skills, to learn to organize, to learn to fight back and to learn to serve our class by building the fight for communist revolution.
LETTERS
Joblessness ‘Recruits’ Workers on Both Sides of Bosses’ War
Why do soldiers from different countries join the military to fight each other? Many times it is because they cannot get a job.
The San Francisco Chronicle (2/17/09) reported that a U.S. colonel said he believes the increase of militant activity is not ideologically-based but stems from poor Afghans being enticed into fighting by their need for money. Afghan officials “believe it’s the guys who say, ‘Hey, you want $100 to shoot an RPG at a humvee when it goes by,’ and the guy says, ‘Yeah, I’ll do that, because I’ve got to feed my family.’”
Pentagon officials say that the economic downturn and a rising unemployment rate are making the military a more attractive option. Undersecretary of State David Chu said the military does “benefit when things look less positive in civil society.” (SFC, 11/30/08)
The bosses want us to fight each other so they can be rich and control their country’s economy. We should unite with these other workers so we can fight for a better life for all of us instead of killing each other for the benefit of the rich.
Internationalism is a communist idea. It says workers of the world have more in common with each other than with the bosses that run the country they live in. The bosses teach nationalism and patriotism to convince us to ally with them, but remember, every ruling class teaches patriotism; only the communists teach internationalism.
California reader
Eyewitness to NATO Afghan Slaughter
[The following letter is from an eyewitness in Afghanistan to the events described below, which gives the lie to U.S. military reports on who was killed and how many.]
I was at a burial ceremony of our colleague cousin who died in the latest explosion. He was not a Taliban, only a villager. Most of the victims were civilians.
The bombing was in the Chardara district, 15 kilometers from Kundaz City. Some say it killed over 200, gathering to obtain fuel from hijacked tankers. Then came the NATO airstrikes. It included a few Taliban, the others are all villagers.
What are these bastards doing? Killing innocent people — is this democracy?
Today around 10:20 AM a vehicle suicide bomber exploded himself on Khanabad Road, close to Lodin village on the way to Khanabad, killing one German soldier and injuring two. The bomber was from Chardara; three members of his family died in the airstrike bombing.
A friend in Afghanistan
Reject Capitalist Ideas
In my workplace I can listen and talk to workers, many of whom are low-paid and trying to survive selling knick-knacks at traffic lights in the city of Bogota, Colombia.
For a long time, but especially since President Uribe Velez came to power, the working class has been fooled and kept busy by the media, which has blamed the misery in which we live here on only the symptoms of capitalism. It’s common to hear that it is because of pyramid schemes, the guerillas, the paramilitary, the worldwide crisis, traffic restrictions, too much rain, not enough rain, holidays, bank taxes, monopolies, landowners, bad governments and other innumerable reasons, that we live in poverty, violence and social decay.
That is why workers look for whoever can take them out of this state of misery. I tell people that the only culprit is the capitalist system itself. It is the system that produces individualism, racism, imperialist wars, sexism, and the miserable conditions workers are forced to live under, by a small minority that has the fascist state under its control.
That is why the only solution in our hands is to dump capitalism for its opposite, communism. That’s a system with no bosses, no wage slavery, a society controlled by workers united in Progressive Labor Party. This is not easy, but we should begin by rejecting practices such as consumerism and sexism, and strengthening the reading of political texts and dialectical materialism, reading, contributing to and distributing CHALLENGE — being a communist under capitalism.
CHALLENGE reader
Sotomayor As Judge Can Only Take Rulers’ Side
The recent hoopla about Sonia Sotomayor’s appointment to the Supreme Court helped the bosses reinforce an illusion they’ve worked hard at building: that the Supreme Court is “above politics” and makes rulings that protect or help people and limits bad things the government does. They constantly repeat how the Court’s rulings “ended segregated schools” (who’s kidding who!), legalized abortion and protect people from unfair police actions.
Many working people cheered her appointment because she comes from a working-class Puerto Rican family living in a Bronx, NY housing project — so she must be “one of us,” right? Wrong! No matter where she came from, she’s an Ivy League-educated judge who earned her promotion through a long history of doing the ruling class’s work in the courts. After all, that’s what the courts are for.
The rulers push the appearance of a Court with one black justice, one Latina and (now) two women as a body “representing” diverse sectors of society. But the essence is that there are two main antagonistic classes in capitalist society: workers who produce everything of value and bosses who exploit them for their private profit. There are no workers on this Court, never have been and never will be. Once Sotomayor became a judge, she joined the bosses’ side.
The Supreme Court is part of the structure of this class rule. It has two important jobs: maintaining the illusion that there’s justice for workers, and helping the ruling class police itself, sorting out differences and keeping the bosses in power. Does it matter who’s on the Supreme Court? Largely, no. The Court makes its rulings by interpreting constitutional law to meet the needs of the ruling class at a particular time.
During slavery the Court upheld it. When workers began to unionize and strike, the Court gave the bosses injunctions to stop them. When the air traffic controllers struck, the courts helped Reagan fire them all. And when the bosses needed a cover for election fraud, it turned to the Supreme Court to elect Bush. So when the bosses — especially the main liberal wing Obama represents — need to make the Court “look a little better” to workers, they appoint a Sotomayor.
In a future communist society, the “courts” will also represent its ruling class: but then it will be the working class. The “courts” will be workers who decide who has violated the rules the working class established to enforce working-class rule, and how they can be rehabilitated, if possible. The Sotomayors, Thomases, Roberts and Scalias will then be part of the garbage can of history.
Brooklyn Red
Global Warming: Only Communism Can Save the Planet, Not Capitalist Schemes
Book Reviews: Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America, by Thomas Friedman (Farrar, Strous, and Giroux, New York, 2008); and The Green-Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, by Van Jones with Ariane Conrad (Harper One, New York, 2008).
These two books on global warming were published last year as the Obama campaign moved into high gear. Friedman is a NY Times columnist. Jones is a human rights activist who Obama appointed as Special Advisor for Green Jobs but then was forced to resign recently after being attacked by right-wing Republicans for supposedly being a “Marxist.”
Both Friedman and Jones recognize that today’s severe global warming is due to increasing greenhouse gases (GHGs) produced by fossil fuels (oil, coal and natural gas) in industry, transportation and in the generation of electrical power. They both recognize the urgent need for a solution. But they both (incorrectly) suggest, in different ways, that the capitalist market can solve this problem, if only governments worldwide would adopt “the correct policies.”
In his book, Friedman is an unabashed apologist for U.S. imperialism. Jones, on the other hand, denounces the U.S. history of genocidal theft of Indian lands, slavery and the ongoing racist treatment of black, Latin, Asian and Native American working-class people, as well as the extreme sexist discrimination against women. Racism/sexism and global warming are the “two biggest problems” (his subtitle) facing the world.
Friedman writes as though racism and the current oil wars never happened and calls on the U.S. to regain its mythical moral leadership in the world (after Bush allegedly destroyed it) by taking the lead in decreasing GHG emissions. Jones, on the other hand, calls on the U.S. government to solve global warming by creating green jobs to build clean energy usage that will also help to abolish the inequality of income and opportunity suffered by black and Latino workers. He says neither problem can be solved without solving the other.
The two authors seem to be living in two different universes — Friedman in fantasyland while Jones is almost in the real world.
While Jones doesn’t defend the war-criminal U.S. ruling class like Friedman does, he appears clueless about the nature of capitalism. He doesn’t recognize the antagonistic relationship between the capitalist class and the working class. He doesn’t see the capitalists’ absolute need to promote racism and sexism to enhance their super-profits and to maintain their political power — control of the state. This enables them to exert their class domination over both the working class and over competing imperialists.
Though Jones advocates the full involvement of “minority” workers to pressure the government to foster use of solar panels, windmills and other forms of clean energy, he proposes that such a coalition be led by “progressive” businessmen. (!) This position is misleading pie in the sky, typical of those like Jones who toy with revolutionary ideas at one point in their lives and then reject them to pursue a career in the Democratic Party.
His central error is not understanding that capitalism, with its driving profit motive, cannot stop using fossil fuels without dismantling virtually the entire body of physical capital in the world, replacing it with new physical plant and modes of transportation employing clean energy sources. The world’s capitalist classes can never agree to do this.
The world’s imperialists are locked in life-and-death competitive rivalries with each other. No “global policy” that interferes with their battle for maximum profits can possibly be written and enforced as long as these imperialists fight with each other over control of the world’s resources and markets.
The main battle we face in the movement against global warming is defeating the misleading strategies of writers like Jones and the fantasies of liberals like Friedman. We must redouble our efforts to demonstrate that only the abolition of capitalism, classes and production for profit instead of for use can lay the foundation for a renewed planet. Only the world’s working class, led by its communist party PLP, once having seized power from the capitalists and consolidated its power through revolution, will be able to clean up the world, revolutionize production processes with safe, clean energy and save the planet.
Obama’s Afghan War Crucial to U.S. Bosses’ Global Control
The fight between the U.S. imperialists and their Russian, Chinese and Iranian rivals — for control of the oil and gas fields of the Caspian Sea and Central Asia region and the pipeline routes to take these resources to market — is leading to wider Middle Eastern wars and eventually to an inevitable global confrontation. Controlling this region is crucial to the U.S. bosses’ efforts to regain absolute control of oil-rich Middle East, which have been the basis for their dominant imperialist position since the end of World War II.
Obama chose to concentrate on the Afghanistan war in hopes the U.S. backed TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India pipeline) could be built. This pipeline, bypassing both Russia and Iran, could reverse Russian-Chinese advances in the energy-rich former Soviet republics, giving the U.S. control of this strategic region.
If successful, together with a new string of U.S. bases in the area, TAPI would put Russia and China on the defensive militarily, break Russia’s growing world energy monopoly, especially of the European Union’s energy market, and position the U.S. bosses to potentially starve China of the energy resources needed to fuel its economic and military rise.
It would also free the U.S. military machine to deal with Iran, if it hadn’t capitulated by then. Iraq could then be more easily pacified and U.S. imperialism’s dream of extending its hegemony well into the 21st century would be within reach.
As U.S. imperialists’ political, economic and military hegemony shrinks, their ability to control the outcome of world events becomes limited. An example is the recent Afghan presidential election, aimed at getting rid of Karzai, who has become an obstacle to their geopolitical goals in the area. He’s been cozying up to China and deepening his ties with the warlords of the Northern Alliance, backed by Russia, Iran and India.
Their electoral scheme failed. So far, with 99% of the votes counted, Karzai is the winner with 54% against the U.S candidate Abdullah Abdullah’s 28%. Plan B was to claim massive fraud and call for a run-off election rigged to guarantee Abdullah”s victory. But some among their ranks like Zbiegnew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, disagree with this plan. They claim it would further destabilize Afghanistan and increase the “growing risk …that the Taliban …be viewed as a resistance movement against foreign occupation… and that would be a strategic defeat.”
The U.S. ruling class is clearly at odds over this. Some are making frantic efforts to force Karzai into a unity government with his rival Abdullah Abdullah (known in Afghanistan as “Obama’s wife”). Others see no option but to accept Karzai and to configure a government run by their ambassador Eikenberry and General McCrystal. Some call for the “Afghanization” of the war while others demand Obama’s unfailing commitment to his surge. Some, with Saudi Arabia and Britain, are working for a negotiated settlement with the “good Taliban.”
Besides, some of their European allies also disagree with the plan and are reluctant to send more troops. German Chancellor Angela Merkel praised the elections, while demanding, with leaders from Britain and France, an international conference to force the “Afghanization” of the war so “that the international engagement can be reduced.” Brzezinski agrees, arguing it might reduce “the growing risk of the war becoming a war of foreigners against Afghans,” and the Europeans allies “might be less likely to pull out entirely…. [Leaving] the U.S. alone in the lurch.”
Whatever tactics the U.S. butchers finally decide on, pipeline TAPI may never fly. It is detrimental to the ambitions of China, Russia and Iran. A U.S.-Taliban agreement will never bring peace to Afghanistan as the warlords of the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s sworn mortal enemies, will fight desperately to survive.
Even if the U.S. imperialists carve out an independent “Pashtunistan” from Afghanistan-Pakistan, as some are planning, the war is likely to widen as the area’s instability helps China and Russia further consolidate their grip on the Caspian-Central Asia region. The Iranian nuclear issue — nothing but a fig leaf to hide the vital role of Iran’s energy resources and strategic location in the fight for world domination — is rapidly forcing a showdown between the U.S., Russia, Iran and potentially Israel.
How many more millions must be murdered, maimed and displaced for the profits of the imperialists of the world? No election, peace agreement, U. N. resolution or slick-talking politician like Obama will ever put an end to this butchery. Workers, students and soldiers, getting angrier at the cutbacks and layoffs, need to see that the widening imperialist genocide, inherent in capitalist crisis, is costing $billions and murdering so many members of our class! Students need to unite with soldiers and workers who bear the heaviest burden for the capitalist war economy. Only an international communist-conscious working class under the leadership of PLP can put an end to this bosses’ inferno, with a communist revolution.
Red Eye on the News
Teenagers bumped down, jobless
NYT, 9/15 — This August, the teenage unemployment rate — that is, the percentage of teenagers who wanted a job who could not find one — was 25.5 percent, its highest level since the government began keeping track of such statistics in 1948. Likewise, the percentage of teenagers overall who were working was at its lowest level in recorded history.
“There are an amazing number of kids out there looking for work.”…. Explanations…mostly boil down to being at the bottom….Half of college graduates under age 25 are in jobs that do not require college degrees, the highest portion in at least 18 years….This has led to less…room for new workers at the bottom.
A raw health deal for immigrants
NYT, 9/6 — President Obama is…giving repeated assurances that [undocumented] immigrants would be excluded from any subsidized benefits under health proposals before Congress….
At the same time, [undocumented] immigrants would not be exempt from the obligations in the House bill…Most [undocumented] immigrants in the country would be required to buy health insurance or face tax penalties.
And since they would be barred from subsidies, they would have to pay for coverage at full rates, regardless of their income level.
For profit, cheat the low-wagers
NYT, 9/2 — Low-wage workers are routinely denied proper overtime pay and are often paid less than the minimum wage, according to a new study based on a survey of workers in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago….
Researchers found that the typical worker had lost $51 the previous week through wage violations, out of an average weekly earning of $339.
The study found that women were far more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than men, with the highest prevalence among women who were [undocumented] immigrants. Among American-born workers, African-Americans had a violation rate nearly triple that for whites….One of the most surprising findings was how successful low-wage employers were in pressuring workers not to file for workers’ compensation. Only 8 percent of those who suffered serious injuries on the job filed.
Paul Robeson, noble anti-capitalist
NYT, 9/3 — Paul Robeson’s story is not forgotten, but is dimly remembered, particularly by the young. Born in 1898…he became the dominant college football player of his time, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, was Rutgers class valedictorian and earned a law degree from Columbia University.
He almost single-handedly legitimized black spirituals and folk music as an art form and became perhaps the most famous concert singer as well as a reknowned actor….
He became a pioneering and uncompromising human rights advocate. He spoke out against segregation decades before the civil rights movement began, and was a fierce opponent of colonialism when that was barely an issue.
He also became an enthusiastic, unflagging admirer of the Soviet Union, something he never renounced or backed away from, even in the face of Stalin’s [critics]. He embraced socialism, not capitalism, as the future. He was blacklisted, had his passport revoked, and, in many ways, was written out of history books….
“I’ve sat in on classes where people are talking about the 30’s and about civil rights and about Martin Luther King, and there’s this gap, as if this man never existed. He’s one of the giants of the movement, and no one knows.”
In poorest areas, sick dial 911
NYT 9/4 – Among the hidden costs of the health care crisis is the burden that fire departments across the country are facing as firefighters much like emergency room doctors, are increasingly serving as primary care providers.
About 80 percent of the calls handled by Engine Company 10 are medical emergencies because firehouse serves one of the city’s poorest areas, where few residents have health insurance, doctors’ checkups are rare, and medical problems are left to fester until someone dials 911….Those calls involved heart attacks, diabetic sores, epileptic seizures and people complaining of shortness of breath.
US drove Sioux off sacred mount
NYT, 9/2 – I have to admit: Mount Rushmore bothers me. It was bad enough that white men drove the Sioux from hills they still hold sacred; did they have to carve faces all over them too? It’s easy to feel affection for Mount Rushmore’s strange grandeur, but only if you forget where it is and how it got there.
Insiders dumping their own stocks
NYT, 9/8 – Better-then-expected corporate earnings in recent months have been the result of companies saving money through job cuts rather than raising revenue through sales growth. It is worthy of note that directors in the US have taken advantage of the rally on Wall Street to offload shares in their firms.
Obama message getting blurry
Jimmy Fallon (TV) – The President is going to deliver his speech to the nation’s schoolchildren next Tuesday. It will be about how if you study hard, you can become the most popular person in the world for eight months, then suddenly, not so much.
Harper’s Ferry Raid Shows: Rely on the Masses to Change the World
On October 17, 2009, PLP’ers are joining many others at Harper’s Ferry to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Harper’s Ferry raid which sparked the Civil War that ended chattel slavery in the U.S. Join us!
Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Osborne Anderson, John Brown, Harriet Tubman — these bold leaders of the anti-slavery struggle understood that the millions of enslaved Africans and millions more of the workers and small farmers oppressed by the slave oligarchy would, under the right conditions, rise up against slavery. They acted on this confidence in the masses and shook the world, from Charleston, S.C. and Southampton, Virginia, to bleeding Kansas and Harper’s Ferry. We should emulate this boldness in our struggles today, for the oppressed of the world will also, under the right conditions and communist leadership, rise up to destroy their exploiters.
Racist ideology intensified in the run-up to the Civil War as the rulers tried to ideologically undermine the anti-slavery cause. Blacks were portrayed by Southern slaveowners as an “inferior breed,” “happy” with slavery, and unfit because of their “inferiority” for a life of freedom alongside whites. Racists in the North repeated the picture of blacks as servile, shuffling, meek, cowardly and dancing in blissful ignorance.
These lies continue today in various forms and are applied to every ethnic group of workers to keep people divided and demoralized. Left out of today’s picture is the eleven-month Stella O’Doro strike in NY, the sit-down strike at Republic Windows and Doors in Chicago, the massive outpouring of opposition to the racist attacks on the Jena 6, black students who fought back against oppression in Louisiana, and hundreds more actions, large and small, around the world.
Anti-slavery rebels knew, contrary to the racist images, that enslaved and free blacks and anti-slavery whites planned and carried out ingenious and daring escapes from slavery with courage and fortitude in the face of whippings, jailing and death. Thousands of slaves escaped to the Dismal Swamp in Virginia, to the Florida swamps, and to the mountains of Jamaica to form egalitarian maroon societies in defiance of the slave system, defending their communities by any means necessary. Slaveowners and their racist apologists claimed that these fighters were the “lunatic fringe,” but John Brown and other anti-slavery activists knew better.
The slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 terrified slaveowners because it demonstrated that every enslaved person was a potential “assassin” of his “beloved” master. Brown and other activists eagerly studied the formation of armies of thousands of the enslaved on the island of Santo Domingo and their success in annihilating their French masters in establishing a black Republic of Haiti in the 1790s.
These experiences led to two profound, if simple, conclusions: people fight back against oppression and their struggle causes change. These conclusions are often poorly understood. Today, many workers say, “Nobody where I work wants to do anything” or “You can’t fight City Hall.” or “You can’t win.” Or “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” But PLP knows better, and acts on the historical knowledge contained in those two simple conclusions.
While the anti-slavery movement grew apace, the European revolutionaries Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were sharpening the working-class fight against wage slavery. Based on their participation in the revolutionary movement and their study of history they developed the philosophy of dialectical materialism. This philosophy, outlined in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, proven true over the years, explains that class struggle is the motive force of history. Periods of seeming passivity among the oppressed, however prolonged, are replaced by blazing struggle, like the explosion of a seemingly dormant volcano. Systems of class exploitation, although they seem at times, permanent, and even “natural,” end. We are no longer cultivating crops and building pyramids in the Nile Valley. Slavery is ended. Feudalism has ended. Capitalism will also end.
Most people do not yet realize this, just as most people in 1859 did not yet realize that slavery was on the verge of extinction. The enslavement of Africans and the system built on this edifice had existed for over 200 years and appeared permanent, like capitalism today. But, with the growth of the PLP and a communist revolution in the face of imperialist war and the continuing crises of capitalism, communism will replace capitalism and all forms of class society.
- France: Auto Parts Workers Seize Plant, Fight for Jobs
- Obama Echos Kennedy ‘Legacy’: War, Racism, Police State
- Union Hacks Screw Transit Workers Despite Rank-&-File Defiance:
- South Africa: Workers, Soldiers Challenge ANC Rulers
- PL’s Ideas Inspire GIs’ Exposé of Brass’s Corruption
- Health Reform Band-aids Will Never Cure Racist Capitalism
- Bosses’ Labor Day Can’t Displace Workers’ May Day: Stella D’Oro Struggle, Not Labor Fakers, Is Model to Follow
- LETTERS
- Red Eye
- Credit check can cost you a job
- Marx, Engels ‘outlast the ages’
- Nigeria drained by foreign oil co’s
- US plotted to overthrow Allende
- Afghanistan legalizes Shia sexism
- Bill Clinton should have sat it out
- Plenty of excuses for new wars!
- Cuban docs’ jump to US ‘unfair!’
- Useless? If it sells, it’s in GDP!
- John Brown’s Raid: Guns Against Slavery
France: Auto Parts Workers Seize Plant, Fight for Jobs
Obama Echos Kennedy ‘Legacy’: War, Racism, Police State
Kennedy-Obama Health Scam = Wartime Consolidation
PLP Fought Kennedy Liberals’ Building of Racism as ‘Integration’
More recently, Kennedy perpetuated liberal deception:
Union Hacks Screw Transit Workers Despite Rank-&-File Defiance:
Before...
...and After
CHALLENGE sale is being organized. A young teacher brought a few students (Summer Project attendees) to distribute our flyers. There are signs of growth and development in Party members that bodes well for working-class people in the Bay Area.
South Africa: Workers, Soldiers Challenge ANC Rulers
PL’s Ideas Inspire GIs’ Exposé of Brass’s Corruption
Health Reform Band-aids Will Never Cure Racist Capitalism
Bosses’ Labor Day Can’t Displace Workers’ May Day:
Stella D’Oro Struggle, Not Labor Fakers, Is Model to Follow
PLP calls on all workers to back the Stella D’Oro bakers all the way, with all the strength of our class.
LETTERS
PLP and Religion, Deep in the Heart of Texas
Planting the Idea of ‘Money Not Needed’
LA Summer Project Wins 8 Youth to PLP
Haiti: Mass Demonstrations for Minimum Wage Hike
Freedom School: Students Fight to Learn, Learn to Fight
‘District 9’ Attacks Racist Apartheid But Offers No Solution
vigorously calls for the aliens to be removed to camps outside of the city.
dispatching alien babies with flame throwers (joking that they pop like popcorn), dissect mass numbers of aliens for medical experiments (in a crazed attempt to locate the source of their “power, á la the Nazis), or regularly gun down aliens in the street for fun it elicits a different response since they do it while wearing business suits or crisp white uniforms. The film plays on how we have been taught to abhor the violence of petty gangsters while ignoring state-sanctioned genocide caused by the capitalist class.
Red Eye
Credit check can cost you a job
Marx, Engels ‘outlast the ages’
Nigeria drained by foreign oil co’s
US plotted to overthrow Allende
Afghanistan legalizes Shia sexism
Bill Clinton should have sat it out
Plenty of excuses for new wars!
Cuban docs’ jump to US ‘unfair!’
Useless? If it sells, it’s in GDP!
John Brown’s Raid: Guns Against Slavery
Two-Day Battle
Great Violence Needed to End Slavery
The Inspiration of John Brown
No Reform Can Fix Capitalist Healthcare
Health Battle Shows Narrow Capitalist Self-interest Persists
Philly Hospital Workers March Against Speed-up
a href="#Airport Bosses’ Sweatshop Conditions Murder Immigrant Worker">"irport Bosses’ Sweatshop Conditions Murder Immigrant Worker
a href="#Fight ‘Choice’ of Wage-cuts or Layoffs at Cal State">Fi"ht ‘Choice’ of Wage-cuts or Layoffs at Cal State
a href="#Imperialists’ Battle over Honduras Kills Workers">"mperialists’ Battle over Honduras Kills Workers
Guadeloupe, Martinique: Bosses Reneg on ‘Promises’ that Ended Strikes
a href="#S. Korea : Auto Workers Seized Plant, Repelled Cops’ Attack">". Korea : Auto Workers Seized Plant, Repelled Cops’ Attack
Wage-cut, Wage-freeze: GE Practices Obama’s ‘Shared Sacrifice’
Clinton Visit to India: Red Revolution Needed to Stop Global Warming
Letters
a href="#‘No plea bargain when you know you’re right...’">‘No "lea bargain when you know you’re right...’
a href="#‘Throw a (red) stone in the water and the ripples spread’">‘T"row a (red) stone in the water and the ripples spread’
Rank-and-File Militance Scores vs. Exploiting Bosses
a href="#L.A. Summer Project Spreads PL’s Politics to Industrial Workers and GI’s">L.". Summer Project Spreads PL’s Politics to Industrial Workers and GI’s ‘Hungry for more action...’
Project Developed Young Leaders
a href="#‘Broadened my horizons about all workers’ struggles...’">‘Bro"dened my horizons about all workers’ struggles...’
a href="#‘A productive week...’">‘A"productive week...’
a href="#[Excerpts from a speech given at PLP’s LA Summer Project]">"xcerpts from a speech given at PLP’s LA Summer Project
Imperialist Rivalries Spurred 1969 Moon Landing
- Fired? Your wage won’t recover
- Working-class tradition: help out
- Profit system rules banks’ actions
- Obama = Bush on immigrant raids
- System rewards those who rob us
- And they’re still at it….
- Sex discrimination can mean death
- US-China clash exploding in Africa
- US gets airbase, winks at tyrant
- Drugs prey on no-hope workers
a href="#‘The Ugly Truth’: Sexism Knows No Boundaries Under Capitalism">‘T"e Ugly Truth’: Sexism Knows No Boundaries Under Capitalism
No Reform Can Fix Capitalist Healthcare
U.S. bosses and their politician-servants are arguing over how best to dole out health care to the working class. One side of this battle, mainly Republicans and the so-called "Blue Dog" Democrats, wants to protect the profits of the insurance and pharmaceutical companies at all costs. The other side, mainly liberal Democrats, sees the current health-care situation as a threat to U.S. bosses’ ability to maintain their position against imperialist rivals. As far as the working class is concerned, the likenesses between these sides are more important than their differences.
Neither faction has offered the real solution for all workers: Free and readily accessible health care, as was the situation after the revolutions in the Soviet Union and China. Clinics were widespread and masses of health-care workers were sent into rural areas to serve peasants and farmers.
PLP believes this history shows that workers in power can provide a healthy environment, just as we’ve learned from what happened when these revolutions were reversed and capitalism restored. In the former Soviet republics, workers’ life expectancy, which dramatically increased in the 30 years after the revolution, has decreased since the late 1960s. In China, schistosomiasis, a disease caused by a parasitic worm that ravaged rural areas, was widely controlled due to planned social action initiated after the revolution; it has reemerged.
The results of socialism were a return to capitalism and renewed attacks on the health of the working class. This is why PLP advocates fighting directly for communism and for a society where all aspects of workers’ health will be primary.
Improving workers’ health is not on the top of the agenda for the ruling class, but the faction that now controls the White House and Congress is focused on maintaining U.S. dominance in the world and therefore has two main goals for health-care reform: 1) force the U.S. working class to accept across-the-board low-quality health care as a fact of life; and 2) discipline the sections of the ruling class which are only interested in short-term profits and threaten to undermine the U.S.’s ability to oppose its rivals. Both of these goals represent a move towards greater fascist control.
Here are the bosses’ plans and a communist analysis:
- Require everyone to have health insurance or else pay a penalty.
This requirement is a direct attack on workers who, because of falling wages, find it more and more difficult to divvy up what they have between food, rent/mortgages, heat, clothing, etc. This racist attack will especially affect black and Latin workers who generally suffer from lower wages and higher rates of unemployment.
- Require small businesses to provide insurance that meets "minimum standards."
These "minimum standards" will attempt to ensure a working class that is only healthy enough to exploit for profit and fight in their oil wars. This means that health care will be rationed and health care for workers who are not "productive" (in the capitalist sense, meaning they don’t produce profits), namely the elderly and seriously ill, will be limited.
- Expand Medicaid to cover the uninsured who can’t afford to buy their own health insurance.
Medicaid fails to provide decent health care now and would have to be expanded just to adequately cover those who aReady use its services. The financial crisis has swelled the number of unemployed (and thus added to the nearly 50 million uninsured), with black and Latin workers disproportionately affected, meaning more and more workers will come to rely on Medicaid. Their ability to force us to accept these racist conditions is a measure of their ability to prepare us for future attacks.
- Tighter regulation of health insurance companies.
This attempt to increase regulation reflects the split in the ruling class discussed above and indicates that Obama & Co. are attempting to discipline those capitalists who care only about their short-term profit-making. It remains to be seen whether health-insurance bosses will submit to this disciplining, but the working class has no stake in the outcome of this battle, because no matter which group of capitalists are running the show, our health will always take a back seat to profits. Of course it’s gratifying to see CEOs get "punished" in public, but it will not mean that Obama and the Democrats actually care about our health.
- Taxing generous insurance plans.
As a legacy of the militant union reforms of the 1930s and ‘40s, there is a section of the working class which has decent health care insurance, primarily industrial and government workers. Not content with helping to wipe out many of these benefits that went along with unionized auto industry jobs, Obama has called for a tax on the remaining decent health care plans.
This plan to tax those few workers who have somehow managed to retain decent health benefits reveals the essence of the entire reform effort: The heavy taxes on the premium plans will drive them out of existence (for workers) and help to create a single, low-quality level of health care for the working class, one that allows for greater government control and discipline, e.g., fascism.
Getting behind either of the factions is a mistake for the working class. Neither side has our interests at heart, a fact clearly indicated when we consider that there has been no mention of a particular super-exploited section of the working class that has a key role to play in this debate: healthcare workers. Mainly women and often immigrants, these workers suffer racist double-exploitation. Their working conditions are awful, especially for home-health providers (who get paid very low wages and have to buy their own gas to get to their patients) and nursing-home attendants (low wages, long hours, too many patients). Improving the health of the working class should begin with improving the health of those who take care of the rest of us.
When we are told of the deaths of workers from disease we often hear "Our mother died of tuberculosis," or "My sister died from AIDS," or "My son died from cholera." These things, the tuberculosis or cholera bacteria or HIV, are only the specific reason for an individual’s demise. The essential point is that capitalism creates the conditions in which these particular pathogens actually kill people. Clean water and adequate sewage treatment, which is the biggest healthcare improvement that’s available, is denied to hundreds of millions of workers in poorer countries (and millions in imperialism’s heartland).
Whatever it is that makes us sick, from treatable infections to imperialist war, from racist police brutality to stress from having to work two jobs (or from being unemployed), it is capitalism that is the real disease. Fortunately there is a cure: communist revolution and a workers’ society.?J
Fascist Economy Rules the Roost for U.S. Big Bosses
In contrast with the rapid and vast restructurings in the auto and banking industries, health care "reform" is proving a much harder task for Obama and the dominant, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalists he serves. The hallmark of fascism, tightened, centralized economic control — which, like an expanded military, U.S. rulers need to compete in a sharpening global rivaRy — is developing unevenly.
In effect, the government runs GM and Chrysler, and banks and brokers have dwindled to a dominant handful. But individual capitalists have yet to display the sense of "sacrifice" Obama demanded at his inauguration, "giving our all to a difficult task."
Reforming — especially nationalizing — health care would benefit the U.S. capitalist class as a whole in various ways. It could relieve the major expense of workers’ health care — which, for instance, cost GM $3 billion annually — thereby boosting companies’ profits. By reducing such costs, it could free up capital for rebuilding infrastructure and the rulers’ war machine, as well as make them more competitive with rivals in Europe, Japan and Canada where health care is aReady nationalized. It also could make people more directly dependent on the government and consequently loyal to it.
Health Battle Shows Narrow Capitalist Self-interest Persists
Reluctant, self-interested capitalists are turning Obama’s health roadshow "town meetings" into bad days on Jerry Springer. New York Times columnist, Nobel Prize winner and leading proponent of economic fascism Paul Krugman lamented: "Angry protesters...have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform." (NYT, 8/6) "Well-heeled interest groups are helping to organize the town hall mobs," Krugman continued. "Key organizers include...a new organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights...run by Rick Scott, the former head of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital chain." Such hospitals, and their doctors, will lose big if Obama succeeds in eliminating current fee-for-service — which enables them to charge what the traffic will bear — and replaces it with government-mandated salaries and test charges.
Health insurers, HMO’s — fearing marginalization if a federal plan takes hold — also oppose Obama, who’s trying to carry out U.S. capitalism’s larger, long-term interests. Drug makers, however, love him, for the same reason: profits (not patriotism). Their lobbying group PhRMA has authorized a $150-million advertising budget to back Obama’s plan. Pharmaceuticals "stand to gain millions of new customers from the expansion of healthcare coverage." (NYT, 9/9/09)
Obama’s consolidation/nationalization effort has succeeded most in auto, where short-term profit has vanished. This has slashed the DuPont’s financial power, whose Wilmington Trust is the largest creditor — meaning loser — in GM’s bankruptcy.
At GM, Obama installed ExxonMobil director Edward Whitaker as chairman. This oil giant is the largest beneficiary of U.S. imperialism’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This may even have engineered the demise of the 95-year-old influence of the DuPont family, which sometimes has been at odds with U.S. imperialists’ broader agenda. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, DuPont president Ellen Kullman quit GM’s board in December, just after Obama’s election.
Greedy Execs Ignore War Agenda for Quick Cash
Many bank executives, like health industry bosses, mainly see the current crisis as an opportunity to get even richer. Frank Rich, another NY Times’ U.S. imperialist pundit, noted, "Nine...bailed-out banks — which in total received $175 billion of taxpayers’ money, but as yet have repaid only $50 billion — are awarding a total of $32.6 billion in bonuses for 2009." (8/9) He includes Goldman and JP Morgan. The same day’s Times editorialized for government regulation of bankers’ compensation.
