Anti-Racist Rage Explodes in Rebellion Against Nazis, Cops

a href="#GM/Delphi’s War Contract: What’s Good For Bosses Will Kill Auto Workers">GM"Delphi’s War Contract: What’s Good For Bosses Will Kill Auto Workers

a href="#‘…You Can Kiss The Pension Plan Goodbye!’">‘…Yo" Can Kiss The Pension Plan Goodbye!’

a href="#Bosses’ ‘Cure’ for Avian Flu: Militarization of U.S.">Boss"s’ ‘Cure’ for Avian Flu: Militarization of U.S.

a href="#Key Provisions Of Harvard’s Fascist Plan To Militarize U.S. Society">"ey Provisions Of Harvard’s Fascist Plan To Militarize U.S. Society

a href="#Capitalism Turns Natural Disasters Into Mass Murder of Workers — Again">"apitalism Turns Natural Disasters Into Mass Murder of Workers — Again

a href="#Black Capitalism Won’t End Racism">"lack Capitalism Won’t End Racism

Auto Workers Paying for Nazi-like Sellouts

a href="#Mexico’s Workers Have No Team in this ‘League’">Mexi"o’s Workers Have No Team in this ‘League’

a href="#British Columbia: Strikers Defy Bosses’ Laws">"ritish Columbia: Strikers Defy Bosses’ Laws

a href="#Salvador’s Disasters: Workers’ Tragedy is Bosses’ Bonanza">Salv"dor’s Disasters: Workers’ Tragedy is Bosses’ Bonanza

Hundreds Protest Racist Minuteman Group

a href="#DC Metro Workers Fight for Unity vs. Bosses’ Attacks on Healthcare">"C Metro Workers Fight for Unity vs. Bosses’ Attacks on Healthcare

Reflections on the War

a href="#Students Confront Fascist D’Souza’s Anti-Muslim Racism">St"dents Confront Fascist D’Souza’s Anti-Muslim Racism

Rulers Use Charter Schools To Undermine Public Education

LETTERS

NYC Teachers Vow Action Against Sellout Contract

What Is Winning?

Teachers get mad, take action

Attacking KKK In Coal Country

Not All Critics Are Bad Critics

Physical Fitness And Revolutionaries....

D.C. Metro, Health Workers Step Up Fight

a href="#Change in Bosses’ Skin Color Won’t End Racism">Ch"nge in Bosses’ Skin Color Won’t End Racism

REDEYE ON THE NEWS

• Dems won’t solve Iraq or other issues
• Capitalism offers us ‘creative destruction’
• 1957-77: China lifted low-income groups
• Polls say: for Katrina aid, cut Iraq $$
• Democracy in action: Congress using Katrina to rob the poor
• New war front: US is shooting Syrians
• Cheeky Nipsey Russell wouldn’t turn cheek

Workers Seize Plant, Confront Argentine Rulers

a href="#Workers Fight U$ Imperialism’s Grip on Paraguay">"orkers Fight U$ Imperialism’s Grip on Paraguay

Under Communism: What Will Prisons Be Like?

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Anti-Racist Rage Explodes in Rebellion Against Nazis, Cops

TOLEDO, OHIO, Oct. 15 — "They don't have the right to bring hate to my front yard," said one black worker. "You can't allow people to come challenge a whole city and not think they weren't going to strike back," said another, who watched the violence begin near his home. They were referring to the anti-racist rebellion that erupted today as more than 600 mostly black workers and youth overwhelmed the police and the mayor, who were trying to protect a planned Nazi rally here.

In the days leading up to the Nazi march, preachers and community misleaders pleaded with workers to stay calm, as they organized "peace" rallies. The police delayed releasing the route so protesters wouldn't know where the racist/terrorists planned to march. The Nazis didn’t apply for a parade permit and planned to walk along sidewalks of North Toledo shouting their racist filth.

But nothing would stop the angry workers and youth, who hurled rocks and bottles at the police. Mayor Ford, a black Democrat, defended the cops and tried to negotiate with the growing anti-fascist crowd. A young man in a mask threatened to shoot him, and others cursed him for allowing the march. The march was cancelled and the cowardly fascists left. Twelve cops were injured, one suffering a concussion when a brick flew through her cruiser window. In all, 114 people were arrested and charged with assault, vandalism, failure to disperse and curfew violations.

After about four hours, the mayor declared a state of emergency that remained in effect through the weekend. About 200 cops patrolled the neighborhood overnight, and an 8 p.m. curfew was in effect. Ford said if the Nazis try to come back he will seek a court order to stop them.

The rebellion was as much against racism and poverty as it was against the Nazis and the cops. More than 8,000 manufacturing jobs have moved out of the city since 2000.

The black unemployment rate is 14.2% here in Lucas County.

Jeep once employed tens of thousands of workers here. The new Toledo North Plant, which borders the North Toledo neighborhood where the rebellion took place, began operations in 2001 with 1,400 fewer workers than the old Jeep facility. Black youth stand no chance now of finding a decent-paying job in an auto factory. About 16.5% of the population lives in poverty, including 44.6% of black children.

This weekend’s rebellion is an expression of the contradictions simmering just below the surface of cities nation-wide. They reflect the anger over the Katrina disaster and the beating of a 64-year-old black former schoolteacher by New Orleans police the previous weekend. It reflects a deep distrust of both Democratic and Republican politicians, who bring workers only wars, racism and cut-backs. It may reflect the beginning of a change in the class struggle. It certainly is an opportunity to build a mass revolutionary PLP.

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DETROIT, MI — "We simply cannot afford to continue to be encumbered by high legacy issues and burdensome restrictions under current labor agreements that impair our ability to compete." That’s the brief civics lesson Delphi CEO Robert Miller gave to the New York Times, to show how the bosses use their courts and laws to enforce their dictatorship over the working class, and explain why the largest domestic auto parts supplier filed for bankruptcy protection. But the day before they filed, Delphi sweetened severance packages to its top 21 executives, "to retain its newly assembled management team," which was recently purged due to an accounting scandal now under investigation.

This largest bankruptcy filing in the history of the U.S. auto industry underlines a deepening crisis that is unraveling over 70 years of wage increases, health care coverage, pensions, work-rules and protections against job losses that were fought for by generations of workers. It shows that as long as the bosses hold power, no worker is secure:

• It reflects the weakening position of the domestic auto bosses on their home turf, especially compared to Toyota, Honda and Nissan;

• It mirrors the global race to the bottom, pitting U.S. workers against their brothers and sisters in Mexico, China and other low-wage havens;

• Delphi makes auto parts that are installed in about 75 million cars and trucks, but has lost $5.5 billion in the last six quarters. Half of its business comes from GM, whose plunging fortunes have dragged down the parts supplier.

• Delphi’s filing could push G.M. closer to the edge. Delphi is seeking to stop paying health care and life insurance benefits to 12,000 retirees, who — until the 1999 spin-off — were GM workers. GM agreed to pay those benefits in the event of bankruptcy, and could be on the hook for as much as $11 billion. GM lost more than $2 billion in the first half of 2005, and its own drive to wrench concessions from the union and parts suppliers has just born its first fruits — the UAW has just given back $1 billion worth of health benefits from its employed and retired members.

• When the United Automobile Workers union (UAW) ultimately accepts major concessions at Delphi, it will set the pattern for the 2007 contract talks with GM, Ford and Chrysler.

With U.S. imperialism’s war in Iraq continuing to sour, and the Katrina disaster exposing the system’s racist brutality for all to see, the same contradictions that forced the brutal restructuring of the steel and airline industries are now in full bloom here. These contradictions are leading the imperialists to fascism and world war. For the international working class, the only solution is communist revolution and the building of a mass PLP!

a name="‘…You Can Kiss The Pension Plan Goodbye!’"></a>"…You Can Kiss The Pension Plan Goodbye!’

Delphi wants pay cuts for its 34,000 union workers by as much as two-thirds, to as little as $10 to $12 an hour. Currently, they make more than 10 times their co-workers in Mexico and China. Delphi also wants to close plants and stop paying 4,000 laid-off workers, as required by their current contract. It filed for bankruptcy protection after weeks of failed negotiations with both GM and the UAW.

UAW president Ron Gettelfinger called this an "extremely bitter pill," implying the union would have to swallow it. The filing will hang like a sword over the UAW as it tries to negotiate cuts before the company asks a judge to set aside union contracts and impose them. If Delphi has no concession contract by December, it will seek a court hearing to terminate union contracts. Then a judge can impose the cuts, and the UAW can strike. Whether they will is another question, but PLP will take up this challenge to build a mass base for communist revolution among autoworkers, union and non-union, and across all borders.

Bankruptcy will allow Delphi to reduce a contribution to its employee pension fund, due in June 2006, from $1.1 billion to $160 million. Delphi boss Miller said, "If the union says, "No, I don't want to give on wages and benefits’ and we…are break-even instead of profitable, then you can kiss the pension plan goodbye."

This Can Be A Turning Point

Miller speaks from experience. He was the chief executive at Bethlehem Steel and a director at UAL, the parent of United Airlines. In his wake he left more than 150,000 steel and airline workers with slashed pensions, health care, wages and jobs. He was hired three months ago and vowed to file before major changes in bankruptcy laws took effect on Oct. 17.

Delphi workers are about to be marched down the same road as steel and airline workers, and pay the price for a union "leadership" that cannot answer the increased attacks on workers because it is blinded by nationalism and committed to capitalism. GM, Ford and Chrysler workers are close behind. But just as Katrina laid bare the brutal racism built into the system, these attacks on high-paid union workers can show the fleeting nature of any reform and the class dictatorship that hides behind endless elections. This can be a turning point for our efforts to build a mass base for communism among industrial workers. We must meet this challenge.

Delphi Super-profits Span From Mexico To China

Delphi has 185,000 workers worldwide. Since being spun off from GM in 1999, it is the largest private employer in Mexico, with 70,000 workers. Many have worked there 20 years, and earn between 500 and 700 pesos weekly ($50-$70) plus bonuses of about 150 pesos ($15).

But even these wages are not low enough. The company has closed several plants and slashed nearly 8,000 jobs. Delphi is invested heavily in China, where auto parts workers earn about 90¢ an hour. They produced $650 million of components there in 2003, and roughly 20% were exported to North America and other destinations worldwide. That’s expected to grow significantly over the next five years.

a name="Bosses’ ‘Cure’ for Avian Flu: Militarization of U.S."></a>"osses’ ‘Cure’ for Avian Flu: Militarization of U.S.

When capitalists worry about our well-being, don’t look for humanitarian motives. The rulers’ concern for the health of the working class extends only to our fitness to produce their profits and fight their wars. That’s the real worry behind fears recently trumpeted in the liberal media that a bird flu virus now migrating from Asia to Europe might trigger a pandemic in the U.S. as deadly as the flu of 1918.

"The health of the nation is at risk," warns Teddy Kennedy (Boston Globe, 10/16). He’s backing a bill that would create a public health preparedness czar, compel drug companies to make vast quantities of vaccines and boost hospitals’ surge capacity. Kennedy dreads a repeat of 1918, when, he says, "entire cities and even our military were brought to a standstill," in the midst of World War I.

Today U.S. rulers are embroiled in an intensifying, and increasingly armed, rivalry among the world’s imperialists. They are hyping the flu scare as part of a broader plan to discipline the nation for ever deadlier conflict. When Kennedy demands "preparedness" and "surge capacity," he speaks the language of wartime mobilization.

Bush feebly attempted to advance the rulers’ agenda by saying that the military would conduct quarantines during an outbreak. But for some time, the big boys have had far more sophisticated and drastic plans in the works. In 2000, Harvard University, working in concert with the Hart-Rudman Commission, issued a report describing just how the government should prepare for public health catastrophes. It called for establishing a federal agency with wartime mobilization powers (see adjoining box below).

Richard Falkenrath, the report’s author, joined the Bush administration in May 2001 and helped establish the Homeland Security department following 9/11. He quit the Bush team in 2004, when its efforts at implementing a police state proved half-hearted, and now works for the liberal Brookings Institution.

Falkenrath’s original concern was bioterrorism. But he recently said, "The highest probability, highest consequence devastating incident in America is an outbreak of pandemic flu….It exceeds by an order of magnitude the severity of a risk of an al-Qaeda biological attack" (Global Security Newswire, 6/10/05). Falkenrath hopes the flu frenzy will elicit "an enormous response from the government."

One of the rulers’ goals is bending the big drug companies to their will. In their view, stockpiling strategic vaccines is now more important than peddling highly profitable anti-cholesterol drugs and painkillers. Costing billions to develop and market, blockbuster drugs tie up capital that the rulers could use elsewhere, such as funding the half-trillion-dollar Pentagon budget or rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure. Kennedy’s recommendations mesh both with Falkenrath’s fascistic blueprint and the current legal woes of Merck and Pfizer.

With military recruitment and popular support for their Iraq fiasco dwindling, U.S. rulers desperately need patriotism. They’re cynically manipulating real and potential disasters to encourage workers to seek government protection, especially the military. But the main threat to public health and safety remains capitalism. The wars it ceaselessly spawns have cut short more lives than any illness ever could.

Furthermore, the capitalists’ wars compound the effects of disease exponentially. In 1918, the rulers turned a flu outbreak into a scourge that killed tens of millions by confining troops in filthy trenches and then shipping them all over the world.

A glimpse at the alternative comes from China in the 1950’s, before the Communist Party there utterly embraced capitalism. The then red-led Chinese government eradicated a widespread killer disease called schistosomiasis by mobilizing virtually the entire population to destroy the snails that spread it. [For a detailed account, read Joshua Horn’s "Away With All Pests," reviewed in CHALLENGE, Oct. 5 and 19.] The lesson here is that the working class can address problems like pandemics only after it seizes state power through communist revolution. That’s the ultimate goal of the Progressive Labor Party.

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• Impose a state of emergency, including curfew;

• Compel people to remain in one location or move to another, including temporary detention;

• Use the military for domestic law enforcement, population control and mass logistics;

• Seize community or private property, such as hospitals, utilities, medicines, vehicles, or transit centers, or to compel the production of certain goods;

• Compel individuals to undertake decontamination procedures, take medicines, or be quarantined;

• Censor and control the media;

• Relax standards for conducting searches and seizures;

• Dispose of deceased individuals;

• Compel civilian public servants to work;

• Waive regulatory requirements on the use of certain pharmaceuticals.

a name="Capitalism Turns Natural Disasters Into Mass Murder of Workers — Again">">"apitalism Turns Natural Disasters Into Mass Murder of Workers — Again

Capitalism has again turned a natural disaster into mass murder of workers and their families. Since last December we’ve seen the tragedies of the Tsunami, Katrina and now an earthquake in Pakistan-India and hurricane Stan in Central America, the latter causing about 2,000 needless deaths in Guatemala, and leaving another million or more homeless. (Also, see article on El Salvador, page 4.)

As we go to press (10/19), the death toll in South Asia’s earthquake is approaching 80,000, about half in Pakistani-held Kashmir and half in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. The numbers are significantly higher than the central government’s figure of 42,000, a count that has lagged behind the local count since the disaster’s early days.

Asif Iqbal Daudzai, information minister for the North West Frontier Province, told the Associated Press that 37,958 people died in the province and at least 23,172 were injured, the vast majority in the Mansehra district. He said the figures were based on reports from local government and hospital officials.

In addition, about 40,000 people died in Pakistani-held Kashmir. India has reported 1,360 deaths in its part of Kashmir. There are also possibly two million refugees who’ve received very little government help. Meanwhile, the International Labor Organization (ILO) has reported that in Pakistan, over 1.1 million jobs may have been lost in this earthquake. Widespread destruction has threatened or destroyed the livelihoods of millions of people, according to an Oct. 18 report by ILO Director-General Juan Somavia.

Both countries are nuclear powers (threatening war against each other). While India has a large number of well-qualified scientists and engineers, the Science and Development Network web site reported (Jan. 2005) on India’s neglect of earth sciences. It pointed to a qualitative and quantitative deficiency of scientists in geophysics, geology, seismology and atmospheric science, despite the fact that the country is located amid one of the most earthquake-prone regions on earth. Both India and Pakistan lack any building codes insuring housing capable of withstanding earthquakes.

This contrasts with India’s funding of space-related activities — directly benefiting its military ambitions — that have created a sizeable pool of specialists to support them, along with an educational infrastructure. Sixty percent of its annual budget goes to the military and debt service.

The Pakistani ruling class is even worse, investing most of the country’s resources in the military. ( President Musarraf is a general and an ally of U.S. imperialism.) The rulers have also encouraged and financed Islamic fundamentalism at the expense of education and science. The military uses one-fourth of Pakistan’s annual budget while an astonishing half of the budget goes for debt service. Education gets only 2%.

A system that can’t protect its citizens from natural disasters indeed must be destroyed.

a name="Black Capitalism Won’t End Racism">">"lack Capitalism Won’t End Racism

WASHINGTON, D.C., Oct. 15 — Today PLP greeted thousands of participants in the Millions More Movement (MMM) rally on the mall here with the message that only building a mass revolutionary communist movement will answer the attacks on workers by the racist capitalist system (such as the bosses’ response to Hurricane Katrina). Four thousand leaflets were distributed along with 1,000 CHALLENGES. Its lead article showed the crucial role industrial workers play in the leadership of social movements, providing the power to advance the interests of the entire working class and its allies. We were able to spread our communist politics during a PLP bullhorn rally held on the edge of the MMM rally during the afternoon speeches.

Meanwhile, hundreds of black workers and youth in Toledo, Ohio put revolutionary ideas into practice by attacking both the neo-Nazis who tried to rally there and the politicians, police, and city officials who dared to allow these racist scum into the city. These assembled workers met offers of "negotiation" from city officials with flying bricks! (See article, front page)

The contrast between the two events is illuminating. At the MMM, sponsored primarily by the Nation of Islam (NOI), tens of thousands of black workers, students and professionals heard Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton propose a ten-point conservative black nationalist reform program that stresses building black businesses. It relies on self-help activities, resembling the tradition of Booker T. Washington who, at the end of the 19th century, encouraged such "self-help" and discouraged any activities challenging the bosses. Most MMM rally participants we spoke to showed little interest in these proposals, and were much more interested in PLP’s strategy: building a revolutionary movement to destroy capitalism and its government, and replacing it with an anti-racist workers’ state. They were also attracted to PLP’s militant local anti-racist campaigns — against racist police brutality, the AIDS epidemic, relief and support of Katrina evacuees, the struggle against the racist reconstruction plans for New Orleans and on-the-job fights against the bosses.

The NOI attempted to stifle such discussions and our rally by calling the cops, who insisted we move or be arrested. So we moved — across the street! — and continued the rally and discussions.

Ever since the 1972 Gary Conference, black nationalist strategies for black progress have been exposed as incapable of meeting the needs of black workers. The MMM simply continued this dead-end approach, which at best will help a handful of African Americans to become wealthier on the backs of the working class.

The choice is clear: revolutionary mass action against racist capitalism, or following capitalist politicians to our doom. Choose life and join the PLP!

Auto Workers Paying for Nazi-like Sellouts

The Delphi case shows again how rotten the U.S. union leadership is and how it is leading workers to fascism and another world war. Winning workers to willingly or grudgingly sacrifice to save the bosses is a major aspect of fascism.

This is what the Nazis did in preparation for war after defeating the labor movement and crushing Germany’s Social-Democrat and Communist Parties. U.S. rulers and all the imperialists have enjoyed a similar free hand with the defeat of the old communist movement some three decades ago.

In the domestic auto industry, things took a dramatic turn in the 1970’s when the UAW:

• Violently smashed any revolutionary challengers, using 1,000 goons to crush the PLP-led Chrysler Mack Ave. sit-down strike and purged PLP from the industry in 1973:

• Sponsored racist anti-Japanese rallies that led to the racist murder of Vincent Chin in a Detroit bar, a Chinese student mistaken by two racist Chrysler employees to be Japanese;

• Gave away billions to bail out Chrysler in 1979, including half the workforce. This ushered in the era of "jointness" with the companies, and decades of concessions, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, from Carter to Reagan to Bush, Sr. to Clinton to Dubya.

Delphi CEO Miller said he did "not…want to put [UAW president] Ron Gettelfinger on the hot seat. He is on the hot seat." Gary N. Chaison, Clark University professor of industrial relations, said, "These were the aristocrats of labor, and now they're in the position that their jobs are going to become lower-wage manufacturing jobs, as if they were producing hairdryers."

This comes with the A.F.L.-C.I.O. disintegrating, the UAW having lost half its membership (even more among industrial workers), and the domestic auto industry about 50% non-union.

The union leaders may be on the hot seat, but it’s the workers feeling the heat. No sooner did Delphi declare bankruptcy than the UAW announced "progress" in talks to grant GM concessions on healthcare. GM spends $1,500 per vehicle on health care, $5.6 billion annually, and wants big cuts right away even though the contract doesn’t expire for two years. They’re clearly looking for GM to come to their aid with Delphi. This strategy, called "leverage" by the union, relies on the biggest bosses pressuring the smaller ones to give the union a break.

PLP will again challenge the UAW leaders for the political leadership of the workers. We will oppose "leverage" by fighting to sharpen the class struggle and to expose the union hacks as agents of imperialism. We will oppose helping the bosses compete globally by raising the banner of "Workers of the World, Unite!" We will show the bosses’ agents the truth of what Haymarket martyr August Spies said at his trial more than 100 years ago. The workers’ desire for revolution "is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out!"

a name="Mexico’s Workers Have No Team in this ‘League’"></a>"exico’s Workers Have No Team in this ‘League’

MEXICO CITY — When fighting his removal as this city’s mayor, Lopez Obrador, was mainly concerned about assuring big businessmen that if he became president he would guarantee to make them even richer.

The bosses’ electoral circus tries to suck workers into the fight for power within the ruling class. One faction wants to continue profiting from the current alliance with U.S. imperialism to share the country’s most profitable businesses. Their "labor reform" would legalize the current fascist working conditions, and guarantee stability behind the mask of "democracy," strengthening the repressive apparatus. This faction represents the Fox government and his legislature. Behind them are the businessmen of Monterrey. The fascist group Yunque is their ideological head.

The other faction comprises the bosses who — without breaking alliances with U.S. rulers — are looking for a greater share of the profits through an economy more independent of the U.S. They want relations with imperialists in the European Union, Asia and Mercosur (the Brazil-Argentine-led common market). These nationalist bosses push policies that expand the internal economy, including social and cultural programs that strengthen nationalism.

Carlos Slim, Mexico’s most powerful boss, has interests in both groups and favors one or the other, according to circumstances. Under capitalism, these bosses hardly lose. We need a communist revolution to get rid of this slime.

The supposed "left groups" and "pro-democracy sectors" are debating their position on the presidential elections, especially since August when Sub-commander Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, declared the PRD (Party of Democratic Revolution) and its candidate Lopez Obrador, to be traitors. Marcos called on the "rank and file and the left" to unite their struggles, to agree on a national program, a new constitution, and how to fight for it.

But capitalism — whether neo-liberal or "socially conscious" — causes poverty and oppression of the working class. We’ve lived for 70 years under capitalism with a "social conscience" and almost 20 years with Neo- Liberalism. None of these bosses offer anything different. We must have no illusion that capitalism will change its nature if we elect a different boss.

None of these factions or bosses’ political parties want to eliminate the wage system, abolish racism or sexism, all of which lead to the special oppression of tens of millions. None want to prohibit profits, the fruit of exploitation, hunger and poverty. They’re proven and sworn enemies of the workers. The only alternative for a world without exploitation or poverty is the continual building and growth of our communist party, the PLP.

Whichever faction wins power, they send their whole police and military apparatus to smash us. We can’t ally with any boss. All are bad. The ruling class unites against any movement that threatens their continued power.

A plot does exist, but not against Lopez Obrador. It’s a plot by the ruling class against the workers. We need unity of all workers against them, but unity based on communist ideas and practice. This unity will be more powerful than all bosses put together!

a name="British Columbia: Strikers Defy Bosses’ Laws">">"ritish Columbia: Strikers Defy Bosses’ Laws

BRITISH COLUMBIA, Canada, Oct. 18 — Thousands of public employees (members of the CUPE union) walked off their jobs today across this province in support of the striking teachers here. More large-scale protests are planned this week. The escalation follows Monday’s B.C. Federation of Labour protest in Victoria by teachers and other union workers that shut down many government services for the day.

The B.C. Teachers’ Federation began its illegal strike a week and a half ago after the provincial government imposed a contract extension on the union. The union is also defying a civil contempt of court ruling, after they disobeyed a B.C. Supreme Court order, telling them to go back to the classroom. The teachers are demanding a smaller class size and a 15% wage increase over three years.

a name="Salvador’s Disasters: Workers’ Tragedy is Bosses’ Bonanza"></a>"alvador’s Disasters: Workers’ Tragedy is Bosses’ Bonanza

SAN SALVADOR — "These are natural disasters and we can do nothing about them," said Salvadoran President Antonio Saca about the recent storms, avalanches, eruptions of the volcano Llamatepec and a 6.2 earthquake that shook the nation.

"Nature is not the enemy. Our real enemy and killer is capitalism," declared a comrade in a meeting with workers from the areas most affected by the storms. "Eruptions, rainstorms and hurricanes cannot be avoided. What can be avoided are the disasters that follow, which are not natural; they’re created by poverty and capitalist greed. We’ve seen this from Pakistan to New Orleans to Mexico to Central America." Under communism, workers’ needs and security will be the priority. Profits will be a thing of the past.

"This is history being repeated," said a worker from Bajo Lempa, a community south of the country’s main river. "When it rains hard like this, they open the dam called Sept. 15 and they flood our homes and land. Here in this area they’re thinking of building a containing wall, but not until the big businessmen carry out their tourist project for a hotel chain."

"That’s why they want to kick us out of here, but we’re going to fight," said another youth from this community. "We’re not willing to leave. What’s more, we won’t let anyone who brings us aid bring the flags of any electoral party, as they’re doing in other communities, asking for votes in the middle of so much tragedy."

President Saca cynically designated ANEP (National Association of Private Businesses) to receive all the international aid. ("The wolf will take care of the sheep.") These are the same killers who for decades have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of workers through hunger, poverty and outright murder. The European imperialists have sent the most aid, almost 80%, trying to win the favor of the local capitalists and the workers as well. They’re seeking to be the new imperialist exploiters of Salvadoran workers.

Although the people who’ve become homeless are demanding control of these donations from workers of other countries, actually much of it will stay with the bosses and the government.

Just like in New Orleans, Italian engineers have been recommending since 2002 that repairs or big changes be made in the drainage system here, where many workers died in mud slides. These studies also recommended stopping construction in the area, but the construction companies are out to make maximum profit, not save lives.

"We must evaluate the cost of maintaining these people in the refugee camps. It’s necessary to leave," said Mauricio Ferrer, director of COEN, the Committee of National Emergency, about those affected by the volcano eruption. More than 75,000 are now homeless. Days earlier people in Palo Campana, Santa Ana, were told they’d be notified 24 hours before an eruption. This became a deadly capitalist promise. The forest rangers and other workers stayed, waiting for Ferrer’s official order until it was way too late. The deaths increased, but for the capitalists they don’t count.

There are hugs for children in the refugee camps and promises of help by the bosses and politicians. The workers’ tragedy is a bosses’ bonanza. Every refugee camp had signs depicting the candidates. Bags of food contained logos of the fascist ARENA party.

The conclusion? This murderous system can’t be reformed; it must be destroyed. PLP’s members and friends feel more urgency to build networks of CHALLENGE readers, meetings and study groups, and to organize struggle against the bosses to prepare a real revolutionary communist earthquake that will destroy the capitalists and their system. This will be a truly NATURAL phenomenon!

Hundreds Protest Racist Minuteman Group

CHICAGO, Oct. 17 — While 600 protesters were chasing Nazis out of Toledo on Oct. 15 (see article front page), PL’ers helped lead a protest in the suburb of Arlington Heights against the racist/fascist Minuteman group, who held a meeting/benefit at a local church. Many protesters knew that the Minuteman is a group similar to the KKK and neo-nazis, and are deputized by the Office Of Homeland Security to carry out not only its racist anti-immigrant worker acts of deportation but also outright terror and murder.

PLP sought to show that these actions are intrinsically tied to capitalism, a system which lures in immigrants, super-exploits them, and then threatens to deport some to maintain the exploitation of the rest. Meanwhile, it uses their children as cannon fodder in imperialist wars. The only solution is to smash all borders and fight for a society without bosses — communism.

After a small number of people trickled into the Minuteman meeting, buses arrived filled with about 200 workers, their families and students, including Latino workers, and others from India and the South Pacific. The cops sought to terrorize them, bringing in riot teams from at least four local police departments. Armed with M-16s and holding agitated attack dogs, the cops walked into the middle of the group of demonstrators over a span of two city blocks. PLP members sought to help allay the workers’ fears, and distributed copies of CHALLENGE. Meanwhile anarchist groups provoked the police and ran back into the crowd, chased by the cops, in effect siccing the police on the undocumented workers.

Towards the end of the rally, a PL member spoke on a bullhorn, saying that as long as these racists gathered to spread their message of hate, protesters would continue to come in increasing numbers to resist them.

As we chanted, "The only solution is communist revolution!" we were joined by local college students. One said they were glad they were not the only communists there. They gave us their contact information and took CHALLENGES to read and give to interested friends.

Several Pl members rode back to Chicago on a bus with a group of local students who were members of a Mexican and Puerto Rican heritage collective. They seek to give local youth a safe place to express themselves artistically.

While this group has a nationalist outlook, they were not at all disrespectful of PLP’s communist message. One of their leaders said that at some point there would be a need to bring people under a far more unifying symbol than any national flag. We said that symbol already existed, the Red Flag of communism. We offered to send them one. They invited us to stay in contact and participate in their future events.

While the Minuteman group was able to carry on their police-protected meeting, we were able to bring PL’s politics to many new workers and students, and establish the basis for continuing contact.

a name="DC Metro Workers Fight for Unity vs. Bosses’ Attacks on Healthcare">">"C Metro Workers Fight for Unity vs. Bosses’ Attacks on Healthcare

WASHINGTON, D.C., Oct. 17 — A PLP-led group once again had to respond vigorously to a right-wing critic at the meeting of Metro Local 689, Amalgamated Transit Union, this time about healthcare negotiations. The bosses, including those running Metro, are seeking ways to save money in this weakening economy. This means cut-backs in workers’ benefits, eliminating retiree health benefits, raising premiums and offering, at best, a tiny wage increase. Sound familiar? U.S. bosses are attacking workers’ health care in industry after industry (see Delphi, front page). Capitalism in crisis means a real crisis for us workers!

The bosses’ demands have raised consciousness among the workers here. We distributed a militant leaflet to the workers entitled, "Our Healthcare is Under Attack." It definitely worked — meeting attendance was higher than usual.

The president (a PLP’er) spoke on healthcare, on health cost escalation, on the bosses’ proposals, and the need to unite to fight these attacks by developing membership solidarity. When he opened the floor for discussion, just as expected a right-winger jumped up to blame the president, saying he needed to negotiate harder. But more talk won’t get to the bosses. It takes solidarity and militancy at least. At some point workers will have to break the bosses’ laws. (See British Columbia teachers strike, page 4) Functioning within the bosses’ rules means submitting to their demands.

When the right-winger finished, a contingent of 15 workers, led by another PL’er, told the fool to shut up and sit down. A comrade took the mike, stating how individuals like this right-winger were individualistic rather than collective-minded, that we must recognize who the real enemy is, and that the union and its members must challenge themselves to take responsibility for sharpening the struggle against management. We’re no longer relying on empty promises from politicians and the old sellout union leaders. Many of us now understand we must step up and fight the bosses’ attacks, and eventually their entire system. Mobilizing workers to attend this union meeting to discuss these issues was a first step.

Reflections on the War

This war has put us in despair. It’s caused us pain and suffering. Our government can legally murder our loved ones and there’s not a darn thing we can do about it — or can we?

I work for a transit company. Recently a homeless man was attacked for no reason by a passenger. The homeless man defended himself and could have done serious damage to the man, but he kept saying, "just leave me alone, I don’t want to hurt you." The attacker ran out the rear door of the bus.

I couldn’t help but wonder about this homeless man with such control in an angry situation. I asked him was he in the military at any time. He said yes, he was in the army — he told us the wars he’s fought in. Told us that at one time he was proud to defend this country.

