Obama and his war counselors continue to engage in a tactical debate over the length and duration of the occupation in Afghanistan, as noted in the June 6 New York Times. But the United States’ long-term strategic necessity to protect this valuable real estate was made plain in a brutal terror attack one week earlier.

On May 28, U.S. bombs killed five girls, seven boys, and two women as they slept in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, one of the devastated areas (along with Kandahar province) that lie along the path of the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) gas pipeline. At the time, U.S. puppet Afghan president Karzai was off in neighboring Turkmenistan, negotiating details of TAPI. The killings stem directly from this deal and exemplify the anti-worker violence inherent in capitalist competition.

Obama & Co. ordered the Helmand strike in retaliation for the death of a Marine whose job was to help secure the pipeline. It makes little difference whether the targeting was accidental or deliberate. Either way, U.S. rulers have been indiscriminately killing innocent civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq for three decades. Their willingness to slaughter millions in this imperial exploit ranks with Hitler’s terrorist V-2 rocket raids on London and the U.S. holocausts in Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.

We shouldn’t sell liberals like Obama short in their capacity for brutal terror. As Madeline Albright acknowledged in 2000 regarding the death of half a million Iraqi children from U.S.-imposed sanctions, “This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.”

U.S. Rulers’ Strategic Need to
Occupy Afghanistan

Since the days of Bill Clinton, U.S. imperialists have treasured the notion of a gas route through Afghanistan. In 1998, U.S. Unocal (now owned by Chevron) stood on the brink of a pipeline contract with the Taliban, the local force that the U.S. armed to the teeth, enabling them to rule the country.

But the fundamentalist Taliban double-crossed its U.S. bosses — twice. First, the Taliban rejected Unocal and inked a pact with Argentine energy conglomerate Bridas (now half-owned by China). Second, the Taliban played host to al Qaeda, another U.S. creation-turned-enemy. In response, following plans drawn up long before 9/11, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001.

Today, Taliban forces challenge U.S. occupiers for control of TAPI. But as important as this potential energy bonanza may be, it’s the prospect of future wars against far more threatening rivals that motivates the Pentagon’s Afghan effort. As Khalil Nouri, a member of U.S. imperialists’ Afghanistan Study Group, boasts,  “[TAPI] consolidates NATO’s political and military presence in the strategic high plateau that overlooks Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan and China….TAPI proves a perfect setting for the alliance’s future projection of military power for ‘crisis management’ in Central Asia” (Examiner.com, 5/19/11).

In other words, TAPI offers both control over critical energy resources and a military beachhead for future U.S. interventions in the area.

Forget About Obama’s
Afghan Pull-out

These long-term geopolitical factors explain why the liberal Brookings Institution boosts VP Biden’s Afghan plan that “would keep an average of perhaps 50,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan over the coming year, 30,000 the following year and 20,000 in the country thereafter, indefinitely” (Brookings website, 6/3/11). 

Meanwhile, Obama’s outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates spoke doubletalk to say that U.S. troops in Afghanistan weren’t going anywhere soon: “Between the successes we have already enjoyed and the increased capacity of the Afghan forces, we are in a position — based on conditions on the ground, as the president has said — to consider some modest drawdowns beginning in July” (USA Today, 6/5/11). Translation: Because of U.S. failures and the incompetence of Afghan forces, GIs will remain in Afghanistan for a long time.

So the carnage will continue. It will stop only when its root cause — the profits that come from military control of resources or strategic advantage over capitalist rivals — is demolished. We need a communist revolution to destroy the current dog-eat-dog system and replace it with egalitarian, working-class rule.J

CIA Created Taliban

(This is an excerpt from an interview in 2000 from the Indian Times where a U.S. crony exposes the CIA creation of the Taliban. )

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) worked in tandem with Pakistan to create the “monster” that is today…Taliban, a leading US expert on South Asia said here.

“I warned them that we were creating a monster,” Selig Harrison from the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars said at the conference…on “Terrorism and Regional Security: Managing the Challenges in Asia.”