CEOs and others who won’t submit to the leading rulers’ greater needs invite the full force of state power upon them. Convicted Enron bosses rot, or have died, in jail. The ever-unfolding Madoff case and last month’s round-up of crooked politicians and rabbis in New Jersey and Brooklyn help the rulers test just how much public sentiment they can stir up against wayward servants of their own class. This includes the potential to spread anti-Semitism in case it’s needed against Goldman for grabbing billions in bonuses.
But in-fighting among the bosses is no mere sideshow for workers. Capitalists’ disciplining of one another punishes the working class in far greater numbers. For every Bernie Madoff or Enron or WorldCom telecommunications exec, tens of thousands of workers lost jobs and pensions. This is especially true for black and Latino workers who, due to racist discrimination, have been thrown on the scrap heap in disproportionate numbers.
U.S. rulers are counting on Obama to impose the wartime economic discipline they require. Viewing his proposed reforms as "progress" would be a serious political mistake. Our Party’s task is to spread the only viable alternative — for workers — to Obama’s "town meeting" message. In short, we must eliminate the profit system which creates all kinds of exploiters of the working class — whether those driving for short-term immediate profits or their long-range imperialist opponents, primarily concerned with saving their system. Destroying capitalism with a communist revolution will take a lifetime of effort.
Auto and Banks Rapidly Consolidate
In further consolidation, the bosses backing Obama have anointed just two firms, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, as the U.S.’s flagship financiers. Goldman’s close Washington ties have earned it the nickname "Government Sachs." And, trying not to be too obvious, once word hit the papers, JP Morgan called off an unprecedented July board meeting in Washington that was to have included Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff.
Behind the scenes, Mellon’s Bank of New York (BNY) and Boston’s State Street, both trustees of Obama’s bailout funds, have become, with JP Morgan, undisputed custodians of U.S. capital. BNY manages $19.5 trillion, JP Morgan $13.5 trillion and State Street $11.3 trillion. Beleaguered Citigroup today comes in a distant and dwindling fourth at $1.8 trillion.
And don’t underestimate former titan, now relatively small Brown Brothers Harriman. This old-money "wealth advisor’s" partners, having bankrolled House banking czar Barney Frank, pull important levers in Washington.
Philly Hospital Workers March Against Speed-up
PHILADELPHIA, PA, August 4 — A group of hospital workers recently marched on the nursing administration to protest the bosses making one worker do the work of two different job classifications.
The workers’ march was provoked by the bosses persuading a nursing assistant to do the job of a nursing clerk. Because this worker wasn’t an actual nursing clerk, the bosses had her enter nursing notes into the computer using an RN’s name. Not only is this a speed-up and a contract violation, but it is also illegal. Even the RN was afraid that she would be in trouble if the wrong notes were entered. A second union member resisted when the bosses tried to force her to do the same thing. She contacted a union delegate who organized a meeting for the clerical workers that led to the march.
While this increased activity can temporarily improve morale, it also highlights some important questions: Where is this activity leading us? Will the unions we’re in (or the unions we want to join) convince us that we have no choice but to accept more layoffs and cutbacks "because of the economy". Will the workers’ inevitable anger and militancy be watered down into paper grievances, drawn-out legal fights in the bosses’ courts, and voting for the "lesser-evil" bosses’ politicians?
Or will workers refuse to accept that the working class must pay for the bosses’ economic crisis? "Union ideas" alone don’t show workers that we must defy every aspect of the capitalist class system. Heck, "union ideas" these days mean concession after concession without any fight
whatsoever!
The rich bonuses paid to the bosses in the auto industry and Goldman-Sachs show that "belt-tightening" only applies to the working class. Despite the U.S. bosses’ efforts to downplay class differences, the working class has nothing in common with the bosses. Our interests can only be served by PLP’s ideas of overthrowing capitalism with communist revolution.
Strikes must be built, scabs must be stopped, injunctions and the cops who enforce them must be defied, and international multi-racial unity must develop. Past union movements have pursued these goals and won significant reform victories, but now so many of those victories have been taken back. The attack on the auto workers’ pensions alone undermines the pension of every other worker. That’s why all of our fights must have the ultimate goal of communist revolution. Communist ideas give us the understanding to see how even a defeat of one reform fight or another can be a victory if it advances the revolutionary movement.
The current struggle of one Philadelphia union shows the damage when there are no communist ideas to challenge the bosses. After working under their previous contract for the last 18 months, union workers at Acme food markets just overwhelmingly approved a contract recommended by their union leadership, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1776. Although Acme leads this area in sales, their competitors are gaining and Acme’s response is to attack their higher-paid union workers. Acme currently paid "250 percent higher than the average competitor in the Northeast region" for health benefits according to Acme’s President Judith A. Spires.
The new contract accepted by the Acme workers has major concessions. The bosses will reduce the percentage of full-time workers from 23% to 18%. This hurts younger workers by reducing the number of available better-paying jobs. The new contract also allows Acme to lease areas in their stores, opening up the door to replacing higher-paid jobs like union butchers with lower-paid workers brought in by sub-contractors.
Why did the Acme workers accept these cutbacks? Without communist ideas the workers were limited to the "leadership" of their union
officials and the bosses. For example, one worker told a reporter, "There’s no strike, which is very good, because no one wins at that," This is the same idea preached by Acme’s President. "We have to tighten our belts and stop the bleeding," Spires said "Nobody wants a strike. Nobody wins in a strike." No wonder the ACME workers conceded without a fight.
We don’t have to be stuck in a system basically playing by the bosses’ rules and fighting the same fights over and over again. Capitalism’s history shows it can only bring workers crises, misery, racism, sexism and war. Communist revolution and building PLP are the only tickets off this bloody merry-go-round.
a name="Airport Bosses’ Sweatshop Conditions Murder Immigrant Worker">">"irport Bosses’ Sweatshop Conditions Murder Immigrant Worker
QUEENS, NY, August 1 — Bosses at LaGuardia Airport here are guilty of the murder two weeks ago of a subcontractor worker, Yendi Medina. By creating exhausting working conditions, they caused a deadly accident. Yendi, a 22-year old Dominican immigrant worker, leaves behind a two-year old daughter and a grieving family.
On July 29th around 5 am, Yendi was waiting to clean an airplane parked away from the terminal. After a long night on the graveyard shift she sat down next to the plane on a bag of pillows she was carrying. An aircraft mechanic, himself working a ten-hour night shift, accidentally ran over Yendi with his company pick-up truck. The airlines prefer to have most of their cleaning and repairs done at night since then planes do not have to be taken out of service during the day and they can reap more profits.
This accident reflects the nature of capitalism, that in its quest for maximum profits bosses constantly endanger workers and do not value our lives. Of course, the bosses and their representatives do their best to try to convince us this is not the case. After Yendi’s death, local bosses quickly told workers that it was a "tragedy" and no one was to blame. They spoke out of both sides of their mouth however, scolding the workers for not exercising enough caution when we drive and walk around on the airport ramp. They allowed some workers to attend the funeral but would not stop calling their cell phones telling them to return to work.
These are the same bosses who, a day before the death, yelled at the workers for complaining about mandatory overtime. These are the same bosses who give them a hard time if a plane is delayed, and encourage them to rush. Under capitalism bosses can never hide their number one motive — profit — for long. Communism will fight not only to meet workers needs at home, but also on the job.
Ironically, the company and subcontractor bosses who now are shedding crocodile tears have said nothing about the racist, sexist conditions they forced upon Yendi before she died. Yendi earned $7.15 an hour with no benefits. Most of the subcontractor workers are immigrants and women and perform some of the dirtiest work at the airport (like removing the waste from airplane bathrooms). On top of all this, the subcontractor bosses saw fit to fire one of Yendi’s coworkers two days after her death. They claimed that the worker was "driving in an unsafe manner." They saw her as an excellent scapegoat.
The only reasonable response to these attacks is to fight back. When a worker was suspended for refusing to work mandatory overtime, other workers rallied to his cause and the bosses allowed him back to work. The bosses know that without workers, the planes, the trains, the machines and the whole society would grind to a halt.
Unfortunately, as long as we live under capitalism each small victory will only be temporary. We can win a worker his job back only to see another killed. The bosses ensure that no worker’s life or livelihood is safe under capitalism. This is why Progressive Labor Party fights for communism. We have a world to win!
a name="Fight ‘Choice’ of Wage-cuts or Layoffs at Cal State"></">Fi"ht ‘Choice’ of Wage-cuts or Layoffs at Cal State
LOS ANGELES, August 5 — "Banks got bailed out, we got SOLD OUT" chanted the crowd throughout their Cal State University (CSU) campus to students passing by. Despite the small summer attendance due to decreasing class offerings and increasing fees and unemployment, a good turnout fought back against the worsening conditions students and faculty are experiencing across the CSU system, the State’s educational system and in the economic crisis in general.
Students received CHALLENGE and leaflets calling on students, faculty and workers to strike against these attacks and to join the long-term fight to eliminate the racist capitalist system which attacks the working class, wages imperialist war and bails out the banks. This campus demonstration followed the Board of Trustees’ meeting where it voted for a fee hike for students, raising the total increase by 32% in one year! (See CHALLENGE, 8/12).)
As community college faculty in Los Angeles were forced to choose between layoffs or furlough days, CSU faculty face the same "choice" — 24 furlough days a year or layoffs. Many faculty, and even students, albeit from good intentions, see the furloughs as a lesser evil of this "choice," but in reality furloughs put the bosses’ crisis on the backs of working-class faculty, staff and students. It amounts to a 10% wage-cut.
Through conversations with students, as well as various working-class people during PLP’s recent Summer Project, it’s clear that this crisis is an all-out attack on the working class, regardless of occupation, while hitting black and Latino workers and youth the hardest. In the schools, professors, teachers, staff and K-graduate students are all affected by the budget cuts in apparently different but essentially similar ways. As these attacks on the working class sharpen, we must participate in these struggles in order to fight for the only solution to this crisis: communist revolution.
a name="Imperialists’ Battle over Honduras Kills Workers">">"mperialists’ Battle over Honduras Kills Workers
TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS, August 10 — At this writing, the struggle of the Honduran people against the military coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya is in its 43rd day. There have been uninterrupted occupations of bridges, highways and buildings, work stoppages and massive mobilizations. On August 7, marches began from the country’s interior, slated to converge in Tegucigalpa and the country’s second largest city on August 12. This massive show of force is in support of highway blockages and a scheduled general strike that could paralyze the country and bring to a head the struggle to reinstate Zelaya.
Beatings, arrests, woundings and killings have occurred. Nevertheless, this great capacity for struggle and sacrifice by the country’s oppressed masses will in no way advance their real class interests. The only possible liberation for the Honduran working class lies in an armed insurrection that fights for communism. But without a revolutionary communist party to lead them, the workers in Honduras and throughout the world will be pawns in the hands of the imperialists’ rivaRy for maximum profits and world domination.
Presently, Honduras is in the eye of the storm of this rivaRy for the control of Latin America. Zelaya’s mortal sin against U.S. imperialism was getting too close to Hugo Chavez and his Cuba-Bolivia-Nicaragua populist bloc. This bloc — together with the rising regional power of Brazil and its MERCOSUR bloc, plus the European, Russian and Chinese imperialists — is challenging the almost two-century-old U.S. hegemony of the continent.
Zelaya and the Honduran capitalists who back him — like the South American capitalists led by Chavez and Brazil — are striving for a bigger share of what’s produced from their workers’ exploitation by allying with the U.S. bosses’ rivals. These rivals, on their part, need to pry this region from the U.S. imperialists’ grip as each tries to enlarge their control of the world’s resources and profits.
Zelaya and his backers, just like U.S. rulers and their lackeys, claim they are "fighting for democracy." But this is just a scheme to win workers and others to fight for their capitalists’ interests. "Democracy," whether imposed with bayonets or legalized by elections, is the capitalists’ dictatorship over our class.
Our liberation lies in forging a communist revolution to impose our working-class dictatorship to smash all the world’s capitalists and guarantee they never rise again. From this we will build a communist society that will eliminate the wage system, money and all capitalist evils. We will produce to satisfy the needs of our class internationally, not to make a handful of parasites richer.
Honduras reveals a weakness of U.S. imperialism. Gone are the days when the U.S. can impose their will unilaterally in Latin America. Whatever the outcome of the Honduran crisis, the struggle for the control of the region will intensify.
Honduras shows that U.S. rulers can only use the military option to regain absolute control of the hemisphere. It also shows that the workers’ only option is to organize for a communist revolution. Zelaya, a capitalist whose family murdered many leftist organizers during the 1980s, will never help workers build such a movement. And any so-called working-class leader who supports him or fights for "democracy" is either knowingly or unknowingly a traitor to our class. Joining and building the internationalist Progressive Labor Party and the fight for communism are the only paths to working-class liberation.
Guadeloupe, Martinique:
Bosses Reneg on ‘Promises’ that Ended Strikes
(what else is new?)
POINTE-A-PITRE, GUADELOUPE, August 4 — Five months after the 44-day general strike against capitalist profiteering, the situation remains tense on this Caribbean island, a French overseas territory.
One of the islanders’ main grievances has been the profiteering by SARA, the oil company owned by Total, Esso and Chevron-Texaco. But on July 22, barely one month after taking office, Marie-Luce Penchard, the new Secretary of State for Overseas Territories, announced the government will allow a hike in gas prices later this month.
This came although the Ollier/Taubira commission — set up under the March 4 protocol that ended the general strike — has not reported yet. Since the announcement, repeated rumors of impending gas-price increases have caused runs on gas stations, jangling people’s nerves and filling the station owners’ cash registers.
Both the LKP collective (an umbrella organization of unions, political parties and cultural associations which led the general strike) and the UGTG trade union are calling on the government — in accordance with the March 4 protocol — to force SARA to reimburse over three million euros that it wrongly received from local government, instead of allowing the company to grab even more.
A measure of the tension here was the cops’ violent reaction when the slam poet Vasko shouted an insult at French president Sarkozy during his June 26 visit to nearby Martinique, which had also been shut by the general strike. Vasko was immediately slapped twice on the face, thrown to the ground, handcuffed and charged with insulting a public official.
There also may be a teachers’ strike when school begins on September 2, demanding more teacher positions as promised in the March 4 protocol.
But now the bosses’ government is going back on its promises that ended the strike — and end to SARA profiteering and more teacher jobs. This bears out what CHALLENGE reported during the general strike: the bosses try to take away benefits that workers win during their struggles, which is why communist revolution is the only way to obtain real, permanent change.
a name="S. Korea : Auto Workers Seized Plant, Repelled Cops’ Attack">">". Korea : Auto Workers Seized Plant, Repelled Cops’ Attack
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA, August 7 — Hundreds of workers occupied the Ssangyong Motor Company for over two months, resisting layoffs. After two raids by the police, which the workers resisted by firing nuts and bolts from slingshots, 500 of 900 workers remained in the plant. They occupied the paint shop where thousands of gallons of flammable paint are stored. The workers initially rejected the company’s offer to reduce the number of layoffs and said in a statement that rather than being divided they would "die together." (NYT, 8/5/09) The next day the union negotiated a settlement that further reduced the layoffs and pressured the workers to end the occupation. The struggle continues.
Wage-cut, Wage-freeze:
GE Practices Obama’s ‘Shared Sacrifice’
GE is following a classic capitalist method of squeezing profits out of workers: pitting one group against another to lower wages and conditions for all. GE chairman Jeffrey Immelt has told the company’s unions that "production costs must be competitive to keep factories from closing and moving to Mexico or China" (NY Times, 8/7) — where GE has been moving all along. Its Schenectady, NY, work-force is now 6,000, down from a high of 40,000.
Now, in exchange for building a new plant in Schenectady and expanding one in Louisville, the IUE/CWA union has swallowed a 2-year wage-freeze and a two-tier wage system that cuts newly-hired workers’ wages $10 an hour. For that, GE has "promised" not to move operations for two years. Immelt whines about "America’s sagging manufacturing base," saying that the U.S. has "lost its competitive edge in many areas, falling behind other countries." When he says "U.S." he means U.S. bosses.
GE’s billionaire CEO says that by expanding domestic manufacturing, the company is "putting its money where its mouth is." Translation: GE is "putting workers’ money (stolen from them) into GE’s profits."
Immelt wants to mask the class contradiction between workers and bosses behind what Immelt says is "more alignment of management and labor." He wants bosses and workers "on the same side" — with the bosses on top and workers at the bottom. This is Obama’s "shared sacrifice" with a vengeance: a $10-an-hour wage-cut, a wage-freeze and a (bosses’) "promise" to stay put in this juicy situation for two years.
They need workers’ help in producing more goods for less wages to enable U.S. capitalists to compete with rivals worldwide, and guarantee they can ensure production for their imperialist wars.
Rather than helping GE to "put its money where its mouth is," workers need to put the bosses where they belong — six feet under.
Clinton Visit to India:
Red Revolution Needed to Stop Global Warming
Global warming, caused by capitalism’s mad rush for profits and devil-may-care attitude about the future, has aReady produced alarming weather events — increasingly violent hurricanes like Katrina, and hurricanes in the North Atlantic, where they had never been recorded. It has produced more severe droughts and flooding and the potential for a rise in sea level that will chase tens of millions from their homes in cities near coasts. So what do we make of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to India (July 18-20), where she failed utterly in pressuring India’s leadership to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that cause global warming?