I don’t know if being homeless has made him numb, but I found myself being very angry. This administration is trying to entice our young men and women to join their slave organization (armed forces) in the guise of fighting for "our freedom" to make them richer, promising these youngsters things they’ll never deliver!

At the anti-war rally I attended with my union, they had boots of dead soldiers spread out on the lawn — the average age was 21. The government left out the "promise of death"!

I would encourage anyone to take pictures of our homeless veterans and show anyone interested in joining the army what their future is — tell them it’s the fine print of the promise they’re not told about when they sign on the dotted line. Also, that line is dotted for a reason — all the spaces in between the dots are where they expect you to fall.

Well, that’s enough for now. Transit’s calling me to do what they underpay me to do.

In solidarity, DC Metro Operator

a name="Students Confront Fascist D’Souza’s Anti-Muslim Racism"></">St"dents Confront Fascist D’Souza’s Anti-Muslim Racism

Recently our PLP campus in the southwest organized an action in which hundreds of students were won to militantly oppose an appearance by the fascist mouthpiece Dinesh D’Souza. This bosses’ tool endorses U.S. imperialism and spouts a viciously racist anti-Arab ideology. By emphasizing D’Souza’s racism in various political and non-political campus groups to which we belong, we were able to organize many people to attend the event and oppose him.

Our flyers detailed D’Souza’s connection to the bosses’ think-tanks, enabling people going to the event to prepare questions exposing D’Souza as a fascist. We also distributed these flyers to those attending the speech, including D’Souza’s family! Meanwhile, the campus Democrats sat on their hands and did nothing to oppose him.

When planning to confront D’Souza, many students questioned obstructing his "freedom of speech." PL’ers explained that freedom of speech is an illusion when one oppressive class controls all media outlets. Still, many were engaging in their first political action and were uncomfortable with the idea of shouting D’Souza down. We decided to be flexible, asking questions that pointed out the speaker’s racism and endorsement of U.S. imperialism. Then, if people became upset with him, we’d encourage them to disrupt the event and shout their objections to D’Souza.

Of the three hundred students who attended, about 200 came to oppose his message in various ways. When he praised the American Empire, the majority of the crowd booed and hissed. People stood and applauded when one professor berated D’Souza for his racist characterizations of Arab people.

One PL’er, disguised as a conservative student, even got to address D’Souza. When the Party member challenged D’Souza’s historical analysis of U.S. Mid-East adventures as completely incorrect — raising the Hart-Rudman Reports on U.S. bosses’ imperialist plans — people from the campus group that brought D’Souza yelled "shut up" and "write your own book."

The majority of the audience shouted back to let the "dissident" speak. Then, when the fascists summoned a cop to threaten the Party member, people began shouting their disagreements with D’Souza, calling him a racist. D’Souza was made to feel completely unwelcome on our campus.

Afterwards, Party members talked to people who were furious about what they’d heard. Many were angry at D’Souza’s mocking and laughing at those who asked questions disagreeing with him, and angry at D’Souza’s sponsoring group that shouted at and ridiculed those who opposed him. Muslim students were furious at D’Souza’s defining all Muslims as "fundamentalists," and "therefore" terrorists.

We explained that D’Souza was simply a mouthpiece for those who wish to maintain the profit system and that he, and others like him, must be opposed. It was then that people abandoned their timidity concerning "free speech." Many repeatedly said people like D’Souza have no right to speak at all and took a more militant stand against these fascists.

The same group that brought D’Souza is inviting the racist, anti-immigrant MinuteMan group to the campus to talk about "border security." Many attending the D’Souza event, and others who heard about it, are now pledging to organize and take a much more aggressive stand against these racists.

This was a victory for working people, a result of the hard work and leadership of PLP members.

Rulers Use Charter Schools To Undermine Public Education

I began working in a charter school several years ago. I wasn’t a certified teacher, which charter schools permitted then. The general buzz claimed charter schools were replacing failing public schools. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was enacted somewhat later, also "to help our suffering public school system."

Charter schools offered a healthy dose of quality competition. NCLB set standards. Looks great on paper, but several years revealed to me the impact of charter schools and NCLB on public education — the exact opposite of what they promised. They are tools the ruling class is using to dismantle the public school system. This is a vicious racist attack, doubly affecting the children of black and Latin workers who attend public schools.

Virtually all charter schools cater to low-income, struggling students and their families. Charter schools offer an illusion of choice. They’re generally worse than the public schools they take kids from. They lack the resources and infrastructure. Our school doesn’t have a gym, a science lab or a library. Teachers tend to have less experience and stay only a few years. Charter schools’ quality is just rhetorical hype.

These schools are also less stable than public ones. Many of our students move from school to school as their parents try to maneuver their way through the education system, looking for help. But any help is generally no more than that received at a public school. The chances are greater the child will be ignored and then passed along to the next grade, or, if a behavior problem, be tolerated because the school needs the income from the state.

Many charter schools use corporal punishment or a demerit system. Others are faith-based. Both styles negate true learning and create environments where obedience and submissiveness are enforced and required. All this guarantees that working-class children whose families seek "better" schools will get the worst education.

Along comes No Child Left Behind, another wonderful misnomer like Operation Iraqi Freedom. One of its harshest components deals with Special Education. It limits the percentage of those diagnosed with a learning disability and placed in Special Education.

NCLB has thus forced many children out of special education and into the general classroom. Schools in poor neighborhoods are hardest hit. Although putting children with learning disabilities in a general classroom is not always bad, if in overcrowded classes and lacking resources, these students who need more individualized attention won’t be getting it. They’ll fall farther and farther behind academically.

NCLB also mandates heavy standardized testing in order to pass certain grades. But recent research shows that high-stakes testing doesn’t increase student performance; it only increases student retention and dropout rates.

Essentially NCLB throws kids who need the most help out of the main program that was supposed to help them keep up academically, shoves them into a crowded classroom, and then tests the hell out of them. By middle school, the kids feel like absolute failures and can’t wait to drop out when they turn sixteen.

So could the ruling class be making an honest mistake? Hell no! The pieces of their insidious puzzle fit too well together. Legalize privatization of public school education. Then pass another law eliminating individualized instruction for children who most need it and create high-stakes testing that "proves" these kids and public schools are failing.

Who wins? The ruling class and its profit system. The companies who make the tests, sell the curriculum and even charge to grade them; the educational management companies who run charter schools; the businesses who rent equipment; the tutoring companies who charge thousands of dollars because a child will possibly be retained.

The ultimate benefit for the ruling class? Those students not easily and cheaply trained become dropouts who will scramble for the lowest-paying job. This allows companies that globalize and send jobs overseas to now lower production costs at home too. When the U.S. dropout population increases, U.S. companies can make higher profits domestically.

We need to let others know how charter schools and NCLB hurt the working class. In my school we’re organizing to fight the special education cut-backs. But we need to expose the ruling class’s supposed "solution" to a serious problem as just another source of profit, and then pose possible real solutions. From that point comes the realization that there are no real solutions under capitalism. That’s the first step into PLP.

Southwest Comrade

LETTERS

NYC Teachers Vow Action Against Sellout Contract

A meeting of my school’s teacher union chapter occurred about the same time talk of a strike was floating around NYC. The chapter chairperson recapped the Fact Finding Report that formed the basis of mediation between the Education bosses and the union. We’d get a 15% raise over the 52-month contract, but lose the right to grieve administration letters in our files. A teacher asked how we could handle problems like the "dumping" of students into classes instead of figuring out which ones they really needed, and switching teachers’ programs without telling them until the last minute. The chapter chair said he’d consult the contract and would get back to us.

Having heard Party members’ reports about activities at their schools inspired me to think of some communist ideas I could raise at such a meeting. The above discussion gave me the perfect opportunity to relate these problems to the proposed contract and link them to the bigger picture. (I asked teachers who were beginning to leave to stay for just a few more minutes.)

I traced the low level of working-class consciousness nationally to the fall of the old communist movement. I said this contract was a step towards attacking workers’ nation-wide, giving the bosses more control to satisfy their need to carry out an imperialist war in Iraq. I described how historically workers’ militancy and unity against the bosses is what produced gains for our class. I noted the Boeing and North West Airline strikes as examples of workers fighting back. Then I proposed that we organize actions to fight for our students’ needs.

From that meeting an action subcommittee was formed, helping to convince a group of teachers and students to join the rally at the following Delegate Assembly protesting the contract. In the next few days, teachers told me they agreed with what I’d said and would help carry out actions we proposed.

Out of this small struggle, a few new teachers took CHALLENGE for the first time. We’re also planning a rally at the school to unite teachers, students and parents. While only a start, now the discussion centers around how we can better serve our students — one of our communist ideas.

Red Teacher

What Is Winning?

I’ve been a high school teacher for 19 years and was given a "U" (unsatisfactory) rating in the second year of a new license. I was fired under the fiction that I "could not teach and could not be taught how to teach." I’m working now as an ATR (Teacher in Reserve) only because almost the whole school — teachers, students, paraprofessionals and security — were angry that I was thrown out and forced the union to fight for my rehiring under my previous license. PLP leafleted the union’s Delegate Assembly protesting my firing.

The NYC Human Rights Commission agreed to file an ageism suit against the City’s Dept. of Education (DOE) because I’m 68 and have a spotless record as a teacher, with many previous commendations. Although the DOE was supposed to respond by the first week in October, up to now (Oct. 16) there has been none. However, I’ve now been moved from the job I’d been given back to my old school. I’m still an ATR, but I now have one class to teach in the subject area for which I was deemed "unsatisfactory." Upon my return, three very religious older teachers, one a Protestant minister, said they never believed I’d be back. They thanked the Lord; apparently I had hardened their conviction in God. A group of 12th grade students whom I had taught in the 9th grade were overjoyed, saying I was a legend in the school.

That day was overwhelming positive and ended with a union meeting at which I carefully raised PLP’s and my disagreements with the proposed contract. The following day, more joy: the basketball team and some other teams wanted me to watch them play. They hoped they would win this year. I spent a full day talking with students and teachers, giving advice and getting the news. Some students told me they were pregnant and that their parents were giving them a hard time. One decent Assistant Principal said I was like a grandfather to the school.

What, then, is winning? The vast majority of teachers and students felt it was a plus that I was back in the school. Although, I’m still an ATR and can be moved at any time, I am teaching the subject they said I couldn’t teach and I’m in the school they threw me out of. In my view that’s winning.

Now anti-communist forces have started to organize against me. This is another plus because it sets the stage once more for struggle. I’m now organizing a little after-school party at one of the local pubs to thank those teachers who never gave in.

Victories come in many different ways. Fighting back is always a victory. Dare to struggle, dare to win!

Brooklyn red teacher

Teachers get mad, take action

"But what about my family?" asked a fellow teacher when I urged her to vote against the current contract proposal. Sure, we haven’t had a raise in almost three years. It’s tempting to give in and vote yes.

But that’s a mistake. If we really want to think about ourselves and our immediate families, we must become conscious of ourselves as members of a class — the working class.

Many teachers have made a first step. They have gotten mad! They see this contract proposal as an attack. At my school, I’ve fought for class consciousness, explaining that this attack on teachers is more sharply aimed at the black and Latin working-class youth we teach.

When I wrote a newsletter and presented it at a chapter union meeting, it sparked the most advanced discussion we’ve ever had. I proposed we write our own leaflet and suggested someone write the draft. Teachers responded. One volunteered to write it and four others helped with editing, proofreading, Spanish translation and graphics. It argued for schools that better serve students, smaller class sizes, an end to racist inequalities in funding, and respect for the hard work of the teachers. Five teachers distributed it at a neighborhood train station.

Yet even these modest reforms — which the bosses refuse to grant — won’t change society’s fundamental power relations, but they’re providing a forum to discuss capitalism and the need for communist revolution. They’ve also inspired some teachers to feel like they’re fighting for something. They are! They’re fighting for the future of the working class. Fighting with class consciousness is the way they’ll actually fight for their families.

I’ve pointed out the big picture, that workers everywhere are under attack —from United Airlines, to Boeing, to Delphi, to Northwest Airlines, to other NYC unions. These bosses are attacking the entire working class, eliminating protections workers sacrificed and struck for.

Unless we build a class conscious movement to confront this capitalist system, we and our children face a future of drastic reductions in our standard of living, more wars for profit, more terrorist attacks and intensified racism. The bosses who run this system are in trouble, and they’ll force our children to fight and die in their wars, if we don’t stop them.

The U.S. ruling class is pushing nationalist/patriotic politics, asking workers to sacrifice, with lower wages and benefits, "for the good of the nation. " They also say, "Things are not that bad," like some delegates said at our recent union Delegate Assembly about this lousy contract proposal.

PLP advocates an internationalist/pro-working class line which asks workers to give their time and energy to build a movement that confronts capitalism’s endless profit wars, systemic racism and wage slavery. Workers must ally themselves with other workers, in other unions, outside of unions, unemployed workers and in other countries. All bosses are our enemy.

Many teachers have been won to think of themselves as "above" other workers. The teachers at my school are decent and honest but need more understanding of how their struggles relate to the working class as a whole. They don’t see themselves as part of history, rather just as people living their own lives. Capitalism fosters this illusion. All of us are supposedly separate "individuals" with our little families. This allows the ruling class to exploit some more than others, bribe some more than others and basically keep us divided.

Teachers need to realize that by fighting for our class, we’re actually serving our students and their parents.

NYC Teacher

Attacking KKK In Coal Country

I've helped organize and have participated in several protests against the Klan and Nazi skinheads in western Pennsylvania's coalfields. Of course, the major criminal in the U.S. is the racist capitalist system, perpetrating such racist atrocities as New Orleans — no aberration.

As CHALLENGE pointed out (10/19) in "Capitalism - Biggest Crime of All," in the U.S. "black workers suffer from the greatest racism, poverty, unemployment and disease," and that "black workers, because of their history in the U.S. and their relation to society, are also the key force for communist revolution."

When we formed the Coal Country Coalition (CCC) to battle the fascist KKK and to support workers' struggles, we made anti-racist action our central focus. At every KKK appearance, we distributed leaflets linking these ghouls to the capitalists. Our position was quite clear.

While it's good to protest the Klan, it's not good enough. We showed that the KKK worked for the bosses by trying to divide workers and make black workers the scapegoats for the problems created daily by the capitalist system.

We also believed that it was necessary to confront the Klan. This position was assailed not only by the cops, who defend the Klan, but also by members of local "unity" groups, who would hold rallies three miles or so from the Klan gathering. Needless to say, the CCC was not asked to speak at these "Love-me-I'm-a-liberal" rallies.

Though the KKK has vanished into the woodwork right now, the CCC continues to battle racism, imperialist war and capitalism and support workers' struggles. We have great respect for PLP because of its long history of courageously fighting racism and capitalism.

Finally, as Karl Marx wrote, "Labor in white skin can never be free, as long as labor in the black skin is branded."

Red Coal

Not All Critics Are Bad Critics

In an article I wrote for CHALLENGE (10/5), "Immigrant Workers: Braceros, Cannon Fodder or Revolutionaries," I claimed some immigrants are more exploited simply because they can't speak English. Later I contradicted myself by pointing out that the situation of English speaking immigrants is ultimately just as exploitative.

The idea that learning some skill is an answer to capitalist exploitation has no foundation in reality. This illusion has liberalism written all over it and shifts the responsibility of exploitation away from the bosses and onto the working class.

These workers are not exploited because they don't speak a particular language; they're exploited because capitalist profit is the order of the day. In any language this spells exploitation for workers.

While this idea isn't new to me, I couldn't see the contradiction until it was criticized at a PLP club meeting. We discussed the error, why it occurred, and what should be done to resolve the issue. By remaining open to my comrades' criticism, I learned more about my weaknesses and the need for vigilance in writing politically. Had I closed myself off to this criticism, as I've done in the past, I would have missed a valuable opportunity to learn and grow as a communist.

At times I find it difficult to be self-critical or open to criticism. I justify this by reasoning that older comrades are "out of touch" or that younger comrades are "too inexperienced." In hindsight, that's the easiest way to perpetuate my own weaknesses. With this in mind, in the future I will welcome such comradely criticism. I highly recommend it.

A Young Red

Physical Fitness And Revolutionaries....

At a recent PLP club meeting we discussed and struggled over the issue of cigarette smoking. One reason this arose was because at a recent Party event, a comrade's son asked his father, "Daddy, why are they smoking? Are they good or bad?"

This led some of us to believe that whether we like it or not, we're examples and we set examples. As revolutionaries, we should have high standards of health and physical fitness. Obesity is also a big problem. Some comrades are overweight. Is this the example we should set as revolutionaries?

The day will come (as if the current fascism isn't enough) when we'll have to train and prepare (physically) for revolution, not just organizationally or theoretically. Don't we owe it to the masses, if not to ourselves, to provide an example of better health, fitness and well being? How can we serve the people if we're physically unfit to do it? Many of us run, some are vegetarian and some actively train. My question is: is this an issue to be struggled over? Is there something to be said about a revolutionary who smokes and is overweight? Are these the kinds of people we want as leaders of a revolution?

Is there any Party material dealing with this topic? If not, we should create something, and wage an internal campaign for comrades to improve their health to better serve the working class.

Red Runner

D.C. Metro, Health Workers Step Up Fight

PLP'ers in Washington, D.C. and Maryland mobilized for the Millions More March (MMM) by building on the advances made in the anti-war march among health and union activists. We leafleted workers and students coming to the March with a hard-hitting statement about racist attacks on New Orleans workers, which showed that capitalism offered nothing before the hurricane and will further destroy lives in the reconstruction of the city.

Many D.C. workers at Metro and in Public Health for the first time joined with PLP in mass leafleting and CHALLENGE distribution. These are the workers who will build a real movement, not the charlatans on the MMM stage. Students from Howard and Georgetown Universities read the leaflets and spoke with Party members. One black Georgetown student exclaimed, "I didn't realize other people saw what is happening in New Orleans this way!"

Our leaflets on HIV/AIDS in D.C. called the AIDS epidemic the "Katrina of DC." Hundreds of flyers urged workers to build a city-wide campaign to target this epidemic which affects at least one out of every twenty residents. D.C. leads the nation.

One of the new members of the public health group we work in wrote us to say, "I had a great time helping on Saturday and was impressed at people's interest in what we were passing out. I also look forward to working with the committee more" — an important development as we prepare for the November 5 convergence of patients, health workers and advocates in Washington, DC for a rally for the "Campaign to End AIDS." This will be the beginning of continued activity to fight for housing, outreach, school education, substance abuse treatment, and federal AIDS funding.

PLP's work in sharpening politics among union workers to fight the war and among health workers to take on the AIDS struggle contrasts sharply with the political leaders prattling on at the MMM event and working only for their self-aggrandizement.

D.C. comrade

a name="Change in Bosses’ Skin Color Won’t End Racism"></">Ch"nge in Bosses’ Skin Color Won’t End Racism

I went to the Millions More Movement Washington rally on Oct. 15 with a school friend and his family. When we arrived we saw tens of thousands on the National Mall. But while Black Nationalism dominated the speeches, the masses of workers and students present were open to PLP's line of the need to smash the racist capitalist system, and with multi-racial unity.

While my friend listened to the speeches, I marched around the outskirts of the rally with other party members and led chants on our bullhorn. People joined us in shouting, "Racism means, we've got to fight back! Killer Kops mean, we've got to fight back!" Our speeches explained the nature of capitalism and how it breeds racism. We also pointed out that a few black capitalists cannot solve the problems facing black and white workers. Soon the Nation of Islam decided they weren't comfortable with our comments and sent their security to shut us down. Nonetheless, the Party distributed 4,000 flyers, 1,000 CHALLENGES and a revolutionary political line.

After our rally, I rejoined my friends on the lawn listening to Louis Farrakhan and others. Basically they called for a growth in black business and independence as the "answer" to racism. Farrakhan even made the outrageous call for a ministry of trade/commerce to tap the cheap labor in Africa and Latin America. Changing the color of the oppressor will not eliminate oppression. Farrakhan's mansion on Chicago's South Side has done nothing to rid neighborhoods of vacant lots and slum housing. Ultimately workers can never win by lining up behind a boss, be it Farrakhan or Rockefeller, Bush or Clinton. We can only win by taking power ourselves.

Red College Student

REDEYE ON THE NEWS

Dems won’t solve Iraq or other issues

While Americans are turning increasingly against the war in Iraq…the support for the war among major Democratic leaders seems nearly as staunch and as mindless as among Republicans. On that and other issues, Democrats are still agonizing over whether to…try to present themselves as a somewhat lighter version of the G.O.P. (NYT, 10/17)

Farewell to US ‘middle-class worker’

There was a time when the American economy offered lots of good jobs — jobs that didn’t make workers rich but did give them middle-class incomes. The best of these good jobs were at America’s great manufacturing companies, especially in the auto industry.

But it has been a generation since most American workers could count on sharing in the nation’s economic growth….

….Corporations are squeezing wages and benefits, saying that they have no choice in the face of global competition. And with the Delphi bankruptcy, the big squeeze has reached the auto industry itself….

…America’s working middle class has been eroding for a generation, and it may be about to wash away completely. (NYT, 10/17)

Capitalism offers us ‘creative destruction’

Bait and Switch presents a world in which…believers in merit and achievement — which is to say, most of us — find themselves tossed aside. That is because they operate in an economy…subject to the relentless process of "creative destruction" — a phenomenon first named by the conservative 20th-century economist Joseph Schumpeter and previously analyzed by none other than Karl Marx….

The white-collar jobless…whom Ehrenreich encounters are carried along in a river that is indifferent to their work effort, needs, opinions, or moral worth. Schumpeter and Marx had a point: American capitalism today…regularly turns all workers — labourers and managers alike — into economic junk. (GW, 10/20)

1957-77: China lifted low-income groups

Gittings knows his China, and we can all be the wiser for reading him….

Such has been the preoccupation with the extremes of the Maoist period — notably the great leap forward and the cultural revolution — that its singular achievements have been largely neglected. The first World Bank report on China, citied by Gittings, concluded that its economic performance between 1957 and 1977 had been impressive: gross national product grew at an annual rate of more than 2% despite a 2% annual growth in population. This compared with an average growth rate of only 1.6% for other low-income countries. In the same period industrial production grew at more than 10%. There were also huge improvements in literacy, mortality rates, healthcare and women’s rights. The report regarded "China’s most remarkable achievement over three decades as making its low-income groups far better off in terms of basic needs compared with their counterparts in most other poor counties". (GW, 10/13)

Polls say: for Katrina aid, cut Iraq $$

…When asked by a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll how they’d prefer to finance the (at least) $200 billion Katrina relief effort, only 6 percent proposed cutting domestic spending and just 15 percent supported increasing the deficit. A majority — 54 percent — choose "cut spending for the war in Iraq." (Washington Post, 9/22)

Democracy in action: Congress using Katrina to rob the poor

As Hurricane Katrina put the issue of poverty onto the national agenda….Congressional Republican leaders are pushing for spending cuts, with programs like Medicaid and food stamps especially vulnerable.

… "We’ve gone…to the…likelihood, that the low-income people will be asked to bear the costs. I would find it unimaginable if it wasn’t actually happening."

…Representatives Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut: "Poor people are going to get the short end of the stick, despite all the public sympathy….poor people do not make campaign contributions. (NYT, 10/11)

New war front: US is shooting Syrians

A series of clashes in the last year between American and Syrian troops, including a prolonged firefight this summer that killed several Syrians has raised the prospect that cross-border military operations may become a dangerous new front in the Iraq war, according to current former military and government officials….

…Officials…say that as American efforts to cut off the flow of fighters have intensified, the operations have spilled over the border — sometimes by accident, sometimes by design.

Some current and former officials add that the United States military is considering plans to conduct special operations inside Syria, using small covert teams… (NYT, 10/15)

Cheeky Nipsey Russell wouldn’t turn cheek

Nipsey Russell…was….One of the early black stand-up comedians who found success with mainstream audiences….

Speaking of nonviolent protest, he observed, "He who turns the other cheek will get hit with the other fist." (NYT, 10/4)

Workers Seize Plant, Confront Argentine Rulers

The workers of Zanon, Argentina’s largest ceramic/tile factory, located in the city of Neuquen, held a march and rally on July 7 (see photo) to reaffirm their right to continue to occupy and reconstitute their factory after seizing it four years ago following the owner’s lockout. The march, reflecting the wide community support for the tile workers, included health workers, public employees, teachers, professors and students, townspeople, and the unemployed organizations ("piqueteros"). They proclaimed the right of Zanon workers to establish a "Fabrica sin Patrones" — "Factory without Bosses."

Several weeks earlier, a bankruptcy court judge had reopened bids to place the factory in private capitalist hands once again. However, the workers had expropriated the plant without payment, arguing that since the bankruptcy declaration was both criminal and fraudulent, there must be no compensation to the former owner or creditors. Zanon’s boss owes back pay to his employees and paying off the fraudulent debts would weaken the community that depends upon the factory as a principle source of income.

An appellate court disallowed the new bid on August 5. The Zanon workers' ultimate aim remains state ownership of the tile factory under worker control.

The former owner, Luis Zanon, was awarded a $45 million loan and credits from the World Bank, Banco Rio and the Neuquen Province and then liquidated and sold the plant, after years of firing workers and instituting dangerous speed-up, killing one worker and injuring countless others. Zanon used his capital for speculative and personal investments. Of the 380 workers still on the payroll, 240 remained to occupy the factory and began production in February 2002 under worker control. (This action grew out of a mass nation-wide uprising in December, 2001, which forced the former president to flee.) By August 2005, employment had risen to 480 workers and production had increased 15-fold.

The workers’ take-over of the ceramic factory had become the symbol throughout Argentina of opposition to neoliberal governmental collusion with corporate finance. Governor Jorge Sobisch supported the former owner and the factory shutdown and viewed the worker takeover not as increasing provincial employment but as a working-class virus that had to be crushed. Given that Neuquen province contained the newly-privatized gas and petroleum holdings, employing over 15,000 workers, the Zanon workers represented a dangerous alternative model. Since the 2001 economic crisis, over 5,000 factories have closed and approximately 180 have been taken over by, and transformed into, workers’ cooperatives. Zanon stood out as workers beginning production without legal permission from a bankruptcy court judge or a provincial legislature.

While many Argentine labor unions have not supported worker cooperatives, in 1998 the Zanon Ceramic Workers local had won control against the former bureaucratic union’s collusion with the owner and began to confront the repressive factory administration. After defying the company shutdown in 2001, the union has organized a democratically-run factory with impressive outreach to the Neuquen community. They hire from among the unemployed "piqueteros." They have built and maintain a major neighborhood health clinic and have opened factory doors to cultural, artistic and sports activities. Majorities of weekly-run worker assemblies make all decisions. Constant rotation of positions of responsibility is this cooperative’s hallmark. All workers, whether in production, sales or administration, earn exactly the same monthly salary. The Zanon workers see their factory as servicing their community, not the capitalist market. Because of that the community has prevented the local police from retaking the factory.

A contingent of workers guards the factory day and night, with cell phones and walkie-talkies at the ready. Zanon workers are battling to be both a productive workers’ cooperative and a vanguard for social change against neoliberal capitalism.

Every move Zanon workers have made is explained in detail to the community through press releases, posters and leaflets. This has stood them in good stead. Every ceramic worker demonstration becomes a social movement. Zanon does indeed belong to the Neuquen community and the community has adopted Zanon.

[The above article was sent to us by a reader who recently returned from Argentina. We in PLP support the Zanon workers in their fight. However, given that capitalism still reigns in Argentina and the bosses still hold state power, eventually actions like those of the Zanon workers will eventually be crushed by the ruling class, be they Peronist like the current President Kichner or any other bourgeois ruler). The ruling class will use all of their state power to prevent the working class from seizing the means of production. Therefore, the best lesson workers can learn from such struggles is to turn them into schools for communism. In this way workers can learn they don’t need any bosses, as well as learn how to build a mass revolutionary communist party to prepare all workers and their allies to smash the bosses and their state power.]

a name="Workers Fight U$ Imperialism’s Grip on Paraguay">">"orkers Fight U$ Imperialism’s Grip on Paraguay

Paraguay’s bosses have long allied with U.S. bosses, dating back to the Chaco Oil War (Standard Oil in Bolivia and Royal Dutch Shell in Paraguay) and the days of fascist dictator Alfredo Stroessner. Then they collaborated with U.S. terrorist Henry Kissinger and puppet Pinochet in Chile during Operation Condor. Paraguayan generals have long trained at the fascist School of the Americas (Assassins) at Ft. Benning, Georgia.

In August, U.S. War Secretary Rumsfeld visited Paraguay to bolster this alliance. Thousands protested his visit, burning the U.S. flag and demonstrating deep anger among workers at U.S. imperialist oppression. Brazil sent over 700 troops to its border with Paraguay to conduct military exercises, simulating an invasion and take-over of a city, as a show of strength against U.S. intervention.

With over two million Paraguayans living in below-poverty conditions, the region needs a true communist revolution, not only anti-imperialist but anti-racist as well. PLP has begun some small efforts in the region. Several workers now receive DESAFIO. But we need more agitation, study groups and wider distribution of the paper. A true base-building effort can win Paraguayan workers, farmers and students to a struggle for communism.

Already, U.S. rulers are revamping and transforming an old airfield in Paraguay’s desert into a facility to improve and conduct "military exercises that have been going on since 1948." According to the Bolivian newspaper El Deber, this facility is located in Mariscal Estigarribia, 200 kilometers from the border with Bolivia. It reportedly will allow the landing of large aircraft and can house up to 16,000 troops. This airport is bigger than the one in Asuncion, Paraguay’s capital.

Shortly after the Paraguayan Senate approved U.S troop maneuvers and granted the U.S. military immunity from Paraguayan and International Criminal Court jurisdiction, 500 U.S. troops arrived on July 1 with planes, weapons, equipment and ammunition on a "humanitarian mission." This transpired right after discussion about joint "anti-terrorism activities." The U.S. threatens to deny almost $25 million in "aid" to countries in the region if they don’t grant immunity, but Paraguay was the only country to accept the "offer." (Benjamin Dangl, 9/28/05)

This is part of the growing rivalry U.S. rulers face from their imperialist competitors in Europe and China for the energy and water resources of South America (the world’s biggest sweetwater supplies). Just a few months ago, a mass revolt ousted another Bolivian president after he tried to sell the country’s gas supplies to imperialist oil companies. Venezuela and Brazil are also fighting for that energy wealth, trying to take advantage of the U.S. quagmire in Iraq.

The Chaco War (1928-35) killed nearly 100,000 people in Bolivia and Paraguay. Today, workers and their allies are again faced with growing imperialist war threats. Their task must be to turn this coming war into a mass revolutionary struggle to get rid of all the bosses and fight for communism.

Under Communism: What Will Prisons Be Like?

Capitalism produces constant, mass unemployment. Crimes committed by members of the working class are mainly caused by capitalist-created poverty. Imprisonment for crime masquerades as punishment of offenders or protection of victims, but the rulers’ main purpose is protecting their system from the huge numbers of unemployed workers. Reintegration of offenders into society is the exception, not the rule. Therefore, life sentences are becoming more common in the U.S. Prison job "training" at pennies per hour is really slave labor for owners of privatized jails.

In this racist system, black and Latin men, mainly youth, are imprisoned at much higher rates because, (1) they suffer much higher rates of unemployment; (2) inadequate legal defense forces many innocents into plea bargains; and (3) racist police frame many. Because of their far greater oppression, black and Latin workers are correctly feared as a greater threat to the capitalists. The many black rebellions in the late 1960’s threw the rulers into a panic. To stifle further rebellions, drugs were poured into the cities. Far longer sentences for small amounts of cheaper crack cocaine than for larger amounts of more expensive powder cocaine reflected a specifically racist assault.

Prisons are conduits for drug trafficking, sexual assaults, beatings and murders, whitewashed as "suicides." U.S. prisons are the most repressive, and contain more prisoners than any country in the world. (See PLP pamphlet "Prison Labor: U.S.-Style Fascism.")

Under communism, the conditions that provoke crime — such as capitalist culture and poverty — would be non-existent. Secondly, for those still retaining the hangovers from capitalism, reintegration would be a priority. Education in literacy and political awareness, regardless of the crime, would foster understanding of the offender’s relationships to others in an egalitarian society. Selfish individualism, mimicking on a small scale robbery and exploitation by the big bosses, would be combated. Offenders would learn that family violence, theft and individual racist acts are violations against the working class as a whole.

