The ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the core provisions of President Barack Obama’s health care reform is no victory for the working class. The mandate forcing people to buy insurance on a for-profit basis is a bonanza for the insurance companies and health maintenance organizations (HMOs). These companies will now have tens of millions of new customers from whom to reap enormous profits. The same is true for the pharmaceutical and hospital industries that will continue to rob the general population with over-priced drugs and tests, many of them unnecessary. The more money they rake in, the less workers will have for basic needs.

The money to pay for health reform will, in effect, come from a tax on the entire working class. This was the basis for the rulers’ new hero, Chief Justice John Roberts, to become the deciding vote in declaring Obamacare constitutional. Congress has the power to tax, he said, and tax it will. Not everyone will be covered by the reformed health care system, of course. Twelve million undocumented workers and their children will remain unprotected, facing Obama’s policy of mass deportations, upwards of 1.4 million and counting.

Workers Have No Stake in Elections

The main beneficiaries of the Supreme Court’s decision may be Obama, whose bid to retain the White House in this November’s election gained a needed boost, and the finance capitalists who back him as their imperialist and international assassin of choice. But whether the Democrats or Mitt Romney and the Republicans come out on top, workers have no stake in either of these ruling-class candidates or in capitalism’s electoral process. The bosses’ election circus is designed to enforce the profit system that heaps only mass unemployment, racism, sexism, poverty and war on the backs of the working class. No doubt the medical industrial complex will use this reform to squeeze workers even more, with mergers swallowing smaller competitors and leading to even more layoffs.

Racist discrimination imposes a special burden on black and Latino workers, who suffer from either a doubly high rate of joblessness and lower wages for those who manage to find work. Racism enables the bosses to reap hundreds of billions of dollars from these wage and job differentials, while dividing and weakening the working class’s efforts in trying to fight these attacks. Capitalists need us only healthy enough to create profits, fight their imperialist wars for them, and bear the children the bosses can exploit in the future. These are the narrow limits of Obama’s concern for the masses’ well-being. 

U.S. Bosses in Dogfight

Obamacare’s troubled progress and narrow 5-4 margin in the Supreme Court reflects sharpening conflict among U.S. bosses. The needs of U.S. imperialists who must deal with sharpening global rivalry are not always aligned with the needs of the drug, insurance and HMO bosses, who make their profits primarily from domestic exploitation rather than imperialist wars. 

At the top of Obama’s imperialist agenda is his need to rein in runaway medical expenditures and thereby fund his masters’ war efforts. Second is the imposition of fascist discipline on all capitalists, great and small. Third is fostering patriotism by making workers dependent upon and loyal to a “benevolent” U.S. government.

This isn’t the first time the liberal imperialist wing has tried to advance health care reform as a political strategy. Ted Kennedy made it the centerpiece of his aborted 1980 White House bid. Bill and Hillary Clinton pushed hard for it in Clinton’s first term but were thwarted by the insurance and drug companies. Today it’s the politicians fronting for the domestically oriented bosses who balk at the more centralized control that Obamacare represents. And despite the Supreme Court ruling, the bosses’ internal fight is far from over.

Obama’s inability to rally broad unity for his mandates is a disappointment to liberal, imperialist Brookings Institute think-tankers, who shed crocodile tears for the uninsured while exposing the fact that Obamacare is not all what it seems:

[B]eneath the surface, the ruling is less liberal than it looks....First, the Medicaid ruling limits the power of the federal government to encourage states to extend medical care. This gives states the authority to resist national efforts to expand health insurance....Second, although Chief Justice Roberts supported the constitutionality of the individual mandate, his opinion limited the ability of the federal government to regulate interstate commerce through tactics other than taxes. This part of the decision will restrict the ability of future Congresses to regulate commerce.... The ultimate result of this decision will be that fewer uninsured will be covered than thought by health care reformers (Brookings website, 6/29/12).

The liberal reformers touting Obamacare may deceive some into thinking the U.S. is on the road to a single-payer healthcare system, a la Canada, which seems to be less costly and more efficient. In reality, however, Canada’s system is paid for by higher taxes on the working class as a whole — not so different from Obamacare, with the difference that U.S. workers have the added burden of paying for the profits of the drug, insurance, and hospital corporations.