Harrison said: “The CIA made a historic mistake in encouraging Islamic groups from all over the world to come to Afghanistan.” The U.S. provided $3 billion for building up these Islamic groups, and it accepted Pakistan’s demand that they should decide how this money should be spent, Harrison said….he had meetings with CIA leaders at the time when Islamic forces were being strengthened in Afghanistan. “They told me these people were fanatical, and the more fierce they were the more fiercely they would fight the Soviets,” he said. “I warned them that we were creating a monster.”

With the largest economy and armed forces in Latin America, and the eighth-largest economy in the world, Brazil is poised to mount a challenge to U.S. dominance in the hemisphere. Already a member of the G-20 (the leading capitalist powers that guide the international financial system) and of BRIC (the counter-U.S. bloc that also includes emerging powers Russia, India, and China), Brazil now seeks a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

To advance its position, the Brazilian ruling class is busy strengthening its imperialist credentials around the world as it imposes police fascist terror at home.

As the military leader of MINUSTAH, the U.N. occupation force in Haiti that terrorizes the populace in the name of “security,” Brazil has spearheaded numerous atrocities since 2004, from a massacre in the City Soleil neighborhood of Port-au-Prince to the murder of union leaders and students. But Brazil’s brutal rulers were just getting started.

The Brazil-Israel Security Connection

In late 2010, Brazil signed a “historic” security cooperation agreement with Israel that could generate billions of dollars in classified procurement contracts between top Israeli defense manufacturers and various Brazilian security agencies (Xinhua, 12/2/2010).

Beyond giving Israel a platform to penetrate other South American markets, these arms deals will provide Brazil’s ruling class with the tools it needs (including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and advanced satellite surveillance technology) to contain guerrilla uprisings on the continent.

“Homeland security” is a growing concern for the Brazilian ruling class as the country prepares to host the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. The Israeli arms industry will be the merchant/consultant for security arrangements for these events — a role for which it is more than qualified. Six of the seven companies competing for these contracts have been implicated in war crimes or in espionage, or both.

The biggest military contractors active in Brazil — Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) and Elbit Systems — supplied the occupying Israeli army with the guns used for war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Richard Goldstone mission for the UN Human Rights Council. In particular, the Tavor rifle being produced for Brazil has been tried out in Israeli army attacks against Palestinian communities.

These companies have undermined the Geneva Conventions and a 2004 ruling by the International Court of Justice, the legal fig leaves that imperial powers are quick to discard whenever they conflict with their ruling-class interests.

Clearing the Favelas for Ruling-Class Sport

The same army and police that have brutalized workers in Haiti are now demolishing the shantytown favelas of Rio de Janeiro, leaving tens of thousands of residents without homes. They are destroying whole communities of the poor in a number of Brazilian cities to make way for the World Cup and Olympic stadium mega-projects, which produce huge profits for the local ruling class and international bankers.

As one local organizer said, “You can see that these projects will truly be constructed with the objective of driving out the impoverished inhabitants, to ‘clean up’ the city and bring in real estate investors to these areas.´´

In neighborhoods throughout Sao Paulo, as many as 90,000 families stand to be evicted. Similar disasters loom in Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Horizonte, and Fortaleza.

Plans for alternative housing are inadequate at best. Workers will be forced to move 30 miles or more outside their cities, far from available jobs and typically in insecure areas. Compensation will be minimal, not nearly enough to find acceptable new housing elsewhere.

As the UN’s Raquel Rolnik admitted, “There are no mega-projects without mega-operations of eviction. With these projects we are producing more homeless.”

According to Brazil’s 2000 census, the country had a deficit of 6.6 million housing units, which amounts to 20 million homeless people, or more than 10 percent of the population. As the World Cup and Olympic projects roll on, these numbers will continue to rise even more sharply.

Brazilian Workers Must Fight Back 

As workers have begun to unite against these evictions, the fake Brazilian left has yet to voice any protest over the plight of these thousands of workers — or of the masses who suffer under capitalist rule. Of Brazil’s total population of 187 million, 55 million live in extreme poverty.