More serious acts, such as racist organizing, anti-communism, murder and child molestation would be tried and judged by masses of workers. The pervasive ideology of capitalism may take generations to uproot, necessitating immediate imprisonment for these crimes.

In the then Soviet Union, prison leaders talked with new prisoners, determining their character and vocational abilities. Progress through three levels was determined by conduct. Some prisoners were granted leaves of up to two weeks a year. Farmers who cooperated received several-month furloughs to assist in the harvest.

Exercise and nutrition were emphasized. There were workhouses for young offenders and therapeutic facilities for the psychologically or physically ill. Detention houses, solitary residences or transitional facilities housed "correctional" and "political" inmates.

Rather than punishment or revenge, the goal was to help the offender work cooperatively in the community. Skills were taught, and work was creative. Those who at first refused to work were encouraged rather than forced. Generally inmates preferred work to isolation from the collective atmosphere. Prisoners wore regular clothes, and guards neither wore uniforms nor carried weapons.

In communist China, prisoners built their own houses, and some prisons resembled farms. One prison had three factories with eight hours shop work, two to three hours study and lectures, four to five hours for meals, exercise, reading, recreation and discussion, and eight hours sleep. Men and women shared a dining room and attended plays and sports contests in the prison compound. The windows had no bars. Cell doors remained open. Guards were unarmed. Prisoners managed barber shops, mess rooms, canteens and libraries.

Political prisoners underwent interrogation and thought reform, or hsueh-hsi, prior to formal trial and verdict. The process took up to several years. (Source: Edgar Snow’s "The Other Side of the River")

Once unemployment is eliminated and all workers have productive jobs, once the culture is transformed from one of individualism (look out for yourself, "number one") to one of the collective (everyone contributes to society as a whole), capitalism-created crime will cease to exist.

1. PLP-led Contingent:
   Transit, Auto, Hospital Workers March Against Strike-breakers, Warmakers
2. Billionaires' Dogfight:
   Dumping Bush Won't End Imperialist Wars
3. Capitalism -- Biggest Crime of All
4. Small-Fry Pays for Big-Time Torturers
5. One Million Strike vs. French Bosses' Privatization `Reform'
6. Anarchy of Capitalism Creates Energy Crisis
   1. World's Bosses Gang Up on U.S. Rulers
7. NOT THE DOLLAR, NOT THE EURO -- WORKERS' POWER!
   1. EUROPE CHALLENGES THE U.S.
   2. DOG-EAT-DOG IMPERIALISTS
   3. The War in Iraq Raises New Questions: The Dollar, the Euro, or ...
8. PL Teacher Links Imperialist Wars and Racist Education to Give-Back Contract
   1. `' We cannot sell out our younger colleagues and our students for a salary raise . . . `
9. Bronx H.S. Teachers Fight Sellout; Charge Union Head in Bed with Billionaire Mayor Bloomberg
10. Students, Profs Building PLP in Mexico
11. Boeing, Union Hacks Use Liberal Gephardt to Swindle Workers
    1. Secret Meetings; Democratic Party Pols
    2. Class Understanding Grows in Aftermath of Boeing Strike
    3. Machinists Left to the Tender Mercies of `Hurricane Boeing'
    4. LOOKING FOR PLP'S COMMUNIST IDEAS
    5. ONE BILLION DOLLARS
12. PLP in LA: `Only group calling for what's needed . . .'
13. RAISE MONEY FOR ANTI-RACIST FIGHTERS
14. Bronx H.S. Seniors Sit-Down Fights Attack on Counselors
15. Under Communism
    1. The Elimination of Schistosomiasis in Early Revolutionary China
16. U.S. Constitution: The Illusion of Democracy
    1. Book Review: "Toward an American Revolution -- Exposing the Constitution and Other Illusions," by Jerry Fresia, South End Press, Boston, MA, 1988.
17. LETTERS
    1. Military Families Must Expand Struggle
    2. Worker-Student Unity On Chicago Bus to D.C.
    3. `Bet there will be some different ideas here'
    4. `Whole gov't system has to change . . .'
    5. Immigrants in France: `Used up, thrown away'
    6. French Subcontractors Use Bankruptcy to Screw Immigrants
    7. Communist Future Not `Utopian'
18. RED EYE ON THE NEWS
    1. Says abuse should be blamed on higher-ups
    2. Louisiana worker gives up on gov't aid
    3. Iraq: Saudi Prince warns of regional war
    4. In US Jails, 9,700 were lifers before age 18
    5. Foreign investment leaves Africa worse off
    6. For 91% of poorest, no college degree
    7. Pols fail, so Religion helps rulers fool us

---

PLP-led Contingent:
Transit, Auto, Hospital Workers March Against Strike-breakers, Warmakers

WASHINGTON, D.C., Sept. 24 -- A multi-racial group of over 100 workers and students -- Metro transit, government and health care workers from D.C., Ford auto and county hospital workers from Chicago, teachers and students from Baltimore -- formed one of the more militant contingents in the massive anti-war march that flooded the city today. They showed what a communist-led anti-war march would look like.

The group met first at a breakfast hosted by Local 689 of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) at the union's headquarters. The local elected a PLP'er as president. After a hearty meal, rank-and-filers from the various unions and schools gave rousing talks which the audience greeted with loud "Right on's" of approval.

A young Metro worker linked the Katrina tragedy to the war in Iraq and racism at home, noting that capitalism was the root of all these working-class deaths. He said workers had to be at the forefront of fighting against racism and imperialist war.

A college student agreed, speaking about the importance of worker involvement in anti-war protests, which could make a real difference. She was very excited about being side-by-side with workers at the breakfast and in the march, fighting the same fight.

A Ford worker cited the attacks directed against auto workers but declared that organizing like this for an anti-war march means that UAW members were "coming back."

Local 689's President traced the plight of workers on the job and in cities ravaged by the hurricane to a system which is governed by profits, at the expense of our class. He said the war won't end simply by marching and pleading with the bosses' politicians to "bring the troops home," but rather by working-class soldiers rebelling like they did in Vietnam, which was an important reason for U.S. imperialism's withdrawal from that war, given the heroism of Vietnam's workers and peasants. He said that kind of action in Iraq with support by striking workers both in Iraq and here at home is the way to fight against the bosses' war. For this it was necessary to build a mass PLP

The participants made signs to carry in the march, such as, "Human Blood: $3.29/gallon" with "Hallibutcher" plastered on a gas station pump; "Support Striking Workers and Rebelling Soldiers"; "Warmaker, Strike-breaker, Fight Boeing!" and "Unions United to Fight Racism." The 8-year-old son of a Metro worker carried a sign proclaiming "Working-Class Revolution!"

These signs were matched by militant chants in the march itself, including, "Asian, Latin, Black, and White, Workers of the World Unite!" These sentiments sharply contrasted with the pacifist "Peace Now" pleas put forward by the March leaders. While the latter directed all their fire at Bush, our contingent indicted capitalism as the cause of imperialist war, racism, poverty and the fate that befell the victims of Katrina.

The group caravanned to the train station and then took the Metro down to the rally. Our militant chants were applauded by many fellow protestors as we joined the main march, where we continued to chant. It was a powerful sight.

All this had an inspiring impact on the workers and their families. Having a militant political gathering beforehand added a broader anti-imperialist message to the superficial one of the march organizers, who blamed it all on Bush. The workers and students vowed to return to their jobs, schools and communities and spread the ideas they had brought to the day's events.

Billionaires' Dogfight:
Dumping Bush Won't End Imperialist Wars

Increasingly frustrated by Bush's failure to implement their wartime agenda, U.S. rulers are assailing his presidency on every front imaginable. As U.S. imperialism plans for ever bloodier military conflicts, the big bosses demand a leader who can create a climate of "shared sacrifice," says the New York Times.

By itself, this Bush-bashing isn't a good development for the working class. When the rulers call for "sacrifice," they really mean they want to spend more money forcing us to defend their profit system by spilling our blood. They require corporations and wealthy individuals willing to pay higher taxes to fund the war machine and workers willing to sacrifice their personal freedoms at home and their lives in battle.

The Iraq morass and Hurricane Katrina show how little the Bush gang has done to muster patriotic spirit or establish an effective, centralized apparatus of homeland coercion. So now the rulers are using state power in the form of the legal system and the media to sap the very foundations of the Bush administration. Bush's congressional base, donor base, electoral base, advisors and cronies are all taking ruling-class fire. But we should avoid getting caught in the middle. We have no side to take in a bosses' dogfight.

In late September, a Texas court indicted Tom Delay for campaign finance wrongdoing, forcing him to step down as House majority leader. But his real crime against the rulers lies in supporting the Bush gang's "on-the-cheap," undermanned, under-funded, and thus far unsuccessful Iraq invasion, all the while pushing for tax cuts for Bush-friendly corporations and budding billionaires. DeLay called for an immediate invasion with existing forces in August 2002. At the time, the ruling class's Council on Foreign Relations was advising an October 2003 operation with hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops and a sizable contingent of allies. Bush went ahead with a March 2003 invasion anyway, sending fewer than half the ground troops recommended by liberal think-tanks and the Pentagon. After the shooting had started, DeLay, like Bush, continued to thwart the plans of the main wing of the ruling class for a more general mobilization, telling reporters, "Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes."

Senate majority leader Bill Frist, another tax-cut champion, is now under federal investigation for shady stock deals involving his family's HCA corporation. Frist's pet project is to repeal the estate tax. But the rulers want the wealthy to willingly bankroll U.S. imperialism. A February 2001 statement published by the Rockefeller family and other members of the ruling class warned that eliminating the tax would harm "government programs so important to our nation's continued well-being." These programs included the Hart-Rudman commission's recommendations for transforming the U.S. into a militarized police state. Beset by his current troubles, Frist has postponed action on the estate tax.

Jack Abramoff, a top pro-Bush lobbyist, faces federal charges for ripping off Native American tribes. But the rulers want even more blood. On September 28, the New York Times ran a story under the headline "3 Arrested in Killing of Businessman With Whom Abramoff Feuded." It linked Adam Kidan, a Bush fund-raiser, with a Mafia murder. The feds have indicted Kidan and Abramoff as partners in a fraudulent casino financing scheme. And they recently arrested David Safavian, Bush's chief procurement officer, for obstructing the Abramoff investigation.

Karl Rove, the White House advisor known as "Bush's brain" is once again in the rulers' cross-hairs. Times reporter Judith Miller, having done a three-month jail stint as a First Amendment "martyr," has now agreed to assist the federal investigation into Rove's role in attacking an official who exposed Bush's lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Hypocrite Miller ignores how she herself promoted the war with stories "proving" the existence of Iraqi WMDs. Miller's hypocrisy reflects that of many leading Democrats, including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, who voted for the war in 2003.

Calling Bush worse than Nixon and implying the threat of impeachment, Frank Rich, another ruling-class mouthpiece at the Times, said (10/2/05) in comparison, "Watergate itself increasingly looks like a relatively contained epidemic of corruption."

The battle rages far beyond Washington. The rulers are moving to discredit the ideology and leaders of the Christian Right, which constitutes Bush's largest single voting bloc. Under intense coverage from the liberal media, a Pennsylvania court is hearing a case, dubbed "Scopes II," that challenges the teaching of "intelligent design," the supposedly more sophisticated version of creationism. In addition, the liberal media, which have promoted every racist theory from eugenics to Sociobiology, are now ratcheting up their criticisms of gross racist statements by pro-Bush Bible-thumpers like Pat Robertson and former Bush, Sr. Education Secretary William Bennett.

Bush has reacted feebly to the rulers' pressure to shape up or ship out. His only call for "sacrifice" has been a pathetic and impractical appeal to citizens to save oil by driving less. Bush did raise the idea of using Army troops to police U.S. cities in emergencies, but fell short of the detailed, far-reaching proposals for fascism outlined by the Hart-Rudman report.

Bush is indeed a sworn enemy of the working class. But this anti-Bush campaign is in no way good for workers, nor are his attackers our friends. When the liberals start assailing racism and calling for "shared sacrifice" in the so-called "national interest," watch out! Remember: the liberals brought us the war in Vietnam, the gunning down of working-class rebels in the 1960's and '70s, racist Workfare, Clinton's bombing of Yugoslavia, and starvation of Iraqi children. The main strategic focus of U.S. foreign policy is the liberal doctrine of squashing all rivals by force and control of Persian Gulf oil at gunpoint.

The anti-Bush crusade stems from the rulers' overriding need to discipline, mobilize and militarize society in a period of intensifying conflict among the world's imperialists. But this is a time to mobilize for the building of PLP as a revolutionary, communist party that will some day bury the war-makers.

Capitalism -- Biggest Crime of All

Barely one month after Katrina exposed the deadly racism of the U.S. bosses, on Sept. 28, another servant of the ruling class, former Secretary of Education William Bennett, said on his radio talk show, "You could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."

"Genocide reduces the crime rate," is just one of the absurdities implicit in his statement. But the main point is that Bennett and the ruling class he serves are the biggest criminals in history, and capitalism is the biggest crime of all, a crime against the entire working class. To paraphrase playwright Bertold Brecht, "It's a bigger crime to own a bank than to rob one." When we smash capitalism with communist revolution and destroy the racist parasites in the ruling class, the crime rate will not only go down, it will be eliminated.

Capitalism depends for its very existence on stealing the surplus value produced by the working class . If capitalism stopped stealing, it would cease to exist. Since the defeat of the Bolshevik Revolution more than 50 years ago, and the Chinese Revolution in the late 1960's, capitalism has ruled the globe and its crime wave against the international working class has basically gone unchallenged. Today, more than half the world's population lives on less than $2 a day! And the death toll from imperialist wars, civil wars, ethnic cleansings, curable diseases, AIDS, hunger, famine and infant mortality is unprecedented in human history. Given the racist nature of capitalism and imperialism, the death tolls are highest in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Globalization -- imperialism on steroids --has only increased the levels of poverty and the numbers of children in sweatshops.

Social, and especially economic relations -- capitalist class relationships of exploitation -- cause crime. Wealth, and the lack of it, causes poverty, degradation, misery -- and crime. Workers and the poor who turn to crime are only aping the ruling class. "They rip off the workers, why can't we?" But the real looters in New Orleans turned out to be white and black cops, and now Halliburton, & Co.

Bennett is drawing racist conclusions from faulty crime statistics. Different groups in the population commit different crimes disproportionately. People classified as "black" are convicted of certain kinds of crime in higher proportion than the proportion of black people in the general population (convictions and plea bargains often have little to do with guilt or innocence). The same is true of other groups.

Rates of violent crime -- murder, for example -- are highest in the Southern U.S., for whites as well as blacks. Bennett could have said, "Abort every baby born in the South, and crime rates will go down." He could have said, "Abort all male babies, and the crime rates for rape and murder and all violent crimes, will go down."

In the U.S., black workers suffer from the greatest racism, poverty, unemployment and disease. They are also victims of the highest crime rates, from the billionaires to purse-snatchers. The racist differential in family income between black and Latino workers and white workers reaps $250 BILLION in super-profits each year for the racist bosses. These super-profits are essential to the capitalists -- and that's only the beginning. Forget about paying rent for rat-infested firetraps or higher prices for rotten meat in local stores.

But black workers, because of their history in the U.S. and their relation to society, are also the key force for communist revolution. Building a mass base among black workers, soldiers, students and youth, winning them to join and lead the PLP, will make us worthy of the title, revolutionary communist party.

Small-Fry Pays for Big-Time Torturers

Lynndie England, the soldier photographed holding an Iraqi prisoner in Abu Ghraib on a leash, received a three-year prison term. No doubt she deserves this and more, but as Bob Dylan famously said about the killer of Medgar Evers, she's "only a pawn in their game."

Her trial -- like others of abuse cases in Iraq -- exposed the mass torture of Iraqis by U.S. forces. England described the organized beating and torturing of prisoners in interrogation cell areas.

The first trials all described teams of CIA and army intelligence interrogators torturing Iraqis, the vast majority randomly rounded up in sweeps by U.S. forces.

These crimes against innocent Iraqis were known up and down the chain of command. England's trial revealed how the soldiers in Abu Ghraib were given the wink and nod to torture, and how professionals were brought in specifically for that purpose.

One officer who exposed the abuses recently told the New York Times that instead of going after the higher-ups, the Army is investigating those who speak up.

Torture in Iraq is playing multiple roles for the U.S. ruling class. It serves to terrorize Iraqis as well as others worldwide who refuse to go along with U.S. interests. It also helps to build an army that loses its reservations about slaughtering innocents; and it's a trial balloon -- much like the imprisonment of Arab men in Guantanamo -- to see how much fascism people in the U.S. will accept.

At this point the U.S. rulers' position in Iraq seems to be worsening. Mass torture isn't winning the war for them. While there hasn't been mass rebellion in the U.S. Army, at home thousand of soldiers have deserted, many because of the racist nature of today's military, and recruitment is down. Amid the horrors the bosses are currently meting out to workers, these are hopeful signs that the U.S. working class will not march lock-step behind the rulers' growing fascism.'

One Million Strike vs. French Bosses' Privatization `Reform'

PARIS, Oct. 5 -- About one million workers went on a one-day nation-wide strike yesterday protesting high unemployment, low wages eroding their purchasing power and government "reforms" to privatize state-run firms that would make it easier for bosses to fire workers. The strike spread across 140 cities and towns, with the industrialized areas leading the way. It was the first time in 30 years that all the unions acted together.

Jean Aubigny, a sympathetic commuter at this city's Saint-Lazare station, told the Associated Press, "All of the rights that our ancestors took centuries to acquire are being squeezed."

The walkout involved postal, electricity, railroad, airline, ferry and some private sector workers. Two-thirds of trains were not running into Paris, one-half of the Metro was shut, the railroads were seriously disrupted and hundreds of flights were grounded, all combining to cause massive traffic jams. Some national newspapers failed to publish.

The loss of 400 jobs in ferry operations -- being sold off by the government -- out of the port of Marseilles to the island of Corsica impelled the Army to take over the ferries from striking workers. Port workers walked out in sympathy.

France's ruling class, trying to compete with its imperialist rivals in this age of endless war and fascist attacks on the working class, is driving to overturn the "social contract" that workers have won through decades of struggle. But this union "show of strength" will probably last for only this one day, given the union misleaders' ideology of "capitalism is here to stay." They're all committed to cutting a deal with the ruling class, competing with each other to be the capitalists' "preferred partner."

Mass actions like this are good if workers learn the lesson that all bosses are their enemies, and that the only solution for a world free of unemployment, racism and imperialist war is communist revolution.

Anarchy of Capitalism Creates Energy Crisis

Why have gasoline prices doubled in the last two years, and who are the winners? The real answers lie in the big picture, not the details the bosses' media like to cite to hide the basic truths.

Capitalism is an economic roller-coaster. The bosses have used a series of lame excuses, like Hurricane Katrina, to drive up prices and keep gasoline in short supply. But like those increases in California electricity prices, the crooked capitalists who steal a few billion dollars are only the tip of the iceberg. The main guilty party is the anarchy of capitalism, forcing it to lurch from one crisis to the next, leading to endless imperialist wars. The oil industry is a prime example.

In the 1960's, capitalists built cars and factories that guzzled oil while not investing much in new oil wells. The result of soaring demand and stagnant output was the 1970's "oil crisis." The capitalist "solution" to the shortages it had created was to drive prices sky high. They rushed to drill new oil wells and redesign everything from cars to more energy-efficient offices. As supply soared and demand crashed, in 1985 oil prices fell to one-fourth their peak price, and stayed that low through the 1990's, while hundreds of billions invested in oil projects and energy-efficiency schemes turned out to be unprofitable.

Did the capitalists learn from this roller-coaster ride? Hell, no! Capitalism is incapable of planning. So for the last decade, business "geniuses" have done exactly as they did in the 1960's: build cars and factories that guzzle oil while not investing much in new oil wells. Exxon has $30 billion cash on hand but has refused until recently, to invest more; Last month, Exxon was still insisting that oil prices would soon decline.

More than a century ago, Karl Marx wrote a brilliant analysis of why capitalism goes through irrational cycles of over-investment and crisis. It's not that the capitalists are stupid. Rather, capitalism is a wasteful system that can't pay attention to warning signs about looming problems. Communism is a system designed to plan ahead, where workers have the means and motive to solve problems before they become crises.

World's Bosses Gang Up on U.S. Rulers

So who's gained from the oil price rises? In part, the oil bosses - Exxon has done well, GM has been hurt. With the price per barrel of oil doubling in the last two years, U.S. oil companies have gained about $100 billion a year. These are the companies to which Bush is closest; no wonder he does little about it.

But the main story is that higher oil prices are part of the same pattern dominating world politics for most of the last decade, namely, a campaign by rulers worldwide to take the USA down a couple pegs. Whether in China or Germany, the Middle East or Latin America, the world's bosses, in various ways, have gone after "the world's only superpower," and oil is a tool in this campaign.

Oil is a weak spot for the U.S. and other big imperialists because it's the one vital commodity they cannot produce enough of domestically. They make their own steel, they pretty much grow their own food, but they must import much of their oil. That means oil is a useful tool for the smaller ruling classes to use against the bigger ones. Whenever U.S. imperialism is weak, the oil-exporting rulers take advantage. As the USA was losing in Vietnam, OPEC jacked up prices. And now that the USA is bogged down in Iraq and the "war against terror," lots of nationalists are taking advantage of the situation to take a tougher line against multi-national oil companies like ExxonMobil (and the two British oil firms, BP and Shell, which are in fact more U.S. than European). Putin jailed Khudorovsky, Yukos' owner, the one Russian oil boss ready to work with the multi-nationals, and has put the oil business back under state control. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez tore up the multi-national contracts, insisting on better terms.

Russia and Venezuela have each increased oil exports by about $50 billion a year, thanks to the $30 boost in prices in the last two years -- and nearly all that money has helped build much stronger states. Middle East rulers have been the main gainers. They reaped about half of the total $550 billion price hike, plus they're in the best position to increase output at a time when few others producers can. Smaller amounts have gone to African, Caspian, and Southeast Asian producers, plus to so-called U.S. allies Canada and Norway.

To be sure, U.S. bosses are not the only ones who must pay when oil prices rise. In fact, the total $550 billion world bill is just about divided equally with the U.S., the European Union and East Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China), each paying about $150 billion annually. But the main political impact of the price rise undercuts U.S. influence and power. For instance, Russian military spending this year is twice what it was a few years ago.

Capitalism can't deliver because it is completely disorganized. Each group of bosses is constantly looking for a way to get ahead at the expense of the others, while the workers get stuck paying the bills. And this doesn't even include all the crooks who cheat us even more while the bosses' government helps them with their scams (the bosses have manipulated the U.S. oil refinery business to jack up their prices $15 per barrel, or about half as much as the rulers of oil-exporting countries have been able to steal). The bosses' long-range "solution" to this is war and more wars against their rivals, eventually leading to another world war.

Meanwhile, we don't need "better enforcement" of laws or a new "national energy strategy." To meet our needs, we must smash capitalism with communist revolution and build a society run by and for the workers.

NOT THE DOLLAR, NOT THE EURO -- WORKERS' POWER!

The longer U.S. imperialism is in a quagmire in Iraq, the weaker it looks, the more its rivals will probe for other, or secondary, weaknesses. The more probing, the more antagonisms, the more instability.

Today, the gigantic U.S. military appears lost in the sands of Iraq. From Gulf War I to blockade to Gulf War II to occupation -- in the 15 years of this bloodbath, U.S. imperialism's top-dog position has been increasingly challenged. In 1991, the "allies" paid $54 billion for Gulf War I. In 2003, the "coalition of the willing" could only muster $5 billion for Gulf War II -- in pledges, not cash in hand.

At its height, right after World War II, U.S. bosses set the capitalist world's financial and trade agenda. Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and GATT (later to become the World Trade Organization) all resulted from U.S. initiatives. The rest of the capitalist world mostly reacted to U.S. programs. U.S. rulers had the atom bomb and the dollar had clout.

Lately, however, major capitalist initiatives have been launched over which U.S. rulers have little control: development of the euro as a viable world currency; emergence of a capitalist China; and the development of A-bombs in India and Pakistan. Today, it's the U.S. that often reacts to events.

EUROPE CHALLENGES THE U.S.

On January 1, 1999, a major challenge to U.S. imperialism materialized. The euro became the European Common Market's official currency. Because Europe had a bigger domestic market and because the U.S. was the world's biggest debtor nation, the euro looked more attractive than the dollar. It has threatened to rival if not replace it as the world's reserve currency.

This is no small challenge. If a country establishes its currency as the world currency, advantages approaching world domination flow to it. For example, most of the world's oil is traded in U.S. dollars. They're called petrodollars. If, say, Japan needs to buy oil, it needs dollars. Since oil prices can rise sharply from time to time, that country needs a large reserve of dollars. Millions of dollars sitting in a Tokyo bank vault would be of little use. So Japan, like other countries, earns interest on its dollars by investing in the U.S. stock market, especially in Treasury bills.

T-bills are the main way the U.S. government borrows money when it overspends (or runs a deficit). Every congressman, senator and cabinet member knows there are billions of free petro dollars in the world waiting to be invested temporarily in U.S. T-bills. This means Congress can cut taxes to the richest 10% and spend gigantic sums on military hardware regardless of the deficit. They know it can be easily covered by T-bills.

DOG-EAT-DOG IMPERIALISTS

Even if the euro were to just share a place with the dollar as a world currency, the balance of power would be radically shifted. For example, if China started buying oil in euros, they would need large reserves of euros. The most economical way to do this would be to invest in the European equivalent of T-bills, and divest a corresponding amount of dollars. This would enable Europe to be able to build a military machine rivaling that of the U.S. Meanwhile, the U.S. would have to cut back even more on all social programs and wages to pay for its military. Now add the reactions of Russia and China into all this. Clearly the issue of petrodollars or petro-euros creates fault lines around the imperialist world. Gulf War I, Yugoslavia, Gulf War II and oil pipeline wars like Afghanistan and Chechnya show that war, rather than conferences, has been the preferred method to deal with reserve currency and control of oil.

The seriousness of this was reflected in Saddam Hussein's decision to demand payment in euros instead of dollars for Iraq's oil. This sealed his doom. U.S. rulers -- who, in any event, wanted to take control of Iraq's oil (the world's second largest reserves after Saudi Arabia) -- also stood to lose trillions if the dollar was no longer the reserve currency.

This is the context in which we must understand Iran's recent announcement that beginning next March it plans to begin competing with New York's and London's oil stock markets, which trade in petro-dollars. Iran's "bourse" (oil market) will trade in euros. This is almost a declaration of war. While the existence of the euro and the dollar side by side might be negotiated short of war -- at least temporarily -- it's inconceivable that a country the size of Iran would announce such a bold plan without ensuring it had friends in high places.

Russia, China, Germany and France all fit the bill. China has just become Iran's biggest trading partner. Russia and Iran have long discussed trading oil and gas in euros. Germany and France, of course, were cut out when U.S. occupation forces reversed Saddam's order to sell them Iraqi oil in euros.

The War in Iraq Raises New Questions: The Dollar, the Euro, or ...

The longer the U.S. remains in a quagmire in Iraq, the more opportunities present themselves to imperialist rivals and the weaker the world's only superpower appears. When Gulf War II began, CHALLENGE warned the invasion might be easy but the occupation would be difficult. Today, we should add that, for U.S. imperialism, while the occupation is grim, its consequences are even grimmer. Two-thirds of world trade is conducted in dollars. Losing this advantage would be a major setback for the world's only superpower.

"A successful Iranian bourse will solidify the petro-euro as an alternative oil transaction currency, and thereby end the petro-dollar's hegemonic status as the monopoly oil currency," says W. R. Clark in his article "Petrodollar Warfare: Dollars, Euros, and the Upcoming Iranian Oil Bourse." No wonder U.S. rulers are contemplating attacking Iran.

The invasion of Iraq, and Iran's newly-announced oil bourse, are gradually drawing all the major imperialists into the battle. Whatever ideology or ideals are used to recruit soldiers or insurgents (U.S. "democracy," Chinese nationalism, Pan-European unity or Islamic history), the outcome in reality means they either "car bomb" for the euro or "smart bomb" for the dollar.

There is a weak link for all the imperialists in this: most workers, soldiers and students are not totally won to die for their bosses. But, that never stopped the imperialists from waging war. That's why we in PLP must fight for the line of to hell with "power to the dollar" or "power to the euro." It's time to fight for power to the workers. This won't happen spontaneously. We must instill among all we know the confidence that workers will fight and produce for a world without exploiters and exploitation. We want share-and-share-alike communism, not the socialism that the revolutions in China and Russia fought for. The longer this dirty capitalist imperialist war drags on, the greater the opportunity to raise the need to build a new communist movement.uIraq Invasion Sharpens Euro-Dollar Fight

U.S. imperialism's supremacy rests on three pillars: oil, a dominant world currency and a gigantic military. Of course, central to military supremacy is the bosses' ability to win the troops politically to racism and nationalism. But from the day the euro was launched (Jan. 1, 1999), it threatened the dollar's supremacy. In three months it was already valued higher than the dollar. Yet by the end of that year, it was lower. The threat had waned. The U.S.-led NATO destruction of Yugoslavia showed the world that Europe - at that time - was incapable of calling the shots on its own doorstep, let alone defending a world currency. However, since the invasion of Iraq, the situation has changed, reflected in the comparison between the two Gulf Wars. The euro has again become stronger. This is another aspect of the sharpening deadly rivalry between the imperialists, who are attacking the international working class.

PL Teacher Links Imperialist Wars and Racist Education to Give-Back Contract

NEW YORK CITY, SEPT. 21 -- Thousands of teachers who packed today's Delegates Assembly(DA) meeting to show their outrage and dissatisfaction with a leadership-proposed contract heard a Bronx PLP teacher condemn it, charging that it was filled with give-backs. In a rousing speech, she charged that ruling-class attacks on teachers were really attacks on working-class youth. She called for rank-and-file rejection of the proposed contract, and of the politicians and their lies. (For extended excerpts, see box.)

The city's schools are overwhelmingly black and Latino and the ruling class has been getting away with racist attacks on these students for years, allowing conditions to worsen to a point where many feel their schools are more like jails. Two days before the DA, 1,500 students walked out at De Witt Clinton H.S., protesting the racist installation of metal detectors. (See CHALLENGE, 10/5)

Teachers have been working more than two years without a raise or a contract. Meanwhile, overcrowding, inadequate programming, and lack of books and supplies are rampant. School budgets are continuously being slashed while hundreds of billions are being funneled into imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The union leadership has been trying to hoodwink members into accepting an outside arbitrator's Fact Finding Report (FFR) as the basis for the upcoming contract negotiations. But some chapter leaders said their members had repudiated the FFR, labeling it "starting off at zero."

Not surprisingly, union president Randi Weingarten monopolized the time, confusing people with "Roberts Rules of Order" and other minutia, so angry teachers couldn't get the floor. By the time of the vote on the resolution, she had won many teachers to a line that didn't represent the class interests of students and teachers.

PLP members have been active in our respective schools, organizing picket lines, union meetings and confrontations with Weingarten's UNITY caucus leaders, explaining that the proposed contract is a racist attack on students, teachers and parents. It proposes a series of give-backs: elimination of important rules teachers need to defend themselves from administration attacks, giving principals more power, a small salary increase for longer hours and increased assignments.

The Delegates Assembly is somewhat of a circus; the dominating UNITY caucus runs the show. Although allowing some dissent, it basically rubber-stamps Weingarten at virtually every meeting. Even though many teachers vehemently opposed the resolution on the floor, the vote carried. Many angry teachers stormed out of the meeting in disbelief and grabbed CHALLENGE and leaflets, as well as newsletters distributed by other opponents of the union sellouts. PLP members encouraged teachers to take the struggle into their schools, to build for strikes and strike actions and to fight for the unity of students, parents and teachers.

As we go to press, the union and the mayor have announced a contract agreement modeled after the FFR, increasing teacher time, giving principals more direct control over teacher transfers and adding to their assignments in the schools, and seriously attacking teachers' ability to grieve attacks by the principal. This is in return for a decent-sounding raise, but that's not what it appears. New teachers will get 6% less.