Only Communism Can Provide for Workers’ Health

Only a communist system, one that puts workers’ needs first, can provide health care that benefits the whole working class. Without bosses and profits, workers — who produce all value in society — can allocate that value to their class’s collective health. Without a parasitic ruling class, health care will be distributed on a communist basis: from each according to their commitment to the social good, and to each according to their need. This is what Progressive Labor Party fights for in organizing for a communist revolution. Join us!

Obama’s recent order, Deferred Action, to delay some deportations of undocumented immigrants (see back page) constitutes a classic capitalist Big Lie. (The Big Lie refers to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic and anti-communist propaganda technique based on the idea that “the great masses will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”)

This is an attack on workers masquerading as a benefit. It comes from the president who has deported more than 1.4 million workers, more than any administration in U.S. history. According to the bosses’ top liberal mouthpiece, the New York Times (6/17/12), Obama is bringing “joy and relief” to undocumented Latino workers by delaying deportations for a small minority.

In reality, however, the edict has several anti-working class aims. These include re-electing war-maker Obama, sustaining racist, low-wage exploitation, and fostering “government-as-savior” patriotism, particularly encouraging military service among Latino youth. 

The fact that the new policy targets only 800,000 of the 12 million workers that the bosses label “illegal” exposes Obama’s resolve to keep squeezing super-profits from the masses of undocumented workers. Farm work, the main destination of those without papers, pays workers at less than half the rate of other industries. Obama’s “kindness” relegates these mainly Latino workers to rock-bottom pay and wretched living conditions under the unrelieved threat of deportation.

The Times shamelessly praises Obama’s opportunist immigration ploy to lure Latino workers to the polls as “a play for a key voting bloc in the states that will decide whether he gets another term” (6/16/12). The Times speaks for the dominant, imperialist faction of the U.S. ruling class’s finance capitalists who yearn for four more years of Obama as invader/assassin-in-chief. He has been proven to be willing and ready to spill workers’ blood to confront challenges to U.S. imperialism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Russia and China.

Obama, Most Militarily Aggressive U.S. President

On April 29, the Times gave space to Peter Bergen, director of the finance-capital-backed New America Foundation, which supplies many foreign policy advisors to Obama’s reelection campaign. Bergen hailed Obama as “one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades.” Republican Mitt Romney, on the other hand, poses potential problems for a ruling class that requires ever-wider wars. His proposed platform of “military build-up amid tax cuts” may prove unworkable.

Obama’s immigration move stands to aid U.S. imperialism’s long-range plans by encouraging enlistment. On June 16, the Times editorialized that Obama has effectively revived the Dream Act, “a bill in Congress to give legal status to young immigrants who go to college or serve in the military....It is well past time to make a more sensible and humane immigration policy the law of the land.” Obama’s new order applies only to under-31-year-olds, and only to those “qualified” at that. It is a backdoor hunt for cannon fodder.

Further, as the Times editorialized (9/20/2010) about Latino youth, “The Defense Department, at least, understands their value.” Laws moving these young people into the military “is one of its official goals for helping to maintain ‘a mission-ready, all-volunteer force.’”

Meanwhile, the rulers’ racist practices, like New York’s stop-and-frisk policy and state anti-immigrant laws that encourage racial profiling, produce arrest records that would disqualify — and deport — the very same Latino youth whose Obama’s edict would supposedly free.

Most dangerous of all is Obama’s attempt to obscure the reality of class antagonism. As worldwide imperialist rivalry intensifies, U.S. rulers need greater all-class unity in support of overseas wars and a domestic police state, both of which run directly against workers’ interests. So Obama & Co. trot out the myth that government can serve and protect our class.

Obama Using Latino Workers As An Election Ploy

The Times hopes that Obama’s latest trick will lead millions of Latino workers to look to him as a compassionate savior: “It sent a clear signal to fast-growing Hispanic populations in Florida, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia and other states that he understood their frustration at his lack of progress so far in addressing problems with the immigration system and reducing the number of deportations” (6/16/12). Obama seeks their votes in these key battleground states to put him over the top in November’s election.

Gary Hart, a leading pro-Obama strategist for U.S. imperialists, co-authored the revealing Hart-Rudman reports commissioned by President Bill Clinton in 1999. Those reports foresaw the 9/11 attacks in stating that an attack on the U.S. homeland would transform popular post-Vietnam anti-war opposition into support for the rulers’ new imperialist adventures. But the ruling class overestimated 9/11’s potential to “galvanize the nation” into patriotic fervor for drawn-out wars that would create a consolidated, fascist state apparatus.