According to a state study from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, 82 percent of Brazilian children and adolescents are illiterate. Half a million children between 7 and 14 don’t go to school at all.

These conditions reflect the capitalists’ greed and a system where the families of workers don´t matter. But mobilization and struggle can help prepare the residents to fight against the financial system and the politics that support them.

Friends of PLP and readers of CHALLENGE are working within tenant organizations to fight against the big capitalist housing interests. Building closer relations with the members of these groups — and expanding distribution of CHALLENGE — will strengthen workers’ political understanding and build a base for an international communist movement.

This will lead to the happy ending of the destruction of today’s voracious system and its replacement by a comunist society based on need, not profit.

NEW YORK CITY — A week after a wheel fell off an in-service bus in Queens, and six months before the largest city transit worker contract expires, TWU (Transport Workers Union) Local 100 safety inspectors found 96 unsafe buses at the College Point bus depot on May 25. The disregard of the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) for safety and the workers’ enforcement of their contract effectively shut down morning rush-hour service.

Like all capitalists and their loyal bureaucrats, the MTA management responded to Local 100’s safety inspection by putting profits first. Workers’ tax dollars, transit workers’ labor and riders’ fares enable the MTA to pay Wall Street investors $1.2 billion interest in profits. These payments increase annually, coming from worker layoffs, reduced service and maintenance.

Management’s job is to preserve those profits, above all. So instead of dealing with the safety problems that put passengers and operators in danger, depot supervisors took four bus operators out of service for refusing to drive unsafe buses. Communism, a worker-run society without profits and bosses, would put the needs of the international working class first.

This latest attack on transit follows two years of layoffs, delays in transit worker raises, fare hikes, and deteriorating service. One of the four out-of-service operators, a shop steward with two unrelated pending charges, faces dismissal. (Another bus operator with no disciplinary record is now back in service.) These latest attacks on transit workers, along with the dangerous conditions that sparked them, are inherently racist because they strike the majority black, Latino, and immigrant riders and workers hardest.

Militant job actions, such as safety shutdowns, are workers’ best response to these racist attacks. But the political line that drives the militancy matters as much as the actions themselves. Under a capitalist system, the bosses who run society will inevitably take away a “good” contract or decent safety measures over time. U.S. public-sector workers, who represent 20 percent of all black workers, are under the gun from politicians of all the bosses’ parties.

For the most part, union leaders throughout the U.S. are diverting workers’ anger to vote for “friends in high places.” Their idea of “militancy” is to stage symbolic actions that blow off steam but do nothing to hurt the ruling class. For lasting progress, workers need to overthrow the bosses in revolution and build a communist society where workers will hold state power, where they will labor for our class’s need, not bosses’ profit.

Without this long-term communist outlook, short-term reform victories only promote the illusion that the capitalist system can work. The reality is that capitalist competition is forcing U.S. bosses to wipe out the few gains public-sector workers have made in order to maximize profits. That’s the only way the ruling class can pay for imperialist wars and bank and auto bailouts. Without communist goals, defeats like those sweeping the public sector can made workers cynical about mass class struggle. Only organizing for a mass communist movement can turn temporary defeats into lessons for long-term victories of revolution and workers’ power.

TWU Local 100 is planning a demonstration at College Point depot and has placed the three remaining out-of-service operators on the union’s release-time payroll until they are back in service. Many transit workers are furious at the MTA for pulling such a stunt. “The supervisor should be in jail,” fumed one bus operator from East New York Depot. As we go to press, PLP is organizing to defend these operators and to take rank-and-file actions against the bosses. Stayed tuned to see how CHALLENGE readers can help

BROOKLYN, May 26 — Nurses, maintenance staff and clerical workers occupied the lobby of the Brookdale University Hospital Medical Center. These workers are Fighting against a pattern of racist hospital closures and cutbacks affecting workers in nearly 500 hospitals. The 3,500 workers in this hospital in the Brownsville neighborhood have lost their health insurance coverage because Brookdale has fallen behind in paying $23 million to their benefits fund.

