PARIS, October 11 — Over 4,000 retirees demonstrated here, and hundreds more in Marseilles, Lyons and other cities nation-wide demanding an immediate across-the-board 300-euro-a-month increase ($387) in pensions, guaranteed access to health care, aid for those unable to live alone and an increase in the minimum monthly pension to 1,425 euros ($1,838). A trade union coalition organized the demonstrations.
“Retirees are neither rich nor privileged!” shouted the crowd in La Roche sur Yon in the conservative Vendée in western France.
“We won’t be the laughing stock for the suckers!” the protesters in Lyons chanted, mocking the bosses who say they “won’t be suckers” and bear any tax increase.
“Retirees are not privileged, it’s the financiers who should be taxed!” the Paris protesters chanted. Today’s protests were sparked by government plans to tax pensions 0.15 percent next year and double it in 2014. The tax is supposedly to pay for care for old people who can’t live alone but in reality, it’s to help ensure that France pays off its $1.9-trillion sovereign debt (2011 estimate) to the world’s finance capitalists.
Ten million retirees will have to pay the new tax while only the poorest 30% will be exempt. But from experience they know they’re next.
The Paris protesters also chanted, “Hollande, can you hear? the retirees are in the street!” This echoed a chant from 2010, when then-President Nicolas Sarkozy upped the retirement age, triggering massive protests. This has exposed current President Hollande and his “lesser-evil” Socialists as every bit as evil as the right-wing UMP party.
Raising the retirement age has increased the number of people aged 55-64 having to work by 3.8%. But the bosses’ economic crisis has spiked that group’s unemployment rate from 4.6% in 2008 to 6.5% in 2011.
“I can’t afford meat or fish,” said Josiane Bardot, 82, who lives on a 900-euro-a-month pension ($1,161), while paying 300 euros for rent. Francis, 87, lives on 1,200 euros a month ($1,548), but can eat meat only one day a week after paying 300 euros for rent plus a steep heating bill. “If I had an extra 100 euros a month, I could eat in a restaurant once in a while,” he said sadly.
An estimated 1.5 million retirees live below the poverty line (964 euros a month — $1,243 — in 2010). Some 8.6 million people — 14 percent of the population — live in poverty. Some retirees live alone in the slums on 600 euros a month.
Victims of Racism and Sexism Suffer Most
In 2010 the Alerte collective said retirees would face increasing impoverishment, especially those who’d experienced periods of unemployment. Because of racist discrimination, black people and those of Arab origin suffer the most unemployment. In old age, they suffer disproportionately from poverty. The same is true of women, who often leave work or work part-time while raising children.
Many retirees no longer have complementary health insurance and are skimping on health costs. Some have to choose between food and health care. More need help to pay their heating bills.
Meanwhile, the Socialist government has just decided to maintain special social security provisions that pump up the profits of private-sector retirement homes. That’s no surprise: Luc Broussy, the Socialist advisor on the issue, headed the private retirement-home lobby for twelve years.
Thus the “lesser-evil” Socialists maintain the system that impoverishes the poor and enriches the rich. Between 2004 and 2007, the income of the richest 0.01 percent rose steadily, by 40%.
What’s needed is overthrow of the capitalist system which exploits workers while they’re young and relegates them to poverty when they’re old. This can only be accomplished through communist revolution — the goal of the Progressive Labor Party.
Washington, DC, September 22 — Today, over 300 anti-racists confronted a dozen Nazi/Klan white supremacists. Only their 500-strong police escort saved them from severe beatings that would have discouraged them from future events. Protesters nevertheless drowned out their racist filth with militant anti-racist chants.
These racists rode into Lincoln Park on the anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. This apparently deliberate attack on anti-racism echoed the 2006 KKK rally at Harper’s Ferry, the site of John Brown’s raid against slavery. Ironically, they arrived on a bus with a black driver and labeled Haymarket (the location of the 1886 protests that gave rise to May Day, the international working-class holiday).