Hart-Rudman led to the the creation of Homeland  Security which spread fear and anti-Muslim racism. It also helped acceptance of the Big Lie of weapons of mass destruction and of the invasion of Iraq.  

At the time, Hart underestimated workers’ growing disillusionment with capitalist political leaders and wars as the workers became more and more improverished. He hopes Obama can reverse the trend. On the eve of Obama’s immigration announcement, Hart wrote:

For more than four decades most Americans identified the Democratic Party with a social contract and safety net, equality of justice and opportunity, and progressive — yes, even liberal — causes....But beginning dramatically in the 1970s things changed. Things being: globalization and foreign competition; the decline of the manufacturing base; petroleum-producing nations controlling the price of oil; and the unsustainable costs of cold war military engagements and deployments....The Democratic response…cost the party its identity.... A well-motivated Democratic president now struggles to move the nation forward against a conservative tide that emerged in the policy vacuum created by Democratic failure to adapt (NYT, 6/15/12).

President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal won him working-class support for World War II. Civil rights laws helped Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson win support for genocidal war in Vietnam, though the war eventually turned workers against U.S. rulers. As November approaches and the capitalists’ profit scramble sharpens into regional (Syria and Iran) and global (Russia and China) wars, watch out for more double-edged “blessings” from Obama.

Don’t Fall for U.S. Rulers’ Big Lies

We must win workers to learn from this history of ruling-class ploys and help them to resist being sucked into imperialist wars that kill our working-class sisters and brothers worldwide. We must lead them to support these workers’ struggles against global capitalist exploitation.

Progressive Labor Party has long championed immigrant workers’ battles against racist super-exploitation, from window manufacturing workers in Chicago to garment workers and aerospace parts workers in Los Angeles to farm workers in California’s San Joaquin Valley. We must step up such class struggle and unite immigrant workers with black, Asian, white and all Latino workers in all the mass organizations in which we participate.

Multi-racial unity is essential to organizing a communist revolution that will destroy the bosses and their profit system which sucks the blood of our class. Then we can create a society run by and for the working class, producers of all value, which will be shared according to need. That is PLP’s goal. Join us.

Harlem March

NEW YORK CITY, June 17 — More than 200 workers and students gathered to march in the heart of Harlem today, loudly defying an avalanche of capitalist ideas and mis-leadership to condemn the racist New York Police Department and its reign of terror in working-class black and Latino communities. Afterwards, the rally fed into a mass, silent march against the racist Stop-and-Frisk policy of police intimidation and terror. Although both events were confronting similar issues, in many ways they could not have been more different.

Our rally was organized by the friends and family of Ramarley Graham, an 18-year-old black youth murdered on February 2 by racist cop Richard Haste. The Graham family and the support committee, including PLP members, decided to hold the rally here in direct response to the organizers of the main march.

In some back room, Al Sharpton, Ben Jealous — head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) — and George Gresham — head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — made a cowardly political decision. Instead of beginning the march in the heart of Harlem, where the mainly black and Latino population deals with racist Stop-and-Frisk every day, they moved the main rally to 110th street, a mainly gentrified area.

Unlike these misleaders, we don’t fear an angry, militant response from Harlem’s black workers. In fact, that’s exactly what we welcomed! Their anger and hatred of the racist police should be a clarion call for all workers, reminding us that the bosses and their thugs are our class enemies. When workers are united and led by a revolutionary communist party they won’t stand a chance.

Joining Ramarley’s family were other victims of the racist KKKops. The son of Kenneth Chamberlain — a 68 year-old black man murdered by cops in nearby White Plains, NY — came and spoke with marchers about how his father accidentally set off a device warning he was having a medical emergency. The police arrived, kicked down his door and killed him. Also present were people from Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood where Shantel Davis was slaughtered by racist cops.

Meanwhile, the organizers of the main march intentionally downplayed the issue of police brutality, focusing only on Stop-and-Frisk. These phony mis-leaders want to encourage narrow thinking among workers, pleading with us to ignore how racism infects our daily lives, from police murder and Stop-and-Frisk to unemployment and school closings.