Clinton’s approach to India was a study in the imperialist rivaRy that dominates global politics. Rather than accommodate her, India’s Environmental Minister Kamesh criticized the U.S. for generating a century’s worth of greenhouse gases (GHGs) without let-up and then preaching to the developing nations that they should stop emitting GHGs.
The capitalist ruling classes of both India and China — the two most populous nations in the world, containing over one-third of the world’s working class — know that the U.S. call for capping GHG emissions is mainly an attempt to slow their growth and prevent them from challenging the U.S. economically. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund aReady predict that the Chinese economy will surpass that of the U.S. in the next 20 to 30 years. This is what Clinton is trying to stop, not global warming!
U.S. bosses want a new international treaty on global warming at the December intergovernmental conference in Copenhagen, Denmark (the sequel to Kyoto). But developing nations are fighting against mandatory caps placed on their GHG emissions because it would hinder their economic growth, so Copenhagen is likely to fail due to the maneuverings of competitive capitalist interests. This neglect of the future of the working class and our planet illustrates why smashing capitalism is necessary to stop global warming.
Recently, the U.S. ruling class switched gears in its position on global warming. Previously, it had encouraged media denials that global warming was a problem or that it was caused by GHG emissions. The media and government were obedient to the short-term interests of giant energy companies like Exxon-Mobil. Now the rulers are pretending that they are about to tackle the problem and decrease U.S. emissions. The Obama presidential campaign began this shift in earnest.
But the world’s working class should not be fooled. Obama remains loyal to the profit interests of the energy companies. The U.S. capitalists are merely adopting a strategy to attack and isolate their Chinese and Indian rivals. The actual changes proposed by Obama and reflected in the Waxman-Markey bill (recently passed in the House of Representatives and being debated in the Senate) are too trivial to begin to make any difference in the rising concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere. The 17% reduction in U.S. GHG emissions by 2020 proposed in the legislation won’t even touch the problem.
Obama & Co. have no intentions of doing anything to harm the global strategic position of the U.S. ruling class. No capitalist government, no matter how worker-friendly it pretends to be, will ever do so. That’s why the world’s working class can only end the emissions of GHGs and prevent the devastating consequences of global warming by taking matters into its own hands.
We must throw the capitalists off the stage of history around the world through communist revolution, and organize a communist society in which both the short-term and long-term needs of workers (including the ecological health of our planet) will be the only considerations in determining how and what to produce.J
What Else Was Clinton Up to in India?
Clinton’s visit to India wasn’t just about global warming. Loyal to her capitalist masters, she also played the saleswoman for the big bosses. She pushed for a contract for U.S. corporations to build two nuclear power plants, and for a deal for India to buy $10 billion worth of fighter jets from Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The Indian bosses liked this part of her visit. It’s all about the money!
Letters
a name="‘No plea bargain when you know you’re right...’"></a>"No plea bargain when you know you’re right...’
I am writing this to all workers that have been wrongfully fired or arrested, on or off the job. You must not give in and take a plea when taken to court. The system is designed to make every innocent person into a criminal.
My personal experience with this follows. I worked at LaGuardia Airport in New York for nine years as a skycap for Delta and Northwest airlines, under two different contractors doing the same job. On November 7th, 2008, I was on the job when I was suddenly grabbed from behind, knocked to the floor, cuffed and taken to jail by two men in plain clothes. I was charged with resisting arrest, hustling and trespassing.
I was fired from my job wrongfully. When I went to court I was offered a guilty plea with a sentence of community service and a $100 fine. But I refused to give in and returned to court at least six times, each time refusing pleas and telling them I was innocent, so acquit me or take me to trial. They knew they would lose, so eventually they dropped all the charges.
I want to say thanks to all the people from PLP who stood by me from the beginning to the end. They all rallied around me and I am so grateful to all of them.
So what I am saying is never take a plea bargain when you know you are right. You will be called a criminal. Never give up. Thank you.
Red-Leaning Sky Cap
[Editors note: The bosses’ courts regularly trap black workers with plea bargains as a way of avoiding the work of a trial. As we saw with this trial and others, the police and courts are willing to work hand-in-hand to frame workers and serve the bosses’ interests.]
a name="‘Throw a (red) stone in the water and the ripples spread’"></">‘T"row a (red) stone in the water and the ripples spread’
A group of teachers at my inner-city high school were sitting around at the end of term. We were marking the state final exams. An older teacher asked me if I was planning to retire. "Probably," I said.
She said, "Maybe this will change your mind," and related the following story: "I was in your Assistant Principal’s office one day — you know, the one who gave you all that trouble in February."
"Oh yes," I said. "She gave me an unsatisfactory rating in November of 2008."
"Well," the teacher said, "A whole group of students came in and confronted her. They told her ‘Don’t mess around with Mr. _________. If you do there’ll be trouble.’ Your Assistant Principal said nothing, but she blinked. She stopped coming into your class during the last period on Friday to bother you, didn’t she?"
It was true; the Assistant Principal had bothered me last term, but not this term. I had wondered why it had stopped. In fact, she gave me a satisfactory rating for this past term and for the whole year. "Wow," I said. "And the students didn’t tell me anything."
We never know how many ripples spread when we throw a stone in the water and when we struggle over ideas with our students and other people we know. What we do really does count.
A Red Teacher
Rank-and-File Militance Scores vs. Exploiting Bosses
On July 18, an annual march on Knickerbocker Avenue in Brooklyn, N.Y. ended the program called "Wake Up Bushwick" in which, for three years, a workers’ project has carried out a campaign by an area community organization and a union.
We won some victories against businesses whose bosses exploit the workers, not paying overtime, decent wages nor basic benefits.
The march ended at the Associated Supermarket where the workers celebrated their biggest victory. The owners were forced to pay more than $1 million to 40 workers who endured this mistreatment during their whole time working at this market. This settlement also includes packers who were never paid a wage, working for a lousy tip.
It was a militant march, chanting, "See this fist — Workers to Power!"; "The workers, united, will never be defeated!"; and "Workers’ struggles have no borders!" These slogans symbolized that only the unity of the working class will make us strong and that we workers have no "nationality" to defend nor borders that divide us.
Our community organization was also demonstrating in support of workers at the Bergament store, whose boss has gotten away with exploiting and mistreating his workers. In this protest, our organization’s youth gave the event a very special flavor, inspiring the crowd with their chants and speeches. It showed that in the hands of progressive youth our future will be bright.
These were small victories but they show that the unity and strength of rank-and-file workers in the committee can be schools for communism that will eventually destroy this system of wage slavery and exploitation. In this area we have a network of about 50 CHALLENGE readers from which a group of eight friends are studying the Party’s ideas by discussing the paper’s editorials.
A Brooklyn Worker
a name="L.A. Summer Project Spreads PL’s Politics to Industrial Workers and GI’s"></">L.". Summer Project Spreads PL’s Politics to Industrial Workers and GI’s
‘Hungry for more action...’
I just started getting involved with activism and the PLP earlier this summer, and my perspective has quickly changed from that of a nihilist sickened by the world around him to a motivated communist revolutionary. The PLP and the simple fact that there are a substantial amount of compassionate people that aren’t just living for their own selfish desires has given me new hope, and a better outlook on life. My Summer Project experience was fantastic, and I’m not trying to sugarcoat anything. My eyes have been opened and my devotion to the struggle has been reinforced. I found an instant camaraderie with people from around the world because we were all focused on one cause: a classless society free of money and superficiality, a society based on compassion and need, and most of all equality for all. Sharing stories with all the workers I met has been a very satisfying experience and leaves me hungry for more action.
A Developing Red
Project Developed Young Leaders
As always, I think the key to our Summer Projects is the development of our young leaders, and this certainly is happening in LA. After several days of distributing literature, several groups got together for a study group on dialectical materialism. Three young comrades did an excellent job in preparing and leading the discussion. Everyone participated, and there was some sharp, but friendly debate, which clarified some aspects of what we were discussing: contradiction. It was really exciting to see the clear understanding and sharp analytical thinking and the continuing development of our young comrades.
One exchange was particularly helpful. A Party comrade could not get a friend to voice a question, so the comrade read the question from her friend’s notes. It turned out that the same question was on many other people’s minds. This started a sharp exchange involving quite a few people, which led to a clearer understanding of dialectics.
Project Volunteer
a name="‘Broadened my horizons about all workers’ struggles...’"></a>"Broadened my horizons about all workers’ struggles...’
I didn’t know what to expect coming to the Summer Project. It was my first one and with no expectations. I was told that it would be a communist boot camp. I found that the working class is more than just NYC. I was very New York-centric and coming to this project has broadened my horizons about the struggle of all workers. The problems that affect workers in New York are much the same as the problems that affect workers here in L.A.
My favorite experience so far has been being at the rally/demonstration in Disneyland. The workers there were very passionate and angry that they have not received their fair share or better said, what they have earned. The moment that sticks out in my mind was when a worker banged his drum and began a chant that went like this: "Do you hear us Mickey?, Do you hear us Pluto?, Do you hear us Donald?" Well do you hear us bosses…you better because we are coming.
From New York to Mannywood
a name="‘A productive week...’"></">‘A"productive week...’
Having now spent three days with the Los Angeles Summer Project, I can happily say that it has been a productive week. As a neophyte in the Party, I had few expectations for the Project, save that it would be a collection of communists actively working towards a classless society. My favorite event thus far has been an evening forum on dialectical materialism, in which Party members clarified the definition of the term, and actively challenged one another regarding processes and conflicts that exist along the pathways towards communism.
In addition to great discussion, we have conducted some paper sales in the garment district and at a local high school in Los Angeles. Though we have distributed countless papers and flyers, I question how effective our efforts have been without constant reinforcement at these locales. With greater organization and communication between Party members, we may be able to capitalize upon existing strongholds with more structured events like rallies, forums, and debates.
A New PL’er
When the Summer Project volunteers visited GI’s, we noted the importance of winning people in the military to communist ideas. Without this, there can be no revolution. The following are some comments from volunteers who visited a town near a military base to talk to GI’s:
I wish we’d stayed longer. Our best conversation was with an Arab-American GI from Detroit. Both his parents lost their jobs when Chrysler folded. He totally understood the capitalist crisis. When he took CHALLENGE I suggested he send it to his parents after he read it.
Both Marines I spoke to were accepting and genuinely interested in our leaflet, newspaper and ideas. One GI kept looking at the leaflet’s map of Afghanistan and the oil pipelines. Something clicked. He said, "But they didn’t tell us this. They told us it was to stop terrorism." When his friend said, "Put that down. It’s communist," he apologized to us for his friend’s attitude and pocketed the leaflet. Bringing our ideas to these GI’s is why I’m a communist.
The Marines wanted to hear our communist analysis, even those who at first disagreed. Many know they are being kept in the dark about the true motives of U.S. imperialism.
One group distributed about 20 CHALLENGES plus leaflets and CHALLENGE EXTRA’s. One 25-year-old GI eagerly took our literature, agreeing it was a war for oil and oil pipelines and said older Marines like him knew this. He worried about the younger ones who were "gung ho" because they didn’t understand the real situation and said we should talk to them. We agreed but also suggested he should talk to them as well. He hadn’t considered the potential power rank-and-filers in the military have, but liked the idea and wanted to know more about past historical experiences.
I was very hesitant about going to this town near a military base but was pleasantly surprised that people didn’t beat us up or get defensive. In talking to people I found one-to-one personal conversations were best.
I had my doubts but this was the best sale I ever had. Many were aware, wanted the paper and quite kind. It was a worthwhile experience.
A GI told us, "The brass tells us everything is good. If they told us what was really going on, we wouldn’t fight." Another said, "I know it’s all politics. It’s the system." When we said the system had to go, he took CHALLENGE, saying he would read it.
One GI said he knows the war isn’t about terrorism, although that’s what they feed them in boot camp. He said it was about oil and was open to talking about revolution.
We had a good time. The map we passed out helped show the oil pipelines the U.S. bosses want in Afghanistan. Many of the GI’s thought we had a reasonable point of view, including about organizing for revolution.
a name="[Excerpts from a speech given at PLP’s LA Summer Project]">">"Excerpts from a speech given at PLP’s LA Summer Project]
At a meeting, a boss of a factory-construction company told teachers about the need for more engineers for competition. He said, "Imagine a map of the world and on it the cost of engineers: $1 for an engineer here in the U.S.; in Britain, 90¢; Germany, $1.10. But in India it’s 5¢ and in China it’s 2¢. How can ‘we’ compete? It used to be that we had the best engineers and the best technology, but they are catching up!" He said some jobs could be outsourced but, "What about those jobs that we can’t outsource, those jobs that need citizenship?" He [meant]… production for imperialist, racist war.
Racism, Sexism, Nationalism
The bosses need racism and sexism to super-exploit sections of the working class and to justify brutality and oppression. More workers are unemployed; incarceration rates and police brutality are increasing. Even before the current crisis, young urban black workers suffered unemployment of 50%; it was 36% for Latino workers. The situation is much worse now.
Unemployment and poverty are brutally racist; black workers usually are the last hired and the first fired. The bosses also need racism for their wars. They try to hide it under a humanitarian face. Spreading democracy, freedom and justice are code words for more imperialist oppression. They push racist ideas on soldiers to try to dehumanize fellow working-class brothers and sisters so they might commit acts of murder or torture for the bosses’ interests in oil, resources and strategic locations.
Our War Is A Class War
We must do everything we can to defeat our enemy. The Party…[knows] the strategic importance of organizing in the military and in war-production factories. A communist base in basic industry and the bosses’ military can organize workers to destroy capitalism and run society directly in the interest of the working class.
If you are passionate about the Party, know what the Party needs, if you are finishing high school and able-bodied, consider joining the military or going to a trade school to become a machinist, a welder or an electrician. Teachers and the whole Party need to get behind this effort.
Soon international capitalist competition will push for all-out imperialist war and we must prepare our Party. The current depression shows the crisis of overproduction will force the working class into the war-production factories and into the military. We must…organize to win the fight by building a base for communist revolution, with a strategy that will mean victory for the working class.
Imperialist Rivalries Spurred 1969 Moon Landing
July marks the 40th anniversary of the 1969 U.S. moon landing. President Obama celebrated the anniversary with the Apollo 11 crew by asserting that the U.S. would remain committed to space exploration and that his education reform is crucial to the work of NASA. Obama failed to mention that both NASA and the education system have served as vital gears in the bloody U.S. war machine for the past 50 years.
Obama’s call for education reform comes at a time when the dominant role the U.S. has played in the world since World War II is being threatened by the growth of imperialist rivals in China, Russia and Europe. Following the lead of educational reforms outlined by Bill Gates, Exxon and Lockheed Martin, a heavy emphasis on math and science in high school is seen as a way to keep the U.S. from falling further behind the curve of its technologically-advanced rivals.
In 1962 when John F. Kennedy declared that "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard," the U.S. ruling class was much more certain of its place in the world than it is today. Anti-communism, and post-WWII prosperity for some, allowed U.S. rulers to bolster support for themselves against supposed communist threats abroad. Like Obama, JFK summoned the tools of the state — through the expansion of military programs and the reworking of the education system — in order to strengthen U.S. imperialist ambitions.
When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the U.S. ruling class in response created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). By promoting "space race" hype, the NASA program encouraged workers in the U.S. to root for "team America." In 1969 U.S. astronauts planted a U.S. flag on the moon that was meant to be a symbol of their global power, but by this time the U.S. was hated around the world.
The Tet Offensive had turned the tide of the Vietnam War and rebellions of U.S. GIs were increasingly common. Unable to rely on its own soldiers, the U.S. became heavily dependent on carpet bombings, bringing the Vietnam War into its bloodiest phase. The bosses cover up this history to keep workers in the dark about capitalism’s bloody past and to spread patriotism so workers will support the bosses’ war plans.
The same year NASA was created, U.S. rulers created the Advanced Research Project Agency (now DARPA) to meet the research and development needs of the U.S. military. Over the next 50 years DARPA developed weapons ranging from the M-16 rifle which aided in the murder of countless Vietnamese during the Vietnam war to the Hellfire-missile-equipped Predator drones currently being used to kill and maim workers along the Pakistan border. DARPA initiatives paved the way for increasing technology-driven warfare and the eventual militarization of space.
The same year NASA and DARPA came into existence, Congress created the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). Aimed at creating a generation of tech-savvy workers able to compete with Soviet rivals, the NDEA included support for loans to college students, and the improvement of science and mathematics in schools. Hoping to win students to U.S. nationalism, students had to pledge anti-communism in order to receive college loans. Students involved in anti-war activities were punished and denied loan money.
The U.S. defeat in Vietnam signaled the beginning of the end for U.S. global dominance. In 1979, the loss of Iran as a Mid-East watchdog coupled with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan intensified the worries of U.S. rulers about their ability to control vital resources in the region. The rise of competing imperialist powers in Europe and Asia has only escalated tensions in the Mid-East. Obama has picked up the torch of imperialism where Kennedy, Carter and Clinton left off, deepening imperialist war in Afghanistan and carrying it over into Pakistan.
The appearance of Obama’s foreign policy may differ from his predecessors, but the essence remains the same: war and destruction of rivals are the only sure ways an imperialist power can stay on top. Obama & Co. understand the vital role the education system plays in their ability to wage war. It is no accident that Obama chose as his education czar Arne Duncan, who as CEO of Chicago public schools handed over control of four public high schools to the U.S. military.