The Brookdale administration claims that it fell behind on payments over the past six months due to its well-publicized financial struggles. But apparently the hospital’s parent company, MediSys Health Systems, had enough money to bribe State Senator Carl Kruger and Assemblyman William F. Boyd, Jr.

In March, federal prosecutors unveiled a criminal case against CEO David F. Rosen, who received millions of dollars in state and city grants and other favors in exchange for giving the politicians fake but well-paid “consulting” jobs. MediSys is also the parent of Jamaica Hospital Medical Center, another major hospital close to bankruptcy. This obscene corruption is nothing new under capitalism, and will remain the norm until workers remove profits from healthcare entirely by smashing it with communist revolution. The fight-back at Brookdale can be one step in that direction.

Brownsville is one of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods, and is 96% black and Latino. For insurance, the community relies primarily on Medicaid, which was cut this April by $2.8 billion. According to a May 2010 study by the Fiscal Policy Institute, unemployment here is 15% to 20%, or about twice the city’s 9.2% average.This excludes from the unemployment rate : the overworked, underpaid, and job-hunters, and those who’ve given up.

The infant mortality rate is on par with Mexico’s —  at 16.7 deaths per 1,000 live births — whereas the U.S. national average is 6.3 deaths per 1,000 births. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, only 32% of the population has a high school diploma, and the neighborhood contains the highest concentration of public housing projects in the United States.

In addition, Brownsville residents suffer epidemic proportions of chronic, racism-induced conditions like hypertension, asthma, diabetes, and obesity, more than double the rate of white workers just a few miles away in Long Island.

As they face the brunt of the current economic crisis, black and Latino workers depend on Brookdale as the sole provider of health care in the entire community. Now the hospital’s bosses, after receiving millions of dollars in political favors, cry that they’re too poor to insure their own workers.

In a city where eight hospitals have shut down in the past five years, these racist attacks on Brookdale Hospital workers and the community of Brownsville are being done deliberately to increase profits. (See box.) But since healthcare costs continue to spiral as more workers suffer capitalist-induced diseases, workers are forced to swallow the bitter pill of worse care in fewer available hospitals and clinics At the same time, healthcare providers’ wages and benefits are driven down. The Brookdale bosses demonstrate that healthcare under capitalism — whether it’s labeled “Obamacare,” “single-payer,” “non-profit,” or “for-profit”— will always fail the working class and unleash racist misery, especially on black and Latino workers.

The union representing these workers, Local 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, is no friend of those it claims to serve. While trumpeting its legal victory for the occupation after Brookdale attempted to get a court injunction, 1199 has followed the footsteps of the UAW for years, negotiating wage-cut contracts while refusing to mobilize its more than 260,000 mostly black and Latino members in the city againsts a single hospital closure.

Instead of relying on union misleaders, our PLP club is mobilizing its members and CHALLENGE readers within 1199 SEIU and the hospitals and communities. We’re working to support an informational picket in front of Brookdale Hospital on June 15. By making contacts and distributing CHALLENGE, we plan to help fan the flames of anti-racism in this fight-back and continue strengthening our growing work in area hospitals and communities. We encourage all Party members and friends to distribute CHALLENGEs and join us on June 15!J

The Reality Behind the ‘Non-profit’ Hospital

Many hospitals in the United States refer to themselves as “non-profit,” or (in an an older term) “voluntary non-profit.” They are, however, just as profit-driven as their “for-profit” counterparts. The biggest difference is that “for-profit” hospitals pay taxes while “non-profit” hospitals do not because they supposedly perform a “community benefit.” According to a March 12, 2007 article in the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Journal-Gazette:

“…some of the things that non-profits count as community benefit are things that for-profit [hospitals] consider the cost of doing business...”

“A non-profit tax expert [says]... there is no standard for what constitutes a ‘community benefit.’ That allows nonprofit hospitals to set their own rules.”

“This core myth that non-profits exist to serve the poor was never true. ...it was never the historic reason for it... they’re not required to serve the poor, they’re not required to lose money, [and] they’re not required to underpay their employees.”