We've all met teachers who didn't teach, and obviously school administrations let them get away with it because the ruling class doesn't care if the black and Latin student population gets an inferior education, primed for low-wage jobs or the military. We all know workers whose children have been badly served by teachers who just shouldn't have been in the classroom. However, we must recognize that the capitalist system is the source of the racist attitudes filling the schools. The vast majority of teachers work hard teaching far too many students, and this contract increases their workload, making it still more difficult for good teachers to do as well as they could. (More on this contract fight next issue.)

`' We cannot sell out our younger colleagues and our students for a salary raise . . . `

(Excerpts from the stirring speech of the Bronx PLP teacher to the Sept. 21 Delegates Assembly.)

"Proof that those who run this country don't care about the working class, especially black and Latino workers and their children, can be seen in New Orleans where thousands were left to die because they had no way to get themselves out ahead of Katrina. [When someone shouted "Get to the point," she shot back] This IS the point. The ruling class that allows workers in New Orleans to die and kills workers in Iraq for oil is the same ruling class that destroys the future of working-class students here in New York City. Our students are the main victims of the attacks by the Department of Education. So long as our students are considered expendable and unimportant, we as their teachers will be seen as unimportant.

"We must fight for the needs of our students and of ourselves. We must fight the racism of the Department of Education. We must build unity among students, teachers and parents. This is what the politicians fear.

"We cannot support a contract where we sell out our younger colleagues and our students for a salary raise. These younger teachers will be working under these conditions for a long time. Our working-class students will also be living with the disastrous results of them. And we will be allowing ourselves to be divided, which is exactly what the administration, politicians and all who run this city want.

"We must reject the Fact-Finders report. We fight for no give-backs, for smaller class sizes and other things that are good for the education of working-class students in New York City."

Bronx H.S. Teachers Fight Sellout; Charge Union Head in Bed with Billionaire Mayor Bloomberg

BRONX, NY, Oct. 4 -- As the teachers union leadership and billionaire Mayor Bloomberg race to force another pro-capitalist sellout on public school teachers, there's been widespread teacher and staff anger at Christopher Columbus High School (CCHS) here over the worsening working conditions, overcrowding, and the Public Employees Review Board Fact Finding Report (FFR). (For details, see above). UFT union boss Randi Weingarten led us into this union-busting predicament. Many are angry at her and her cronies for endangering the few meager protections teachers and other school employees still have.

For two years the CCHS staff has conducted a variety of activities for better working conditions and a better educational experience for our students. In addition, we're trying to prevent the school's closing. The Department Of Education wants to convert the building into a number of mini-schools, funded by the Gates Foundation.

Militant picket lines at CCHS, which PL members helped to organize and lead, have called for students and teachers to unite in demanding mini schools out of CCHS, more schools to alleviate overcrowding, smaller classes and a UFT contract.

Recently, staff and students picketed against the FFR. Teachers' signs condemned the union leadership's blatant class collaboration. Upon seeing a sign declaring, "Recall Randi; Randi is in Bed with Bloomberg; No to give-backs!" a local UFT hack went berserk, running to the principal, our chapter co-leader and the Bronx-wide UFT representative, demanding measures against whoever wrote this sign.

Nobody cooperated with the administration/hack witch-hunt except our local Trotskyite (phony leftist), who proceeded to destroy the sign. He wrote UFT Rep "deploring" the sign's content and profusely "apologizing" for our teachers "stepping out of line." So: union hacks in bed with the enemy and a Trotskyite trying to stop the flood of anger coming from those who must suffer the effects of their class collaboration.

We've been struggling for two years with many staff members about a strike and the issues listed above, with mixed success. Many staff members have feared to act, but others have been active in several ways.

Before this pending settlement, most staff was strongly pro-strike. However, we remain divided by years in service, grade level taught and what we do and teach. The UFT sellouts used these factors to weaken us and prevent unity at CCHS. However, these struggles have created opportunities to increase our CHALLENGE readership, bring pro-communist ideas to our school and move people to the left. We also need to expose the tentative contract's fascistic provision that impedes filing a grievance against any charge the bosses want to trump up against school workers, especially political activists. The UFT leadership and the school bosses want to bribe teachers with a "higher" salary in exchange for accepting more control over staff and surrendering the right to defend ourselves when the system attacks us.

Teachers must be won to see that capitalism will not and cannot provide the learning conditions teachers want for their students and for themselves. We must build a movement that will fight the billionaires out to save their rotten system, who put profits ahead of our students' well-being, and the pro-boss unions that don't serve our class interests. Ultimately, a communist system eliminating exploitation and racism will be the antidote to the atrocities we experience daily.

Students, Profs Building PLP in Mexico

MEXICO -- "Some fight for a year and that is good...Others fight all their lives: they are the ones we cannot do without." (Bertolt Brecht)

So read a poem read during the anniversary of a student organization in northwestern Mexico. Amid political apathy among many, the celebration's musical festival attracted some 200 people.

The atmosphere was great. PLP members and friends helped organize the activities. Women friends of the Party showed great potential. We now have the opportunity to develop closer social and political relations with them.

The next day, current and former students and professors from other universities met to evaluate the festival and plans for the growth of the Party, ideologically and numerically.

Just before last year's anniversary some students participated in a party welcoming new students. After a fight among some in the party, the cops came and attacked everyone. To confront this police brutality, we organized a mass march from the campus to the city's downtown. From the beginning, students "arrested" a cop and warned they wouldn't free him until all the arrested students were released. PLP comrades participated in this action and strengthened their commitment to fight for communism.

The trust and solidarity among all involved in these actions can help to win more students to a higher level of political activity. This can lead to joining and building PLP and the fight for the interests of workers and students internationally.

Boeing, Union Hacks Use Liberal Gephardt to Swindle Workers

SEATTLE, WA., Oct. 1 -- The 28-day Boeing strike ended today, concluding another chapter in a continuing class struggle. Desperate to maintain our allegiance, the union leadership declared victory, scheduled the contract vote one day before we would lose our medical benefits and got the acceptance they wanted. This "victory" came cheap as the new contract just shifted money around, freezing our wages. Throughout the strike, the Party's base organized meetings of dozens to fight for anti-racist class-consciousness -- a real victory in building a mass PLP on the long road for our class to take power.

Only when we act and think as a class can we begin the march to break the chains that bind us to the bosses' system. To that end, strikers distributed 1,500 leaflets and 500 CHALLENGES during the strike. One leaflet entitled "Holding the Line; Fighting for Our Class" was particularly popular. After explaining how the racist profit system is worldwide, it concluded: "Calls to fight for `American Workers' fall short. From Baghdad to Boeing to New Orleans we fight the same enemy. We fight for the working class. History is on our side. Eventually we will find a way to win."

Of course, no contract can liberate us. They only define the shape of the chains that bind us. Nonetheless, this contract contains some particularly nasty bits. The company paid for a measly additional $4 pension multiplier (an extra $4/month per year of service) and restoration of retiree medical benefits for new hires by eliminating all general wage increases. This wage-freeze contract gave the 3,500 called back from layoff in the last year smaller signing bonuses than the rejected contract. Over 500 got zilch. Nothing was won on outsourcing and selling of plants, while the medical part contains the same formulas that resulted in higher premiums under the last contract. "I'm going to burn my `Do The Right Thing' union T-shirt!" threatened one striker.

The company did agree to withdraw its demand for multi-machine operation -- up to four machines per operator. Of course, this won't help the many thousands already in sold plants or in subcontractor firms which all have multi-machine operation policies. Nor will it help the rest that will be sold in the future -- if they don't lose their jobs outright to outsourcing. The 1989 strike involved 56,000 workers. In the1995 strike, there were fewer than 40,000 workers. This time the number dropped to 18,000+. Signaling their continued intentions, during the strike Boeing offloaded machining work on two freighter programs from the Auburn site to the non-union Salt Lake City facility.

Secret Meetings; Democratic Party Pols

Even as hundreds of thousands marched against the bosses' oil war in Iraq, a secret meeting in the D.C. offices of former Democratic Party boss Dick Gephardt worked out a deal. Today the union misleaders are in control with their nationalist politics, but the bosses can never be sure. The longer the strike continued, the more opportunity we had to spread revolutionary anti-imperialist ideas amongst this crucial workforce in basic industry. They had to end the strike.

Boeing hired Gephardt to grease the works. A scant four months ago, he was rewarded with a seat on the board of Spirit AeroSystems (the outfit set up by the buyer Onex) in exchange for ramming a wage- and job-cut deal down the throats of recently sold Wichita workers. The union praised this corporate mercenary to the skies. "They probably got the union leaders in a room and lectured them about the `national interest' and we were sunk," said a former shop steward.

As long as we remain chained to capitalism, contracts and secret meetings will seal our fate. Victory is defined as not losing too much and even that is temporary as the bosses reorganize our industry to pay for more oil wars. When the IAM International president says this contract is an "opportunity [for Boeing] to make strides working with the union to stay competitive" he disarms us. There are bosses and workers. You can't serve both.

Many, if not most of the strikers, refused to return to work on Friday, the day after the contract was approved. A small group continued their Friday breakfast, just as they had every Friday during the strike. They, along with others, vowed to continue organizing the events we had planned if the strike had continued, events dedicated to building revolutionary class consciousness. And we will keep holding expanded Party meetings so our friends can continue to attend. It's from these events and these workers that we will gain our lasting victories.

Class Understanding Grows in Aftermath of Boeing Strike

"Have you all decided if you want breakfast?" asked the waitress. "It's getting too late for the early bird special." At a coffee-shop meeting with half a dozen Boeing workers, all CHALLENGE readers, we got so wrapped up in discussing the strike, scabs and holding the line that we forgot to look at the menu until the waitress reminded us.

KATRINA, IRAQ and BOEING

Whether it's a major corporation, a war for oil profits or a huge natural storm the results for workers are a disaster under the capitalist system. The IAM machinists are in danger of joining the working poor of New Orleans who were left behind to the fury of the hurricane. Boeing wants to leave its striking workers behind with inadequate pensions and a substandard health plan, and for some, no medical at all.

Wouldn't you think that one of the world's largest arms-producing corporations, the largest manufacturing exporter in the U.S. and a huge supporter (and beneficiary) of the war in Iraq would be making enough profit without trying to screw its workers blue in the bargain? But the capitalist law of maximum profit compels Boeing -- in competition with the world's other aerospace companies -- to attack its workers harder year after year. Similarly, the U.S. military attacks Iraqi workers so ExxonMobil can float along on a sea of Mid-East oil rather than let it flow to its European, Chinese and Japanese imperialist rivals.

Machinists Left to the Tender Mercies of `Hurricane Boeing'

Bush showed up late in Louisiana, but in time for his photo opportunities. How about IAM district president Mark Blondin? A Boeing worker asked, "What's the union leadership doing to keep up the spirits of the strikers? If I was in Blondin's shoes," he answered his own question, "I'd get some intense movies to show our workers the bloody history of the strikes in the 1930's and '40's. We need to know that our wages and pensions came out of workers and their leaders fighting the bosses, not just negotiating a deal with them at some hotel."

This worker is already moving beyond the union's line. He's talking about the need for class consciousness, which he thinks workers had in the thirties. He sees the need to educate and organize his fellow workers as a class against attacks from capitalism and big war-maker Boeing. He's looking to put the fire and the fight back into the soul of workers.

A woman comrade sitting next to him said, "And instead of going to sleep between contracts, we should be meeting like this to begin preparing for the next contract." A floor inspector agreed that what we do here in this strike affects the next contract. "Today -- and for the last 60 years -- unions are about making a deal with the boss," he said. "Is it likely that the union president would put out a call for the workers to come to films about the militant history of the U.S. working class?" he asked. No one thought so.

LOOKING FOR PLP'S COMMUNIST IDEAS

A CHALLENGE study group, the history of the class struggle, communist philosophy and ideas -- all this and more are what workers are asking for. Should we meet between the contracts simply to plan how we'll fight for another $1 an hour? Or are we going to focus on the fight to take everything they've stolen from us? Are we after a piece of reform or the prize of revolution?

"We have the resources to do this," the inspector continued. "With the workers from the roadhouse meeting yesterday, including the Northwest strikers, and today's meeting, that's thirty people at our first film showing." Someone else said, "We can do it, then present it to the union leadership at the membership meeting. That way we'll find out, do they want to pick up on it? Or do they drop it and expose themselves?"

ONE BILLION DOLLARS

Boeing says the IAM is asking for a billion dollars more than the company can pay and still remain competitive. How much less of that billion will the union leadership try to sell us and in what form? That's what "making a deal" is all about.

Is $1 billion all this strike is about, a struggle of IAM workers against the aerospace giant? Yes, but it's more. It's also part of the larger struggle of all workers against a capitalism preparing for endless wars that are grinding down every working man and woman. When we clearly see ourselves as waging a fight for our class and not just for ourselves, we have the potential to give leadership to the working class internationally.

Just as the bosses pay attention to every strike to gauge the mood of the workers, so the working class takes note of strikes. The potential to inspire our class to stand up for itself and fight for our own future is always there.

In this spirit two in our group said they could find a hall to show a movie. Another woman said she had a friend at the school district who would lend us a DVD projector. Two others are going to check out the films "Salt of the Earth" and "Matewan."

Can large things come from small beginnings? We aim to find out.

PLP in LA: `Only group calling for what's needed . . .'

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 24 -- "Iraq and Katrina, one and the same -- the capitalist system is a death game!" was one of Progressive Labor Party's chants heard by many of the 15,000 people who marched through downtown today protesting the occupation and war in Iraq. Many were young. All were angry. PLP's anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist politics stood out among the liberal anti-Bush and pacifist chants. Our contingent flew the red flag high for all to see.

This enthusiastic group, composed mainly of high school students, gave great leadership. Two young women led the chant: "The workers, united, will never be defeated! Obreros, unidos, jamas seran vencidos!" as well as rounds of "Fight Back" related to the war, the Boeing strike, the hurricane response and police terror. One comrade spoke attacking capitalism as the cause of both the imperialist war and the racist destruction after the hurricanes. PLP made a splash as the only communist group as well as a serious youth-led contingent. One man said, "You're the only group here calling for what's needed."

We distributed 1,000 CHALLENGES and 2,400 leaflets to the interested marchers, linking the Boeing strike, the imperialist war and Katrina. We pointed out that the workers, soldiers and youth are crucial to organizing a mass PLP to end imperialist war with communist revolution. Our attacks on imperialism and capitalism offered an obvious alternative to the pro-Democratic Party politics of many of the liberal groups that "led" the march. The students who helped lead our contingent left the march inspired to do more, not only on their own campuses, but also to discuss how to actually combat the system of capitalism that causes war and fascism.

Many were glad to receive CHALLENGE and gave donations. Quite a few gave their names to be contacted for upcoming events. Marchers as well as onlookers encouraged us to distribute more papers.

RAISE MONEY FOR ANTI-RACIST FIGHTERS

Nine anti-racist members and friends of Progressive Labor Party face trials in Los Angeles, Bridgewater, NJ and Farmingville, LI, NY, for fighting the KKK-type anti-immigrant Minutemen racists. They follow a long PLP tradition of fighting the bosses' racist thugs. The legal costs of defending these anti-racists amount to some $60,000. We're asking all CHALLENGE readers and friends to donate whatever they can.

Send checks or Money orders made out to Challenge Periodicals and mail to PLP, GPO Box 808, Brooklyn, NY 11202, USA

Bronx H.S. Seniors Sit-Down Fights Attack on Counselors

BRONX, NY, Oct. 3 -- On Thursday, September 29, about 200 seniors at John F Kennedy H.S. sat down in front of the principal's office, protesting the excessing (removal from their Kennedy jobs) of four counselors. Five other counselors were excessed in June, cutting the total counselor staff by nearly 70%. Four counselors are now expected to serve approximately 3,500 students.

The seniors depend on their counselors for help with college applications, guaranteeing all graduation requirements are met and for advice on other problems. When they learned they were losing their counselors, they questioned the administration. With no real answers forthcoming, the students sat down.

Immediately assistant principal Rashid Davis showed his fascist colors, frantically dialing his cell phone (presumably trying to reach the police), screaming, "I know how to deal with a riot! Hose them down!" Teachers old enough to remember the 1960's immediately thought, "Now his name is Bull Connor?" (the Birmingham police chief who used dogs, hoses and other violent attacks on civil rights marchers).

The seniors continued their protest until forced out of the building by security. Once outside some underclassmen who had joined the seniors were arrested by the cops. Many teachers were furious at the principal and gave the students "thumbs up" as they passed the protesters, a change from often previous support for the administration.

In meetings after the demonstration and on Friday and Monday, many students told how the principal had tried to convince them to go along with the excessing, saying he had no choice: "It was either the counselors or teachers. Do you want your classes bigger?" Some choice! Students said, "He [the principal] lies to us all the time!" Some students are beginning to realize the administration is their enemy and won't do anything to improve students' education. Many understand the fight must continue.

Students need to learn that racism is intrinsic to capitalism and guarantees that working-class students won't get a real education, especially at Kennedy where the vast majority of students are black and Latino. These are the youth U.S. rulers depend on for cannon fodder in Iraq and other imperialist wars. As students learn the true nature of not only their high school but also of the entire capitalist system, they'll realize they must fight against being used by their class enemy.

Under Communism

The Elimination of Schistosomiasis in Early Revolutionary China

Schistosomiasis is a parasitic disease that today ravages 200 million adults and children throughout the Middle East, Africa, Central and South America and Asia. It's caused by a small worm that enters through the skin. Its egg hatches inside tiny river snails and the worms are discharged into the water. The worms' eggs are discharged in the stool of infected persons. In stool-contaminated rivers the eggs are eaten by the snails and repeat the cycle.

The worms cause holes and obstruction in the intestines, bleeding and anemia, enlargement of the spleen, malnutrition and death. Children fail to grow and develop. Adults become sterile. Suffering is unimaginable.

But in the 1950's and 1960's, Chinese workers, led by their Communist Party (CCP), eliminated the disease by preventing exposure to, and contamination of, river water and by eliminating the snails, the latter through a mass campaign. The CCP sent health workers to teach the population about the disease, inspiring the workers with understanding, firing their enthusiasm, releasing their initiative and tapping their wisdom as to how to carry out the campaign.

The disease was concentrated around the lower Yangtze River, infecting more than 10 million people. The workers were mobilized to search for and stamp out millions of snails. They burned riverside vegetation and temporarily drained waterways. Where bridges made this impractical, they sprayed poisonous chemicals sparingly. Without ending the disease cycle, those treated would just contract it again.

All these steps were developed and carried out by the farm workers, often at great personal discomfort from the boredom, heat and mosquitoes, but led and inspired particularly by past sufferers of the disease. By relying on the workers, the CCP learned from them how to spread the campaign to other regions. For years, soldiers from the People's Liberation Army, students, teachers and office workers volunteered to help.

Once prevention was underway, all infected victims had to be found and treated. Everyone was instructed to submit stool samples, but many didn't treat this seriously. Workers who had suffered from the disease publicized its horrors, producing cooperation. The sufferers were treated with medicines and, when necessary, with surgery to remove massively swollen spleens or to relieve intestinal obstruction.

In 1955, when the effort began, some wanted to rely on a few "experts" from Shanghai, whose work proceeded slowly while the disease spread. Only with the reliance on the millions of workers themselves was the disease reversed. The class struggle between those who advocated reliance on "experts" and those who relied on the masses of workers was fierce and unrelenting. Wherever the former had the upper hand the disease flourished. Only where reliance on the masses won out was the disease driven back. Eventually the snails were eliminated in wide areas of China, but constant vigilance was necessary to prevent their return.

Under communism, vigilance and continued class struggle for communist theory and practice can never be relaxed. With them, monumental achievements in health and in all other human needs became the order of the day. Horribly for the Chinese workers and for workers worldwide, the class struggle there has been reversed. Capitalism's return to China has caused a return and increase of many diseases, including cancer, heart disease and stroke, as exploitation and oppression of the workers accelerates. But this situation, while long-lasting, is nevertheless temporary. One day workers will again seize power. The capitalists and the snails will again be eliminated.

(Source: "Away With All Pests," by Joshua Horn.)

U.S. Constitution: The Illusion of Democracy

Book Review: "Toward an American Revolution -- Exposing the Constitution and Other Illusions," by Jerry Fresia, South End Press, Boston, MA, 1988.

From "liberals" to "conservatives," Congress and the media have been promoting a guessing game: will closed-mouth John Roberts, Bush's nominee for Supreme Court Chief Justice "follow the Constitution" or give free rein to his right-wing political views, thus hastening the erosion of hard-won rights for women, black people and the working class in general?

Behind this game lies an unquestioned assumption, namely that the Constitution protects the working and middle classes from oppression. But Fresia shows nothing could be further from the truth.

Actually, the Constitution was intended to be, and always has been, an instrument of the capitalist class to protect its wealth from former slaves and the working class, and initially to protect the slave-owners from the northern bankers and manufacturers.

Disguised as "protecting" us from terrorism by non-governmental groups, executive orders and laws have been issued recently that permit increased wiretapping and electronic surveillance, holding anyone the government chooses in extended arbitrary detention without trial, carrying out military tribunals with no appeal rights, and many other forms of governmental oppression.

But workers cannot appeal to the Constitution for protection from these orders and laws, since, as Fresia shows, they're all completely consistent with it. Abundant quotes reveal that the men (and they were all men) who wrote the Constitution intended to protect profit-making property-owners from the working class.

Furthermore the Constitution was sneaked through by the slave-owners over the anticipated objections of certain state legislatures whose populations -- fresh from an anti-colonial war against the British aristocracy -- were up in arms over the even greater oppression they now faced at the hands of domestic property-owners.

The Constitution's first 10 amendments -- the Bill of Rights -- are often touted as a guarantee of freedom from government oppression. The Bill of Rights, however, doesn't even address the right to participate in government, only protection from it, and only for capitalists at that. And there is nothing protecting workers from their bosses. Lincoln's famous claim that this is a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" was then, and continues to be, a bald-faced lie.

Fresia gives detailed proof, intentionally or not, that supports Marx's and Lenin's declaration that all states (governments) serve only the interests of the class that owns the means of production, meanwhile drowning the interests of the oppressed and exploited (literally, in New Orleans).

For example, the Constitution's authors, including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison (first, third, and fourth U.S. presidents), owned vast amounts of property, listed by Fresia, including hundreds of slaves. He proves how they designed the Constitution to protect themselves from rebellion by those workers who generate the profits -- whether through chattel or wage slavery.

Bush is only one of the latest in a huge long and dishonorable line of wealth accumulators who display total contempt for workers -- most particularly, black and now Latin workers -- generated by a fear of losing this profit-making property. Murderous racism is no accident. It was and is designed as an insurance policy against united rebellion by the oppressed and exploited.

Fresia updates it all with the secret operations of the CIA and private mercenaries who assassinate, train in torture techniques, and otherwise blaze a trail worldwide to secure U.S. corporate profits. He details how the Constitution encourages and protects these secret operations in worldwide terrorism, and enables the government to wage war for oil in the Middle East, killing millions in the process. Significantly, he also shows how the non-violent and peace-directed approach of modern protest movements prevent effective opposition to the ruling class.

In summary, the book helps destroy the illusion that somehow things have "gone drastically wrong" in recent years. The fact is that conditions have been drastically wrong for the great majority of us for over 200 years. The book's major weakness is that Fresia never poses the only solution, a working-class revolution for a communist system. For the alert reader, this conclusion is all but inescapable.

LETTERS

Military Families Must Expand Struggle

George Bush was not in Washington, D.C. on Sept. 24, but tens of thousands of angry workers, students, and soldiers were. We were there to rally, march and shout about our opposition to the oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our disgust for the bosses' racist disaster in New Orleans. Indeed, one of the march highlights of over 250,000 people was stopping in front of the White House and chanting "George Bush (Cheney, politicians, ruling class, etc.) you can't hide,...We charge you with genocide."

The marchers were delighted to join our militant chanting. There were no marshals to provide information or direction in order to move people in a safe and serious way. At times, the crowd was forced into small spaces and against cement barriers, causing people to be crushed.

One of the few groups that had organized security was the Campus Anti-War Network, with signs that read "College, Not Combat." A marcher close to a PLP member commented how elitist that sounded. A better slogan would have been, "Students, workers, and soldiers unite."

Some PLP members marched with their union, like SEIU and the ATU at D.C. Metro. Others came with church or community groups. The military groups (Military Families Speak Out-MFSO-VVAW, IVAW, Veterans for Peace, and Gold Star Families for Peace) were supposed to lead the march. But the March leaders decided to let celebrities like Jesse Jackson march at the front, with only a few military group members.

The following day, a national MFSO meeting took place. Many people had been in Crawford, Texas with Cindy Sheehan, and had been part of the cross-country bus tour that wound up in D.C. for the march. Some had loved ones who had been killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Their grief brought many to tears, but also brought anger against the war-makers. A few raised the question, "Where do we go from here." One person said MFSO should issue a statement of solidarity with thousands of Katrina victims, tying the racist nature of the economic draft to the bosses' criminal neglect towards these workers. The leadership cut off discussion on this idea, saying we should "stick to the issues."

Until recently, MFSO had been active mostly on the Internet, with only a few chapters sponsoring meetings or events. Emphasis has been on media coverage, and convincing politicians to call for an immediate U.S. troop withdrawal. Many felt it was time for a change. Some good ideas were raised about expanding the organization, including going to high schools and exposing the recruiters' lies, and forming groups of health care workers to advocate/agitate for better care for returning soldiers. Several people called for a campaign to integrate this mostly white, educated group. One person suggested reaching out to more oppressed military family members who live on or near the big bases.

The struggle within this group will sharpen. The leadership has many very loyal supporters. There's way too much faith in the system. We must continue to build ties with those who are ready to take the next step. Pleading with government officials or even militant marches won't get us what we need. And we are fighting for tens of thousands of families in Iraq who are grieving because their loved ones have been sacrificed on the altar of ExxonMobil, BP, Halliburton, etc.

PLP's goal is to unite workers, soldiers and students from Baghdad to Washington, DC, from Kabul to Newark, to fight for a society without any bosses and their imperialist wars. We have a long road ahead, but the seeds for this revolution are being planted in the small things we do today.

NJ Red

Worker-Student Unity On Chicago Bus to D.C.

As the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq grows daily, the economic gap between the rich and poor widens. As inter-imperialist rivalries sharpen, so does working-class discontent grow. It is for these reasons that hundreds of thousands traveled to Washington on the weekend of September 24-25 to voice their views.

While the march on Saturday may have been rather uneventful, the most memorable actions for us (two PLP members in our late teens), occurred during the trip to and from Washington.

On Friday afternoon people boarded buses throughout Chicago. Our bus was filled with local union members, professionals, high school and college students.

As we started, the bus captain asked people to come forward and say something about themselves and why they were making the trip. One worker made a profound statement when recounting a conversation he had with a co-worker. He said it was risky for him to be taking such a trip because of his health problems. "If I die at least I know I died doing something!"

A young college student stated that once she reached Washington she would link up with friends who have been vocal not just in the anti-war movement, but also in spreading awareness of the plight facing Coca-Cola workers in South America. She explained the situation and made the connection between the fight of these workers and the exploitation of our class world-wide.

When it was our turn, we said we aimed to show this was an issue far bigger than just the Bush administration. We stated we were PLP members and were fighting for a communist society, controlled by those who produce everything in society, not by a small ruling class. We answered the question of our mission by starting the chant: "Racism means: We got to fight back! Police state means: We got to fight back! Bush administration means: We got to fight back! Labor splits mean: We got to fight back! Capitalism means: We got to fight back!"

At one stop a UAW member told me of his fight against Apartheid in South Africa, how he was motivated by the actions of the South African unions, and the communists' role in that struggle. After seeing how no one person held a power greater than that of the collective, he was motivated to return and work at implementing changes in his local.

During a rest stop, one of three young sisters traveling with their mother asked where my friend was. I said my comrade had gone to eat. They asked me what the term "comrade" meant. I explained that as communists, there is a bond between us that we express by saying "comrade." This was repeated on the ride back as we distributed CHALLENGE. We declared that our mission in life -- to fight for freedom from exploitation at the hands of capitalism -- created a very strong and special bond among us. And that's why we fight for communism.

Young Red

`Bet there will be some different ideas here'

I went to the Sept. 24 anti-war demonstration in Washington with fellow comrades and others. Though the bus ride got us off to a rocky start, overall it was a good experience. Unfortunately the people in charge hadn't ordered enough buses, so some latecomers were left behind. And the bus leader did not promote collectivity among everyone.

However, this atmosphere changed when we arrived in Washington and joined the demonstration. We chanted and spread our revolutionary ideas to those around us, inspiring enthusiasm among them. They chanted along with us and some even spoke on the bullhorn

I began distributing CHALLENGES amongst the crowd. Many people took one and thanked me. Several became more interested once they saw the words "revolutionary" and "communist." One lady said, "I bet there will be some different ideas in here."

When I ran out of papers I returned to my group to get more, plunging again into the crowd, reaching people I hadn't reached before. I was proud of how many people I had exposed to revolutionary ideas and opinions.

When we were done marching we relaxed on the grass but soon I gathered up some leaflets and began distributing them to people in the area. All in all, it had been a good march and trip.

Returning to school on Monday, my English teacher asked me what I did on the weekend. I told her about the demonstration in Washington. She said she had heard about it and asked how it went. I told her it was good.

Showing this letter in CHALLENGE to my friends and other students will help bring my experience at the demonstration to them.

Brooklyn Student

`Whole gov't system has to change . . .'

On September 24, we went to the LA march protesting the war in Iraq. I chanted and helped with the bullhorn while others distributed flyers and posters. As the people ahead of me began to march, a huge rush of adrenalin came over me. I remembered one chant from May Day, "Las luchas obreras no tienen fronteras!" ("Workers have no borders!") We chanted that and lots of others like, "Bush and the Democrats, one and the same; fascism is the name of their game."

We've been meeting at school over lunch to organize a club on campus and to mobilize for the march. Everyone was wearing stickers we passed out two days before the march: "Stop the War in Iraq, March 9/24/2005." We distributed flyers and taped them to the walls, and more students really started getting into it.

We've also attended meetings with college students to organize a November conference against the war. They've encouraged us to raise our opinions. We've also gone to PLP study groups where we've learned about the war and Katrina and how to organize against such horrors.

Something we've discussed is "Life after Bush," because although some are organizing for a walkout to "Drive out the Bush Regime," we think it doesn't really matter who comes after Bush -- the Republicans and Democrats are pretty much the same and it's the whole government system that has to change.

West Coast Student

Immigrants in France: `Used up, thrown away'

Racism against immigrant workers is a worldwide capitalist phenomenon. A French national radio program (10/2) reported on the country's aging population of North African immigrants who entered France in the 1960's, presumably to work short-term and then return home, with no provision for them to remain here.

When reaching retirement age, they often find it difficult getting benefits due them. Very checkered employment histories require assembling lots of documents from many employers to calculate their benefits. Some have problems filling out forms, not being proficient in French. They make use of the French health system at one-third the rate of others in their age group.

Poverty-stricken, they continue to live in "foyers," public housing for laborers so rudimentary, they're smaller than studio apartments. As they age, their increasing health problems require a different kind of facility but no money is provided for that.

They don't return to their home countries for various reasons. Some are ashamed to return to their villages in Morocco or Algeria after having promised they'd be back driving a fancy car and loaded with money. But after a lifetime as a laborer here, that's impossible. Generally they feel they've failed and wasted their lives, leading to very low self-esteem, neuroses and other mental problems.

After spending nearly 40 years in France, some no longer have family or friends in North Africa. They aren't really French, but are no longer North African. They're stuck in the middle of a capitalism system which has failed them on two continents.

Some, of course, have raised a family in France and so want to stay to be with their children and grandchildren. But the latter are too poor to lift their parents out of poverty. Others also have health problems that cannot be treated in North Africa and are better off taking advantage of the French health system rather than returning to their native country, ruled by fascistic agents of one imperialist power or another.

The radio program noted that this problem has been developing for 40 years. It increasingly became clear that these immigrant workers wouldn't be returning home, leaving France with a large number of impoverished and aged day laborers. No French government ever provided for these workers.

The French have an expression for this: "Workers are treated like Kleenex -- used up and then thrown away. That's capitalism!

A Reader in France

French Subcontractors Use Bankruptcy to Screw Immigrants

My wife and I saw a French documentary on the Saint Nazaire shipyards, covering the building of the ocean liner Queen Mary 2 in 2002-2003. The film exposes subcontracting as a way for the bosses to make super-profits.