While education reform is expected to produce a new crop of workers able to make the next generation of technologically-advanced weapons, the Obama administration realizes that this type of weaponry alone cannot win wars. U.S. rulers have adopted a boots-on-the-ground approach, recently deploying tens of thousands to Afghanistan and calling for thousands more. They are paving the way for future recruits though the creation of various national service programs and through standardized testing regimes that push students out of high school and into the military.
As workers’ cynicism and lack of patriotism persist along with the economic crisis, the bosses have amplified their call for sacrifice. The bosses aim to disarm workers by teaching patriotism and lies about the history of the working class. We must bring the message of revolution to the classrooms and workplaces and organize students and workers to fight against imperialist war under the banners of the Progressive Labor Party.
Red Eye
Fired? Your wage won’t recover
NYT, 8/4 — ….it can take years for a worker’s earnings to bounce back after a layoff, and… it can take even longer for a layoff during a recession. Economists, in fact, say income losses for workers who are let go in a recession can persist for as long as two decades, a depressing prognosis for the several million people who have lost their jobs in the current recession.
Working-class tradition: help out
NYT, 7/12, Barbara Ehrenreich — As in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the [recession’s] most reliable first responders are not government agencies, but family and friends....
There is a tradition among the American working class of mutual aid, no questions asked. My father, a former miner, advised me as a child that if I ever needed money to "go to a poor man…."
When I worked at low-wage jobs in the 1990s, I was amazed by the generosity of my co-workers…. Such informal networks — and random acts of kindness — put the official welfare state, with its relentless suspicions and grudging outlays, to shame.
But there are limits to the generosity of relatives and friends…. The poor simply run out of resources.
Profit system rules banks’ actions
NYT, 8/1 — So why isn’t it happening? Why aren’t we seeing kinder, gentler banks trying to repay their debt to society? When I spoke to bankers this week, they sounded aggrieved at all the anger directed their way, and they claimed they were doing the best they could. And from their perspective, they are.
But their perspective is that of anyone running a business: their priority is to maximize profit…. That’s what capitalists do…. Maximizing profits means, for instance, jacking up credit card interest rates… and foreclosing when that makes more economic sense than modifying a loan. To ask them to put aside the profit motive, even temporarily, for the good of the country — it’s not even in their frame of reference.
Obama = Bush on immigrant raids
NYT, 8/4 — After early pledges by President Obama that he would moderate the Bush administration’s tough policy on immigration enforcement, his administration is pursuing an aggressive strategy for an "illegal"-immigration crackdown that relies significantly on programs started by [President Bush].
A recent blitz of measures has antagonized immigrant groups and many of Mr. Obama’s Hispanic supporters.
System rewards those who rob us
NYT, 8/3 — Crashing the economy and fleecing the taxpayer aren’t Wall Street’s only sins…. Financial-industry high-fliers made fortunes through activities that were worthless if not destructive from a social point of view.
And they’re still at it….
Unfortunately… the Obama administration… still seems to operate on the principle that what’s good for Wall Street is good for America.
Neither the administration, nor our political system in general, is ready to face up to the fact that we’ve become a society in which the big bucks go to bad actors, a society that lavishly rewards those who make us poorer.
Sex discrimination can mean death
NYT, 7/30 — These dramas play out constantly in poor countries. One woman dies a minute from complications of pregnancy or childbirth somewhere in the world, and 20 times as many suffer childbirth injuries.
There’s no mystery about how to save these lives. Some impoverished countries, such as Sri Lanka, have succeeded stunningly well at saving mothers simply because they have tried. But foreign aid donors like the United States have never shown much interest in maternal mortality, and impoverished women are typically the most voiceless, neglected people in their own countries — so they die at astonishing rates….
One of the most lethal forms of sex discrimination is this systematic inattention to reproductive health care, from family planning to childbirth — so long as those who die are impoverished, voiceless women.
US-China clash exploding in Africa
NYT, 7/19 — Chinese business interests in Africa have grown dramatically in recent years…. Bilateral trade between the regions quintupled, to $55 billion, from 2000 to 2006, and that the figure is expected to reach $100 billion by 2010….
The authors contend that China’s ambitions in Africa are grandly geopolitical…. "I’m going to be honest with you, China is using Africa to get where the United States is now, and surpass it…."
Many African leaders are enamored of the Chinese mix of authoritarianism and capitalism in business affairs, an emphasis on efficiency and a lack of preaching about human rights….
It is not hard to join the authors in predicting that this joining of Chinese and African interests will likely succeed to the chagrin of the rest of the business world.
US gets airbase, winks at tyrant
NYT, 7/23 — …The Obama administration has [ranked] pragmatic concerns over human rights in dealings with autocratic leaders…. Politicians and independent journalists have been arrested, prosecuted, attacked and even killed over the last year as the Kyrgyz president, Kurmanbeck Bakiyev, has consolidated control….
The United States has remained largely silent in response to this wave of violence, apparently wary of jeopardizing the status of its sprawling air base, on the outskirts of the capital, which supports the mission in Afghanistan.
Drugs prey on no-hope workers
NYT, 7/30 — For more than five years Mr. Eche has been a slave to paco, a smokable [sic] drug made from bits of cocaine residue mixed with industrial solvents and kerosene or rat poison. Labeled "the scourge of the poor" by politicians, the drug has become the greatest social challenge facing shantytowns like [Argentina’s] Oculta….
"Every time he comes out of treatment it is worse because he has nothing, no work. There is nothing for him to do…."
Paco averages only 10 percent cocaine, with the rest being highly toxic substances, [a] judge said. "Doctors we have consulted say nerve cells and brain cells start dying soon after consumption begins," he said….
Oculta’s residents are starving for jobs with decent salaries to help break the cycle of hopelessness that is creating whole families of paco addicts.
a name="‘The Ugly Truth’: Sexism Knows No Boundaries Under Capitalism"></" />"The Ugly Truth’: Sexism Knows No Boundaries Under Capitalism
The new movie The Ugly Truth starring
Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler (of the horrifically racist, fascist movie 300) is a rehashing of an old romantic comedy stand-by, the uptight career woman looking for love who falls for her smooth-talking, womanizing male co-star. Written by three women (proving sexism knows no boundaries under capitalism) the tired, rehashed plot reaches new levels of crass sexism. The movie is hyperbole at its worst, insulting the audience by force-feeding them wholly unbelievable and insulting caricatures of what "real" men and women are supposed to be.
Heigl plays a morning news producer who drives men away because of her demanding nature, while Butler’s character is a cable-access TV personality whose show is based on telling women "the ugly truth" about men, that they’re all shallow, sex fiends incapable of love and uninterested in any sort of relationship with a woman other than physical.
The movie is rated R for the unnecessary and copious amount of vulgarity that replaces any attempt at witty dialogue or character development. The Ugly Truth boils down to the lesson that women should be subservient to men in all ways: by making less money, wearing skimpy clothing, laughing at unfunny jokes and, most importantly, leaving their brains and hearts at home (and that men should look for and only find satisfaction in such women).
Like Sex and the City, The Women or Bride Wars, this movie wants us to believe that happiness really lies in vacuous consumerism and oversexualization. In the end the main characters end up together, but this union doesn’t come about because of some profound lesson learned about the importance of respect for each other, but rather Heigl’s willingness to be the objectified woman Butler’s character wants.
I went to see this movie only a few days after it opened and so watched it in a packed theater. The mix of people was fairly evenly distributed between men and women and their reactions were quite interesting.
There were few laughs from anyone (this may have been due in part to the movie’s hackneyed script) but there was a general air of disgust. More than one couple walked out of the film and of those who stayed many seemed uncomfortable or insulted. The man sitting next to me kept groaning and shaking his head. It seemed that no one was satisfied with this movie’s portrayal of men and women or the nature of their relationships, and why should they be?
The ruling class is constantly shoving sexist crap down our throats, utilizing all media at their disposal, but in recent years the level of filth the working class has been asked to ingest has worsened. Recent action movies like 300 and Watchmen fetishize sex and violence, but romantic comedies like The Ugly Truth are doing their part as we "laugh" along to women being treated like mindless sex objects and men being portrayed as soulless perverts.
Sexism is critical for keeping the bosses’ profits up and the working class divided. As the bosses’ economic crisis deepens they will have to rely even more heavily on sexism to keep their system running. Movies like The Ugly Truth show the degenerate nature of the U.S. capitalist class and its culture here in the waning days of the empire. The battle lines are clear: for the bosses there is sexism, racism and fascism; for the workers there can only be communist revolution!
a href="#11-month Stella D’Oro Strike Ends:">"1-month Stella D’Oro Strike Ends: Battle Against Bosses Continues
a href="#Obama’s Trip Fizzles, U.S. Rulers’ Rivals Gain">Oba"a’s Trip Fizzles, U.S. Rulers’ Rivals Gain
S. Africa: 70,000 Strike, Battle Cops
Stella Strike Proves Workers Have No Future Under Capitalism
a href="#PLP Action In Haitian Consulate Hits Regime’s Fascist Crackdown">"LP Action In Haitian Consulate Hits Regime’s Fascist Crackdown
a href="#Boeing Workers Must Smash Boss-Gov’t-Union ‘No-Strike’ Gang-up">Boei"g Workers Must Smash Boss-Gov’t-Union ‘No-Strike’ Gang-up
a href="#Union Hacks: ‘Roll over, play dead’; Workers Need to ‘Roll over them!’">Union "acks: ‘Roll over, play dead’; Workers Need to ‘Roll over them!’
MTA Workers Should Strike Against a War Contract
U.S.-Inspired Honduras Coup: Another Inter-Imperialist Battleground
Workers Sit in to Stand Up vs. Parking Meter Robbery
a href="#Workers’ Power Is the Rx:">"orkers’ Power Is the Rx: Healthcare ‘Reform’ A Capitalist Shell Game
LETTERS
a href="#Mexico: Paradise for Bosses, Hell for Workers""Mexico: Paradise for Bosses, Hell for Workers
a href="#‘Reading CHALLENGE, I view the world differently…’">‘Rea"ing CHALLENGE, I view the world differently…’
a href="#Mexico’s Elections: One Big Anti-Working Class Attack">"exico’s Elections: One Big Anti-Working Class Attack
What You Do Really DOES Count!
a href="#Students, Profs Fight Capitalism’s Campus Cuts">"tudents, Profs Fight Capitalism’s Campus Cuts
a href="#‘Fog of War’ Pretty Clear: McNamara Murdered Millions">‘F"g of War’ Pretty Clear: McNamara Murdered Millions
Stress and suicide rife in U.S. Army
N. Korea nukes already restrain U.S.
N. Korea nukes already restrain U.S.
Facing court with no interpreter
Insurance co.’s steal health money
For bankers, recession is over
PLP Project Develops Young Leaders, Worker-Soldier-Student Alliance
a href="#Worker to PL’er: ‘You guys were always there…’">Worker"to PL’er: ‘You guys were always there…’
a href="#Worker to PL’er: ‘You guys were always there…’">Projec" Unites PL’ers with Stella D’Oro Strikers
a name="11-month Stella D’Oro Strike Ends:">">"1-month Stella D’Oro Strike Ends:
Battle Against Bosses Continues
BRONX, NY, July 13 — After an 11-month struggle, the Stella D’Oro strikers won a decision from a state National Labor Relations (NLRB) judge that temporarily restored their jobs under the old contract with back pay to May 9. The scene at the plant gate was typified by the “Sweet Victory” hand-lettered sign held up for passing workers, who blared their horns in congratulation. Workers hugged and cried and laughed as it sank in that the slow drag of the strike had led to a result.
When the strikers returned to work “happy for battle,” supporters cheered and called out their varied, multi-
national names as they passed through the gate and gave a victory sign. Many waved CHALLENGE in the air. One veteran comrade told the workers near him, “There’ll be a million small victories and defeats between this and state power, and we should learn from them all.”
They were united, persevered and prevailed, a beacon for all workers. “Now we’ll support the next group that goes on strike,” said one worker. “Fight on!” cheered the supporters. Despite all, the working class will never die.
Under the joy there is also great bitterness. “I don’t get too excited. Those criminals won’t stop here,” said one woman packer. The Brynwood bosses are appealing the decision. They’re also cruelly saying they’ll close the plant and move in October.
Attack and Counter-attack
The strike has been an endless series of attacks and counter-attacks. The bosses attacked with concession demands to bust the union; the workers countered by striking. The bosses attacked with police harassment and scabs; the workers countered by expanding strike support. The workers won the first legal decision; the boss countered by appealing it. The workers won a court-ordered return to work; the boss countered by saying they’ll close the shop. Many workers understand that the struggle is not over, that it’s just moving to another stage. “What’s the next step?” they ask.
Back at work they had to clean up after the scabs. The place was filthy, broken toilets, broken machines. The sanitation crew went through the plant until it shone. One proud cleaner was outraged at the dust and grime on the loading dock he used to keep spotless. It is a food plant, after all. Mechanics fixed the machines. The operators threw out the first run of cookies below their standards. Machines that used to make 24 pallets of cookies daily could only do five, and the workers weren’t hurrying.
Then the line began to run properly on one machine, and a manager said it was the first time since the strike, as though this was a mystery. The operator explained that it’s not only training one worker that counts, it’s the long experience of a skilled team working together.
In No Mood for Concessions
Feeling their power, workers are in no mood for concessions, something the bosses’ flunky professors like the New York Times’s Joshua Freeman say is inevitable; they feel a raw anger at the managers. One woman leader couldn’t talk to them at all. An older woman was exhausted after standing all day at the packing table, back to wage slavery.
Some workers think the company is bluffing about closing the plant to win big concessions, but they recognize that capitalist property laws mean this could be their end as Stella workers, just as some lost their jobs at other runaway plants like Farberware. When managers talked of restoring the “best” scabs to fill missing numbers, a shop steward thundered, “Scabs working alongside us? That means war!” They dropped that bright idea.
It’s becoming clearer to the workers that they’re in a long class war in which the past eleven months are just one battle. While some commented about the court decision saying, “I knew we would get justice,” others, especially those close to PLP, realize that the capitalist class owns not only the factory but the state apparatus: the courts, the laws, the politicians and most union officials. The local judge’s decision still must be upheld by the full NLRB in Washington, hardly something for workers to depend on.
To defend ourselves, workers must pursue the more important political struggle. The courts invariably support the capitalist class because for 400 years the bosses have shaped laws and courts in their own interests. “Right — it’s their laws; the owners make the laws,” one packer agreed.
There’s no lasting working-class justice to be found there. But they keep us running from court to court to encourage belief in the court system. It’s like the electoral shell game, where we’re supposed to run from one politician to another, one party to another, while government policy continues to serve the capitalist class. A legal strategy is only good if it’s to buttress the main political strategy, strengthening class unity and the hard, militant fight of workers’ direct action. But Local 50 union leaders are now visibly slowing down that main aspect of the struggle.
The bakers’ union leadership is not the worst around. (Just compare them to the UAW sellouts who “crafted” a 50% wage cut for new workers!) They pushed sincerely for the strike, did not sell it out, and welcomed support, including from communists. But sincere or not, they’re stuck in the usual union belief that you must play by capitalism’s rules, which ultimately hold the workers back because they, too, have been filled with the same ideology.
Rank and File Built the Strike
All along the local’s leaders made the legal strategy the main thing, even as they approved the rallies and boycott. But the punishing months dragged on, and the Local and international did not vigorously build support, even from other area union locals. Counseling “patience,” they viewed other workers’ support as secondary. They left it to the rank and file and their supporters.
But this impelled the workers to build the strike themselves; they proved as skilled at that as they are at baking. But the union — all the unions — did not support this effort. The court decision, therefore, leaves the workers less strong than with a communist-led working class building more mass political support. The workers’ eloquent testimony in court didn’t hurt, but the main achievement is the progress made in building strike solidarity — still the basis for more class unity, a strong challenge to Brynwood’s runaway shop, and (as workers join the Party) the strategic leap ahead to fighting the whole system.
So what’s the next step? The union’s new go-slow attitude is wrong — they have vetoed another rally until late August and want to feature politicians. Many workers recognize the union’s weaknesses, but feel they must go along with the leadership for the sake of unity. Yet they also see the need to continue strengthening their own leadership and organization as it emerged during the strike.
The best way to do that is building PLP in the plant. A dozen get CHALLENGE regularly and are spreading it around. They said the whole plant was buzzing last Friday about the small rally by some young PLP’ers that afternoon. “Don’t these folks ever give up? Don’t they ever take a break?”
They love the interest of the young communists in their struggle, the spirit of chants like, “Stella workers lead the way, Make the Brynwood bosses pay” and “Kick the bosses in the ass, Power to the working class.” One worker drinking coffee across the street after his shift could no longer stand there, grabbed a sign and joined them. Some of the most militant and thoughtful strikers are thinking seriously about joining the PLP.
Communist Ideas Strengthen Workers
The key force remains the workers themselves. Can they step it up one more notch? PLP will help 100%. Our strike role has been to serve the whole working class, to serve these workers by bringing other workers to join and support and learn from them, to spread their spirit and news of their strike to our international readership with story after story in
CHALLENGE.