PLP members distributed over 100 CHALLENGES and talked to anti-racist marchers about communism, free speech and the role of the police and capitalist state in perpetuating racism. Most agreed with a sign that declared “Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech.” White supremacists use such rallies to recruit members to carry out violent attacks on blacks, Arabs or Latinos, but the militant opposition of multi-racial groups like this crowd make racists think twice about joining such racist gangs and slows their growth.
The crowd drowned out the Nazis’ feeble efforts to speak over their bullhorn. Then mounted park police, supported by regular DC police and motorcycle cops, led the Nazi parade down East Capitol Street. The anti-racist crowd would have none of that, and by consensus formed a human barricade across the street. We stopped the mounted cops, forcing the Nazis to stand in the horse manure behind them.
The top brass of the DC police began threatening arrests, and just before the arrests began, the protesters dissolved the barricade and re-formed it a block away. A PL’er gave a bold communist speech via the human mike (the crowd signifies agreement by repeating the speech) in the middle of the confrontation. The barricade scenario happened again, but this time, a brave young black man declared that he would not move, that he had lived in this neighborhood since he was three, and that no Nazi would march down his street.
PL’ers called on the protesters to come back from their next barricade and support this bold fighter, and they did. At this point, the mounted police used their horses as battering rams against the crowd of furious anti-Nazi protestors. The Nazis were able to continue marching, but protesters continued to harass them all the way to the Capitol building, drowning out their message with chants of “Death, death, death to the Nazis; Power, power, power to the workers!” The Nazis rallied briefly behind a phalanx of fully-equipped riot police serving as their personal bodyguards and then scurried off to their bus and left town.
Smash Racists
Stopping the most extreme racists is critical in an atmosphere of intensifying racism and oppression in the U.S. and around the world. Any hint that extreme racism can function openly and boldly will encourage meeker racists to step up and bolster the ranks of the white supremacists. The result of such a process can only be racist murder and intimidation. We must strike first, and hard.
Despite the overall boldness of the rally, we missed the opportunity to stop the march and beat the Nazis senseless. This time we did not have a sufficient plan and were unprepared to attack (and risk arrests.) However, this was a learning experience for many of our newer comrades and our friends from the Occupy movement, who turned out in large numbers. PLP has an impressive history of bold physical confrontations with Nazis and the Klan. In fact, Klan leader Bill Wilkerson publicly declared in the 1980s that PLP was the main barrier they faced in building their movement. We will study the history of the ruling-class support for these Nazis and PL’s staunch opposition. Next time, we will be ready and the Nazis will be lucky to escape with their lives.
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More War, More Racism
We should recall that the organized white supremacist movement in the U.S. in the 1930s included hundreds of thousands and was supported by the ruling class. When the U.S. ruling class wanted to win workers to fight fascism in the 1940s, they reduced their support for such racist groups to build a façade of anti-racism. Fighting Hitler at that time had become extremely profitable for U.S. bosses.
However, before World War II, Hitler had received support from U.S. companies such as Ford, GM and IBM in building his tanks, trucks and technologies — a fact omitted from history textbooks.
Today a veneer of anti-racism is part of the ideas pushed by U.S. bosses. But the deeper they lead us into wars around the world, the more racist terror they unleash both in the U.S. and worldwide. Arab workers locked up without trials after 9/11 and immigrant workers rounded up on the job and deported away from citizen children can attest to that.
As the economic crisis deepens we may see even more blatant racist attacks from both the state and gutter racists like the neo-Nazis, Klan and Minutemen. We must not let them get away with it. We have a world to win.
The imperialist drumbeat to invade Syria is getting louder by the day. The U.S. rulers have found a willing partner for a push to war in the energy-rich slave state of Qatar, which borders Saudi Arabia on the Persian Gulf. This blossoming alliance seeks to use the Arab Spring upheavals and the Iraq War to heighten its profitable influence in the Middle East.
In a September 25 address to the UN General Assembly, the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, urged other Arab countries to do their “military duties… to do what is necessary to stop the bloodshed in Syria.”