The shipyards require the subcontractors to do the same work for less and less money -- 5% less year after year. Subcontractors able to win the bids are subsidiaries of major firms. These subsidiaries are under-capitalized.

The subsidiaries hire foreign workers (from India and Romania in this film), pay them rock-bottom wages, then no wages, and then eventually go belly-up.

The shipyards are happy because they get the work done at a very cheap price. When one subcontractor goes bankrupt, they just bring in another one. The major firms are happy because they skim the profits off the subsidiaries before they go under. The workers get screwed because there's no way for them to recover their unpaid back wages once the subcontractor has gone bankrupt.

While the film explains very well how this works, and graphically depicts the human consequences for the workers, it doesn't show any way of fighting the system.

It does present French and immigrant workers supporting each other, but the French trade unions are clearly outgunned. They don't have the funds or the legal expertise to fight the bosses' scheme in the bosses' courts, and nowhere does the film pose the idea of all the workers striking together, instead of each group of foreign workers walking out individually, isolated from the others, when it is already too late, when they haven't been paid for weeks or months, and when their subcontractor is about to file for bankruptcy,

A Friend from France

Communist Future Not `Utopian'

The Oct. 5 letter criticizing the Sept. 21st "Under Communism" article on Katrina is wrong and superficial. For example, the letter states:

* "First, even if we're living in a pure communist world, at least some people will die during any disaster, even with prevention." This is wrong. A hurricane is predicted long in advance. Cuba evacuates everybody from hurricanes, normally without loss of live. Is Cuba "utopia"?

* "Thus, our ability to help those experiencing natural disasters would face severe limits" because of capitalists' viciousness. Sure, but that's true about everything. The example of Cuba is relevant here too. The Katrina article was not about "superior technique" at all, or any technique. Choosing to protect and defend the working class instead of profits is not "technique," but politics.

As for the characterization that the Katrina article was "utopian," I'd add, "Why should people become communists? Why should we give our lives fighting for it?" The vision of a communist society is that of a shining, wonderful future. "Utopian" implies a lack of struggle. Communist society will be full of struggle, but struggle for a better world and life for all workers.

This is an immensely inspiring vision. We must hold out this bright future to inspire ourselves and others. Our vision of the future is what gives us the strength to work for communism in the present. We should depict the communist future as infinitely preferable to the capitalist present and future, because it IS infinitely better and more beautiful. To call this inspiring vision "utopian" is a form of cynicism.

I thought the original article was very good.

N.J. reader

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

Says abuse should be blamed on higher-ups

WASHINGTON, Sept.27 -- An Army captain who reported new allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq said Tuesday that Army investigators seemed more concerned about tracking down young soldiers who reported misconduct than in following up the accusations and investigating [of]...higher-ranking officers....

In a Sept. 18 letter to the senators, Captain Fishback wrote, "Despite my efforts, I have been unable to get clear, consistent answers from my leadership about what constitutes lawful and humane treatment of detainees. I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment."

...Investigators who have questioned him in the past 10 days seemed to be less interested in individuals he identified in his chain of command who allegedly committed the abuses....

"I'm...concerned this will take a new twist, and they'll try to scapegoat some of the younger soldiers. This is a leadership problem."

...When he took his complaints to his immediate superiors, Captain Fishback said his company commander cautioned him to "remember the honor of the unit is at stake." (NYT, 9/28)

Louisiana worker gives up on gov't aid

...Dartanian Sanders, a laborer from Abita Springs. LA.,...spent three days driving through two states seeking help for his family. "The lesson is...counting on the government in an emergency is like sending your kids to the candy store where the guy is selling drugs." (NYT, 9/24)

Iraq: Saudi Prince warns of regional war

WASHINGTON, Sept.22 -- Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said Thursday that he had been warning the Bush administration in recent days that Iraq was hurtling toward disintegration, a development that he said could drag the region into war.

The prince said...the potential disintegration of Iraq into Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish states would "bring other countries in the region into the conflict."

Turkey, he noted, has long threatened to send troops into northern Iraq if the Kurds there declare independence. Iran, he asserted, is already sending money and weapons into the Shitte-controlled south of Iraq.... (NYT, 9/23)

In US Jails, 9,700 were lifers before age 18

About 9,700 American prisoners are serving life sentences for crimes they committed before they could vote, serve on a jury or gamble at a casino -- in short, before they turned 18. More than a fifth have no chance of parole....

"It broke my heart," said Steven Sharp, [jury] foreman... "It's terrible to put a 15-year-old behind bars forever."

The United States is one of only a handful of countries that does that. Life without parole, the most severe form of life sentence, is theoretically available for juvenile criminals in about a dozen countries. But a report to be issued on Oct. 12. by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found juveniles serving such sentences in only three others. Israel has seven, South Africa has four and Tanzania has one.

...More than 350 of them were 15 or younger....

Juvenile lifers are overwhelmingly male and mostly black... (NYT, 10/3)

Foreign investment leaves Africa worse off

The large inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI) into Africa since 2000 looks good on paper but is unlikely to deliver lasting benefits to Africans, according to a United Nations report.

"...the resulting outflow of profits may be so high as to make it a substantial cost. Production...displaces local firms."

Multinationals often shield profits from a developing country's tax authorities depriving it of vital revenues. Mr Kozul-Wright said capital flight from Africa, by rich people or multinationals, was a huge problem....

...The global tax avoidance industry causes $500bn a year to flow out of developing countries, dwarfing the $78bn annual aid inflow. (GW, 9/29)

For 91% of poorest, no college degree

...The gap between rich and poor is widening. Students in the poorest quarter of the population have an 8.6 percent chance of getting a college degree. Students in the top quarter have a 74.9 percent chance. (NYT, 9/25)

Pols fail, so Religion helps rulers fool us

Most people believe that their government does not act according to their wishes, a worldwide opinion survey shows. Lack of confidence in governments is highest in the former Soviet bloc, where 75% say their country is not governed by the will of the people. But similar views are held by most Europeans (64%) and North Americans (60%).

...Worldwide, politicians represent the least trusted occupation, scoring only 13%....In the US 50% trust religious leaders and 40% would give them more power. (GW, 9/29)

 

a href="#Bosses’ Racism the Real Disaster for workers">"osses’ Racism the Real Disaster for workers

a href="#Liberals’ Blueprint for a Police State">"iberals’ Blueprint for a Police State

a href="#Liberals Use Katrina To Push ‘National Service’">Li"erals Use Katrina To Push ‘National Service’

Fickle Workers?

• Turning Fickle Into Fight . . .
• a href="#…And Fight into Revolution">"And Fight into Revolution

a href="#U.S. Hides GIs’ Huge Mental Casualties">".S. Hides GIs’ Huge Mental Casualties

a href="#Stern’s Pro-Boss Politics Mirror Nazi’s ‘Labor Front’">Stern’" Pro-Boss Politics Mirror Nazi’s ‘Labor Front’

Grinding Down The Working Class

D.C. Metro Workers Reject Pro-War Patriotism at Union Conference

a href="#Protest Links Racist Attacks on Katrina’s Victims to Rulers’ War in Iraq">Pr"test Links Racist Attacks on Katrina’s Victims to Rulers’ War in Iraq

Nationalist Pols Undercut Militant March vs. Racist Minutemen

Stories of Police Terror and Worker Solidarity in New Orleans

a href="#Immigrant Workers: ‘Braceros’, Cannon Fodder or Revolutionaries?">Im"igrant Workers: ‘Braceros’, Cannon Fodder or Revolutionaries?

a href="#GI’s in Iraq Get Pizza, Laptops and Death by Mortar">"I’s in Iraq Get Pizza, Laptops and Death by Mortar

Raise Money for Anti-Racist Fighters

a href="#Liberals Aim to Turn Cindy Sheehan’s Fight into ‘Anybody-but-Bush’">Libe"als Aim to Turn Cindy Sheehan’s Fight into ‘Anybody-but-Bush’

1,500 Students Walk Out Against Prison-like School

U.S. Constitution: Document of, by and for the Ruling Class

a href="#‘Diamonds Are Forever’ Soaked in Blood">‘D"amonds Are Forever’ Soaked in Blood

Workers are the Real 'Saints'

UNDER COMMUNISM - China eliminated syphilis in the early years of the revolution.

LETTERS

PLP Impresses D.C. Metro Worker

a href="#PL’ers Help Stop Transportation Firings">"L’ers Help Stop Transportation Firings

Primary Lessons of Katrina

Touts Book on Big Bill Haywood Trial

No Cops Under Communism

Becoming Fighters for Communism

a href="#Politics Primary in Fighting ‘Natural’ Disasters">Po"itics Primary in Fighting ‘Natural’ Disasters

Challenge Correction:

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

• Black enlistment drops by 40 percent
• Don’t look to Democrats to change US plan
• Using hurricane as excuse for low wages
• Top bosses grab $400 to worker’s $1
• Russia Counter-Revolution Bleeds the People
• Kill Chavez? In ’03 Robertson had other idea
• High-tech army fails imperialist task

• ---

a name="Bosses’ Racism the Real Disaster for workers">">"osses’ Racism the Real Disaster for workers

The profit system and its racism caused most of the death and misery following hurricane Katrina. Millions have seen the racist criminal nature of the U.S. bosses. But it’s not just Bush or some inept bureaucrats. Workers and their allies must be won to see that it’s the whole capitalist system, and that the only long-range answer is to fight for a society without bosses and their racism and profit wars. That answer is communism.

Tens of thousands, mostly black workers, could have been evacuated from the storm’s path. Dams could have been built and levees reinforced years ago. Most of the damage and suffering could have been anticipated and prevented.

But capitalism once again proved that maximum profits and the war budget trump human sacrifice. Then, after failing to avert the avoidable, government at every level subjected the stricken to inhuman conditions. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands face unemployment in a "refugee crisis" without precedent in U.S. history. (New York Times, 9/11)

The Bush gang stands as guilty of mass murder by neglect in the U.S. Gulf Coast as they are of mass murder by gunfire and bombing in their filthy Persian Gulf oil war. Now the liberal politicians and media are lambasting them for their callous racism, greed and refusal to heed decades-long warnings pointing to such a catastrophe. Correct. But if these bosses are pushing this, something else is afoot here.

I name="t’s More Than Bush…"></">t’" More Than Bush…

Beware of the liberals. In fact, the liberal bosses pose a far greater danger to our class than Bush & Co. They want to channel popular outrage at the Katrina atrocity, and mass solidarity with its victims, into demands for a stronger police state, beefed-up armed forces and a general militarization of society. Bush’s presidency has proved woefully ineffective in carrying out the liberals’ agenda for U.S. world domination. The Iraq quagmire shows that the forces the Bush White House has fielded don’t meet today’s challenges, let alone bigger future conflicts U.S. imperialism is bound to face.

The mass indignation and charity inspired by Katrina show that millions of U.S. workers have a deep aspiration to serve the people. This is good. But the liberals want to use that for an electoral movement to "throw the rascals out" of Washington and, worse yet, for a broad patriotic mobilization to fight and die for imperialism.

The storm’s track was known for days before it hit. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered the city evacuated but failed to provide for the 50,000 mainly black and poor households with no independent means of transportation. Hundreds of school and city transit buses sat in their lots. Yet the liberal media are now glorifying Nagin because he’s stridently criticized the Bush mob.

For half a century, scientists warned that New Orleans’ dams and levees wouldn’t withstand a powerful hurricane. In 1998, engineers devised "Coast 2050," a plan involving massive sea gates, like those built in the Netherlands after its 1953 disaster. Those gates might have saved the city. But the plan’s price tag was too high for Congress. In fact, Federal flood control spending for S.E. Louisiana was slashed in half between 2001 and 2005. As a result, the Army Corps of Engineers discontinued work on the levee system that could have protected New Orleans from flooding.

a name="Liberals’ Blueprint for a Police State">">"iberals’ Blueprint for a Police State

CHALLENGE readers will remember the Hart-Rudman Commission’s reports on National Security in the 21st Century — the liberal rulers’ "bi-partisan" blueprint for 20 years of a home-front police state and ever-widening wars to defend U.S. world domination, particularly of oil. Among other things, these reports proposed the National Guard function as a homeland Gestapo. Well, 40% of the Louisiana and Mississippi Guards are now in Iraq. A New York Times editorial (9/2) restated the Hart-Rudman thesis: "…the National Guard must be treated as America’s most essential homeland security force, not as some kind of military piggy bank for the Pentagon to raid for long-term overseas missions." For those, said the Times, "America clearly needs a larger active-duty Army."

From the beginning, the government’s inept response has been more of a military occupation than a relief effort. The Pentagon has shoved aside traditional aid organizations like the Red Cross and Salvation Army. While tens of thousands of victims ashore craved food and water, the Navy and Coast Guard immediately launched their largest domestic maneuvers since World War II, dispatching ships to secure oil rigs and shipping lanes.

But the liberals want still further militarization; they’re getting some. On September 9, Homeland Security replaced incompetent Bush crony Michael Brown with Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen as chief of FEMA operations along the Gulf. New York Senator Hillary Clinton, a leading candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, has introduced legislation to restore FEMA’s cabinet-level status and draw its top officials from the ranks of generals, admirals or police commissioners.

Liberal bosses also hope to use Katrina to reverse Bush’s tax-cuts-for-the-rich policy because it hampers imperialism’s ability to wage wars and implement a domestic police state. Alluding to the intensifying rivalry among the world’s top imperialists, the Times intoned (9/2): "Congress and the president had better get the message: an extraordinary time is upon the nation. The annihilation in New Orleans is an irrefutable sign that the national tax-cut party is over. So is the idea that Americans cannot be required to accept sacrifice or inconvenience."

a name="Liberals Use Katrina To Push ‘National Service’"></">Li"erals Use Katrina To Push ‘National Service’

But the liberals need millions of workers willing to give their labor power and lives freely to the capitalist state. On Labor Day, the Times cynically seized on the Katrina disaster to boost the liberals’ push for "national service," asking for Labor Day to be turned into "a day of national service." (See CHALLENGE, 9/21, p. 2). This is the same plan which flopped with the Kerry campaign.

But helping storm victims is not the service the liberal rulers really want or need. The 12 years of the liberal Carter and Clinton presidencies saw many opportunities to repair and improve New Orleans’ levees and dams.

From the Gulf of Mexico to the Persian Gulf, Demopublicans Call for More War

On September 7, as thousands festered and died in filth, a group of highly-placed liberal Democrat and Republican "statesmen" — "Partnership for a Secure America" — placed a full-page in the New York Times urging the nation to keep its eye on the imperialist ball. Warmakers and fascists among the signers included former secretaries of state Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher, as well as Hart and Rudman themselves. The ad pointedly didn’t mention the hurricane. Instead, it urged that leaders "from across the political spectrum…come together to develop a bi-partisan national strategy to address the terrorist threat." They called for more U.S. troops and more "allies" (i.e., European and other bosses whom U.S. imperialists might cut in on Iraqi oil profits) to achieve decisive victory in their current bloodbaths. The reasoning: "outcomes in places like Iraq and Afghanistan will affect global security for decades to come." This "Partnership" is bankrolled by the liberal, imperialist Rockefeller and Soros foundations, among others.

The rulers want to channel the sympathy for Katrina’s victims into its opposite: a deadly mass movement to help their class rule the world. The Katrina’s destruction will pale before the hundreds of millions of corpses imperialism will pile up in its pursuit of this goal. Charity won’t stop the bosses. Neither will an election that replaces Bush with a Democrat. A system that can build nuclear weapons and can murder workers by the millions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam but can’t repair dams and levees to protect workers and can’t transport children and old people out of harm’s way doesn’t deserve to exist. A system which cannot exist without launching wars that devastate humanity doesn’t deserve to survive.

Millions of U.S. workers have proved after Katrina that their hearts are in the right place. Many are open to radical ideas: disgust and anger at the Bush crowd’s antics have generated potential desire to discover the catastrophe’s true underlying causes and to take useful action. This mood provides an important opportunity for PLP. The aspiration to serve the people is crucial, but is insufficient. A communist analysis and communist practice are necessary to make it a reality for the working class. The best way to honor the victims of this and future capitalist atrocities is to build the PLP. Communism is a difficult goal, but it’s the only one worth fighting for — and eventually winnable.

Boeing Strikers Push Unity with Northwest Walkout, Katrina Victims

SEATTLE, WA, Sept. 16 — Contradictions have sharpened as the Boeing strike enters its third week. From the discussions and debates at union meetings and picket lines, barbershops, church fund-raisers for Katrina victims, breakfast and lunch meetings, one can tell strikers are coming to terms with the possibility of a long strike. At this date, no negotiations are scheduled.

Our questions — while inspired by the strike — go farther. How to explain the recent passivity of the U.S. working class? How does New Orleans, which most agree has exposed U.S. capitalism’s racism and anti-working class bias, relate to our struggle? Just who is our enemy? Certainly, Boeing CEO McNerney is, with his millions in salary and supplemental retirement. But what about a system that attacks us all to finance the bosses’ oil wars? Getting answers to these questions right will have as much to do with determining our future as the pension, medical and work-rules contained in the final contract settlement.

Fickle Workers?

"I think you will have trouble with scabs if this continues," warned a striker at a recent breakfast, noting that this is the first big industrial strike in a while. "Others fought before us, but too many are not willing to really fight now. I hate to say this, but I think your fellow workers are too fickle."

That kept the water boiling for a while! Everybody at the table had an opinion. Some argued that the only way to understand this behavior is to realize that we all have contradictions — contradictions between capitalist individualism and communist working-class consciousness. Fifty years of business unionism, combined with abject revisionism (acceptance of capitalist ideas in the erstwhile communist parties) that did in the old communist movement, have taken their toll.

"We don’t have the fight and fire deep in our soul that our predecessors had," said another striker, "We have to find that."

The working class will find that fight and fire when we develop a revolutionary communist vision of the future. Today, we must focus on recruiting and developing Party members who can lead the fight for this vision. They, in turn, must increase the circulation of our revolutionary communist paper, CHALLENGE, through expanding our network of readers and sellers. These networks will, in all likelihood, be the hub of any attempt to sharpen the struggle, like mass picket lines to stop scabs.

Good things happen when workers who are under increasing attack regularly read CHALLENGE. "They are always doing this," said one 62- year-old white striker and a relatively new reader, referring to the racist portrayal of black flood victims in New Orleans as looters. "I think it was you [a comrade] who showed me those articles on how the bosses’ media uses race to divide workers. You’d think we’d get it by now!"

Turning Fickle Into Fight . . .

One comrade striker told how she brought leaflets to her hair salon. Her half-hour appointment lasted hours. Her hair dresser took the flyers that urged "strike against a system that uses race and class to leave workers behind" and gave them to every customer. "She may not know it now, but she has a lot of communist ideas," said our comrade. (Strikers distributed a thousand of these flyers, linking New Orleans, our strike and the bosses’ oil wars, despite not being inside the plants.)

Discussions at the salon about New Orleans and the Boeing strike mixed with debates about racism on the job. "On my job, Mexicans told the boss we weren’t working hard enough," complained a black woman.

"Pitting one race against another makes the boss happy," answered our comrade. "We want to send the boss home stressed and unhappy so we’ve got to talk to these workers and beat racism". The hair dresser backed her up.

Strikers built on this concept of working-class unity at various union meetings during the last two weeks. The union misleaders’ concept of unity means supporting them in negotiations. They’ve staged intimidating shows of power at these meetings.

Apparently, not intimidating enough! Some rank-and-filers spoke about supporting the Northwest Airline strikers, which the leadership refused to do. The latter actually shut the meeting down before a resolution could be brought up. Others linked our struggle to New Orleans, saying that the mostly black workers "left behind" during the flood and in the Superdome had the same enemy as we did. The racist exploitation in subcontractor plants was detailed. All the gobbledygook about "how we are all Americans" was ridiculed. More still proposed additional ways to support Northwest strikers and Katrina flood victims. The hall burst into applause as one speaker ended, "Same enemy, same fight, all the world’s workers must unite!"

a name="…And Fight into Revolution">">"And Fight into Revolution

But even this applause revealed the contradictions within us. The same strikers who applauded the call for international working-class unity also applauded the union leadership’s nationalist, narrow trade union approach.

The bosses have state power now. Their labor lieutenants control the unions. It should be no surprise that their ideology dominates.

To turn this around we must understand the contradictions brought out by the strike in each and every one of us. The bosses want us to believe the lie that workers can’t be revolutionary leaders and that what we do doesn’t really matter. Quite the contrary, each worker who takes up the mantle of party membership and revolutionary leadership prepares for the day when our class thinks and acts in our own interests. Over time, our revolutionary vision will dominate. We will find the "fight and fire." Winning means preparing our class to take power.

U.S. Imperialism Attacks Workers from Baghdad to Boeing

Knowing that workers want to fight for something bigger than themselves, the union hacks frame this Boeing strike as a "fight for American workers." (Apparently, the hacks definition of "American" workers excludes Northwest strikers; Wichita commercial workers who were forced to vote and vote again until they agreed to wage, benefit and job cuts; and Lockheed strikers who the union was furious at because they overrode the hacks’ recommendation to accept the elimination of retiree medical benefits for new hires.) Even so, the term "American workers" excludes the majority of our class — and potential allies — not just in the U.S. but also throughout North and South America. Meanwhile, it sets us up for patriotic appeals to buttress the bosses’ oil wars, like in Iraq.

The chairman of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), the bosses’ main foreign policy think-tank, makes the case perfectly clear. He, along with his friends on the Boeing Board of Directors who are also CFR directors, says we must prepare for more "stunningly expensive" wars to control Mid-East oil. We have to choose, according to the bosses’ logic, "between retirement security and national security." Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board concludes "competitive outsourcing could be the answer" to the bosses’ funding problems. (Aerospace Daily, 2/3/2000)

We have everything in common with the workers in Baghdad, and nothing with CEO McNerney and the bosses on the CFR board. The question for us is: which class do we want the fruits of labor to serve — the bosses and their oil wars for imperialist domination or the worlds’ workers?

a name="U.S. Hides GIs’ Huge Mental Casualties">">".S. Hides GIs’ Huge Mental Casualties

It’s the toll the Department of Defense isn’t adding up for you.

[The latest] toll everyone knew was 1,834—Americans dead in combat. According to the Pentagon, the toll of war wounded was 13,877.

But TV’s The Mclaughlin Group doggedly reports another casualty toll….

When one adds mental illness to the mix, the cumulative casualty toll exceeds 43,200, reports show.

That’s a stunning figure. With a fighting force in the vicinity of 200,000 at any one time, that would make for one of the highest percentile casualty counts in modern warfare. (COX newspapers)

a name="Stern’s Pro-Boss Politics Mirror Nazi’s ‘Labor Front’"></a>St"rn’s Pro-Boss Politics Mirror Nazi’s ‘Labor Front’

(Our last issue exposed SEIU chief Andrew Strern’s intimate tie-in with the ruling class. Sitting on the Rockefeller/Ford-funded Aspen Domestic Strategy Group, Stern helps set these bosses’ policies in winning workers to back U.S. imperialism worldwide. Having split from Sweeney’s AFL-CIO, Stern is pushing the drafting of undocumented workers in exchange for citizenship, with the unions acting as draft boards. Stern wants to help the rulers control millions of immigrants by exploiting them in low-wage war production plants and using them as cannon fodder in the U.S. Army)

Unions proved very useful in mobilizing for World War II. The rulers entertain a similar hope for them now, as global conflicts loom over the horizon. But the movement Stern spearheads more resembles the German model for fascism than the U.S. model of the 1930’s and 1940’s. At that time, millions of U.S. workers in largely red-led unions sincerely believed they were fighting against fascism, despite the disastrous United Front policy of the Communist Party. Hitler’s Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party, the Nazis, on the other hand, abolished existing unions from the outset and set up an all-encompassing "Labor Front" with goals inseparable from German imperialism. Stern’s open collaboration with top capitalists on matters of national service, national security, and competitiveness forms part of broader plans to spill workers’ blood so that U.S. imperialism reigns supreme.

Hitler and his bosses succeeded temporarily — before the Soviet Red Army ground them into dust — because they had managed to win the bulk of the German working class to fight and die for Nazi ideology. Although the Stern breakaway reflects a similar aspiration on the part of U.S. liberal imperialists, their chances for success are far from certain. It’s been a long time since U.S. workers enthusiastically went to war for this rotten system. By the end of World War II, GIs were holding mass demonstrations against the idea of invading the Soviet Union or China. The Korean war saw a significant number of desertions and defections. The bosses’ Vietnam genocide gave its name to a "syndrome" that described mass rebellion, desertion, defection, and violence by U.S. troops against their own officers. U.S. soldiers’ morale today in Iraq is declining, with desertions and AWOL cases mounting.

"Vietnam Syndrome" therefore remains a significant monkey on the rulers’ back. Furthermore, the Stern gang has so far concentrated on service workers, who represent a growing sector of the economy and are extremely important. However, the big prize from the bosses’ viewpoint remains the workers in heavy industry, telecommunications, aerospace, and auto — the major war industries. The rulers have enjoyed relative labor peace for many years on this front. For this they can thank AFL-CIO bigwigs like Sweeney and the collapse of the old communist movement.

Grinding Down The Working Class

But, as the Stern phenomenon is attempting to show, passivity is no longer enough to meet imperialism’s needs. The bosses now require several generations of industrial and service workers in the tens of millions ready to kill and die to keep the U.S. on top. For years, the rulers have attempted to bribe large sections of the working class with the promise of material benefits like home ownership and the latest gadgets — cellphones, computers, whatever fad comes down the pike. Stern & Co., along with the think-tanks behind Hart-Rudman, are looking to replace this crass, individualistic consumerism with a modernized version of Hitlerite ideology, a kind of fascist "collective" spirit based on nationalism and sacrifice for whatever mask they put over their need to spill blood for maximum profit. This is all the more important to them as they have begun the process of grinding down the entire working class economically, not just millions of the most oppressed workers, who have had to live for years with high unemployment, little or no health insurance, etc. The rulers need desperately for us to march enthusiastically toward our own doom.

Well, the jury’s still out on their chances for success. The direction the working class takes in the coming years will determine the outcome. Ideology and the political organization that flows from it will determine that direction. Stern & Co. represent an early version of 21st century U.S. "National Socialism. "Two political errors can arise from our reaction to the Stern phenomenon. One is falling for it. The other is underestimating its danger.

The only antidote to this danger is the growth of the Progressive Labor Party and revolutionary communist consciousness and militancy among the same sections of the working class the Stern gang and its bosses are attempting to win.

D.C. Metro Workers Reject Pro-War Patriotism at Union Conference

DENVER—The contrast between communist and capitalist leadership stood out sharply at a recent conference for leaders of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU). Our group from the Washington, D.C. Metro Local of the ATU was multi-racial, multi-generational, and as one young worker said, "the future of Local 689." We went with the goal of building political consciousness among the Metro workers who attended and on raising the war in Iraq with the other locals there. This was the exact opposite with the thinly-veiled pro-capitalist transit "leaders," promoting spending all their members’ money on electing politicians, who they even admitted are hard to hold accountable.

The union hack opening the proceedings set the tone by announcing the conference theme: "being under threat." He said we live in "daily danger of attacks on our freedom and our way of life." From whom? The bosses and their attacks on unions? Or from the ruling class’s attack on the workers in New Orleans? No, he was explicitly advocating the racist "war on terrorism."

Every morning we were told to stand for the national anthems of Canada and the U.S. and then to remain standing for a moment of silent prayer. Many Metro workers were offended by both the flag-saluting and the prayer. Two of our members refused to stand.

On the closing day, one misleader gave a speech about the flag, how it "stands for freedom and respect for the soldiers who have died fighting for that freedom." When the conference stood to applaud this pro-imperialist harangue, the entire contingent of Local 689 members remained seated. It was a great show of solidarity and power.

One comrade took the microphone to say, "When the U.S. and Russian soldiers met at the Elbe [River in Germany] in World War II, they sang the Internationale. They didn’t salute different flags; they united as workers under the red flag." Another comrade said, "The flag to me stands as a symbol of the oppression in this country. As a black man, I know that flag makes me three-fifths of a man. We were brought here in chains and suffered under that symbol of freedom."

When he finished, someone from another local shouted, "Want a plane ticket?" Six members of local 689 approached this racist and demanded a clarification. He backed off, stating he didn’t mean anything by his comment and that he was "a Native American."

Besides us, the only other mention of the war in Iraq came from the speaker on "terrorism and how to spot it." He distributed a list of "the worst offenders" of "state-sponsored terrorism" and the U.S. was not on it, causing someone to yell out, "the CIA!"

Near the end of the conference, one young Metro worker cited the need for solidarity between young and old workers, and for a fight against racist wage progressions. His speaking affected the other young workers he was working with; they saw his leadership and the need to speak out.

Another older comrade said the future of the labor movement shouldn’t rely on begging politicians, but on raising class consciousness through mass actions and demonstrations. He said the labor movement needs to be in the forefront of fighting the divisions within the working class such as racism and anti-immigrant attacks.

All this was an eye-opening experience for many workers in our contingent. It was very clear that these union leaders didn’t want to change society at all, or even build the labor movement. As one young worker commented, "They’re held bondage to their paychecks and nice suits and houses."

The conversations throughout the conference were the most important aspect of attending. We built commitment to organizing for the upcoming anti-war march in D.C., and built leadership among the younger workers who attended. Other local unions responded to our ideas and will be attending the anti-war rally at the union hall. We will continue to work with them to build class consciousness in the union and in our neighborhoods.

a name="Protest Links Racist Attacks on Katrina’s Victims to Rulers’ War in Iraq"></">Pr"test Links Racist Attacks on Katrina’s Victims to Rulers’ War in Iraq

NEWARK, NJ, Sept. 9 — Demonstrating at the Federal Building, over 50 college students, workers and community activists protested the racist and anti-working class treatment of our fellow workers in Louisiana and Mississippi. Linking the events of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, PLP members emphasized that racism and imperialism are not just part of the Bush administration, but two elements necessary to capitalism. A speaker also criticized the demand, "Troops out of Iraq, Troops into New Orleans," saying the National Guard’s role is to protect the bosses from working-class fight-backs, not to protect workers from these disasters. Actually the rulers are using the Katrina disaster to increasingly militarize civil society (see front-page article).

Although many participants were from liberal-led organizations, they joined chants, such as "From New Orleans to Iraq, the working class must fight back," and "Racism here, imperialism there; the struggle is growing everywhere." People responded very positively whenever speakers indicted capitalism, rather than merely blaming the Bush Administration. People bought 100 CHALLENGES.

The multi-racial demonstration of both young and old showed the importance of developing ties in these organizations, on the job, on campuses and in our communities. This led to the size and character of the rally. More importantly, it demonstrated that the working class is open to real left ideas. While many don’t have a communist analysis of capitalism, Katrina enabled them to see there’s a problem with "the system," that we need to do more than impeach Bush, a common call just weeks before this action.

Right now it’s important to talk to our friends, classmates and co-workers about events in Louisiana and Mississippi, and explain that one cannot talk about "race and class" without connecting them to how capitalism uses racism to divide and exploit all workers. As these events have shown, capitalism is not the answer for the working class, whether in Iraq or New Orleans. This is why we need to build a communist party that will represent the interests of workers worldwide. The bosses will fight back with everything they have to make sure our class doesn’t take state power, so we must fight back even harder to make sure it happens.

Nationalist Pols Undercut Militant March vs. Racist Minutemen

AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 17 — One thousand people from many Texas cities marched against the racist Minutemen at the State Capitol today. The Minutemen are a vigilante group like the Klan who harass and threaten immigrant workers along the border and at day labor sites from California to New York, claiming to be protecting jobs for white workers. Some politicians are trying to deputize these thugs to enlarge the Border Patrol.

Many workers and students joined the march along the route. Marchers chanted, "Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Racist Minutemen Have Got to Go." Near the Capitol, a half dozen racist thugs chanted anti-immigrant and anti-communist filth. They were surrounded by around 30 marchers, including PL students, who shouted, "Fight capitalism, not other workers," shutting them down until they finally left.

Some marchers questioned how much these thugs represent white workers’ sentiment. But just as with most KKK appearances, only five or six were ready to show up. Clearly these vigilantes are class enemies who should be physically smashed when they appear, in order to help stop a fascist movement from growing in the U.S.