We also rely on the workers. We try to strengthen them materially and politically with the ideas the communist movement has learned the hard way over a century and a half. We bring them the Party as their weapon, tested for 45 years: take it, use it, join it, build it, for this fight — to the max and to the end — but also for the fight after this and the one after that. Make the PLP your own, it’s for you and your children.
When your children go to school and to CUNY, communist teachers and professors will teach them the truth about capitalism. Here’s the Party of the working class that will never “go slow,” that does not believe in playing by the bosses’ rules.
As Stella workers bring the art and craft of their strike into active membership and leadership in PLP, we will see a sweet victory indeed. And if the plant closes? The workers pick themselves up and go on, to life under the dictatorship of capital, but with the red flag and CHALLENGE in our lives that can transcend that system.
Our day will come, and the Stella D’Oro strikers of 2008-09 will have played their part. As the recession bites deeper and deeper and October looms, there’s a new mood on the shop floor.
a name="Obama’s Trip Fizzles, U.S. Rulers’ Rivals Gain"></a"Obama’s Trip Fizzles, U.S. Rulers’ Rivals Gain
On balance, Obama’s Russia-Italy-Africa trip proved a diplomatic setback for U.S. imperialism:
• In Moscow, Russia’s Putin bluntly opposed Obama over areas of longer-term strategic conflict;
• In Italy, at the G-8 meeting of eight leading economic powers, Russia’s and China’s influence pushed Iran sanctions off the table;
• Obama didn’t even succeed in raising global warming as a U.S.-led international cause, with China and its allies specifically opposing U.S. attempts to stifle their burgeoning economies through fuel regulations;
• During a Vatican stop-off, former Hitler-youth Pope Benedict reminded Obama that he and his institution still mainly represent a strong anti-U.S. wing of European bosses;
• Anti-U.S. instability in sub-Saharan Africa shaped Obama’s subsequent overnight in Ghana, the only nation his Pentagon handlers deemed safe enough for him to visit.
Meanwhile, in the Iraq and Afghanistan-Pakistan killing fields, decisive success continues to elude Obama and the capitalists he serves, while the death toll mounts. At the bargaining table, it’s the rise of rivals China and Russia and their allies that weakens U.S. rulers’ supremacy. In the war zones, it’s the current inability of the U.S. — population 306,000,000 — to field much more than 200,000 troops. These two worsening problems will ultimately drive U.S. bosses to a single, drastic solution. As the 20th Century mass slaughters show, global war involving full militarization of industry and society is the last hope of threatened imperialists.
Ultimately, Global War Only Way Out for U.S. Bosses
Obama & Co. face a tough time building a consensus among factions of U.S. capitalists who can’t even agree on the tax hikes and health care reform the bigger bosses require to ease the economic crisis. Public sentiment on the Iraq and Afghan wars ranges from organized pockets of both resistance and support to far more general apathy. Keeping or finding a job and saving homes from foreclosure have become the chief concerns of millions of U.S. workers, as sharpening worldwide competition heightens the rulers’ war needs. Obama’s sketchy summit scorecard makes imposing wartime discipline on U.S. imperialists and taking steps towards restoring the draft all the more urgent.
Obama in Moscow: Wins a Little, Loses a Lot
Before Obama’s visit, Russia had agreed to allow U.S. forces to use its airspace for their Afghan campaign. And Russian-dominated Kyrgyzstan re-opened its Manas air base to the U.S. But, at the Moscow meeting, Putin said “No” to Obama’s request for Russian sanctions on Iran, to U.S. missiles in Poland and to NATO membership for ex-Soviet states Georgia and Ukraine.
Stratfor, a ruling-class supported think-tank that provides often-reliable policy analysis to U.S. business, media, and academia, summed up the proceedings: “The geopolitical divide between the United States and Russia is as deep as ever, even if some of the sharper edges have been rounded. Ultimately, little progress was made in finding ways to bridge the two countries’ divergent interests. And the burning issues — particularly Poland and Iran — continue to burn.” (Stratfor, 7/7/09)
Obama Takes it Out on Africa
Obama, touted as the “son of Africa,” gave a racist, lying, blame-the-victim speech, essentially calling most of Africa dysfunctional, and thus by implication worthy of occupation by a “superior power.” He told Africans, “The legacy of colonialism was not an excuse for failing to build prosperous, democratic societies.”(NY Times, 7/11/09) And, “‘poorer countries have an obligation’ to reform themselves.” (NYT)
What hypocrisy! Centuries of enslavement, economic domination and invasions by Western powers — still occurring through troop deployments and the draining of the continent’s resources by the likes of Big Oil — and the crippling of home-grown agriculture leading to famines by European demands for profitable single-crop exports, all combined to exploit Africa’s workers and farmers unmercifully. Now Obama has the nerve to blame Africans for the hell the colonialists created and continue!
Obama and U.S. rulers really seek in Africa not democracy but access to the continent’s strategic resources and supply routes, which would be critical in a world war. They’re trying to combat China’s capitalists who have blanketed the continent with huge investments, building projects to gobble up oil reserves and vital minerals. This inter-imperialist rivalry can only lead to war.
Dismal Diplomatically and on the Battlefield
The absence of millions of deployable troops underlies the U.S. Iraq fiasco. Iraq remains fruitless for the Exxon Mobil cabal that planned the invasion dreaming of six to eight million barrels of crude per day. Iraq’s recent auction of oil projects, for which neither it nor its U.S. puppet-masters can provide security, went bust. Exxon, Chevron, Shell & Co. walked out. And anti-U.S. Iraqi insurgents greeted Obama’s promised “withdrawal” (actually a retreat from cities to megabases) with terror bombings that have killed 123 civilians since July 5.
Ground Wars Need Ground Troops — and a Draft
In Afghanistan, Obama’s new emphasis on ground war will mean nothing without real numbers of ground troops. The Pentagon’s surge will put fewer than 100,000 total soldiers into a country of over 35,000,000. A half-million U.S. troops failed to subdue similarly-sized Vietnam. Despite an earnest desire for land war, futile air strikes will continue.
The same goes for Obama’s extension of the fighting into Pakistan. A new U.S.-backed air offensive by Pakistan into its Taliban-dominated Waziristan region is “unlikely to destroy the enemy...and will leave in place Taliban warlords whom the United States and its NATO allies in Afghanistan regard as a significant cross-border threat,” warned the Dallas Morning News (7/12/09), citing Javed Husain, a retired Pakistani general. He said, “If it’s not going to be a ground forces operation, then the foot soldiers of the Taliban will remain....It’s a ridiculous thought that air power can win it.”
Obama and his banker-bosses are taking significant steps that will aid mobilization. Nationalizing General Motors, for example, sends a powerful message to all industrialists: Further takeovers “in the national interest” are coming. Obama & Co. are working quietly but deliberately to restore the draft. On June 23, Michelle Obama and Maria Kennedy Shriver launched a “new” initiative called “United We Serve,” encouraging young people to “public service.” There’s nothing new about it. A 2003 Brookings Institution report of the same name, written by Bill Clinton among others, and couched in patriotic jargon, boiled down to a plea for mandatory national — including military — service.
The rulers’ present relative weakness does not necessarily help our class. In fact, the more endangered that capitalists are, the more harshly they attack workers. But we can use the bosses’ assaults to organize militant, class-conscious fight-back, turning the class struggles into schools for communism, which can win workers, soldiers and youth to join and build PLP. This can sow the seeds of communist revolution, the only solution for the working class to the hell of capitalism.
S. Africa: 70,000 Strike, Battle Cops
SOUTH AFRICA, July 8 — In the largest strike since 1992, over 70,000 construction workers from the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) walked out demanding a 13% pay increase. Employers — represented by the Federation of Civil Engineers Contractors — are offering only 10.4%, while reaping huge profits from a $3 billion investment in the 2010 World Cup soccer tournament. Strikers have militantly battled the cops in the streets.
The strike has stopped work on five of the ten stadiums being used for the tournament. It has also halted work on the railroad linking Pretoria and Johannesburg. “We are building the -stadiums but we don’t have the money to buy a ticket,” declared Owen Vele, an assistant surveyor, who said he was paid Rand2,200 ($268, £167, 193 euros) for a 50-hour week.
The strike follows a string of smaller work stoppages, including wildcat actions in the health and emergency services. Strike action is also expected by teachers and other public-sector workers before wage re-negotiations are due to start in several weeks.
Stella Strike Proves Workers Have No Future Under Capitalism
Dear Stella D’Oro workers:
Your brave action, unbreakable unity and steadfast determination have been an inspiration to workers far and near in this time of capitalist economic crisis. Over eleven months of this struggle, news of your heroism has spread slowly but surely across the city, the region and even the nation. Through some newspapers, but especially through CHALLENGE, your story has spread across the globe.
Despite a long court battle and police harassment on the picket line the Brynwood Partners have been unable to break your union or your strike. So now they want to close the Bronx bakery.
Your sharp struggle has softened but not defeated the Brynwood bosses’ attacks. Only communist revolution can do that. Even the most determined and militant reform struggle can only bring incomplete gains for workers.
Hartmax, a maker of men’s suits backed by bailed-out Wells Fargo bank, moved to close its operations in Illinois and fire its 4,000 SEIU employees. The Hartmax workers, inspired by workers who had occupied the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago, threatened to occupy their plant if it was closed.
Hartmax relented and instead of closing its plants sold the operations to another investor who kept them open. The new owners will surely demand concessions from workers in order to keep the plants open. Even when workers fight hard for a victory today, the capitalist system leaves bosses in power to attack us tomorrow.
Our fights against the bosses hold value not mainly in terms of reforms we win or lose but in lessons we learn. Learning to defeat racism and sexism with working-class unity is a lesson we can build a new world on. When we see the bosses take away gains in the blink of an eye that workers have fought over many years to achieve we understand that in the long run we have to take this bosses’ power away from them once and for all.
We have seen that bosses fear militant struggle most of all because in these actions we are feeling our way toward the workers’ power that will be our salvation. When we see that governments and politicians will never serve workers, we learn that we need a new government, one that will put the needs of workers first. This is communism. These are communist lessons.
These lessons are not yours alone, workers of Stella D’Oro. Your valiant stand has helped workers and youth far and near to learn that we have no future under capitalism. This monumental achievement is yours to claim. You will never be forgotten for as long as workers and youth in the Progressive Labor Party continue to struggle for a decent life, free from exploitation on the job and imperialist war overseas. Thank you.
Yours in the fight,
Progressive Labor Party
a name="PLP Action In Haitian Consulate Hits Regime’s Fascist Crackdown">">"LP Action In Haitian Consulate Hits Regime’s Fascist Crackdown
NEW YORK, July 9 — International working-class solidarity was on display as a group of PLP’ers occupied the main office of the Haitian Consulate. They demanded immediate release of political prisoners detained in the Rene Preval regime’s fascist crackdown on workers and students in Haiti who are fighting for an increase in the minimum wage. Our Haitian class brothers and sisters nodded their heads in approval as we chanted “same enemy, same fight, workers of the world unite” and were glad to receive the latest issue of CHALLENGE. Every opportunity we have to emphasize and reinforce the bond we share with workers in struggle around the world is a great opportunity and privilege for us. In this period of sharpening economic crisis it is crucial that we spotlight militant responses to the bosses’ attacks on workers as examples to be followed, wherever our class is fighting back.
a name="Boeing Workers Must Smash Boss-Gov’t-Union ‘No-Strike’ Gang-up"></a>"oeing Workers Must Smash Boss-Gov’t-Union ‘No-Strike’ Gang-up
PUGET SOUND, WA., July 13 — “The supervisor asked us what we thought at the crew meeting,” an older black Boeing CHALLENGE reader told a group of young Summer Project volunteers, referring to the “no-strike deal” being pushed by the government and the company. “We got up and walked out!” His friend thought this was great. Another Boeing comrade asked how we could turn crew-meeting walkouts like this into rolling thunder (hammering) and marches through the plants. This year’s Progressive Labor Party’s (PLP) Summer Project came just in time to spread revolutionary communist politics and fight-back — our answer to this fascist attack — to key plants throughout the Seattle area.
The government has stepped in to force this no-strike deal down our throats. Last Tuesday, the senior Democrat on the Congressional military committee, Rep. Norm Dicks, backed Boeing’s demand. “The whole thing comes down to, can they get a long-term agreement with the union, with a no-strike clause. That’s ultimately what has to happen here [to keep jobs in Washington State, not South Carolina].” The Democratic governor and the rest of the Congressional delegation beat the same drum.
At a bare minimum most workers have asked what’s there to talk about. Just say no!
Not so the union! By last Thursday, the union could no longer hide behind secrecy, partly because our Summer Project volunteers were at every key plant with our communist leaflets and signs, exposing the set- up and calling for fight-back (see p. 8). “We’re open to talking…[and] are working to improve our relationship with Boeing,” said district union president and fascist collaborator-in-the-making Wroblewski.
We’re All Auto!
For months now, PLP has predicted something like this “no-strike” regime was in the works. CHALLENGE and the CHALLENGE EXTRA pointed to Auto and the racist decimation in Detroit as the harbinger of fascist reorganization of industry.
The union countered that we’re not auto. “Autoworkers got ‘fat and lazy’ when they were on top,” asserted one union official. “Imagine getting all that pay when you’re laid off. We never did that. Nothing gets produced if the company can’t make some profit. We only struck because the company was unreasonably greedy.”
Our job is not to save the company, but to fight for the working class. These union mis-leaders are traitors to our class!
As last week proved, “We’re all auto!” Another Boeing worker told LA H.S. and Community College students how a 54-year-old relative lost his auto subcontractor job and was forced to move in with his mother. A friend of his had been shot dead when he ran for president of a key UAW local some years back. He was clear: the sharpening worldwide crisis of overproduction was leading to wider war, eventually world war, and coming to Puget Sound.
Breaking The Law
Every worker was furious and maybe even a little taken off guard by the rapid developments. It became clear through our daily dinner discussions between workers and volunteers and meetings in the plants that the idea to limit our struggle to the confines of the bosses’ laws was crippling our fight-back.
“As much as I want to, you can’t have rolling thunder, marches or wildcats because that’s illegal,” said one honest worker. “Look,” commented another friend, “that’s how we started these things around contract time. It was all illegal when the Party helped organize the first marches in ’95. In fact, they’re still illegal! The company and the union just allow them now because they can control them.”
We have to be prepared to break the bosses’ laws, now more than ever, as striking itself is being made illegal in industry after industry.
Smashing The State
Inevitably, this leads to debating the nature of the government. Most of the 26,000 IAM members at Boeing “instinctively” know any extralegal fight against this key war industry, particularly in this period, will bring down the armed might of the ruling-class State apparatus. It’s not surprising then that even some of our closest friends “hope against hope” that they can find an “easier” path.
“Whether Republican or Democrat, they all turn against the working class when they get in office,” said another reader and seller at yet another dinner with volunteers. “Maybe, we would stand a chance if we outlawed lobbyists and corporate campaign contributions, while limiting individual contributions to a $1,000.”
But the very politicians that our union spent millions getting elected are the ones demanding we submit to this “no-strike regime.” “Do you really believe the bosses would ever let the government represent anything but their interests?” asked another Boeing worker. “It’s the bosses’ State; they built it to force their will on us. It must be smashed and replaced with communist workers’ power.”
We don’t have to be victims of the bosses’ crisis. “We’re all Auto” is more than a catchy phrase. Industrial workers can up the ante like no other section of the working class. With essential anti-racist alliances with subcontractor workers, students and soldiers, we can defeat the armed might of the bosses with communist revolution. This may not be the easiest path, but it is becoming increasingly clear that building for revolution is the key to our survival. This year’s Summer Project helped blaze that path.
a name="Union Hacks: ‘Roll over, play dead’; Workers Need to ‘Roll over them!’"></a>Un"on Hacks: ‘Roll over, play dead’; Workers Need to ‘Roll over them!’
LOS ANGELES, June 13 — Some Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) workers are talking about striking since our contract already expired and the union leaders aren’t telling us about negotiations.
When PL’ers took CHALLENGE and the CHALLENGE Extra to transit workers, they grabbed them. One gave us $10. Others took more for themselves and for other workers and also gave money. Many agreed workers are being forced to pay for the bosses’ crisis. Our taxes, wages, working conditions, benefits and pensions are all being used to bail out the banks and pay for wider Middle-East wars.
When union leaders said workers shouldn’t expect any gains and should just feel lucky to have a job, workers became even angrier. We must fight back. Otherwise the attacks will get worse. Look what happened to auto workers. The UAW leaders told them to accept “labor peace” in exchange for job security. They got mass layoffs and even more attacks! But in this crisis, the real victory will be the growth of the revolutionary communist movement to eliminate the bosses and their system.
a name="MTA Workers Should Strike Against a War Contract ""MTA Workers Should Strike Against a War Contract
World capitalism, and particularly U.S. capitalism, are facing their worst economic crisis in 80 years. Most analysts believe it hasn’t hit bottom yet; some believe it will grow into a full-fledged depression worse than the 1930s.
Faced with this gloomy future, our “fearless” union leaders whine that “Management says it has no money and unfortunately they are telling the truth…and the MTA budget for the next year calls for no wage increase.” These “leaders” have no fighting plan. They tell us to roll over and play dead, hoping MTA will take pity on us and “preserve your wage guarantee and health and pension packages.” But they also say, “MTA thinks it has us over a barrel.” So what will stop MTA from rolling over us?