Two days later, the New York Times ran an op-ed piece, “Five Reasons to Intervene in Syria Now,” by Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Michael Doran of the Brookings Institution. The column’s rhetoric — in line with President Barack Obama’s pledge “to foresee, prevent and respond to genocide and mass atrocities” — cynically masks the drive for profits from gas pipeline routes that motivates Qatari and U.S. war plans. It is apparent that yet more death and devastation await workers in the Middle East.
This latest push for a U.S. intervention, including (for starters) a countrywide no-fly zone and a Turkish corridor for military supplies to Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, is part of a sharpening competition between imperialist interests.
In the name of “freedom,” U.S. and allied capitalists aim to remove Syria’s Assad government, which has united with gas-rich Iran and Russia in jockeying for gas export routes. Qatar contains 14 percent of the world’s natural gas reserves, ranking it third behind Russia and Iran.
The majority of Qatar’s natural gas is located in the massive offshore North Field, which spans an area nearly as large as the country itself. The leading foreign investor in Qatar’s North Field is ExxonMobil, the largest U.S. oil and gas company and the world’s richest corporation by revenue.
According to the Asia Times, “It’s clear what Qatar is aiming at: to kill the $10 billion Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline….Here we see Qatar in direct competition with both Iran (as a producer) and Syria (as a destination), and to a lesser extent, Iraq (as a transit country)” (9/28/2012). With Qatar as a main source, the article adds, the “strategic aim” of U.S. ally Turkey “is to become the top energy crossroads from the Middle East/Central Asia to Europe.”
U.S. ‘Humanitarianism’
Murders Millions
Since the First Gulf War invasion of Iraq in 1991, Qatar had been home to a major U.S. Air Force base and now serves as a launching pad for strategic U.S.-backed energy and financial ventures (see box). The victims of these ventures mount into the millions:
• Reporting on the strife in Egypt, The Economist magazine (9/9/2011), a staunch booster of U.S.-UK imperialism, provided a conservative body count of 846;
• Libya’s own health ministry estimated at least 30,000 dead in that country (Associated Press, 9/9/2011);
• According to The Lancet, the authoritative British medical journal (10/12/2006), Iraqi war deaths totaled 654,965 between 2003 and 2006;
• At least half a million children died from earlier U.S. sanctions that Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, deemed “worth it” (“60 Minutes,” 5/12/1996).
Racism Kills Worldwide
Furthermore, domestic U.S. racism, as reflected in the recent rash of cop killings of black and Latino youth, has been “exported” to this mass murder of Arab, Muslim and black workers in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Racism has no boundaries. It is fueled and justified by the demonization of peoples as “worthless” or as “terrorists” for imperialist purposes.
ExxonMobil and Qatar Aim to Break Iranian-Russian Gas Dominance
Qatar’s energy sheiks have joined U.S. bosses’ domestic schemes to break the global gas supply dominance of Russia and Iran. As the world’s largest shipper of liquid natural gas (LNG), Qatar has vessels and expertise that could transform the current U.S. gas boom into a geostrategic weapon. “Exxon Mobil Corp. and Qatar Petroleum International are teaming up on a proposal to export LNG from Texas. Exxon is a 30% owner of Golden Pass Products and Qatar holds a 70% stake. The two firms could invest up to $10 billion in the project” (MarketWatch, 8/20/2012).
The CFR and Brookings proponents of a Syria invasion share something in common with Qatar’s ruling clan: the same benefactors, representing the dominant wing of U.S. capitalism. JPMorgan Chase and ExxonMobil have invested fortunes in these finance-capital think tanks. In accord with Qatar’s rulers, Boot and Doran propose that “American intervention would diminish Iran’s influence in the Arab world.”