However, at our rally multiple speakers linked the litany of racist attacks to the capitalist system. As we heard, racism serves the barbaric bosses in two important ways. First, it allows them to wring even more profit out of the working class. In the U.S., the wages and benefits of black and Latino workers are deliberately kept lower than white workers’, netting the bosses hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars in super-profits. This racist wage system is used as a threat to white workers’ demands, thus driving down their wages as well. A similar situation exists worldwide.

Secondly, racism keeps workers divided, encouraging us to blame other workers for the lack of jobs and low wages, weakening any united struggle. This understanding of racism will never escape the lips of the Sharptons or Greshams. At our rally it rang out loud and clear, giving Harlem residents a communist analysis and a way to fight back.

After rallying, we marched through Harlem, a neighborhood which has been the target of racist police brutality for decades. Here, in 1964, the murder of black teenager James Powell by the same racist NYPD sparked the Harlem Rebellion, the first of the big-city uprisings in the 1960s. Our march and militancy paid tribute to those brave rebels. Instead of silence, Harlem residents heard chants like, “NYPD, KKK, How many kids did you kill today?” and “Racist cops, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” 

Our vocal anger at the NYPD’s racist murders put into stark relief the treasonous ideas pushed by the organizers of the main march. They called for a silent march, muting the anger of the protesters. The effect was tens of thousands of workers and students, united across ethnic lines, meekly walking down the street. The cops and politicians who maintain this racist capitalist system could rejoice at this passivity.

Unfortunately, despite a long-term struggle over the issue, too many in the group felt obliged to respect the decision of the traitorous organizers and remained silent. This is a specific aspect of a more general struggle: instead of relying on politicians and ministers, workers should be won to trusting their own class. 

The struggle continues. The Graham family holds weekly vigils which should shame the organizers of the main march. More importantly, it should spark workers and students, committed to multi-racial unity and the militant fight against racism, to hold our heads up high. We’re not silent nor passive. We’re loud and angry. We march through the streets of the Bronx calling on neighbors to join our fight against the racist cops. We indict the whole racist, capitalist system. And we end every march at the police precinct where the racist murderer of Ramarley Graham worked. Here we are the loudest, charging the police with murder and putting them on notice that the multi-racial, international working class is coming for them and their system.

*****

Racist KKKops Are Violent, We Will Not Be Silent!

A small group of PL’ers attempted to break the silent march but the majority of the marchers were reluctant to join us. We then relocated to the march’s end point where a collective sigh of relief engulfed the remaining marchers. They were finally out from under the passive tenor of the day when a crowd of hundreds heeded our call and took up chants of:

“Racist cops, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”

“This racist system has got to go, stop and frisk is the new Jim Crow!”

“Killer cops mean we’ve got to fight back!” and,

“Racist cops are violent, we will not be silent!”

When a group of white-shirted cops moved in to silence our bullhorn, we shifted location and new (and physically imposing) friends from the crowd moved to protect the chanters under the red flag. Despite the best efforts of the march leaders to keep the lid on mass anger, we’re proud to say we ended the day as we began it, holding the red flag high and guaranteeing a vocal, militant communist character in the anti-racist movement. 

As long as capitalism exists there will be racist police murders in our cities. Within each struggle PLP will inject revolutionary communist politics into each fight whether it’s in one-on-one relationships with survivors of cop terror, in community organizing meetings or in the streets where the masses confront the fascist system head on. Join us!”

Flatbush Murder 

BROOKLYN, June 17 — “Murderers! Murderers! Murderers!” This chant rang out on Friday evening, June 15, from all corners of Church Ave and East 38 Street as we demonstrated against the racist police killing of a twenty-three year old black woman Shantel Davis the night before. She was shot by “bad boy” detective Philip Atkins. Shantel was unarmed. Atkins’s “bad boy” nickname comes from his reputation in this mainly black working-class neighborhood as a drug-pushing fascist who harassed, beat up, threatened, lied and arrested residents, especially youth. 

Several workers who’ve been threatened by Atkins shared their stories with PLP. One 45-year-old worker reported being stopped, and when he protested, Atkins shoved a gun into his mouth. A mother told of her son being stopped and frisked. When he objected, Atkins asked “Do you know where Kings County hospital is?” The young man said “yes.” Atkins pointed his gun at his groin area and said, “Do you want to go there?” 