MTA bosses and our union mis-leaders are parroting the U.S. bosses’ cries that there’s no money. But they found trillions to bail out their banks. They’ve spent over $4 trillion on their murderous, racist oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are finding billions more to expand them to Pakistan. But there’s no money for us!
For them, we’re expendable, like the auto workers they laid off or Iraqi-Afghani-Pakistani men, women and children they’re slaughtering with million-dollar missiles. For the U.S. and MTA bosses and union sellouts we’re nothing but machines to be worked and discarded when no longer useful.
But we’re part of the working class that produces and transports all the world’s goods and people. The capitalist class sells the products of our labor and gives us in wages and benefits a fraction of what they get for them. They keep the rest as profits. To maintain their profits, they cut back our wages, benefits, lay us off, close their factories and move them to low-wage areas.
That’s why workers must fight for communism: a society without bosses and money, where the products of our labor will be distributed according to need and where everyone will contribute to society according to their commitment. That’s why rolling over and playing dead is not an alternative, no matter how difficult the situation.
The only time we lose is when we don’t fight for our class interests. No matter what the odds, if we and more workers become more confident in our class and more committed to destroying capitalism, then we have won. Eventually the victory will be ours.
The ruling capitalist class, although apparently all-powerful, depends for its economic empire on the industrial working class and for its military might on the children of the working class. Its very survival is based on oppressing our class. They rule by force and by pushing their poisonous capitalist ideology on us. Our struggle is to replace it with communist ideology. When the working class, soldiers and students embrace communist ideology and unite against the bosses, capitalism will be history. Dare to struggle, dare to win!
U.S.-Inspired Honduras Coup: Another Inter-Imperialist Battleground
The Honduran military coup is the opening salvo of U.S. imperialism’s renewed efforts to more aggressively try to stem its imperialist rivals’ expansion in its “backyard.” Honduras, where the two generals leading the coup were trained by the U.S. military at its School of the Americas, in Ft. Benning, GA, is the testing ground of Obama’s “new policy” toward Latin America. If successful, the U.S. bosses hope to apply it to topple anti-U.S. regimes throughout the region.
But, as the continuous mass demonstrations in Honduras supporting the deposed president and the pro-U.S. forces military response shows, this process won’t be peaceful. Furthermore, as the populist appeal of the anti-U.S. forces led by Hugo Chavez spreads and the European-Brazil-led bloc grows stronger, so will the need of these camps to arm themselves in preparation for wider inter-imperialist conflicts. This year Latin American regimes will spend about $50 billion on arms, almost double what they spent five years ago, this in a region where more than 200 million people live on less than $2 a day and 98 million sleep on the streets.
This dire poverty has proven fertile grounds for local capitalist politicians like Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to build populist anti-U.S. movements allied with U.S. imperialist rivals in hopes of getting a bigger share of their workers’ exploitation. The U.S. bosses’ response to this threat has been to increase their efforts to build pro-U.S. mass movements, including $50 million annually to “democracy promotion” in Honduras, and triple their military aid to Latin America. Stephen Johnson, Assistant Defense Secretary for the Western Hemisphere under Bush, explaining the need to arm their Latin American allies to the teeth, said: “Right now funds for security assistance are slim and what programs we can offer are limited by complicated sanctions. That leaves a vacuum for powers like China and Russia to fill.” (Reuters, May 21, 2007).
Despite U.S. efforts, the Russian, Chinese and European imperialists continue to make big inroads in the Americas. This is especially true in South America, where Russia and China are the main supporters of Hugo Chavez’s bloc. And where the European Union, as the biggest investors in the sub-continent, support Brazil’s rise as the dominant regional power vying to displace the U.S. While Russian and Chinese arms flow to the Venezuelan bloc, Brazil is acquiring European weapons.
Not everything is “peace and love” among the anti-U.S. forces. The European imperialists are threatened by Russian and Chinese growing influence in South America. The Germans — the biggest foreign investors in Brazil — are particularly alarmed by Chinese economic inroads there. They and some Brazilian bosses despise Hugo Chavez’s populist rhetoric. Brazil has the biggest wealth disparity in the world. They know that crumbs thrown to the impoverished masses á la Hugo Chavez will come at the expense of some of their profits, and those of the local ruling classes.
Just because the U.S. and the European-Brazil led bloc have a common anti-Chavez position does not make them friends either. The contradictions between all these imperialists and regional bosses will sharpen even further as the worldwide economic crisis deepens. So will the anger of the working class whose needs can’t be met by free market capitalism or state capitalism (Chavez’s “Socialism of the 21st Century” or the Socialism that the old communist movement fought for).
Central and South American workers need to organize the internationalist Progressive Labor Party and fight for communism, shown by history to be the only viable solution for the working class.
Workers Sit in to Stand Up vs. Parking Meter Robbery
As the sun rose above AutoZone, it seemed that nothing could be more beautiful. After a week of around-the-clock protesting against the installation of parking meters in the economically depressed neighborhood of South Chicago, community organizers, residents, and PLP members stood in awe of the magnificent sight. As the group sat in stunned silence, it seemed there couldn’t be a more perfect moment —
until a CTA bus driver passed through, tearing the silence with his blaring horn and punching his fist in the air. Protesters cheered, with a new appreciation of the beauty of the working class that has been supporting the sit-in with food, drink, cheers, and by joining us for several hours at a time.
Commercial Ave. is home to small “mom and pop” businesses, a church, and several social service organizations and community centers. Meters would make it impossible for many unemployed, immigrant, and poor residents to wait the hours-long lines for groceries from the food pantry or assistance with light and gas bills. This is all likely part of the city’s plan to rid “undesirables” from the area surrounding the potential
Olympic site.
Community organizers have held rallies outside the Alderman’s office and during the South Chamber of Commerce meeting. When the Executive Director of the Chamber moved the meeting to avoid protesters, the rally was moved, and people took the streets, marching to the new location. People hanging out of second floor apartment windows chanted “Fight back!” with the marchers.
Overnight, workers bring carne asada, hot dogs, and tamales to cook on the grill. Passers-by join the demonstrators for food and discussion about the importance of organizing the community to fight against the attacks on the working class. Leaders of the sit-in recognize that the cry of the people may be falling on deaf ears and it’s very likely the meters will be installed soon. Still, they smile as youth walk past at 1:00 am chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!!”
Demonstrations such as these have tremendous potential to build class-consciousness, develop new friendships, and strengthen the bonds with our friends. It is critical for PL members to engage in such struggles. Without our outlook that in each small battle we are building strength to wage the larger war against the bosses, our working-class brothers and sisters might become discouraged, and lose the will to fight altogether. We must remind them what we are fighting for. We must show them communism is alive and well in the workers who bring us dinner, asking for nothing in exchange; in the workers who sit with us for hours in the sun or rain; in the children who shout the loudest “Commercial Avenue not for sale!”
In an era when poverty, unemployment, and apathy often seem unbearable, such struggles also help encourage PL’ers. In the fight against capitalism time will pass, and we will see the bosses turn their wrath on the working class time and again, often more and more viciously. We will see workers’ victories rolled back and taken away. Throughout it all, however, the tremendous spirit of the working class is never broken. In many ways they already live the line. They show their readiness to fight. The working class’ true enemy is capitalism; we must fight to win the war for communism. Every struggle, every time — FIGHT BACK!
a name="Workers’ Power Is the Rx:">">"orkers’ Power Is the Rx:
Healthcare ‘Reform’ A Capitalist Shell Game
WASHINGTON, DC, June 25 — Today thousands of union workers from CWA, AFSCME, and SEIU joined health care professionals in a rally protesting the U.S.’s obscene health care system. Several PLP’ers were there to greet them with hundreds of leaflets and over 100 copies of CHALLENGE. Many workers were excited by its reports about the Stella d’Oro strike. But the strategy of today’s rally was just the opposite of the militant action shown by that strike.
Rally speakers included union sellouts like President Gerry McEntee and liberal politicians like U.S. Senators Charles E. Schumer and Arlen Specter. They generally urged support for Obama’s health reform plan. In fact, Health Care for America Now, the “labor-community” coalition that organized the event, is part of Obama’s plan to create networks that rally mass support for his legislative initiatives. But none of the health plans being debated in Congress will meet the workers’ needs because of the growing political, economic and military crises facing the U.S. imperialists.
The bosses are scrambling to compete internationally by vigorously cutting the wages and benefits of workers. In the auto industry, benefits and wages have been slashed, workers laid off and bankruptcy laws used to enforce this attack. Maintaining the capitalist economy requires not just the trillions of dollar in bailouts but attacks on workers’ standard of living as well.
But why not cut administrative costs, profits of insurers and pharmaceutical companies and cover the 50 million uninsured with this money, as Democratic Party rhetoric suggests? The proposed “public plan” (or even a “single-payer plan”) could not guarantee “quality, affordable health care for all.” The bosses’ must channel money to retool their industries, fight wars, develop innovative technology and beat out their competitors. Such is capitalism!
Any funding for reform will come mainly from the working class. The legislative debate shows that funds for reform won’t come from the rich or from shifting dollars from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, the bosses will tax health care benefits, cut income tax deductions, raise co-pays and “shared costs,” and tax soda and alcohol — all ways of taking even more money from workers. Capitalists can also hold down costs by cutting benefits within health plans. The worse the economic situation gets, the fewer the benefits. Massachusetts is already doing this, and more health plans will follow.
Why do the bosses even bother with health reform rhetoric? To keep us loyal to their rotten system and confused by moving money around while actually slashing benefits! More stringent cuts will certainly follow in coming years because of expanding wars and sharpening economic competition and crisis. Supporters of health care reform need to follow the lead of Stella d’Oro strikers and build a militant movement. Workers, students and professionals must fight to seize power through revolution, not be duped by the bosses’ shell game. With political power, we workers can build a needs-oriented health care system, without profit, racial disparities, and big marketing budgets. All the more reason to break with the capitalist politicians and join the revolutionary PLP!
LETTERS
a name="Mexico: Paradise for Bosses, Hell for Workers""Mexico: Paradise for Bosses, Hell for Workers
Mexico’s federal government has rescued big businessmen financially when they steal from each other, and has exempted them from constitutional obligations such as payment of social welfare fees, and from ensuring a dignified retirement for millions of workers at retirement age.
Enormous petroleum reserves have been exhausted primarily by selling it cheaply to the U.S., petroleum that imperialism has used primarily to support its wars, killing workers every day.
In recent years, neoliberal governments along with big capitalists have looted the country, endangering workers’ survival. In recent months 697,000 jobs have been lost while a day’s wages are a miserable $51.90 pesos (US$4), an average of US$120 a month. If Mexico’s workers were unable to migrate to the U.S., massive rebellions would have erupted in Mexico long ago.
Meanwhile, the government has allotted huge incomes to the upper echelons of the bureaucracy. Supreme Court judges are paid $700,000 pesos (US$53,846) a month, supposedly to make them immune to corruption. But in practice they exonerate governors and senators, like Puebla’s governor or Zacatecas’ current senator, even when their crimes are obvious.
Electoral functionaries increased their already high salaries by 50%. Federal deputies divided up (stole) $173,000,000 pesos, left over from the 2007 budget, making themselves white-collar criminals.
Governmental bureaucrats and the political parties — who say they represent the workers — actually oppress the workers, especially those who have struck to defend their rights, like the workers in Cananea fighting to improve safety at the workplace and like the miners of Pasta de Conchos in danger of being buried alive.
This is the reality for working-class lives under this rapacious and murderous capitalist system where exploitation and misery continue to be a daily occurrence.
We must destroy this system by organizing the working class for communist revolution. In turn, we’ll build a new society where exploitation, racism and nationalism don’t exist, a society that guarantees a dignified life for workers, as a result of having served society their whole working life. Let’s fight for communism!
Industrial Comrade from Mexico
a name="‘Reading CHALLENGE, I view the world differently…’"></a>"Reading CHALLENGE, I view the world differently…’
The first thing I noticed about CHALLENGE was the fist. That symbolism made me want to read it. Then I liked the tone — it antagonizes you to think. “Revolutionary communism” automatically made me start asking questions. I knew about revolution, but I had only heard negative things about communism. Now I wondered: What is communism, and how does it relate to revolutionary action? Its ideals are common work, common sharing, and community. I looked at communism different from that point on.
Then I started thinking about how can I use these tools and bring it back to the students at school. Our struggles are all different, but I have come to realize that these battles all derive from the same source.
I have been reading CHALLENGE for about nine months, and view the world differently now. I’m able to distribute the paper to five or ten friends each issue.
So where do we go from here? The more I listen, I read, and participate in the struggle I appreciate that all the answers aren’t there yet. Finally, I am involved in something where I am not being told what to do or how to think. I actually get to help create the kind of society I have always believed humankind deserves, or was intended to be. No racism, sexism, ageism period! No wages, foreclosures, or class/caste systems that devalue the role you play in society. I am awakened to the ways in which capitalism has destroyed families, students, workers, and so much more. We must unite and fight, live for what’s right and end the usury that destroys a fruitful life.
An Awakened Reader
a name="Mexico’s Elections: One Big Anti-Working Class Attack">">"exico’s Elections: One Big Anti-Working Class Attack
The July 5th elections for municipal presidents and local and federal deputies, occurred amid claims of change, employment, better quality of life, eradication of poverty and meeting people’s needs. These claims and actions of the so-called representatives of the people are filled with lies and hypocrisy.
National and foreign bosses and their politicians are preparing for the 2012 presidential elections, using these 2009 elections for an electoral map — numbers of voters who will vote in 2012 — and for measuring their political force by regions.
The PRI, New Alliance, and Verde Ecologista (Green ecologists) prepare for an alliance. The New Alliance, with the sellout Elba Esther Gordillo, proposes the same old tactics of mobilizing the teachers and rigging the votes for their party. The Verde Ecologista proposes the death penalty for kidnappers, killers and terrorists. They’re trying to win over workers while the killings, robberies, kidnappings and social conflict grow with the crisis.
The PRI with its “preservation of institutionality” contains overlapping contradictions between the political elite modifying the constitution according to their interests and the PAN with its “war on drug trafficking.” They’re displaying their deadly weapons to maintain fascist military power, backed by U.S. bosses.
The parties of the supposed “left” are also preparing their scenarios for the 2012 contest. The Party of Labor, Convergencia and PRD are in a fierce struggle with the parties of the extreme right, trying to “modernize” the left. They propose riches be generated for and by Mexico’s people, endangering the situation even more by promoting intense nationalism in our class.
Meanwhile, a supposedly “leftist” sector proposed a “blank” vote, enabling people to vote for no one. They say this would be the best option to show that society needs real changes. Their examples of the “modernization of the left” are Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, supposed “left-wing” regimes who can maintain their economies while going toe-to-toe with the U.S. yet kneeling to European or Asian bosses — supposedly “beneficial.” But submitting to these imperialists is the same as submitting to U.S. imperialists.
No electoral party promotes working-class power, which abolishes a system that enables a minority to live off the sacrifices of the vast majority. We need a change, but NOT the reformist one advocated by supposed “left” or right-wing parties. Progressive Labor Party proposes a revolutionary change, not the bosses’ electoral fraud. We want to destroy the capitalist system and all the bosses. That’s real change. We fight for communism. Join PLP.
Red Youth
What You Do Really DOES Count!
On Day 2 of the Summer Project we were handing out papers near a Boeing factory. I went to get coffee and set CHALLENGES down on the counter. One black worker stood pretending he was looking at the menu, but he kept making eye contact so I asked him, “You wouldn’t happen to work at Boeing?” “Yes I do,” he said. I told him how students from LA like me had been reading all year about the crisis they had going on at Boeing, and the battles, and that a few of us had mobilized to come and find ways to support the workers. One way was to pass out papers and help them organize. Our first step was to come down to the plants and meet some workers, pass out the literature and get a better feel for what was going on.
Meanwhile other Boeing workers popped up from different corners of the restaurant and surrounded us. I told them we heard about the no-strike deal from a fellow worker but the union was too quiet about the issue. I said some people were mobilizing right now and the paper was a way to start the process. I asked them if they’d be interested in taking the paper and and one guy gave me a dollar. Then they asked me if they could have ten or fifteen more to put inside the plant and so I gave them a stack and two guys stuck them under their shirts. They said they would pass the papers out inside and talk more about what’s going on.
Sometimes you don’t really understand what you’re doing until a moment like that happens, and then you know that we’re really making a difference.
Summer Project Volunteer
a name="Students, Profs Fight Capitalism’s Campus Cuts">">"tudents, Profs Fight Capitalism’s Campus Cuts
LOS ANGELES, July 9 — “The state will be required to cut down on education and healthcare to keep capitalism going. The state is not neutral. It is a tool in class society to keep the ruling class in power. We need to fight for communism.” That is what a comrade said in reference to the Board of Trustee’s decision to cut the winter session here in a Southern California Community College. This led to a two-hour discussion between three friends involved in the fight against the budget cuts that ended at midnight.
For the past two months hundreds of students and faculty have been fighting the budget cuts on our campus. Student-workers and part-time professors are getting laid off, sections are being cut, teachers are being laid off and the winter session has been slashed. Students have been hard at work trying to get informed about all the cuts that are going to be happening in the following semester. They have been communicating with concerned professors, attending Board of Trustees meetings, and researching on their own. The campus doesn’t inform the students about the sessions being cut or the potential layoffs of faculty. The administration is intimidated by the students’ and professors’ organizing against the cut-backs and other attacks. In fact the
administration held a budget-cuts rally and only invited students who would not challenge them and specifically did not
invite any other students.