The agreement between U.S. and Qatari rulers is not complete, however. Qatar’s sheiks believe that Saudi-led, U.S.-armed Gulf Cooperation Council forces can oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. But while U.S. finance capitalists understand that “Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and Israel would like to see Mr. Assad toppled,” and that “France and Britain could also be counted on to help,” Boot and Doran maintain that only the U.S. Air Force and Navy “have the weaponry needed to dismantle Syria’s Russian-designed air defenses with little risk.” The authors manage to ignore nuclear super-power Russia’s naval base in Syria.
CHALLENGE doesn’t make speculations. But when capitalists are calling all the shots, we know for certain that whatever happens in Syria (or Iran) won’t be good for our class. A U.S. coalition strike will kill many. In the absence of such a strike, imperialist rivals Russia and China will be in a stronger position — another step toward a wider war.
U.S. Elections Hide War Dangers to the Working Class
The phony choice between Obama and Republican Mitt Romney aims to derail U.S. workers from uniting to rise up against these war-makers.
By painting Obama as a lesser evil to the right-wing Republicans, the U.S. ruling-class media attempts to deceive workers into believing he will protect them from the “extremists.” But while Romney rants about bombing Iran, Obama prepares for it. Tens of thousands of U.S. military troops are stationed throughout the Middle East. Nuclear-armed aircraft carriers, waiting in the Persian Gulf, are not there as peacemakers.
Meanwhile, U.S. workers under Obama suffer from all the pathologies of capitalism: mass racist unemployment and home foreclosures, huge numbers of racist deportations, and the world’s highest racist incarceration rates, with black and Latino workers representing 70 percent of the U.S. prison population. These attacks stem from a profit system enforced by whoever resides in the White House. Clinton or Bush, Obama or Romney — for the working class, it makes little difference.
The only real choice for workers lies in uniting to destroy this exploitative system and its oppressive state apparatus, and to replace it with a communist society without bosses, profits, racism, sexism and capitalist-bred imperialist wars.
The goal of the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party is to win workers and youth in all our workplaces, unions, schools, campuses, communities, churches and mass organizations to the fight for revolution. That’s the answer to the bosses’ election circus. Join us!
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Middle East Bank Scramble Mirrors Global Imperialist Rivalry
As a willing U.S. client state, Qatar hopes to turn a fat profit by taking over banks in lands recently “liberated” with lethal U.S. assistance:
Qatar National Bank (QNB), seeking to boost its regional presence, has hired J.P. Morgan Chase to advise on its planned buy of [French] Societe Generale’s Egyptian arm….It also raised its stake in Iraq’s Mansour Bank and bought a 49 percent stake in Libya’s Bank of Commerce and
Development earlier in April. BNP
Paribas, another French lender, is said to be seeking initial bids for the sale of its Egyptian retail arm, with QNB interested in the business…. However, the lender lost out to Russia’s Sberbank in bids for Turkey’s Denizbank earlier this year (Reuters, 9/2/2012).
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Multi-Racial March Hits Cover-up of KKKops’ Racist Murder
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Two comrades went into the Haitian countryside to meet with two groups about the necessity to build the struggle against capitalism. The first group was a reading group made up of 15 high school and university students. The second group was a freedom school (“tilekòl”) of 12 regular agricultural workers and 30 of their friends.
The agendas of both meetings were to discuss a mass campaign to end cholera in Haiti and the historical importance of August 14. This date commemorates the initial planning meeting in Bois Caïman, in the north of Haiti in 1791, of slaves for their revolution against slavery.
In every period of imperialism, the class enemy brings not only a political and an economic oppression, but also genocidal dangers (e.g., yellow fever in the colonial period, “chik,” a parasite which attacks the feet, in the period of the 1915-34 U.S. occupation, and cholera with the current UN/Minustah occupation).
Both groups discussed the source of the exploitation and assassination of the working class — the capitalist system. Even if we are able to win today’s reform struggles, as long as capitalism exists there will be other similar problems to resolve tomorrow.
The only way out of this perpetual struggle is to destroy the capitalist system. We must transform ourselves into determined fighters, build our Party into a mass party internationally, and create an egalitarian communist society that serves the interests of our class.