Although the march was tremendously anti-racist, it was organized and controlled by liberal Mexican and Chicano groups like LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), and Hispanic AFL-CIO organizers who tried to turn the day into a nationalist and cultural festival. After excellent chants opposing racism and defending undocumented immigrants, these misleaders would shout, "Viva La Raza," "Viva South America" and "Viva Mexico." Unity of all workers from all nations was absent. There were almost no black marchers, no mention of immigrants from Asia and Africa nor of the Katrina victims (mainly blacks but also many immigrant and white workers). Only the PLP leaflet explained how anti-immigrant racism and capitalist-created borders hurt ALL workers and drive down everyone’s wages. The March organizers tried to tell the crowd that immigrants only take away jobs from dishwashers, or only take the jobs that no one else wants. These patriotic sellouts’ only argument was that immigrants from South America "deserve" to be in the U.S. and take part in the "American Dream."

Most important, speakers from the podium never said that borders serve the rich and should be destroyed. They never uttered the word "capitalism." But many, many marchers were open to ideas of international solidarity and destruction of the capitalist profit system because they have seen how borders serve the rich. Only the PL leaflet explained the need to destroy the profit system and its borders and build true communism. The March leaders’ speeches implored listeners to vote for liberal politicians, asking everyone to beg Hillary Clinton and her friends in Congress to help immigrants by passing the Dream Act. This would allow young undocumented people to become "legal" by attending college or most likely by joining the Army since many won’t meet the college requirements.

One young student speaker pleaded with the crowd to support the Dream Act so she could become a nurse practitioner, explaining that she had already lived the "American Dream" by attending college. She was blind to the fact that under such legislation, hundreds of thousands would become easier to control and deport while tens of thousands would be forced to fight and die in Iraq and elsewhere in exchange for every college student who might get a degree and a job.

But the marchers’ anti-racist and anti-vigilante enthusiasm was great. PL’ers met many people who can be won away from fake electoral reformism and nationalism to international working-class unity against capitalists everywhere.

Stories of Police Terror and Worker Solidarity in New Orleans

Much of the media coverage on the destruction in New Orleans has been a racist smear of workers suffering from the flood, depicting them either as helpless and inept or as thieves and criminals. "Sixty Minutes" on CBS (9/11) also showed the cops as "heroes," a mighty tough sell, considering that one-third of the force ran away. Interviews with workers trapped in the city reveal the true picture, however: the cops and National Guards threatened the lives of workers trying to escape or just survive, while workers organized themselves, their sharing saving many who would have died. Some were broadcast on the NPR program "This American Life" (9/9).

Denise Marsh, a black worker at the city’s Memorial Hospital rode out the hurricane in her home after she was kicked out of her hospital room to make way for two white nurses. After the levees broke, she spent two days at the hospital in rising water, and was taken by boat to the Convention Center, a sewer with an overwhelming smell. Every few hours the cops told them busses would come, lining them up in the sun without food and water. Armed police and Guards kept passing by with water, but never stopped.

Young men with guns broke into stores on St. Charles Street and got juice for babies, food, water and clothes, distributing them and trying to secure the area, fanning old people to keep them cool. They were well organized and thoughtful, Marsh said, distributing food, but were labeled "animals." "I was touched by them," she said. Some people tried to cross the bridge into Algiers, which was dry and had power. Armed National Guards turned them back, under Governor’s orders to shoot to kill.

Another story which has received wide attention came from several EMTs from San Francisco, in New Orleans for a convention.The conventioneers pooled their money to hire busses, but the latter were commandeered by the Guard. They camped near a police command center, but the cops told them their busses were across the bridge in Gretna. They walked miles through town, their numbers growing to 1,000 by the time they reached the bridge. Armed Gretna sheriffs fired over their heads, threatening to shoot them if they advanced further. The sheriffs told them, "we’re not turning the west bank into another Superdome," which the EMTs understood as "code words for racism."

In the pouring rain, they gathered on an expressway. sharing water from a stolen water truck. "Blessed are the people who loot," said one EMT. The driver took as many as would fit in the truck. Those left gathered food from a wrecked National Guard truck, cleaned up the area, and built an improvised bathroom. At nightfall, a Gretna sheriff drove them off at gunpoint: ""Git the f--- off this freeway." The EMTs hid in an abandoned bus until daylight. In the morning they phoned someone from the firefighters’ union, who arranged for them to cross the bridge.

A high school student who survived days without food and water summed up what she learned: "I didn't know it was a crime to be poor and the punishment was death."

These stories show that the bosses’ government was not just inept or indifferent to the people’s suffering but used its armed force to enforce racism and stop workers’ efforts to save themselves. This will be the future for millions of workers until we do away with the real disaster, the capitalist system.

a name="Immigrant Workers: ‘Braceros’, Cannon Fodder or Revolutionaries?"></">Im"igrant Workers: ‘Braceros’, Cannon Fodder or Revolutionaries?

Two articles in CHALLENGE, (8/17 AND 9/7) about the industrial working class must also address the plight and importance of immigrant workers in the class struggle. Contrary to the racist smokescreen of fascist groups like the Minutemen and Save Our State, and the like-minded right-wing politicians who advocate strengthening "our" borders, U.S. imperialists need this source of cheap labor and working-class cannon fodder. Without it they’d find it very difficult to compete against China’s low-priced products and to wage imperialist wars. This stubborn fact doesn’t escape the liberal bosses and policy-makers.

As detailed in CHALLENGE (7/20/05 editorial), Senators John McCain (R-Arizona) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) have introduced a bi-partisan immigration bill to secure cheap labor for war industries and millions of rank-and-file troops for their war agenda, stem the influx of undocumented workers (in favor of "regulated," "more manageable" workers), and expand their fascist plans for the entire U.S. working class.

Liberal bosses have also mobilized their labor lackeys. A Brookings Institution essay by SEIU president and Change to Win coalition leader Andrew Stern suggests, "Why not make a two-year commitment to national service one pathway to legalization. Union leaders and employers together could identify eligible current and future workers…." (United We Serve) The bosses’ plans to win immigrant workers to their imperialist agenda and persuade them that exploitation is a sacrifice for "their" country are clear. But it’s also clear that the revolutionary potential of this most intensely exploited sector of the working class, when empowered with communist analysis, could help lead the working class and PLP.

Since all ideas come from life, examining conditions for industrial immigrant workers in the factory where I work reveal "temps" who receive no benefits, have absolutely no job security, and receive on average $2 to $3 less pay per hour than regular workers. They are mostly undocumented immigrants hired through employment agencies in order to free the companies who exploit them from any legal entanglements. For the bosses these workers are more disposable than the rest of us and can be exploited for anywhere from a few weeks to a few years, without the added costs of medical insurance, pensions, vacations or even sick days, and then are discarded without fear of repercussions. One co-worker has been employed for seven months without benefits, while the bosses keep counseling "patience."

Some temps are legal-resident immigrants, but they’re exploited as much as those without green cards because they’re so busy working they can’t learn English. "I know they shouldn’t treat us this way," says another, "but I can’t even defend myself. They reprimand me in English; how can I argue with them?" While the bosses dangle the carrot of long-term employment to keep temp workers loyal, these workers rarely become permanent.

The "fortunate" immigrant workers who’ve learned English and have green cards get to slave away as "permanent" workers — until the next round of layoffs. They fill the ranks of workers described in the previous articles. Immigrants from more than seven countries comprise at least 60% of the workforce in this factory, indicating the importance of internationalism and the fight against nationalism. To the dismay of the Minutemen and other racists, it also reveals U.S. capitalism’s dependence on immigrants to keep its manufacturing alive and profitable.

Since U.S. bosses must produce commodities at prices competitive with China and other rival imperialists, they must exploit every worker as much as possible. But, as Karl Marx wrote, they "…create their own grave-diggers."

These workers are not defeated. They’re searching for a solution to capitalist exploitation. The conditions in industrial production create a work-force ready for communist ideas. They generally accept the fact that the bosses are stealing from them; that the unions are, as one worker put it, "sellouts, when push comes to shove." Although exploitation pits worker against worker for the higher-paying positions, most look at co-workers within their circles as comrades in a struggle to survive. Every day there’s talk of how the bosses couldn’t care less about workers, about how current conditions are unlivable. But this doesn’t mean winning these workers to communism and PLP will be easy. Like the rest of us, industrial workers struggle with internal contradictions.

But PLP has dedicated itself to building for a communist revolution that’s the only way out for these and millions of other workers worldwide, including Chinese workers. The road to that revolution must travel through the industrial working class.

a name="GI’s in Iraq Get Pizza, Laptops and Death by Mortar">">"I’s in Iraq Get Pizza, Laptops and Death by Mortar

They’ve been keeping us busy. I’ve been juggled around since the day I was sent here. But that’s the Army for you. And you wouldn’t believe how the Army attempts to kiss all our asses. Anything to keep us from uniting and complaining, right? Well, they can pay us more money; entertain us with large-screen TV’s to pass our down time watching movies; bring us Pizza Hut, Burger King, Subway and even KFC. They can sponsor Karaoke nights, casino evenings and open up pools for relief from the HOT sun. We want books? They open up libraries. We want internet? Free internet access, or with a monthly payment the internet is brought to your room — via wireless access. We want gourmet coffee, not the mud water we were getting? Well, a coffee shop opens with an espresso machine — get your vanilla latté or café mocha or frappuccino (even with whipped cream).

Then on your day off, you’re sitting inside a building overlooking the pool filled with young bodies mingling. You decide to take it outside, so you pick up your laptop and finish sending that e-mail from a reclining chair while sipping on your mocha frappuccino.

Then you hear a mortar round coming towards the base, followed by an explosion that makes the ground you’re standing on tremble. At that very moment you realize where you are. The sirens remind you you’re at war, and how much you’d rather be home.

Suddenly, you realize all these crumbs are worthless — worthless for one’s self, despicable for the soldiers who were killed when that mortar round hit the dining facility, worthless for the father and husband who was killed when a roadside bomb exploded while patrolling the streets of Iraq. Almost 2,000 soldiers’ and tens of thousands of Iraqis’ lives lost — all for nothing, except oil profits.

Believe me, the pacifiers offered don’t fool everyone, just as the excuses manufactured for this war are being exposed as lies. Many soldiers are upset, and if we aren’t home by February, you can guarantee people will take it a step forward, because this isn’t worth being away from family and friends. So I’ll be home soon.

Raise Money for Anti-Racist Fighters

Nine anti-racist members and friends of Progressive Labor Party face trials in Los Angeles, Bridgewater, NJ and Farmingville, LI, NY, for fighting the KKK-type anti-immigrant Minutemen racists. They follow a long PLP tradition of fighting the bosses’ racist thugs. The legal costs of defending these anti-racists amount to some $60,000. We’re asking all CHALLENGE readers and friends to donate whatever they can. Checks and money orders can be made payable to Challenge Periodicals and mailed to PLP, GPO Box 808, Brooklyn, NY 11202.

a name="Liberals Aim to Turn Cindy Sheehan’s Fight into ‘Anybody-but-Bush’"></a>"iberals Aim to Turn Cindy Sheehan’s Fight into ‘Anybody-but-Bush’

I was in Crawford, Texas twice, while Cindy Sheehan was there. She was indeed a powerful catalyst for anti-war action. My first time I went with some people I knew and some I didn’t know. We found hundreds of people from around Texas and other states in a Crawford park and later drove out to "Camp Casey," the ditch along a country road where Cindy Sheehan and other military families and vets had pitched tents and set up a row of crosses with names of dead soldiers.

It wasn’t just "peaceniks" from cities. An older man in his pickup truck, from a nearby small town, wearing his "Vietnam Vet" cap told me he and his wife had been bringing in supplies. "You know what that is in Iraq?" he said. "It’s just a desert Vietnam." He spoke disparagingly of the few pro-war counter-demonstrators. "I know a lot of them," he continued. "It’s just the same old, same old people from around here."

The speakers at the rallies took a very narrow line, noting only U.S. casualties in Iraq. Only Cindy Sheehan mentioned the deaths of Iraqis. When one speaker began saying, "We can’t come home from Iraq tomorrow," people in the crowd shouted, "Yes, we can!" and "Out now! Out now!" A vet who appeared to be one of the rally leaders spoke very hatefully to a young man who was taking a more left, anti-imperialist position.

Two weeks later in Crawford there were thousands of people meeting at "Camp Casey II," under a huge tent on donated space near the Bush "ranch." It was very well organized. I recognized some of the organizers/workers from Austin; they had apparently been there through the week. I wondered, do these people have paying jobs from some of the groups running the event? (Otherwise, how do they live?) I got the impression that groups allied with the "left" wing of the Democratic Party want to keep Cindy Sheehan under their wing and keep the message very very narrow. The Peace House where we parked initially was so bedecked with American flags that at first I thought we were at the pro-war rally. However, one Iraq War vet give an impassioned speech contrasting the Americans eating their fill in Fallujah while Iraqi children starved outside. But again, most of the event was narrowly focused on lamenting the deaths of young GI’s.

Out on the country road, Bush supporters were driving by slowly in SUV’s with flags and pro-war signs. I yelled, "Get out of Iraq NOW!" Some women and children joined the cry. But a rally monitor came along quickly and shushed us. There was a pro-war rally in a high school football stadium miles from Camp Casey.

Driving back home, we agreed that though Cindy Sheehan is a sincere person and an appealing personality, the anti-war "movement" is in danger of turning into support for "anybody-but-Bush" politicians and the liberal wing of the ruling class that wants to continue and expand imperialism "by proxy" — keeping the U.S. death count down.

An old friend in Austin

Red GI

1,500 Students Walk Out Against Prison-like School

BRONX, NY, Sept. 20 — Fifteen hundred students walked out of De Witt Clinton H.S. yesterday, protesting the installation of metal detectors through which they have to pass before entering school. "They’re treating us like prisoners," Marleesa Lee, 17, told the NY Times (9/20). "They have money for metal detectors, but not for books," she declared.

"This is school, not a jail," read a sign carried by junior Saira Asif, 15.

The students took to the streets and marched nearly two miles to picket the Bronx office of the Department of Education, snarling traffic on the way.

They were also protesting a ban on leaving school for lunch, which led to dangerous overcrowding in the cafeteria for the student body of 4,600. Many missed part of their first class because the lines to pass through the detectors were so long.

This student militancy, amid a racist "educational" system that crams nearly 5,000 mostly black and Latin youth into what passes for a high school, sets a good example for their teachers who have now gone over two years without a contract with a union that "fights" with TV commercials rather than walking out themselves. Prison-like schools are one more symptom of a war budget that constantly cuts funds for schools while spending hundreds of billions for oil wars — to which the rulers want to send these youth to fight and die. And that won’t change even if billionaire Bloomberg, the current Republican Mayor, is defeated by Democrat Fernando Ferrer, the "lesser evil" choice of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).

The day after the student walkout, angry teachers at a UFT Delegate Assembly meeting rejected the city bosses’ latest contract offer and authorized a strike, while attacking both Bloomberg and union president Weingarten. Unity of students and teachers behind common anti-racist demands would really up the ante of class struggle against a ruling class that treats these students as fodder for capitalism’s low-wage sweatshops and its imperialist wars.

U.S. Constitution: Document of, by and for the Ruling Class

The U.S. ruling class has used the myths of freedom and democracy to win soldiers to support the government because it’s our job to supposedly protect these "freedoms," especially those found in the Constitution.

Well, Thomas Jefferson did write in the Declaration of Independence that "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights" but he borrowed those words from John Locke, an English philosopher. However, Locke spoke of life, liberty, health, and property, not happiness. The signers of the Constitution talked about joy but they were inspired by the pursuit of property, not happiness.

After the U.S. War of Independence, the founding fathers — rich merchants, slave-owners, landlords and large farm owners — argued about the kind of government they wanted. A union of states with a strong federal government won. The reasons? Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay agreed: to control the effects of "factions." Madison explained that these "factions" were the haves and the have-nots. "The most common and durable source of factions have been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society." Factions also included various sections of the propertied class — "a landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest and many lesser interests."

But the main "factions" were laborers, slaves and the property-less who might revolt and overthrow the propertied class, as well as competing bosses who might rise violently against the state to dominate or separate the union. Hamilton said, "A firm union will be...a barrier against domestic faction and insurrection." And Madison added, "The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation." Madison explained that the causes of faction cannot be removed but a strong federal government would deal with its effects such as, "a rage for…an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project."

After taking years to create the new government, the newly-formed United States elected as President George Washington a slave owner and the richest man in the former British colonies.

Today U.S. rulers have extended the vote to all citizens, males without property, women and black people. But workers remain oppressed because behind this "democratic" government is a group — the ruling class — that prevents working people from taking power, while disciplining competing bosses in the name of their national interest. As one political philosopher put it, "What better way to enslave a people then to give them the vote and tell them they are free?"

a name="‘Diamonds Are Forever’ Soaked in Blood"></">‘D"amonds Are Forever’ Soaked in Blood

When Kanye West attacked Bush for "not caring for black people" during an NBC-telethon fund-raiser for Katrina victims. he became part of the problem instead of the solution to a racist capitalist system that causes such mass tragedy from New Orleans to Sierra Leone.

His new "progressive" single, "Diamonds from Sierra Leone (Remix)," talks about "blood diamonds" in that African country.

The music mixes soul vocals sampled from a James Bond movie into an alluring hip-hop beat, similar to the DeBeers’ commercials music. Kanye relates events in Sierra Leone to those in U.S. ghettos. He explains that, "Over here, it's a drug trade, we die from drugs. Over there, they die from what we buy from drugs. The diamonds, the chains…"

Kanye laments, "…I thought my Jesus Piece was so harmless/'til I seen a picture of a shorty armless." The bosses and their lackeys who control the government and diamond mines terrorize their workers and other inhabitants, often cutting off mostly child workers' hands and limbs with machetes for not finding enough diamonds.

One scene in the song's video depicts a diamond dealer reaching into a jewelry display case and a small black hand reaches up, grasping a diamond. The dealer plucks the polished stone from the child's palm and places it on the counter for the enjoyment of two rich white women. Another man gives a woman an engagement ring, and blood runs down her hand. In this video, only white people buy and sell these "blood diamonds." Doesn't anyone else buy diamonds?

In one part of the remix, Kanye asks Jacob the Jeweler, popular among many celebrities, if he's selling Kanye conflict diamonds, and asks Jacob not to lie. If relying on a multi-millionaire celebrity jeweler, out for profits, to sell him "non-conflict diamonds" sounds like a contradiction that's because it is — one of many in the song.

Kanye West, who wears diamond-encrusted chains, explains the day he stops wearing his chain will be "the same day I give the game back." After delving into the blood and politics of Sierra Leone, how does Kanye West justify wearing blood diamonds? He crashes a Porsche and runs away with Sierra Leone kids into a church; the end of his video says, "Buy conflict-free diamonds."

Do "conflict-free diamonds" really exist? The Swiss-based DeBeers monopoly controls a majority of the world's diamonds, most of them mined in Southern Africa and South America. True, the diamonds used to finance the warlords and capitalists fighting in Sierra Leone and elsewhere are "drenched in blood," but everything produced under capitalism comes drenched in the blood of workers exploited by this profit system. The point is, how will we fight this.

Capitalism's music industry teaches youth to value diamonds, gold, sneakers, cars, and rims (expensive flashy car wheels) over human relationships. But Kanye says that the real conflict over blood diamonds is inside the "black soul" because "it is in a black person's soul to rock that gold." Not only is it racist to say it's in black people's "souls" to wear gold and diamonds, but Kanye is part of the capitalist music industry that promotes and teaches youth these capitalist values. In other words, "Do you," get your ice, and forget about everyone else.

In Kanye's other videos, he portrays women as possessions; their bodies are jewelry, things to display and own.

Actually, the first cut of this song, the one in the video and on the radio, brags about Kanye's wealth and status. He talks about a stripper named Porsche, her fat friend named Minivan (it's supposed to be a joke), and seeing Vegas through designer glasses while tripping on acid. The "diamonds are forever" in the chorus of the song refers to the Roc-A-Fella Record label and their trademark sign. Kanye told Vibe magazine that he made the video and the "progressive" remix after a fellow rapper told him about the Sierra Leone "blood diamonds."

In Jay Z's verse on the track, he boasts about selling kilos of coke and comparing drug-dealing to selling CD's. At first, lyrical "niceness," full of allusions and puns, distract what he's really saying. However, listening closely the verse has nothing to do with Sierra Leone. Kanye just finished talking about how drugs and money are means of exploitation, and Jay-Z is bragging about how rich and godlike he is. As much as these rappers think they are big capitalists with multi-platinum albums and millions of dollars, they're really just pawns for the ruling class.

Kanye West recorded a song that pretends to educate people about a serious issue but comes off looking stupid, regardless of how good the production and flows are, and actually deflects the real causes of conflicts, like Sierra Leone’s civil war and its blood diamonds.

Workers are the Real 'Saints'

Just to shed more light on the consistent inequalities that capitalism seems to shore up on a regular basis. On September 11, 30 some odd brand new cars, luxurious and expensive, were dropped off at San Antonio's largest sports stadium for New Orleans Saints football players. Ornate BMWs, Mustangs, Land Rovers, Cadillac Escalades, easily amounting to over $2 million, soon littered the parking lot.

Tens of thousands of workers from New Orleans have lost everything, and are sleeping in abandoned warehouses and sporting stadiums, while these celebrity football stars are staying in the nicest hotels and commanding luxury automobiles in which to tour the Alamo City. Resources should be going toward finding homes and jobs for displaced workers, and towards putting their children in school. Instead, they're providing expensive toys for sports celebrities, whose primary purpose is to divert our attention from real world problems. But this is capitalism, where profit always takes priority over people. The Saints football team makes millions for its owners and investors, and now has a new contract to play several games in San Antonio (which appears to be using the New Orleans tragedy to try to gain a city football team). So the Saints’ owners are spending obscene amounts of money on their stars to keep them happy and keep the profits rolling in. Whatever these sports stars are, they are not saints. The real saints are the workers who pulled together to survive the flood-induced hell of capitalist racism in New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama and those who have stepped up to volunteer.

UNDER COMMUNISM

Dr. Joshua Horn’s book "Away With All Pests" describes how China eliminated syphilis in the early years of the revolution.

In the late 1940’s, when the communist-led workers and peasants took power, more than 50% of the population in some areas of China suffered from syphilis. Syphilis, and the resulting secondary infections from other organisms, causes nerve degeneration, inability to have children, painful gaping wounds and many other horrible symptoms.

All sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are a result of, among other causes, (1) the subjugation of the population by outside imperialists like the U.S. and Britain; (2) war and the widespread rape that accompanies it; (3) poverty; (4) drug addiction; (5) prostitution; and (6) sexist attitudes towards women.

Public health campaigns in capitalist countries, even with antibiotics like penicillin, are unable to eliminate syphilis and other STDs because social and political conditions prevent it. But in revolutionary China, syphilis was completely eliminated in less than 10 years in the 1950’s. How did they do it?

First, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) led mass campaigns to eliminate prostitution, making it illegal. Angry workers punished the brothel owners. Former prostitutes were given jobs and education. Their families and neighbors were taught that the old oppressive society, not a weakness of the individual, caused prostitution. Many former prostitutes eventually became leaders in their communities and members of the CCP.

But this alone would not have lasted if the inequality of women in society had not been transformed, with laws granting women equal rights and the necessary campaigns to change the attitudes of the entire population, both men and women.

Next came the elimination of poverty through the creation of relative equality of economic conditions of men and women, and across all former classes. Adequate food, clothing, shelter, education and health care were guaranteed to all.

Then came mass campaigns, with the help of medical workers, to educate the population about the nature of syphilis, how it’s contracted and how it’s treated. Medical workers met with communities and exchanged information about social relationships and about the disease. An army of fighters was mobilized to find, treat and educate all the victims of syphilis nation-wide. Attitudes about sexuality and STDs had to be changed. Relying on the masses made all this possible.

Doctors had to be convinced that workers could give penicillin to victims of the disease. Otherwise there would never have been enough people to treat the victims.

Chinese antibiotic factories turned out large supplies of penicillin and many drugs for other diseases. These factories produced surpluses to help workers in other impoverished countries as well.

In this way, China — once called the "sick man of Asia" — became the world’s first country to eliminate syphilis. Today, however, syphilis and other STDs are making a comeback in capitalist China. Until the Chinese workers seize power again, and institute a communist rather than socialist system, the rapid and deadly decline in public health will continue.

LETTERS

PLP Impresses D.C. Metro Worker

I became a supporter of the PLP quite simply and frankly because they’re darn good people!

I went to a protest sponsored by my job and was introduced to some PLP’ers. Following the protest, they invited me to "tag along" to a meeting. It was one of the best "tags" I’ve had in a long time.

At this meeting, I was totally impressed to see people of all different backgrounds pulling together for one cause. I was especially impressed by the ideas and logic of the younger members and their enthusiasm of how to fight capitalism and imperialism. I thought to myself, "There are people who still care."

I was invited to another meeting and found myself making excuses not to go. I called the friend who invited me and told her I couldn’t make it. She said she understood. My sister and I had plans to go grocery shopping, but there was this powerful force that would not let me. We both wound up at the meeting and enjoyed it so much that we do our best not to miss any others. My sister said it felt good to be around "intelligent people" again. I must agree.

I took my niece to the last meeting. She now wants to attend again. I’m grateful for the people who have entered our lives to show us there’s still hope for humanity. May the comrades and supporters of PLP stay strong and on the right path to get all of us what we deserve — RESPECT and the right to live our lives equally together without being slaves to the capitalists. Thank you!

D.C. Metro worker

a name="PL’ers Help Stop Transportation Firings">">"L’ers Help Stop Transportation Firings

Recently a group of comrades distributed leaflets supporting fired workers and others facing firings. The bosses are speeding up these transportation workers while cutting their wages and benefits. When the workers organized against these attacks, the company fired the leading workers.

Then some workers wrote a leaflet explaining the key role workers play in the profit system, producing all the wealth while the boss lives off their labor. They demanded an end to the firings and called on other workers to join their struggle.

When workers read the leaflets, they moved closer to us. We told them they were not alone in the struggle, that when workers get together and organize they can become a formidable force against the boss.

The bosses got scared and doubled the security at the company gates, to try to intimidate the workers. But workers continued to take the leaflet.

This action was a very good experience. It showed me that workers will confront their bosses and that, with PLP leadership, can be won to understand the need to fight the entire system, for a society without bosses.

Even though the action won’t end these workers’ problems, for now the bosses stopped the firings and offered them a monthly bonus.

Many workers there are very grateful for our solidarity action, which is winning new friends that could become future Party militants. That’s our challenge.

A comrade in Mexico

Primary Lessons of Katrina

We need to concentrate on a limited number of primary lessons to be drawn from the Katrina disaster. I was at two demonstrations/rallies about Katrina. There were many slogans, with an aspect of truth in nearly every one. But mixed in were some that were basically wrong:

• • "It’s Bush’s fault"-type slogans ("worst administration ever," etc.).
• • "Troops out of Iraq, Into New Orleans" — a very reactionary slogan, of the AFL-CIO/ liberal Democratic-type variety.
• • Slogans about the main victims being "black and poor," (as though people who are "poor" do not work!). It was the working class!

There are certain primary lessons from Katrina:

• • The bottom line is, it’s capitalism — not just "Bush," not just the Republicans, not just Brown and FEMA. (The black mayor who was on TV so much is just as much to blame). The little, tiny bit of collectivity the Cubans or the Dutch have is what makes their reactions to natural disasters better. That’s the secondary aspect of social democracy, the only aspect that works for workers, but we need supreme collectivity — communism.
• • There was no mistake. It was deliberate. The studies were done. All the authorities knew this was going to happen eventually. They didn’t care if the working class — and even many middle-class professionals — lost everything, including their lives and property. They don’t care. The U.S. ruling class’s state represents pure exploitation. They’re interested in us for profit, nothing else
• • RACISM: They use this to make the exploitation go over more easily and hike their profits. Equally important, racism divides the working class.
• • The capitalist government can NEVER "be on our side."

We should concentrate on these primary lessons.

A New Jersey comrade

Touts Book on Big Bill Haywood Trial

I read a highly engaging story of class struggle in the silver mining region of the Western U.S. in the 1890’s and early 1900’s, "The Big Trouble," by J. Anthony Lucas, all 754 pages.

Based on the 1907 trial of union and IWW leader, "Big Bill" Haywood, Lukas — a master story teller — weaves in the important characters of the period from President Teddy Roosevelt to baseball pitcher Walter Johnson. This is the book for you!

West Coast Comrade

No Cops Under Communism

The letter from "Red Student" (CHALLENGE, 9/7) immediately reminded me of a 1998 CHALLENGE that said: "Under communism we would have no place for the Klan. Racism would not be tolerated. It will not exist, period." Also, in the early 1920’s, when the Soviet Union was still a workers’ state, a whole busload of people physically attacked and chased a racist off the bus when he shouted insults at a black man.

They told the stunned man (not used to such displays of violent action) that racism would simply not be tolerated any more, and that racists had better either get used to it or stop being racist.

Cases of domestic violence today are products of wider societal ills that express themselves in the most intimate relationships (romantic and sexual). Under communism they will be a sign of not having struggled hard enough to eliminate that old framework. A communist society’s proper response to such abuses would begin with a solid, scientific understanding among Party members of the fundamental divisiveness and anti-working class, pro-profit character of bourgeois gender roles. This summer in particular, Party members have already had great new discussions along those lines; these are steps toward that new understanding

The hope would be not only that communism could help victims recover more quickly and fully, but also that the fresh, inspiring political framework it would give society could enable the abusers themselves to be rehabilitated much more effectively. Consider that while such programs would be helping to eliminate the attitudes of abusive "significant others" or spouses, communism in the media, schools, etc., would simultaneously be dismantling and disallowing the present widespread images of females as objects for men’s pleasure (e.g., music videos).

We already know that abuse, murder and pedophilia are never O.K. for a person to act on, regardless of the circumstances. It would be the local workers’ militias’ job to deal with these saboteurs of the revolution, by force if they refuse to back off before inflicting harm.

Red Student specifically asks about a police force. We won’t need a police force separate from the ragtag militias on the one end and the professional army on the other. Those will be enough. It’s much easier, and more participatory, to keep things as direct as possible. We’ll still have lots of enemies, but if we do our base-building correctly, we’ll have even more friends. And a lot fewer ways of losing than our predecessors did.

Young Red

Becoming Fighters for Communism

The letter "Cops Under Communism" (9/7) asked how would the Party protect people. The answer depends on who's fighting on the front lines of the working class today against the horrors of capitalism. Our PLP, though small, is growing and trying to become the eyes, ears, conscience and champion of the international working-class battle to smash capitalism and win communism. Becoming a member of PLP is like becoming a fighter for communism who serves the working class, as opposed to cops who serve the capitalist class.

Cops' power appears awesome at times, like at the Republican convention in NYC or when they brutalize and force workers into dividing pens during anti-racist protests and strikes against bosses' exploitation. However, the essence of cop power is that it's temporary and dependent on the degree of political consciousness in the working class. From New Orleans come reports of cops turning in their badges and shutting their precincts in the face of outraged workers, along with TV images of uniformed personnel pointing rifles at desperate people seeking food, water and clothing but unable to stop them. The capitalist rulers are being forced to airlift in tens of thousands of soldiers — although desperately needed as replacements in imperialist wars — to protect locked-up property which people need to survive.

The cops' "protector" image can change very rapidly into their real role as mercenaries for corporations, as it did during the 1930's Great Depression when falling profits and a society fed up with imperialist war caused the capitalists to unleash a class war on workers. That same scenario may be underway today.

I remember that era as characterized by workers' mass hatred of capitalist bosses and especially of their cops who protect scabs crossing picket lines. Any workers seen talking to a cop were immediately classified as a "stoolies" and treated like lepers. For youth without knowledge of those times, the rulers' genocidal indifference to people's suffering in the Gulf States offers a crash course in capitalist racism and class warfare.

The most difficult time under communism may be when the majority of people will not be in the Party and crime may not be banished for some time because capitalist ideas of serving yourself have deep roots, and corruption will go underground.

The success of communism will depend on how well we recruit workers to the Party before the revolution and how well these recruits can win the uncommitted majority to see that communism not only serves their needs through the destruction of exploitation, racism and sexism but is a society that needs and honors their work. They will expose bourgeois ideas, practice and culture, protecting the working class by becoming fighters for communism.