Last week at a Board of Trustees meeting, over 125 students, teachers and workers protested their decision to cut programs students need. The crowd was very militant, and rallied outside the meeting. When they started to allow the audience inside the boardroom, students held up posters stating that there shouldn’t be any cuts. Throughout the meeting students caused disruptions and attacked the board members. One of the Board members cried, “I do everything to help the students,” but we know that under capitalism it doesn’t matter what she wants, she serves the needs of the ruling class and attacks the working class. This aroused other students to stand up and interrupt the board members to tell the truth about who is hurt by the cuts. This isn’t the first meeting students have attended, but this is the most militant one this campus has had since the crisis started.
When the decision came to cut programs, the winter session was the first to go. Cutting supplies was last. Some students joked that the school will be cutting toilet paper. Attending the board meeting showed the reality that the government doesn’t really help or support the working class, but instead attacks us. It made it clear that the Board of Trustees can’t and won’t help the students or teachers during times of crisis.
We will need a mass group of people to make a change on our campus and around the world. We must work with students on these issues to win them to our revolutionary ideas. That’s why it’s good that some of these students will be active in the PLP Summer Project. Some of them are reading CHALLENGE and we plan to expand this number so that more students can see that they’re part of the international fight against the capitalist system.
a name="‘Fog of War’ Pretty Clear: McNamara Murdered Millions"></">‘F"g of War’ Pretty Clear: McNamara Murdered Millions
Michael Jackson… Farrah Fawcett... the bosses’ media flooded us with news of their deaths. Yet many workers probably didn’t notice the death of an enemy of the international working class whose life reveals the horrible reality behind the lies of hope and change promised by liberal politicians like Barack Obama.
As Secretary of Defense under Presidents John Kennedy (JFK) and Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), McNamara is probably most infamous for his pivotal role in the imperialist Vietnam War, launched by U.S. capitalists to protect their strategic interests in Southeast Asia, particularly against Russia and China. Three million Vietnamese and 58,000 U.S. soldiers were killed.
Early on McNamara oversaw operation “Rolling Thunder,” the carpet bombing of North Vietnam that hurled nearly triple the number of bombs dropped on Europe in all of World War II (WWII). McNamara played such a pivotal role in conducting the war that at times it was called “McNamara’s War.” He was rightly hated by many, including many veterans from the war. Nonetheless, many understood that McNamara and the military were serving the larger interests of U.S. capital.
Harvard-trained, McNamara was a “Whiz Kid,” famous for his analytic abilities and his goals of “maximum efficiency.” At that time, “We were the best and the brightest,” he reminisced. (“Fog of War,” 2004) Tellingly, McNamara recalls that while at Harvard “society was on the verge.” He was referring to the Great Depression and often communist-led mass fights for unionization and against unemployment and evictions. He acknowledges that the liberal rhetoric and policies of then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) helped save U.S. capitalism. FDR was another liberal politician whose deceptive appeal Obama and his handlers hope to copy.
During WWII, the U.S. military sought Harvard’s help to become more effective. This became McNamara’s first experience as a mass murderer for U.S. bosses. He worked under General Curtis LeMay to maximize the efficiency of B-29 bombing over Japan.
This produced the firebombing of Tokyo that, according to McNamara himself in the documentary “Fog of War,” killed 100,000 Japanese civilians in one night! To fully understand the scale of destruction he helped plan, McNamara says that Tokyo’s size then equaled New York City’s. Now picture that destruction in NYC. Many more Japanese cities were similarly firebombed.
When asked by the interviewer in the “Fog of War” if he was aware of his responsibility in these mass civilian deaths, McNamara recalls General Lemay saying, “If we lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right….We were behaving as war criminals.”
After the war McNamara quickly became a darling of the rulers’ liberal wing. Ford hired him to make it profitable and he became the first company president who wasn’t a Ford family member. Soon afterwards JFK named him Defense Secretary. McNamara quickly entered JFK’s inner circle. Today Obama fashions himself as an heir to the FDR/JFK legacy.
The bosses’ media encourages popular nostalgia about JFK’s Presidency, a supposed “Camelot” or fairy-tale place of “idealism” and “service.” Obama and his ruling-class masters echo these same themes to win support particularly among youth, students and workers. Beneath the Kennedy/Obama liberal rhetoric is the lie that workers and bosses are on the same side and that an “enlightened capitalism” can consider workers’ interests. But the reality of these politics is continued capitalist exploitation, racism, anti-communism and murderous imperialist war that McNamara symbolizes.
Today many rightly despise Cheney and Rumsfeld for their roles in overseeing the Iraq oil wars under the Bushes. But as PLP says, “It’s not just Bush, it’s capitalism.” Many hope that a liberal Obama foreign policy will somehow be “less” imperialist. But when capitalists compete for the exploitation of the world’s resources and workers, war is inevitable.
To those who view Obama and the liberal rulers behind him as “good guys,” especially following Bush, McNamara’s life proves that the international working class has no friends among any capitalist rulers, liberal or otherwise. Obama will continue McNamara’s murderous imperialist legacy in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. Communist revolution remains the urgent task for the working class. The idea that workers might find solace and compassion with “lesser-evil” liberal bosses and politicians repeatedly and inevitably leads to the mass murder of workers worldwide.
Red Eye
Stress and suicide rife in U.S. Army
NYT 6/7 — Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, …predicted the toll this year will top the record of 2008 when the Army suffered 133 suicides. That was twice the number in 2004, before the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns turned into a slog of repeated tours…. He conceded there may be no study establishing an “overwhelming” connection between combat stress and suicide, “but I just can’t believe that it is not very much related.”
Troops in the field already know this the hard way. About one in five returning home privately admit to post-traumatic stress disorders, but only half seek treatment. Soldiers fear their careers will be compromised if they reach out for help.
N. Korea nukes already restrain U.S.
Pythian Press 6/14 — “Iran and North Korea appear to be seeking small nuclear arsenals in order to deter potential adversaries from launching an attack upon them — by threatening them with unacceptable damage in retaliation,” says Daley….”It is really quite a remarkable development,” says Daley….In contrast to all the debate….about whether the United States and/or Israel ought to launch a preemptive strike on Iran — no one seems to be proposing any kind of military strike on North Korea. Why not? Because of the mere possibility that North Korea could impose unacceptable damage upon us in reply.”
No Safety Net for the Desperate
NYT 7/5 — Government “safety net” programs like Social Security and food stamps have pulled growing numbers of Americans out of poverty since the mid-1990’s. But even before the current recession, these programs were providing less help to the most desperately poor, mainly non-working families with children…. The overhaul of cash welfare since 1996, aimed at pushing single mothers into jobs, ‘makes sense when unemployment is 5 percent.”
“But if you are out of work, the welfare system in a time of recession doesn’t have anything to offer.”
Facing court with no interpreter
NYT 7/4 — When Maythe Ramirez went to Superior Court in Contra Costa, Calif., for a child custody hearing in 2006, she wanted to tell the judge that her husband beat her and should not be allowed broad visitation rights. The court did not provide an interpreter for her however….
The court system can be a bewildering place for anyone, but it can terrifying for those who do not understand English…. But while interpreters are commonly offered in criminal cases, many states do not require the services in all civil cases….
In family law cases, which deal with issues like divorce, child custody and abuse, the lack of language help “can mean the difference between justice and injustice,”
Insurance co.’s steal health money
NYT 6/25 — Congressional investigators said Wednesday that two-thirds of the nation’s health insurance industry used a faulty database that overcharged patients for seeing doctors outside their insurance network, costing them billions of dollars in inflated bills.…
”The result of this practice is that American consumers have paid billions of dollars for health care services that their insurance companies should have paid,”
For bankers, recession is over
GW 7/3 — Bankers are again looking forward to bumper payouts, eight months after the sector faced meltdown. After weeks of firing staff, there’s a hiring frenzy in investment banks. Business is booming, partly as a result of the chaos caused by the bankers. Bond markets are hectic as a result of governments’ need to finance deficits, and economic ills have created (profitable) volatility in foreign exchange markets. Even guranteed bonuses have made a comeback.
PLP Project Develops Young Leaders, Worker-Soldier-Student Alliance
SEATTLE, July 13 — “This project was great because we got such instant response to our leaflets,” concluded a young East Coast volunteer. We distributed about 1,200 CHALLENGES and over 2,000 Extras and flyers at Boeing plants in the early morning as workers drove in. Then we talked to workers and returned to update our flyers daily, reflecting what we learned from the visits.
Our banner, “NO-STRIKE DEAL? NO WAY! FIGHT BACK!” was a big hit. Workers slowed down, stopped, requested CHALLENGE, honked their horns, called supportively out the windows, and raised their fists in solidarity! Their positive response to our multi-racial, age-integrated groups gave us energy to keep getting up, selling CHALLENGE and enhancing student-worker alliances.
We distributed a special flyer along with CHALLENGES for 220 soldiers at nearby Ft. Lewis. The day before we discussed the fallacy of the “good war” in Afghanistan, where many of these soldiers are being sent. We included a map of the proposed oil and natural gas pipelines the U.S bosses want to build through that country.
Soldiers are not solely victims of, or killers for, U.S. imperialism, but potentially a key force for revolution. Indeed, without winning these working-class soldiers there can be no revolution. Four gave us contact information to continue receiving our communist literature.
Training to take leadership, this group of mostly college and high school students from across the U.S. came together here for the 2009 Summer Project at Boeing. Combating the capitalist training endured in school, they met and ate with workers, participated in study groups and sold CHALLENGE.
Under capitalism, schools teach self-interest and individualism, but this Project proved we can live and struggle collectively in the interests of our class — in this case by creating relationships with industrial workers. This develops collectivity as we forge a strong worker-student alliance.
Boeing workers told us the company has just bought a non-union factory in South Carolina to induce workers to compete with each other for jobs, and that the IAM union may sign a “no-strike” clause “to keep jobs in Puget Sound” (see page 4). Many workers no longer believe the union is working for them. Despite the leadership’s assurances that plenty of backlog work exists to keep Boeing workers busy in this area, workers notice they have less and less work.
Workers feel they’re being used like tools that can be easily removed when the bosses don’t need them. In meeting us, workers realized they’re not alone in questioning the bosses’ and unions’ actions, and even the system altogether. These conversations also taught us how the industrial struggle unfolds. We also saw workers moving to the left from our discussion about the limits of reform.
PLP veterans led a study group about the history of PL’s industrial work, and then passed the torch to younger participants to discuss dialectical materialism (the study of understanding and analyzing how to change the world), racism, sexism and communist work in the military. Many first-time participants were involved in the Project. Their frankness about their experiences in the Project, in their lives and through their questions about PLP consistently sharpened the debate. They also benefitted from hearing that others face similar struggles in their own lives. Several described their uneasiness advancing communist ideas although not understanding them completely. These first-time participants confronted this by leading briefings and study groups.
After the activities, first-time Project participants led discussions and posed questions about why we are focusing on Boeing workers. We discovered that about 50% of Boeing’s production is military, connecting it to current imperialist wars, but also dramatizing aerospace workers’ revolutionary potential. Winning Boeing workers to revolution will enable them to construct military equipment in winning the class war.
Leading political discussions has increased the confidence of the newest participants to share PL’s ideas with their friends. Our CHALLENGE distribution improved every day as we engaged workers and developed our class-consciousness together. The young leaders who matured in the Seattle Summer Project will be great assets in their home cities as they take on more leadership in the working-class struggle for communist revolution.
a name="Worker to PL’er: ‘You guys were always there…’"></a>Wo"ker to PL’er: ‘You guys were always there…’
Project Unites PL’ers with Stella D’Oro Strikers
BRONX, NY, July 11 — “We are hard workers. Most of us have been working in this place for 20 or 30 years. When we went on strike we approached it the same way. We went to the picket line like we go to work; 24/7, seven days a week. That’s how we won.” This quote from a Stella D’Oro worker summed up the feelings of the eight strikers at a closing forum of the Stella D’Oro Summer Project. The Stella workers enthusiastically spoke about the battle — how they kept up morale during the long strike, how they fought sexism and built unity between men and women, and fought nationalism and racism and came to see themselves as a family.
A man who had been in the plant many years talked about how they kept together, “Before, I would go in the plant every day and mainly think about whatever problems came up at work, but during the strike I began to see the human side of the people I work with.” When asked about whether or not there was anti-communism in the strike in reaction to the presence of PLP, one worker said, “You were with us in the cold, in the rain, in the snow, you brought us pizza and coffee. You guys were always there. What can you say to that?”
The day before the project began, PLP students and teachers and a Stella D’Oro striker held a meeting to make plans to spread communist ideas during the Project. Plans were made to go to shift changes and discuss the CHALLENGE article, “Winning Means Destroying the Profit System: Stella D’Oro Strikers Fight for All Workers” (see front page, 7/15/09).
With copies of CHALLENGE and an invitation to the project’s evening events, we greeted the workers as they went in for their shifts. During the shift changes we reached over 60 workers each day and contacted over 30 workers by phone, in addition to distributing over 1,000 CHALLENGES.
The first evening event was a showing of the communist-made film, “Salt of the Earth,” about the struggle of Mexican-American mineworkers in New Mexico against their brutal bosses. A Stella D’Oro worker compared his experiences to those of the miners. He asked for a copy of the movie, planning to organize more Stella workers to see it.
The next night, a PL comrade gave a talk on the Flint Sit-down Strike of 1936-1937. Hearing how workers can take over the bosses’ factories and organize against attacks from the National Guard and police showed the power of the working class to organize life inside the plant, while battling the bosses trying to get them out.
This group of Stella workers, from all over the globe including North Africa, Europe and Latin America, showed tremendous fortitude, strength and optimism about the necessity of the working-class’ fight. It was clear that this struggle is not over.
The final forum, which concluded with the singing of the Internationale, raised the question of what is next for the Stella workers, and what is next for all workers and students as we face budget cuts, layoffs, evictions and increased attacks. We will continue to visit the plant, fight alongside the Stella D’Oro workers, and struggle to fight for a society led by the working class — communism!
- From Compton to Hammond to Harlem: Fight Racist Police Terror
- Obama’s Gates Flip-Flop Serves Racist Rulers’ War Needs
- Rulers and Harvard Boost Slicker, More Deadly Nazi-Style Policing
- White Cop, Black Prof Both Agents of Bosses
- France: Workers’ Threat to Blow Up Machinery Nets $42,000 Each
- D.C. PL’ers Lead Battle to Fire Criminal Transit Bosses
- PLP Summer Project Fights Racist Attack by Harlem KKKops
- PL’ers Lead Mass Protest Against Cal State’s Racist Budget Cuts
- Chicago ‘Mini-Project’ Backs Transit, Health, School Workers
- Obama’s ‘Shared Sacrifice’: ‘1199’ Hacks Cut Wages, Pensions to Save Bosses
- Minimum Wages Produce Maximum Profits
From Compton to Hammond to Harlem:
Fight Racist Police Terror
Obama’s Gates Flip-Flop Serves Racist Rulers’ War Needs
Rulers and Harvard Boost Slicker, More Deadly Nazi-Style Policing
White Cop, Black Prof Both Agents of Bosses
France: Workers’ Threat to Blow Up Machinery Nets $42,000 Each
Racists Set 10-year-old Black Child on Fire
D.C. PL’ers Lead Battle to Fire Criminal Transit Bosses
PLP Summer Project Fights Racist Attack by Harlem KKKops
PL’ers Lead Mass Protest Against Cal State’s Racist Budget Cuts
militancy. Some of the students and faculty easily transitioned from chants of “Hey-hey, ho-ho, this whole system must go” to “Hey-hey, ho-ho, capitalism has got to go.”
University of California systems. One Latino student traveling as much as three hours each way would no longer be able to afford school. Another Latina student said she had used her already evaporating savings and would no longer have enough to pay for next semester’s classes. A faculty member who also spoke out reported her classes had gone from four a semester to two, with many of her students having to withdraw from her classes because they could no longer afford them due to financial and family responsibilities. This is the reality capitalism forces upon the working class. Only communism can create an educational system that meets our needs.
Chicago ‘Mini-Project’ Backs Transit, Health, School Workers
Obama’s ‘Shared Sacrifice’:
‘1199’ Hacks Cut Wages, Pensions to Save Bosses
Minimum Wages Produce Maximum Profits
How We Organized an Anti-Racist Rally
U.S., Local Bosses Use Crisis to Militarize Mexico
Militarization and Drug Trafficking Attacks All Workers
ideas to break the chains of the capitalist system.
LETTERS
Summer Projects Unite Workers and Students
‘Learned what communism really means...’
No More Doubts: ‘I’m joining PLP...’
‘What we do really counts...’
‘Along the pathway to communism...’
Party-led Group in Spain Vows Anti-Imperialist Struggle
Rally to Unite Boeing Workers vs. No-Strike Deal
Attacking Racist Devastation of Industrial Workers Head-on
What’s Good For GM Is Racist
Devastation For Us
Only Communist Revolution Can Smash Fascism
hierarchy. We workers, on the other hand, must not build our movement based on illusions.