Even the capitalist media revealed that he had six civil suits pending against him. Two of those lawsuits have already been resolved by the NYPD paying the victims damages. 

Community residents who had been present at the killing told how the cops had sealed off the area. They seized the cell phones of the witnesses and took the video feeds from several local businesses’ cameras. The mass media cooperated with the cops and immediately attacked Shantel’s behavior and her reputation. But her neighbours knew better: this was a racist and sexist cold-blooded murder. The killer cop was black, but all cops are blue and serve only as a tool of protecting the bosses’ laws.This sexist murder reflects the violence capitalism breeds against women. We truly cannot get any justice under this system. Many women took the lead in speaking up against these racist cops.

Workers, Youth Prove their Power

This Friday was for the workers, students, and young people to prove their power. Progressive Labor Party was an integral part of this rally. Over 250 CHALLENGEs were sold. Speakers on bullhorns added to fuel the existing anger of residents. At our peak, over 100 protesters were present, transforming what would’ve been a passive vigil into a rally displaying the potential of workers’ rage. Workers read about the murder of Ramarley Graham who was killed by the kkkops in the Bronx. Young people spoke of their experiences. Everyone stressed the need to organize and fight back. PL’ers also spoke about the need for a communist world. 

A church “leader” got on the bullhorn, announcing that cops are not bad. Hoping to pacify us, he told the crowd to wait for an investigation. It didn’t work. Several young leaders began chanting, “Racist cops you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.” The residents eagerly took up the chant, with clenched fists. We were angry, determined and fearless. We marched to the unmarked cop car parked in front of an NYPD van across the street. About thirty workers surrounded the cop car and chanted “Murder!”  at the two sergeants inside.

Driving the KKKops Off

After their initial shock, the sergeants came out of the car followed by several community affairs cops. One of those cops began harassing one of our friends. We surrounded the cop, chanted in his face, and drove him off. Eventually one sergeant got to him and told him to back off. 

We were back the next day, Saturday, June 16. Our new friends were there, as were many more people. A group of “community leaders” and politicians were also there, negotiating with the cops. They tried to cancel our planned march to the precinct. We should’ve made a plan for residents and PL’ers to speak up sooner. But speak up we did and much more.

The politicians push the idea that Atkins is a bad apple and that there are good cops. But brutal cops like Atkins can do what they do only because other cops help him and at best, stay silent. The bosses’ role for the cops is to instill fear in workers so they remain passive in the face of capitalism’s attacks through budget cuts in hospitals and schools, or racist immigration policies.

Women Take the Lead

Led by PL’ers and new friends, we marched to the precinct, more than a 100 strong. Workers joined us along the way. The protesters were angry and determined. People spoke of their experiences both with killer Atkins and with many other cops. CHALLENGEs were used and people signed up for a Ramarley Graham and Anti-Stop-and-Frisk protest (see page 3). A woman said her son was arrested the day before and she was prevented from seeing him. We chanted at the cops and she was allowed to go see her son. One young woman was especially brave as she crossed the cop barricades and flaunted her big poster sign in the cops’ faces. Such women’s leadership is admirable and needed in all struggles. 

A young man related his experience with bad boy Atkins. He was arrested and spent four days in jail while Atkins lied to his mother. With help from a lawyer, he was released — only to find Atkins waiting for him outside his house. Atkins followed and harassed the young man. A neighbor confronted this vicious cop. Atkins yelled at the woman, who then told him to get off her property. He told her this young man sold crack cocaine (which was an outright lie). She told him “So what?!” Atkins backed off.

‘We Say Shoot Back!’

From the kkkop station, we marched back to the neighborhood and this time we took the streets! People from cars were honking and cheering. As we chanted, “They say give back, we say fight back” some women changed it to “They say give back, we say shoot back.” Our morale was sky high. So was working-class anger. Back at the scene of the killing, we took over the intersection with a four-corner circle, stopping traffic, raising awareness. We later had a barbeque, with more planned action ahead. What a day!

We returned today to unite this struggle with the march in Manhattan against the racist kkkops, against this racist system and we marched for a communist world (see page 3). Under communism, workers have power everywhere, not just for a little while in the streets. We strive for a world without racism, sexism, and nationalism. These last few days we’ve taken a few steps in a lifetime struggle. When prepared, even on short notice, communists can achieve great things. Unite with PLP for a world without kkkillings of our class!