A comrade

a name="Politics Primary in Fighting ‘Natural’ Disasters"></">Po"itics Primary in Fighting ‘Natural’ Disasters

The 9/21 column on how communism would deal with disasters like Hurricane Katrina made some useful points on the superiority of communist organization and coordination for mobilizing masses of workers for disaster relief and reconstruction, but in general, the article was too utopian. First, even if we're living in a pure communist world, at least some people will die during any disaster, even with prevention. We can't control everything. Second, after any successful revolution, the capitalists and those adhering to their ideas will fight viciously to re-establish their rule. Mass destruction may exist across parts of the planet (with food, clothing, etc. in short supply in many areas). Thus, our ability to help those experiencing natural disasters would face severe limits.

Superior technique, while important, is not primary in a communist-organized society. Communist politics is primary. We won't win workers and allies to communism by promising them some kind of paradise. We'll win them through the struggle to end privilege, individualism and profits with collectivity, accountability to each other and the desire to serve the masses, not the bosses. Whether we're sharing wealth or deprivation, the key difference is that we're mobilizing to serve the collective, not privilege and profits.

Boston Red

Oops

The headline No Cops Under Communism did not correspond to the letter in the last issue (9/21). The letter for which this headline was meant to is in the current issue of CHALLENGE.

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

Black enlistment drops by 40 percent

Recruitment among African Americans — who make up nearly one-quarter of active-duty forces despite making up only 13 percent of the U.S. population — has fallen by 40 percent in the face of strong community opposition to the Iraq war. (L.A. times, 8/22)

Don’t look to Democrats to change US plan

…While a debate over the war has erupted…Democrats…remind me of Gore Vidal’s description of the Vietnam-era Congress: Unsure of whether to be hawks or doves, they sound like capons.

A capon, for the enlightenment of the vegetarians in my audience, is a castrated chicken….

Leaders like Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid of Nevada, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York criticize Bush, but only for the way he has tried to win, not on…his goals…. (Chicago Tribune)

Using hurricane as excuse for low wages

…Around New Orleans, the prevailing hourly wage for a truck driver working on a levee is $9.04….

Thursday, Mr. Bush issued an order that exempts federal contractors working on disaster relief projects from a longstanding federal requirement that they pay workers "prevailing wages," which are usually pegged to union pay rates....

"There are a lot of opportunities to experiment," said Treasury Secretary John W. Snow… (NYT, 9/10)

Top bosses grab $400 to worker’s $1

…At 367 top corporations….for every dollar bill in a worker’s pocket, the boss gets $431. And here’s a nugget of perspective: If the minimum wage had kept pace with bosses’ pay since 1990, it would be $23.03 an hour. (NYT, 9/4)

Russia Counter-Revolution Bleeds the People

…Behind the glitz Russia’s counter-revolution has not stopped taking a heavy social toll. After the privatization of industry and the transfer of most oil and natural resources to Yeltsin’s cronies in the 1990s, a new stage is under way — the total commercialisation of the welfare state.

Many state assets, from kindergartens to trade-union holiday homes, were shut and sold off a decade ago. In recent years local authorities have been charging people a growing share of the cost of the hot water, heating and electricity that their centrally supplied flats use.

Last week a law came into effect that requires councils to charge people 100%....

Cost recovery is spreading to health and education. Prescriptions, blood tests and other minor procedures increasingly have to be paid for. State universities are charging fees….

The newspaper Izvestia…wondered last week whether the new cost burden would lead to demonstrations…. (GW, 9/22)

Kill Chavez? In ’03 Robertson had other idea

When I heard Pat Robertson calling for the assassination of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, my first thought was that….two years ago, Robertson’s hymnal of hate was open to a different tune.

"How dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, ‘You’ve got to step down,’…He doesn’t work for us!" he said.

In that instance, Robertson was sticking up for his buddy Charles Taylor, then the strong-arm dictator of Liberia, under indictment by a U.N.-backed tribunal for war crimes in neighboring Sierra Leone. Robertson has $8 million invested in a Liberian gold mine, which might have skewed his thinking.

Maybe if Chavez forked over some oil shares, Robertson would change his tune. (San Antonio Express)

High-tech army fails imperialist task

Remember shock and awe?....Now the shock is something else. It is shock of discovering that…America now looks like some fearsome robotic dinosaur stomping across the landscape, a gigantic Power Ranger toy, all bright gadgets and display but no power and nothing inside…It can’t actually do anything useful after all.

The hollow superpower stands exposed….The lessons that the Vietcong on bicycles thought they had taught the behemoth are being learned all over again… (GW, 9/22)

When money runs the world, hunger kills

The immediate cause of the hunger may be climate change or other "natural" phenomena, but the root cause is now recognised as extreme poverty, which causes more sickness, suffering and death than any disease on earth….

What is happening now is the relatively new phenomenon of terrible hunger amid ever-increasing plenty. India, which endured severe famines 60 years ago, now exports subsidized food and has never grown so much; yet figures suggest that half of all children on the subcontinent are malnourished.

…In 1970 sub-Saharan Africa had 18 million malnourished children. By 1997 there were 32 million. The UN predicts the figures will reach 350 million by 2015.

Extreme poverty and hunger are now so interlinked it is impossible to separate them… (GW, 9/22)

1. SEIZE THE MOMENT!
   Millions See Racist Killer Nature of Capitalism
2. Victims of Katrina Treated Like Prisoners
3. Black Cops and Officials Also Very Racist
4. Bring Red Politics to Workers
   Strike Hits Warmaker Boeing
   1. It's Not Easy Selling Capitalism to Workers
5. Boeing and NWA Strikes: Red Politics Needed In Class Struggle
6. Boeing Strikers Discuss New Orleans
7. National Service: Volunteer For War Or Police State
8. Newark: Racism, Elitism Hurt Northwest Strikers
9. SEIU Janitors Support NWA Strikers in Spite of Hacks
10. Struggle for Communism Is Long and Hard But Needed
11. Liberals, Gutter Fascists:
    Two Sides of the Same Coin
12. Stern's Job: Use Unions to Win Immigrants and All Workers to Fight in Bosses' Wars
    1. STERN JOINS THE BOSSES' CAMP
    2. USING UNIONS TO DRAFT IMMIGRANTS
13. `Hustle and Flow' Hails Misogynist Hip Hop Culture
14. Harry Potter: Nothing Magic About Exploitation and Slavery
15. UNDER COMMUNISM
    1. How would disasters from hurricanes like Katrina be avoided?
16. Israeli Rulers Help Protect U.S. Oil Empire
17. Sexism Benefits Only The Capitalists
18. LETTERS
    1. Teachers Angry at Racist Neglect of Katrina Victims
    2. Hacks Help Brewery in Colombia Slash Jobs
    3. Our Vision of the Future
    4. TV's Law and Order Helps Build Fascism
    5. No Cops Under Communism
    6. Summer Project Helps Build Worker/Student Alliance
19. RED EYE ON THE NEWS
    1. Barbara says, Let them eat cake
    2. Profit system puts safety last
    3. Israel: 8,000 move, 400,000 will stay
    4. Workers' stress kills health, happiness
    5. Why other countries might want nukes
    6. Imperialist US will keep Air Force in Iraq
    7. G.I. Bill pushed black vets into bad jobs
    8. US nuked Japan to threaten USSR

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SEIZE THE MOMENT!
Millions See Racist Killer Nature of Capitalism

Every so often a rare moment occurs that exposes the racist and brutal nature of the profit system. And in that moment, millions can see the nature of the beast and can be won to a more revolutionary communist outlook. This is such a moment. The rulers are losing a war in Iraq, about 20,000 industrial workers are on strike against Boeing and Northwest Airlines, and the ruling class has turned a hurricane into genocide of black and poor workers in New Orleans. Under different objective conditions, and with a mass PLP base among workers, soldiers and youth, such a moment could spark the armed struggle for the seizure of power.

Those objective conditions are not here yet, and we are a long way from having the mass base for PLP we require. Nevertheless, it is our job to seize this moment and advance the forces of revolution.

From Baghdad to New Orleans, capitalism stands exposed as a mass racist murderer for all to see. From Bush, to the head of FEMA, to the Governor of Louisiana, to the black Democratic Mayor of New Orleans, capitalism has failed. The number of dead -- mostly black workers, children and the elderly -- will dwarf the number of GI's killed in Iraq or civilians killed on 9/11.

The racist rulers, especially the liberals like the NY Times, are crying crocodile tears and will try to use this moment to fight for an even bigger army to wage more wars, so the National Guard can be used to protect the rulers' property and impose martial law at home, and for a larger, more efficient police-state Homeland Security Agency. They will use this disaster of their own making to try to put the White House back under the control of the biggest bosses and curb the neo-cons. We must expose their murderous deception and point out that the Democrats supported all the budget cuts and have said little to nothing in this crisis. 

The industrial strikes have a special significance,particularly Boeing. When we say that billions are going to the war in Iraq and Homeland Security, much of it goes to Boeing, a major racist war-maker and strike breaker. The war, the strikes and the mass murder are all intimately tied together. What's more, PLP has built a base among Boeing workers over decades, and we can advance the revolutionary movement and recruit to the PLP out of this strike.

And not just at Boeing, but everywhere we have a base, we must seize the moment. PLP in Texas is actively taking part in the resettlement of victims from New Orleans, struggling with victims and care-givers alike to build a mass PLP. Postal workers in Chicago are holding a fund raiser in their union hall, while struggling to bring more workers into the Party. This moment can be one of increased revolutionary opportunities, but they will not happen spontaneously, we must work hard and seize them.

Every Party member and club should be involved in some kind of relief effort for the victims of New Orleans, while mapping out a plan to more aggressively build the Party. We should be fighting in the unions, on campus and in the communities and barracks, to march on Washington against the war and racist mass murder at home on September 24 in Washington D.C, L.A. and the Bay Area in California, to organize relief efforts for the flood victims, to support the Boeing and Northwest strikers, to sharpen the class struggle where we are and to build a mass international PLP. This moment will not last, but if we seize it, we can be stronger than we were when it arrived.

PL Volunteers Help Victims of Katrina and Racist Negligence by Rulers
Report from Texas

PLP members and friends are working on storm relief in Texas cities. In a major city near Louisiana, PLP has met many people fleeing New Orleans who blame the rich and government officials on all levels for the disaster that has killed their relatives and forced them into refugee camps across Texas. Multi-racial groups and families are fleeing on foot, pulling shopping carts and hitchhiking to get out after all so-called relief efforts failed or never even got started. Even the medical personnel from Louisiana hospitals are now fleeing on foot. People managing to get out on organized bus caravans move from checkpoint to checkpoint at evacuation centers in Texas which are barely operational.

Tens of thousands of working people are volunteering to help the refugees, inundating organizations like Salvation Army and Red Cross, which are barely able to organize anything, yet are doing a hundred times more than the government agencies like FEMA and Homeland Security. Many of the volunteers met by PL members are veterans of the two Iraq wars, often injured and disabled themselves. Most everyone agrees that the oil war in Iraq has sucked up all the funds that should have paid for relief.

The volunteer efforts are a lesson in the possibilities for communist revolution by the working class. Friends of PLP have called across the state to organize help at Red Cross sites and consider whether or not to go to Louisiana. The thousands of people working in food warehouses and shelters are almost entirely self-organized. The working people show up to volunteer and organize themselves, often fighting off the bureaucrats who do nothing but go to press conferences to announce relief efforts which don't even exist. Many volunteers, including PLP members, have taken matters into their own hands, picking up refugees stranded by the freeways, searching for victims whose medications have run out and getting them hospital care, and much more.

PLP school teachers in Texas will have (or will propose to have) refugee children in their classes and are discussing how to work with fellow teachers and PTAs to meet these families and build an understanding of how racism, imperialist war and the capitalist system itself, caused this disaster.

The ongoing Katrina crisis is showing the working class what capitalist "democracy" is worth. People are relying on themselves and the goodness of their class brothers and sisters for anything that is positive. A terrible problem is that PLP is so small. It is difficult to reach thousands with our message that communist revolution is the only long-run solution. People fleeing Louisiana and Mississippi, and the volunteers helping them, all can see the problems. They also sense that the only real help is to organize from below, for working people to help working people. But only a rapidly growing PLP can show people that the way to prevent U.S. rulers from continuing their system and its attacks on working people is to get rid of the rich altogether. Only PLP can explain the need to destroy the capitalists who try to stay on top of their European and Asian competitors by endless wars, financed by racist attacks against poor people at home.

Victims of Katrina Treated Like Prisoners

Hundreds of cots not even inches from each other are the living arrangements for New Orleans evacuees in this large Texas city. Although hurricane victims are now getting shelter, food and health care from thousands of volunteers in a show of mass multi-racial and class solidarity, many explain that the events in New Orleans were caused by the government officials who quit offering public services of any kind long ago.  (PLP members doing volunteer work are carrying pencils and notebooks to exchange contact information with other volunteers and flood victims.  This often requires asking for relatives' phone numbers from flood victims who have no phone and no homes left in Louisiana and Mississippi.)

Many of the people that fled New Orleans have told PL volunteers helping at evacuation centers that they are being treated like prisoners, endlessly passed from one police checkpoint to another.  At a San Antonio relief center people had to get on and off buses several different times before reaching the main registration. In another city, lawyers reported that hundreds of police were awaiting the evacuees, planning to interrogate and search them in a facility without any outside observers.

It is starting to look like there will be up to 500,000 people sent to different closed military bases and other sites around the U.S. and will live in what will become refugee camps under martial law.

While the rulers' economic analysts focused first on the disruptions to the U.S. oil supply and its effect on U.S. competitiveness, these geniuses have now realized that the workers who ship, load and unload most of the U.S. agricultural crop that comes down the Mississippi to the Port of New Orleans, are gone. There are no houses, no transportation, no facilities at all left to support the workers that keep U.S. produce moving to make profits for giant corporate agriculture. The bosses are worried that this will cause a crisis as the harvest advances over the next several weeks.

Although this is not spontaneously producing conscious revolutionary communists, it is becoming easier to talk to people about the need for PL's politics and organization. The breakdown in federal and local government services, as money is siphoned off to imperialist war, shows that increasingly, only the police (who are deserting and committing suicide in New Orleans) and the military physically keep the bosses in power. If PLP can win workers to revolutionary ideology and commitment, the bosses' ideological hold on the workers will be in jeopardy. PLP-led volunteers can win our brother and sister storm victims to take matters into our own hands for the long run, while helping to provide immediate relief efforts. When workers see that the same enemy that invaded and occupies Iraqi has attacked the New Orleans black working class flood victims, great advances will become possible.

Black Cops and Officials Also Very Racist

One port/railroad worker, whose job ended when his tractor cab got stuck on a median he couldn't see in two feet of water, explained that the cops and jails in New Orleans are the most racist in the nation.  This black worker explained that the black officials and cops treat black working people as bad, or worse, than the racist bosses who run New Orleans.  To this worker, the rotten treatment of the working people in New Orleans, which led to their complete abandonment to the hurricane and flood, was completely based on the profit system and its need to suck profits from workers of all races.  He explained that if you were a black worker in New Orleans who sounded like you knew what was going on, you were surely going to jail whether you were accosted by a black or white cop. 

Several disabled vets from New Orleans explained to PLP that the government has "subcontracted" away government services for everything the past several years, that new pumps to drain the water had never been made operational, that the explanation on TV that water made the pumps quit was a lie, and that one levee might have been broken on purpose so that higher income neighborhoods would be spared.

The "subcontracting," which is a way government officials get out of their responsibilities, such as opening private jails, make the subcontractors rich.  Meanwhile the services supposedly to be provided are not really given.  This is happening in a big way today -- a city official in Texas announced that FEMA (part of Homeland Security) was "subcontracting" the management of the disaster relief effort for the entire city to private companies like Halliburton.  This means that in this city people who don't know anything about disaster management and who haven't even worked on it for the past week will now be in charge.

Texas Comrade

Bring Red Politics to Workers
Strike Hits Warmaker Boeing

September 2 -- The strike is on. About 18,300 workers struck Boeing, the war-making, strike-breaking aerospace giant today, about 16,000 here in the Seattle area. Marches of hundreds through the plants followed weeks of rolling thunder -- banging metal on metal, amplified by machinist-made whistles and bull horns that reached decibels forcing all but the most protected, to flee the factories. Boeing workers were left in no mood to accept a contract that split young from old, plant from plant, and worker from worker. Faced with this anger and a ruling class determined to reorganize aerospace into a vast network of low-cost industrial "sweatshops," the union mis-leadership had no choice but to recommend a strike or lose the workers completely. Eighty-seven percent voted to hit the bricks!

"Why can't we stage a slow-down, instead of striking?" asked one machine operator. "What do you think we've been doing for the last week?" responded another.

It's Not Easy Selling Capitalism to Workers

The union hacks have been in a bind throughout these negotiations. They would love to maintain "labor peace," but the bosses' need to grind down the industrial working class to pay for "stunningly expensive" oil wars makes this problematic.

As with the Northwest Airlines mechanics, the hacks have been forced to strike, even as they promote capitalism's dog-eat-dog ideology that undermines that fightback. "Don't let them split us apart," they warn. "...withholding our labor is the only way to stop this attack on American workers. " Well, that leaves out most of the working class and builds nationalism -- a key tool the ruling class uses to promote their imperialist wars. And as for all "American" workers, the IAM leadership literally turned their backs on NWA strikers the week before [See Box page 3].

Union leaflets fault Boeing for not "partnering" with the union, for cutting off groups of workers at former Boeing factories in Wichita, KA, Spokane, WA, and Arnprior, Canada. The IAM leadership made these very same workers vote and vote again until they finally accepted contracts that cut wages, benefits and jobs. Boeing wants to end retiree medical benefits for future hires, and the union vowed, "not to forget them. " Meanwhile, the International sabotaged a Lockheed strike over this very issue, while the local leadership tried to shut down a union meeting rather than pass a resolution in support of the Lockheed strikers. As Challenge reported, the workers passed it anyway.

Red Politics Is What Angry Workers Need

The union hacks can't be too happy that our Party has exposed them to thousands of Boeing workers. Nearly 2,500 workers bought Challenges during these negotiations, 1,200 during our July summer project alone. Over 4,000 communist flyers answered the capitalist ideology pushed by the hacks. Hundreds have acted, in one small way or another, under our leadership--from signing petitions and union resolutions, to circulating our literature, to voting for real class unity at union meetings over the objections of the leadership.

Despite their blatant hypocrisy, nobody should have any illusions that these pro-capitalist hacks can easily be removed from power. In fact, on one level this strike is about shoring up their shaky position. But they have to be careful. Sometimes, for the bosses and their labor lieutenants, it's better to let sleeping dogs lie.

During the summer project, our Party challenged Boeing workers to step up to bat -- to swing away and start a rally. "A rally that starts with rolling thunder and points to industry-wide demonstrations and strikes at a bare minimum. ...A rally that rejects the pro-capitalist ideology of the union mis-leadership and guides our fight with class-consciousness and anti-racist, internationalist solidarity. ...A rally that can teach us about the strength of the working class, so we can develop the wherewithal to end the bosses' profit-driven system." At least we're on base now.

Boeing and NWA Strikes: Red Politics Needed In Class Struggle

August 21 -- "If you can't give them bread, then give them circuses," would be a good description of this year's contract negotiations. The rallies, leaflets and even more information about the proposed contract early on--tactics that our Party and base have fought for, over 30 years--were all there. Unfortunately, none of this was aimed at building working-class solidarity and militancy.

The old social contract, where the bosses gave "the bread [crumbs]" as long as the union movement supported imperialism, has been thrown out the window. The union hacks are caught between Iraq and a hard place. They have to maintain our allegiance to be worth anything to the bosses, while US imperialism needs to attack us on all fronts to maintain its shaky empire. Revolutionary, working-class consciousness must replace trade union reformism or our class will be trapped as well.

The Truth Revealed

This became crystal clear during the August 21 "truth rally." Some 3,000 Boeing workers and their families rallied and marched outside the airport hotel where the negotiations took place. One block away, the main group of Northwest Airline strikers was picketing. One picketer visited our rally. Many in the crowd stopped to shake his hand and wish him well, but the leadership told him to "get lost." The hacks proceeded to march us away from the strikers, so we ended up literally turning our backs on the picketers. To add insult to injury, they sang "Solidarity Forever" at the final rally.

Furious workers circulated a resolution against crossing NWA picket lines. The IAM leadership directed members at Northwest to cross the mechanics picket lines and do some of their work. Dozens signed and a few went to visit the picket lines afterward. Since then, Teamsters, Teachers, Flight Attendants, Longshoreman, members of the IAM retirement club--defying their leadership--have all come to show support. At a BBQ hosted by a Boeing worker, strikers, their families and Boeing workers met to plan how to build solidarity.

"It's time to forget [union] politics and for workers to support each other," said one striker. To tell the truth, it's the capitalist politics of the union misleaders that gets in the way. PLP's revolutionary communist politics, which put the interests of the working class first and foremost, is the answer. The lengthy discussions on everything from the need for working-class consciousness, to fighting against racism and the Iraq oil war point to the desire workers, engaged in class struggle, have for political understanding. Nobody thought any of these topics were "outside" issues.

A Credibility Crisis

When we returned to the shop, we were flooded with one or two union leaflets a day. The most political was, "Divide and Conquer? You Might Be Next!" It referred to the company's attempt to pay the 800 Wichita military workers left under our corporate agreement lower wages than the rest of us. It blames the company for "cut[ting] out a group at every turn." It calls for unity.

"...And they wonder why people don't believe them anymore," commented an irate member. "The union leaders just cut out the NWA strikers themselves!" "That's why unions are losing," added another "In a time of crisis, you can't be neat and clean about everything. You just got to back workers."

Finally, one woman criticized a comrade for not seizing the microphone and leading the rally back to the picket line. It's good to hear that our fellow workers have faith in our communist ideas, but seizing the microphone was tactically impossible. We need a bigger organization to make that happen. She and others like her on the shop floor and at the BBQ can form the nucleus to make that happen. Combined with mass sales of Challenge, these workers can lead our class to seize more than just a microphone. As one retired Boeing worker we've known for 30 years said, "Don't ever forget about the government!"

Boeing Strikers Discuss New Orleans

Two of us started this strike with breakfast at a local diner. Naturally, we discussed strike issues and plans to build other big breakfast and lunch meetings throughout the duration. Then the discussion turned to New Orleans.

"There's something that really bothers me about New Orleans," my friend started. I was worried because of the racist, anti-working class attack in the press about "looting and mayhem" among the black survivors.

"Here they have all these poor people literally fighting for their lives, and all they can talk about is the looting. Let them have the damn stuff. Most of it is probably not any good anymore, anyway. Just help them!" He surprised me.

We could see a Safeway Supermarket out the window. It reminded me of a story by a teamster milk driver I know. The Safeway management pours chlorine on perfectly good leftovers so that no homeless could eat what the bosses can't sell. By now my friend was really pissed. "They can pour billion into two wars and they can't help these people!"

It's clear the main thing these bosses want to protect is their profits and their system. The attacks on the black workers in New Orleans and the Boeing workers comes from the same source, billions for imperialist war being paid for by the working class. And many of those billions go to Boeing in Pentagon contracts. If the ruling class is willing to shoot a poor, black worker for stealing a loaf of bread, imagine their reaction if they think they could lose their war production to an angry, communist-led working class. My friend has the right idea. Racism is paving the way for attacks on us all. This system has to go!

National Service: Volunteer For War Or Police State

The U.S. military is facing troop shortages in Iraq and Afghanistan. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. While the brass currently measures the shortfall in the hundreds of thousands, U.S. rulers must prepare for an eventual clash with a rising rival superpower requiring millions of willing soldiers. Defeating a military alliance of China and Europe or Europe and Russia (the Pentagon is studying both scenarios) would necessitate a greater mobilization than during World War II. Then, the Soviet Union bore most of the allies' burden. This time, the bulk of the fighting would fall to the U.S.

But U.S. rulers have a serious problem. Memories of rebellions against their murderous Vietnam debacle make restoring the draft a last resort. So the rulers' liberal agents are casting about for a "national service" scheme to begin the massive task of filling the ranks. The liberals are trying to take advantage of the many good people offering help to the victims of Katrina. The New York Times Labor Day editorial (9/5) said: "It may be time to recycle the idea of Labor Day. Instead of a day off, perhaps it should become a day on, a day devoted, across the nation, to helping out -- a day, in fact, of national service...what was lost with the sacrifice we were never asked to make after 9/11 was a sense of collective effort, the awareness that this was something we were all in together."

The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI)-- the Democratic Leadership Council's (DLC) think-tank -- just published "The AmeriCorps Experiment and the Future of National Service." The DLC, led by Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton, marches in lockstep with the rulers' police state-and-war agenda. It embraced the Hart-Rudman reports and made regime change in Iraq a central plank of Gore's campaign in 2000.

After outlining proposals for promoting church and community-based service programs -- with a military option -- the PPI book concludes with the rulers' key debate: compulsory vs. volunteer service. William Galston, a domestic policy advisor in the Clinton White House, calls for "full-time 18-month service for all 18-year-olds," with a military/civilian choice. PPI head Will Marshall, noting that, "America may need to mobilize one day for full-scale war," proposes transforming Selective Service into a "recruiting device for voluntary national service, as well as a register of the nation's available manpower." Young men and women could choose the CIA-front Peace Corps, its domestic version AmeriCorps, or the military. Volunteers would then receive preference in college admission.

The volunteer service favored by the liberals cuts two ways. It reveals the weakness of U.S. rulers, afraid, in Marshall's words, to raise the "specter of conscription;" but it also has the dangerous potential to win large numbers of well-intentioned people to the rulers' imperialist agenda.

In a follow-up article in the DLC's "Blueprint" (7/23), Marshall invoked the supposed "selfless and patriotic ethos of the New Deal and the New Frontier, which linked our nation's security explicitly to economic and social reforms -- social insurance, civil rights, high-quality schools, help for the poor and vulnerable." He explicitly equates liberal calls to service with the rulers' genocidal wars: "Democrats...need to show the country a party unified behind a new patriotism -- a progressive patriotism determined to succeed in Iraq and win the war on terror, to close a yawning cultural gap between Democrats and the military, and to summon a new spirit of national service and shared sacrifice...."

Sacrifice is the liberals' latest watchword. They understand that material incentives alone cannot motivate the military or the masses. Marshall says, "Democrats sometimes make the mistake of believing they can spend their way back into the military's affections. So they call for big increases in veterans' benefits, health care, housing...What matters most are intangibles -- being recognized and honored for the sacrifices they make to preserve our way of life."

Marshall says working-class families should take star-spangled pride in sacrificing their tax dollars and their children. "Democrats ought to insist on a major expansion of the military, by as many as 100,000 troops...and insist on paying for a larger force by rolling back the administration's unconscionable wartime tax cuts. This would neatly frame the real choice facing patriotic Americans: a stronger military versus tax cuts for the privileged."

What the rulers lack, however, is an effective ideology. Winning millions of workers to act against their class interest is a tall order. The Nazis used anti-Semitism. U.S. rulers employ anti-Arab, anti-Islamic racism to motivate troops to kill in the field. But their dependence on Saudi, Kuwaiti and other regimes prevents them from making "Kill the Arabs" a big media message. The liberals complain that Bush squandered the patriotic opportunity furnished by 9/11. They may be awaiting more such attacks. Whatever happens, our job is to mobilize workers in their class interest to destroy the profit system that thrives on workers' blood.

Newark: Racism, Elitism Hurt Northwest Strikers

Newark, NJ Sept. 1-- For the past two weeks, PLP has joined the Northwest Airlines mechanics on the picket line at Newark Airport. This strike is as significant as the PATCO (Air Traffic Controllers) strike that was busted by the Reagan-Papa Bush govt. in 1981. The mechanics' union, the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association (AMFA), was forced into the strike due to the airlines' demand to fire half the union mechanics, cleaners, and custodians and slash wages by 25%. NWA's "new business model" is a plan to outsource heavy maintenance and use thousands of scabs to do union work, and was hatched a year and a half ago. They have been aided by the 130,000 layoffs of airline workers since 9/11, leaving a big pool of skilled unemployed workers.

Meanwhile, the mechanics have made it easier for the bosses to break their strike. About seven years ago they broke off from the much larger International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) and formed a chapter of the AMFA. The reason for this, according to the workers we spoke to, was that they are "skilled" workers, compared to the "unskilled" baggage handlers in the IAM. Since they felt that they had more responsibilities than other workers, they should be paid more and represented better. Their union leaders had convinced them that their strength is in skill, not numbers and solidarity.

While PLP organized students and other workers to support the strikers, we also struggled with the mechanics to see the error of believing that "skilled" workers are more important than "unskilled" workers. We discussed the importance of class-consciousness and how crucial it is for workers to see that their common interests lie with their class, whether they are baggage handlers, mechanics, or pilots. As with PATCO, which was the first blow of 25 years of union-busting, mass wage and job cuts, etc., the vicious attacks on our brothers and sisters at NWA will affect all of us.

We distributed PLP leaflets and Challenge to the strikers, which showed how British Airways workers wildcatted in sympathy with fired food service workers, using class solidarity to shut down London's Heathrow Airport. Many striking mechanics began criticizing the way their union leadership had sold them out in the past. Another worker spoke about his father and grandfather who had been in the Longshoremen's Union and the battles that those workers fought against the bosses. By the end of the conversation, some of the workers began to question the union bosses' idea of "skilled" and "unskilled" workers.

It is important to point out that workers' unity is necessary to fight the bosses, but we must also point out that trade unionism will not stop these attacks. Even if the IAM or AMFA leaders were more militant, they would still have their hands tied because of patriotism and reformism. Workers need a leadership that connects the attacks suffered by mechanics to the the oil wars in Iraq-Afghanistan, that fights racism be it against baggage handlers (many baggage handlers are blacks and immigrants) or against the victims of racist neglect after Katrina swallowed New Orleans. We need a leadership that fights for international unity with the workers in London's Heathrow. This is the politics of PLP, which is based on the belief that workers are one class worldwide against an international system of exploitation and that every battle in the class war that is raging must be turned into a school for a society where workers rule and without bosses: communism.

SEIU Janitors Support NWA Strikers in Spite of Hacks

AIRPORT IN THE MIDWEST, August 20 -- Black, Latin, Asian, African and white airport janitors, citizens and immigrants, women and men, fought back against Northwest Airlines and their own union bosses with the onset of the NWA mechanics' strike. Northwest and its major subcontractors tried to force mostly immigrant workers to scab during the strike, cleaning NWA's major operations facilities and offices, replacing 800 janitors who are part of the striking AMFA mechanics' union. The racist union leadership has played into the bosses' hands by attacking immigrant workers in their strike literature rather than uniting with them.

At first the bosses concocted the racist lie that immigrant workers who have lived in the U.S. less than five years must work as scabs or jeopardize their immigration status. A small group of workers exposed this lie and struggled with their own sellout union leaders in SEIU. At a shop stewards' meeting the Saturday before the strike, the local SEIU leader and the head of the AMFA local made it clear they would not help.

On Monday, regular CHALLENGE readers who had formed a strike support committee distributed a PLP leaflet in Spanish and English throughout the airport. It was well received and caused a lot of intense political struggle over not scabbing and the need for international solidarity. The racist bosses tried to find out where this leadership was coming from, but failed.

That night the local president called an emergency meeting at the airport. He had no plan to stop the racist bosses from using us as scabs. One steward gave an anti-racist talk, supporting the striking mechanics and others were very vocal in supporting her. By Wednesday, a small but significant number of airport workers were refusing to scab for NWA. The bosses had not expected any resistance to their fascist plans and called an emergency meeting to try a new tactic. Exposed, they backed off trying to use low-seniority immigrant workers and switched, trying to use workers with high seniority as scabs. The bosses are having some success at this, but our struggle is continuing.

This struggle shows that even small resistance can disrupt the bosses' fascist plans, and the importance of the Party having an integrated and international base among the workers. We are learning how to organize under increasing surveillance and under the nose of the Department of Homeland Security. We are also learning the importance of building a mass base for PLP in the airline industry.

We cannot delay or hesitate in fighting fascism. If the strike support committee had delayed even one day, the small but significant number of airport workers would not have had the courage to defy our racist oppressors. We cannot delay in winning these workers to join, build and lead a mass revolutionary communist PLP.