Cholera: The Bosses’
Killing Machine
The youth group began with some information about the continued presence of cholera in Haiti. This disease of poverty has been made worse by the lack of clean water and sanitation. Fifty percent of city-dwellers and 70% of people in the countryside do not have access to clean water; fewer have adequate toilets. It continues to kill four to five each day. After the devastating earthquake in 2010, UN occupation troops brought the cholera virus by leaking their waste matter into the Artibonite River, the source of drinking water for tens of thousands of working-class people in the Plateau Central.
The Haitian government, the UN (including the World Health Organization), the imperialist countries, and the “humanitarian” organizations all maintained their silence. They did not prepare for the possible appearance of any epidemic after the earthquake. They did the minimum necessary when cholera was introduced. Once the main manifestation of the epidemic was over, they all turned their backs and walked away.
Today, cholera continues to spread, not only in Haiti, but in the neighboring Dominican Republic, in Spain, in Ghana and elsewhere where working-class people live in poverty. It was noted that the budget of the hated UN occupation troops — Minustah — for 18 days would pay for the inoculation of every man, woman and child in Haiti!
We debated whether Minustah’s presence in Haiti serves any purpose other than suppressing the will of the masses. We also discussed how superstition about the spread of cholera (not by a magic powder but by the lack of clean water and sanitation facilities) hides the political reality that it was brought to Haiti by imperialism. The ruling class allowed cholera to spread by its racist neglect. By ignoring the continued cholera epidemic, the working-class’s ability to organize and fight back is weakened.
Youth Study History of Haiti’s Revolution
During the presentation about the slave revolt of 1791 we learned that it was the first planned meeting between the “maroons” (those who had escaped slavery and lived freely in the mountains) and slaves. It led to a mass violent uprising lasting 12 years, ending the ability of the slave owners to continue their brutal, racist exploitation of the slaves. It also led to the successful abolition of slavery and the independence of Haiti from the yoke of French colonialism.
Bourgeois education teaches students in Haiti that what happened at Bois Caïman was a spontaneous, religious ceremony that relied on superstition. In our discussion, we learned that the planning of the insurrection used the cultural symbols of voodoo as tools of resistance against slavery. The young people asked why voodoo was no longer a tool of resistance against capitalism but just another religion which weakens workers’ ability to fight. It was pointed out that the capitalist class always corrupts popular culture and turns it into a poisonous substance that alienates workers.
Workers Organize Against Flood Conditions
The peasant group — tilekòl — has been meeting for several months, in part to resolve their water problems. When it rains, instead of watering their fields, it floods them. They have no access to clean water and are forced to pay for drinking water. The contamination and privatization of water is a problem for workers around the world. A similar struggle continues in the 12 districts to the east of Valle de Mexio, near Mexico City.
Tilekòl has decided to organize its community and fight back to change these conditions. They can try to solve the flooding problem and irrigate their fields by creating a system of canals (typically used in Haiti to solve flooding.) They will organize “koumbites” — collective work teams — to dig the canals. However, they don’t have the hand tools necessary to do the job. They also require an adequate system to bring clean water to the community with a series of public fountains.
Therefore, they have agreed to circulate a petition among all the members of their community and organize a huge delegation to present the petition to the local bosses demanding that they act. However, more action will be needed.
All of these steps are important to show that workers have the skills needed to run society for the benefit of all. When workers around the world understand that we don’t need the bosses or their capitalist system, we will be one step closer to breaking the chains of our oppression!
New York City, September 27 — “Justice for: Shantel Davis!”
We chanted in the halls of the Presbyterian Church where the Women’s City Club of NYC was presenting the head of the murdering NYPD, Ray Kelly, an award for enhancing the life of residents.
Our interjection of anti-racist politics as well as the reality about the death squad (NYPD) that Ray Kelly leads was not welcoming news for these high-society women. We brought the fight directly into their arena. The struggle for an indictment of the kkkop Philip Aktins continues, intertwined with the struggle to end capitalism’s racist reign.