Struggle for Communism Is Long and Hard But Needed

El Salvador,--"It's taken me a long time to realize that elections are good for nothing," said a former FMLN militant. "We've been telling you for years; PLP is not wrong in its analysis because it has an objective communist basis," answered a PLP comrade. "Since 1979, PLP predicted that the FMLN would never lead a revolution due to the bourgeois ideas on which it was founded. Now it has joined Christian-democratic groups and pseudo-revolutionaries who call themselves Trotskyist socialists."

Such discussions have been taking place in coffeehouses, universities, homes and workplaces here due to the FMLN's internal elections to choose candidates for deputy and mayoral elections all over the country. FMLN's Political Commission thinks that everything is under control. The uncertainty of their base does not reach the offices of the now corporate FMLN elite.

Throughout the internal elections, there have been rumors of fraud and coercion coming from the leadership. The goal of the misleaders is to run candidates who are loyal to capitalism. FMLN's leadership does not intend to shift its politics and ideology to the left. FMLN top hack Aquiles Montoya, declares, "FMLN's thesis rests on leading a bourgeois democratic `revolution' leading to socialism. Its position does not have any historical support and is very convenient for electoral political struggle. " The words of Shafick Handal, head of the FMLN, before the National Association of Private Enterprises stood out, "In reality our supposed socialism cannot be defined as being completely against capitalism. The program that we have developed does not, at its core, call for an immediate abolishment of capitalism in general or in the existence of capitalist relations of production, distribution, and exchange."

"Tit for tat" illustrates how factions of the Popular Liberation Forces (FPL), and the Salvadoran Communist Party (PCS) have hogged political offices. "Sectarianism no longer exists in the front. Now we are one. No one ever speaks about the FPL or PCS," declared an angry young member of the electoral front. He also admitted, "it's true, in some municipalities the ballot boxes were stuffed; where there were 800 members, there would appear 1,200 voters." Facts are stubborn things. The new and old FMLN militants are only perpetuating the capitalist system. They mimic the strategy of the bosses' parties, which deceived and slaughtered tens of thousands of workers in the '70s and the '80s. "I saw an FMLN mayor with boxes stuffed with ballots in his own home. Is this the kind of representatives that the FMLN is offering us?" asked a worker. "We are right where the bosses want us, and more than 100,000 people had to die for this!" said a furious PLP comrade.

These discussions reflect the sharpening contradictions between bourgeois democracy and the need for the working class to take control through communist revolution. Communism will tear down flags and borders that enslave the international working class.

PLP in El Salvador will never drop our red international communist flag. In every issue of CHALLENGE/DESAFIO we distribute, we spread working-class ideas. They send out positive messages about international communist struggles. They are proof that workers can grasp communism all over the world.

The most glorious moments of communism have been written in blood, sweat and tears, in trenches and in workplaces. At this moment, the PLP in El Salvador is struggling to understand that there is no easy way to fight for communism. The electoral system is only an illusion. Communist revolution depends on consistency and discipline. Every letter, every Challenge article, every friend that we win, every reader and member of a club strengthens our struggle for international communist revolution led by PLP.

Liberals, Gutter Fascists:
Two Sides of the Same Coin

LOS ANGELES, August 20 -- Today PLP exposed a black liberal "community leader's" support of racism. Several weeks ago, the liberal Earl Ofari Hutchinson invited Joe Turner, the racist leader of Save Our State (SOS), an affiliate of the anti-immigrant Minutemen, to speak at his L.A. Urban Policy Roundtable. When Hutchinson was deluged by emails and calls condemning this racist and showing that anti-immigrant racism is an attack meant to divide workers, he changed the topic of the Roundtable to talk about how to stop gang violence, and uninvited the racist. But that did not stop racist Turner from coming, or Hutchinson from defending him.

We made sure to be at the Roundtable to oppose SOS, racism and the system that spawns them. Racist Turner came in before the discussion began and told someone he was "proud to be a racist." Some of us exposed him and chased him out of the room yelling that racists had no place in L.A. or anywhere. The leaders of this action were told not to come back into the building while liberal Hutchinson provided a bodyguard for the racist. Almost everyone who came in got a copy of our leaflet blaming capitalism, not immigrants, for low wages and unemployment.

Some of us saw Turner outside and chased him and his bodyguard, who ran into the parking lot and called the cops, who temporarily detained us.

Some of our friends who stayed inside denounced anti-immigrant racism. One teacher, who had been praised by a former student earlier in the meeting, pointed out that racist Turner was trying to create racism and hatred between black and Latin youth and workers. The audience applauded, as they had earlier when he explained that capitalism is to blame for gangs and sending youth to Iraq to kill and die for US imperialism. Earl Ofari Hutchinson interrupted him, saying the meeting was not a barnyard. Then how come this racist pig was allowed in?

As people left the meeting, they wanted to know about Turner and SOS. Some agreed with our condemnation of anti-immigrant racism saying, "The last thing we need is a race war between blacks and Latinos." We discussed with many people how allowing SOS to enter the meeting was like allowing the KKK to come. The liberal Hutchinson tried to legitimize the racist, and a few days later he sponsored another Rroundtable discussion featuring Police Chief Bratton to talk about community policing!

Our job is to strengthen our revolutionary communist movement to fight all forms of racism--whether the gutter type coming from Turner or more dangerous sugar-coated of liberals like Hutchinson and Bratton. Then, as our movement grows we can give all these racists their just desserts.

Stern's Job: Use Unions to Win Immigrants and All Workers to Fight in Bosses' Wars

Last month six big unions broke away from the corrupt AFL-CIO. SEIU chief Andrew Stern led the break-up, promising to reinvigorate the labor movement by signing up millions of new members. Unions, vowed Stern, would again battle greedy corporations and no longer act as mere fund-raisers for Democratic politicians.

Despite the militant-sounding rhetoric, the split is a deadly development for the working class, marking a significant step in U.S. rulers' efforts to organize society for a period of ever-expanding wars. Like the Sweeney crew he wants to replace, Stern serves the dominant, imperialist wing of U.S. capitalism. Of course, Sweeney & Co. are fully committed to the same vile mission, but currently the bosses need something more than the labor peace Sweeneyites have provided. Merely preventing workers from launching strikes or other militant struggles, while still necessary, is no longer sufficient to meet the imperialists' needs. They now require a union leadership capable of mobilizing workers to march enthusiastically and in large numbers to carry out imperialism's bloody agenda.

Stern hardly represents a "lesser" evil. His push to organize new union members aims at winning millions of workers, heavily black, Latin and immigrant, to patriotism and support for the rulers' military adventures.

STERN JOINS THE BOSSES' CAMP

Stern has sold himself completely to the imperialist camp. He sits as a trustee of the Aspen Institute think-tank, among planners and beneficiaries of every U.S. aggression during the past five decades. Aspen trustees include Henry Kissinger and Robert McNamara, who have the blood of 3 million Vietnamese workers and 58,000 GI's on their hands; Madeleine Albright, who advised Clinton to bomb Serbia back to the Stone Age in 1999; Warren Rudman, whose Hart-Rudman reports foresaw and welcomed the Sept. 11th attacks and provided a blueprint for transforming the U.S. into a militarized police state; and Saudi Prince Bandar, heir to the vast oil treasure that forms the economic cornerstone of the U.S. empire.

Stern doesn't just rub elbows with the warmakers; he helps shape and carry out their policies. Stern belongs to Aspen's Domestic Strategy Group (DSG), funded by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, which focuses on winning workers to fight for U.S. world dominance in the 21st Century. The DSG's 2002 report stated that future competiveness requires a larger workforce. Because of the declining U.S. birth rate, however, "any growth will simply have to come from older workers and immigrants." Social Security cuts and disappearing pensions are already forcing many workers to toil well beyond their rightful retirement dates. But the DSG worries that an influx of "unassimilated" immigrants will make a large sector of the population politically uncontrollable and thereby undermine military recruitment. "We will end up with folks who aren't quite as connected to this society and don't have as much incentive to invest in a nation as earlier immigrants did," warned DSG director David Ellwood of Harvard's Kennedy School. The DSG urged "dramatic efforts...to hasten assimilation."

USING UNIONS TO DRAFT IMMIGRANTS

Stern thinks his "Change to Win" breakaway coalition can assist the rulers here by boosting immigrant enrollment. Writing for another ruling-class think tank, the Brookings Institution, he noted, "Unions are often immigrants' entry point into civic life." Stern wants unions to become gateways to the barracks, as well. He proposed drafting undocumented workers, with unions functioning as draft boards. "Why not make a two-year commitment to national service one pathway to legalization? Union leaders and employers together could identify eligible current and future workers," said Stern in "United We Serve," a 2003 Brookings survey of ways to enlist the manpower the rulers will need in coming conflicts.

"United We Serve" is an important document. It provided much of the ideological basis for the national service plank in the Kerry campaign, which Stern eventually endorsed. Clinton and former Reagan defense secretary Weinberger contributed essays to "United We Serve." Throughout the book's various viewpoints runs a common theme: perverting people's desires to do good and belong to something larger than themselves. One contributor, Harvard professor Robert Putnam espoused the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing approach: "Wartime mobilization could also spark progress toward social justice and racial integration." Kerry lost, but the rulers' need for loyal soldiers and civilians has only intensified. The general in charge of Army recruitment just got the boot for his poor results.

Liberals like Stern wave the patriotic battle flag that others have dropped. In addition to offering unions as press gangs, Stern has jumped on board the rulers' domestic police-state agenda. One year after 9/11, Stern took part in yet another capitalist confab, the National Symposium on Competitiveness and Security, sponsored by Mellon Bank, Lockheed and the U.S. nuclear weapons labs, among others. Stern's panel concluded that workers "on the factory floor and in the office lobby" should serve as stool pigeons for the police and feds. In 2004, with Stern's blessing, a 60,000-member SEIU local in New York began a program in which the NYPD trains janitors and doormen to spot and report "suspicious activity."

(Next: How Stern would help the U.S. ruling class mobilize for world war)

`Hustle and Flow' Hails Misogynist Hip Hop Culture

An earnest speech where a pimp schools his "ho" on "the game" -- another capitalist way, comparing how men and dogs are different because men think about their futures whereas dogs, and implicitly women, don't -- opens this hateful neo-blaxploitation throwback. Hollywood is revamping this genre of celebrating the criminal life of "hustlers" (drug dealers and pimps) to manipulate mostly working-class youth into thinking "hustling" is the way to triumph within the capitalist system.

It's produced by John Singleton whose "Boys in the 'Hood" at least portrayed black working-class anger towards police and poverty, while pushing black nationalism and the black criminal. The film portrays Terrence Howard (DJay), as a pimp in the midst of a mid-life crisis, who rekindles his love of southern "Crunk" music and attempts to make it as a successful rapper. The movie is a sickening journey into sexism, racism and a glorification of the "hustler" lifestyle, the essence of modern hip-hop "culture." Howard was obviously picked for his resemblance to Ice-T, the real life "Hustler" who made his "dream" of a being a rapper come alive.

The vile songs, like "Whoop That Trick" and "It's Hard For A Pimp...," as well as their catchy hooks and bass beats, propel the message of "By any means necessary." Malcolm X's anti-passive statement is interpreted to mean that if you do whatever it takes to make money -- dealing drugs and abusing and exploiting women -- then you'll triumph over the odds, rise up and eventually "make it." What's not told is that under capitalism the odds are entirely against the working class as a whole. With this movie, the ruling class is trying to galvanize working-class youth into sexist and exploitative behavior by using the appearance of hip-hop culture and the rap game to glorify their selfish system.

Repeatedly the pimp's group of women try to rebel but he intimidates them into submitting to his control with threats of violence and abandonment from the house they live in. When one of them stands up for herself (a brash black "loudmouth" stripper), she's kicked out, along with her infant son, since she dared "disrespect her man." In these scenes, this repellant sexist is reinforcing his power and domination by putting his "bitches" in line.

This pimp doesn't care one bit about these women except for the money they give him. He's constantly pushing his individual needs above everyone else's, particularly in one degrading scene where the young girl has to fellate an old storeowner in order to acquire an expensive microphone. Outside he yells at her about how much he hates forcing her to do those things and he doesn't really want to live like this, but who is really being exploited? In several scenes she challenges the notion of selling herself and is reassured it's "all necessary" for them to get by. She's told she must trust her boss who knows what's best for her since "she doesn't have a plan." He at one point dubs her his primary investor, duping her into believing that he actual looks out for her.

The pimp is portrayed as a good man underneath, who had found his love of music in order to survive the streets of Memphis (coincidentally picked because it's the birthplace of Elvis and thus great music). The pimp, and hip-hop as a whole, is later musically validated by his white producer -- of whom he was initially suspicious due to his "race" -- who says that there's a tradition of rap coming from the South with blues music as the original "black music."

This movie is just a glamorization of a criminal who, through his individualistic, sexist, journey for fame, rises outside of the system to get his songs heard through his white prostitute after she's left "in charge" when a fellow southern rapper drops the pimp's demo in a urine-filled john. Meanwhile, in jail he meets two black cops who say they're also aspiring rappers, insinuating that we're all together as a people in the struggle to rise up and get heard.

The working class doesn't need to play into the bosses' hands through pimping, drug dealing and celebrating it through music, as this movie tries to demonstrate. Rather than accept this message of exploiting each other to get ahead "by any means necessary," we need to revolt against the capitalist system that uses these tools to advance the bosses' agenda. "Hustle and Flow" is not a revolutionary movie, regardless of how it's being lauded. The pimp may be using everyone around him to get money and riches, but really it's the ruling class who's using this movie and its contemptible theme to manipulate the working class. Our class needs to destroy the capitalist system and its ideals of fame and money, because in reality this was just a sick, hip-hop fairy tale.

Harry Potter: Nothing Magic About Exploitation and Slavery

Science fiction and fantasy writers nowadays don't use their imaginations very much. They use their talent inventing plots, gadgets and magic. But when it comes to imagining better human relationships, forget it. Most writers simply project capitalist social and class relationships into their imaginary worlds.

J.K. Rowling's popular Harry Potter series is a good example. Every time the hero, Harry Potter, leaves home for boarding school, he enters a parallel, magical world. But the realm of magic is just a souped-up version of Tony Blair's Britain. This would be great if Rowling used her books to criticize capitalism. Instead she does the exact opposite.

Rowling's strength is her anti-racism. Harry Potter and his friends are continually confronting evil wizards who believe in nazi theories about "racial purity." These evil magicians despise Harry's "mud-blood" and half-giant friends.

But this anti-racism has to be set against the social and class relationships that Rowling portrays. The latest volume, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, praises rags-to-riches entrepreneurship. The twin elder brothers of Harry Potter's best friend, Ron, go into business manufacturing and selling magical jokes and novelties.

Rowling describes in glowing terms the advantages of being a successful capitalist: power (they make their workers wear uniforms), respect (employees address them by their last name, whereas they call employees by their first names), and the ability to give their mother expensive Christmas gifts. Rowling even has a scene where the twins make Ron pay for things in their shop. Profits are thicker than blood -- and Rowling approves of this!

While praising capitalism, Rowling criticizes government bureaucracy from the right -- an echo of neo-con attacks on the laws that limit the exploitation of labor. In a word, Rowling loves Thatcherism, which Tony Blair and "New Labour" continue to apply in the U.K. today.

Rowling develops capitalist fantasies. She imagines house elves, a race of slave laborers whose only joy in life is working for their masters.

In the fourth book, Harry's friend Hermione set up a liberal do-good Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare (S.P.E.W.) because "we are all colluding in the oppression of a hundred slaves!" Critics immediately praised Rowling for putting ideas of class struggle in a children's book, and wondered: "where will she go from here?" The answer is: nowhere.

She dropped S.P.E.W. like a hot potato. In the latest book, a teacher casually admits using a house elf to test his wine for poison. Harry's only reaction is to imagine "the expression on Hermione's face if she ever heard about this abuse of house elves, and [he] decided never to mention it to her."

Even worse, Harry himself is a slave- master, having inherited the house elf, Kreacher, from his godfather. Harry barks orders at his slave and makes him follow an evil student night and day for a week without sleeping. Admittedly, Kreacher is cast as an evil being, who colluded in the murder of his former master. Rowling contrasts him with Dobby, the good house elf that Harry liberated. Dobby scrupulously obeys all Harry's orders out of pure love. To understand the way J.K. Rowling has defined good and bad behavior, all you have to do is give Dobby and Kreacher appropriate new names: Uncle Tom and Nat Turner.

Rowling's latest book is rotten in its portrayal of class relationships. It is just as bad in its depiction of some social relationships. From the first book, Rowling has had a flippant attitude towards alcohol. In this book, the divination teacher becomes an alcoholic, but Rowling does not imagine any teacher or student trying to help her.

The Harry Potter books will continue to be wildly popular with young people because of Rowling's talent as a fantasy writer. We need to talk with them about the social and class relationships she portrays, and show how relationships will be transformed under a society without slavery or explotation: communism.

UNDER COMMUNISM

How would disasters from hurricanes like Katrina be avoided?

The short answer: Prevention. Under communism the working class would have the power to slow the global warming that causes more violent hurricanes. Global warming may be partly natural, but it is greatly worsened by industrial and transportation pollution that exists under capitalism, because corporate profits, rather than human needs, rule.

Second, since earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes happen, a working-class state could avoid building new cities in danger spots, and could relocate existing ones, like San Francisco and New Orleans. For example, during World War II the Soviet Union mobilized the working class to move entire cities and industrial plants east of the Ural Mountains, beyond the reach of the Nazi armies. And they succeeded, despite the devastating winters and numerous acts of sabotage by Nazi sympathizers.

New Orleans (NO) borders and lies below the level of Lake Pontchartrain. The PLP would mobilize and organize the NO working class to build a new city away from the danger spot and move the households. But before evacuating NO, the Party would have led the workers in shoring up levees, in case a hurricane struck during the building and relocation process.

Since hurricanes give several days' warning, if there was no time to shore up the levees the city would be evacuated immediately. In contrast to the rich black NO mayor's departure and call to evacuate -- meaningless for people without vehicles or money for food and lodging, particularly the poor black population -- the Party would provide adequate transportation to carry everyone out of the city safely and immediately. As during World War II, attempts at capitalist sabotage would be dealt with mercilessly.

The population outside NO would be called upon to take people into their homes on a short-term basis. Racism would be fought vigorously, not only to eliminate any hesitation in this effort but to unify the working class around this goal. Meanwhile longer-term housing would be constructed by as many workers as the job required, so that people could be housed during clean-up of the city, pending the much longer-term effort of permanent relocation.

Food, water, clothing, sanitary supplies and medicines would continually be imported in plentiful supply and distributed to the neediest first. Peoples' former occupations would necessarily be interrupted, but clean-up and relocation would require so much effort that no one would be idle.

No income would be lost, because there would be no income under communism. Guided by the communist principle -- from each according to commitment, to each according to need -- all necessities of life would be provided free, and money would be abolished. Unemployment would be history.

The Party and the workers would struggle with anyone refusing to participate, and the Party would guarantee prevention of interference, including possible imprisonment, and, in cases of deliberate sabotage, execution.

In these processes the Party would first mobilize workers by calling on them to participate and then would organize participants to carry out the necessary coordination of effort and division of labor. In contrast to the armed cops and Guardsmen currently in NO, whose first job is to protect the property of the rich, the Party and each of its hundreds of thousands of members would have a base among her/his fellow workers and neighbors and be known and trusted. If the Party had a large enough presence already in NO and the U.S., this kind of leadership could have organized rescue efforts from the flood and the gathering and distribution of food, water, diapers, medical care, as well as portable toilets and bathing facilities.

The key elements of communist leadership in times of disaster are mobilization, organization, coordination of the vast majority of workers and the disciplining of internal and external enemies of the working class. Over the long term, including the present, the key element of Party leadership has been and continues to be the struggle to arm the international working class with an understanding of communist theory and practice that will enable the workers to rule the world. The distribution of CHALLENGE plays a crucial role in that effort.

The task at hand for the working class of all nations is to organize, with Party leadership, its own hurricane to drown the capitalist ruling classes. Under the distant future of communism, with capitalists out of the picture, the working class will survive future hurricanes, tsunamis and volcanoes with minimal disruption in our lives.

In future issues we will discuss the way that workers in revolutionary China were mobilized by the Communist Party to eliminate public health scourges, like syphilis and parasitic infections.

Israeli Rulers Help Protect U.S. Oil Empire

Recently, much has been made of the withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza strip. Gaza is a small area populated by 1.3 million Arabs and until their forced eviction, 9,000 racist Israeli settlers. The job of protecting them has become too costly, so U.S. and Israeli leaders agreed, as with Lebanon a few years ago, to a partial retreat. Israeli troops will continue to control Gaza's borders and the flow of people and goods into and out of the area. The Zionists will keep control of most of the West Bank and East Jerusalem as an ongoing base for the protection of U.S. oil interests in the Middle East.

Since the formation of Israel, U.S. imperialism has spent billions of dollars and enormous amounts of arms to establish Israel as their top cop in the Middle East. Israel's job is to use armed force and threaten the use of nuclear weapons to protect U.S. imperialism's oil interests. Mass opposition to the war in Iraq and other challenges to U.S. imperialism has made maintaining U.S. control of the Middle East more difficult militarily and politically.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, certain sections of the Jewish ruling class developed the ideology known as Zionism, -- a nationalist ideology as reactionary as the German, Italian, Japanese and other nationalist ideologies that destroyed 100 million workers during World War 2.

From 1900 to 1940 upper class Jewish Zionists tried to sell the lie that the "true" Jewish homeland was the areas described in the Old Testament as the "promised land," with little success. They used the racist slogan, "A land without people for a people without land," even though Arabs lived there for over 600 years. To the Zionists, Arabs weren't people. This "promised land," known as Palestine, was seized as a "protectorate" by Great Britain a result of World War I, in 1918.

Nazism was built around the racist hatred of Jews and extreme German nationalism. During World War 2, the Nazis killed over six million European Jews, and tens of millions of others. Many of the surviving Jews felt that they had no future in Europe. The racist rulers of the U.S., England and France, who either blocked entry or collaborated in the extermination of the Jews, adopted the Zionist plan of establishing a "Jewish state" in Palestine.

In 1947 the U.N voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab areas. The Jewish area became Israel. In a series of wars from 1948 to 1982, Israel seized control of the Arab areas of Palestine (the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem), forced hundreds of thousands of Arabs into exile in neighboring Arab states, and replaced them with over 400,000 Jewish settlers. Over the years, Arabs fought back against the Israeli occupation and, in the process a Palestinian nationalist ideology developed.

Nationalism is the most dangerous ideological enemy of workers everywhere. It is the tool that all ruling classes use to set workers against each other and advance the bosses' interests. All nationalism is reactionary and against the interests of workers. The Zionists and Arab nationalists and Muslim clerics, backed by the U.S. ruling class and its imperialist rivals, are all oppressors of Palestinian and Jewish workers. The Israeli occupation has killed tens of thousands of unarmed civilians, destroyed tens of thousands of homes, and stolen most of the water in the occupied territories. A mass communist movement of Arab and Jewish workers must emerge to end the oppression, all nationalism, oil wars and exploitation through worldwide communist revolution.

Sexism Benefits Only The Capitalists

Last issue discussed the effect of inter-imperialist rivalry on the industrial working-class, and how China's bosses' super-exploitation of its workers sets the pace for other imperialists, like the U.S., to intensify its own exploitation and compete through war. Since capitalism promotes sexism to profit from, and divide, the working class, it's important to examine the exploitation of working-class women in industry.

From the textile mills of the 18th century to today's factories, capitalism burdens female workers by encouraging sexist attitudes of male supremacy. This helps the bosses justify viewing women as inferior to men, and as sex objects, restricting them to low-paying positions, and paying them less for their labor power -- thereby keeping wages lower for all workers. The result: higher profits for the bosses and further decline in the working class's quality of life. (See "The Fight for Communism Is the Fight Against Sexism," in The Communist Magazine, Summer, 2003)

In my factory, at least 50% of the workers are female but only 5-10% are employed above the entry level. Many have been in the same "unskilled," low-paying positions for 10-20 years. Yet a month after being hired, I (a male worker) was already training for a "better" position. While these women are often among the best at what they do, and know the work better then the bosses' lackeys who are there to "supervise" us, their ability is continually overlooked because of gender.

Sexism permeates the factory. Women are treated as second-class workers -- given the most repetitive, menial jobs -- and are treated as sex objects by their supervisors. Even the most rebellious feel helpless to stop this abuse. They say, "I've told him already to please not touch me, but he keeps on rubbing up against me as if I never said anything." "I know that if I let him, he'll let me get what I want, but I don't come here to be fondled. I come here to work."

This persistent abuse convinces many female workers they will never advance beyond their current positions. I asked one co-worker with ten years experience, why she didn't apply for a higher-paying job. She replied, "I'm beginning to get old anyway; at least at this position they know I do my job well and they sort of leave me alone." Later, I asked her if it wouldn't make things easier for her financially if she got a higher-paying position. "Of course," she said, "but I won't kiss their asses or flirt with them, and that makes it difficult."

Because capitalism pervades every aspect of life, this is only a part of these women's struggle against sexism. Many arrive at work already exhausted from hours of domestic labor (cooking, cleaning, child rearing, etc.), often with little or no help from their spouses. This unpaid work is simply seen as "part of a woman's responsibilities," another way capitalism profits from sexism. Capitalists must pay enough wages for the working class to subsist and reproduce; otherwise they'd soon have no workers. So without unpaid domestic labor forced onto women, the capitalist would be forced to provide higher wages to meet the needs of every male worker. In other words, in order to survive and return to work, every male worker would have to be able to pay someone to do the cooking, cleaning and child rearing. So, for the working class to continue to exist, the capitalist must be forced to pay higher wages, lowering his profits. Sexism allows the capitalists to reap more profits through the unpaid domestic labor of working-class wives, daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers.

Still further, this strategy divides men from women. The men run big expensive machines while women are relegated to secondary operations, encouraging a sense of superiority in men that keeps some of them from seeing women as political beings with equal abilities and the same stake in fighting and ultimately destroying capitalism. Men who embrace this false idea of someone "below" them in society prevents them from improving their objective situation. Men don't benefit from sexism. The special exploitation of women depresses the entire wage scale.

Ultimately, sexism keeps men and women from seeing the revolutionary potential of women workers, enabling the bosses to stop us from uniting in struggle against them.

Still, these boss-promoted divisions don't outweigh the common experience of exploitation, of "life" for workers under wage-slavery. This objective experience creates an army of women and men whose common interests are to destroy capitalism. Our goal must be to win them to fight for communism: a world free of sexism and capitalist exploitation.

(Next: temporary and immigrant factory workers.)

LETTERS

Teachers Angry at Racist Neglect of Katrina Victims

Last week as the horrors of capitalism in the aftermath of Katrina became more and more devastating, I took a PLP leaflet around to all the tables in the teachers' cafeteria at the school where I work. Everyone I talked to was as furious as I was that the working class people, mostly poor and black, had not been evacuated, that there was no help for the victims, that four days later there was still no food and water in the Superdome or at the Convention Center; and that resources needed to shore up the levy and the National Guardsmen needed to rescue the survivors had been directed to Iraq. I told everyone that this shows the nature of capitalism, and that this was why I am a communist. Everyone had their own comments about why they were as angry as I was, and were grateful for the leaflet. A new teacher took several leaflets to pass out to other teachers.

As the liberal media are now working overtime to channel the anger of the working class against the Republicans, it's more important than ever to point out that it's not just Bush, its capitalism! The mayor of New Orleans, who is furious with Bush, could have insisted that city buses be used to take the poor out of the city before Katrina hit, but did not.

Red Teacher

Hacks Help Brewery in Colombia Slash Jobs

Luis A Pedrazo, head of the union of Bavaria Brewery workers in Colombia said that the sale of Bavaria to the SAB-Miller corporation is worrisome because it threatens to lose more workers there because of the "lack of a strong union" to defend them.

But, as CHALLENGE has pointed out in the past, the union was busted by Bavaria because of the sellout policies of Pedrazá and other hacks. Bavaria got rid of 5,600 workers before it was sold to SAB-Miller, while the union was led by Pedrazá, who for several decades betrayed the interests of the workers he supposedly represented. It is obvious that Pedrazá and the rest of the hacks made a deal with Bavaria to get rid of most of the workers, to make it easier to sell.

Today, Pedrazá wants to do the same sellout by proposing to form a union representing the 1,600 workers still in Bavaria. Sixty percent of these workers have no job security and are hired with contracts of 3-6 months.

These hacks are as bad as the bosses, benefiting from the destruction of the livelihood of thousands of workers, destroying the lives of workers .

Workers in Bavaria don't need any more sellouts, they need a revolutionary communist leadership to fight the old and new Bavaria bosses and all the hacks.

A Red Worker

Our Vision of the Future

I agree with Old-Time Red's position that communist revolution historically comes in the midst of the devastation of world war and I think it is necessary to remind people of that fact. However the series "Life Under Communism" is about what we are fighting for in the future, how our system will affect workers' lives. Challenge is very good at the important task of criticizing capitalism and reporting on worker struggles, but we also need to try and lay out what we are fighting for. A vision of what we want to replace the misery of capitalism with, and confidence in the PLP to lead a revolution, is what inspires people to fight for communism.

Another old red

TV's Law and Order Helps Build Fascism

The mayor of San Francisco recently admired the cameras that Chicago is using to spy on the streets of the city. He wants to use them, amidst reports that street crime has dropped in the areas under surveillance. Cameras are everywhere now. They show us traffic jams around the city. They are in stores and banks. They didn't stop the transit bombings in London, but they may have made it possible to identify the bombers.

Increased surveillance of the working class is one of the signs of developing fascism. They don't have cameras in the executive offices of companies and governments who make decisions that ruin hundreds and thousands of people's lives (cuts in health care benefits and pensions, job cuts, and especially wars).

The bosses use several methods to win workers to accept and support this surveillance. One is to publicize the drop in crime in neighborhoods that are under surveillance. However, this may be suspect. When the police cleared SF's Golden Gate Park of homeless encampments, many people applauded. But then people living near the park complained about all the homeless people who were camping out in front of their homes. The city hadn't solved the homeless problem, they just moved it to another part of town. That may be the effect of all these cameras.

Another way to get us to sympathize with the police is through one of the most popular TV shows, Law and Order. The show portrays police detectives as nice people who are interested in justice, so we root for them to get the "bad" guys. The accused are always guilty (except when the plot twist puts someone else in the bad guy role). The show promotes the use of surveillance cameras for catching bad guys, lying to them and roughing them up once in awhile. It tells us that the forensics people are accurate and impartial. We are shown that every accused person has a good lawyer to defend them, but we get annoyed when these same lawyers use "technicalities" to obstruct justice. We get angry with the internal police investigators for going after the good cops that we root for.

The reality is that the police target minorities and the poor, cover up their own illegal activities, frame innocent people, violate people's rights, push drugs, plant evidence and beat people up and kill them. Even if they don't do those activities, they protect those that do by not reporting them to their superiors. The real role of the police is to protect the capitalists' property and their right to exploit workers and to attack workers who fight back against cutbacks, racism, and unemployment. Just look at how the New Orleans cops were unleashed against the victims of Katrina. Notice that the bosses can call the cops on you for passing out a leaflet on the job (It happened to me!), but just try calling the cops on them.

West Coast Comrade

No Cops Under Communism

On the July 15-16 weekend, 22 comrades from the NY-NJ area held a cadre school on fascism. After spending the first night collectively setting up camp, we met in workshops the next day.

The first one discussed the nature of fascism and its current prevalence worldwide. In the second workshop, "How to Fight Fascism," the youth shared their experiences with fascism in their schools and the methods for fighting it. An open mic concluded that day, with comrades reciting poems, songs and monologues.

Inclement weather cut the weekend short, but still much was accomplished. The youth developed a greater understanding of fascism, and learned a lot from older comrades about their struggles with fascism in school. I was inspired by the more experienced comrades' recounting of their own encounters with Nazis. I realized the importance of militant struggle. Fascism means we've got to fight back!

red youth

Summer Project Helps Build Worker/Student Alliance

The PLP Summer Project in Washington, D.C. in early June provided valuable insights on how to conduct a successful worker/student alliance (WSA), insights that have contributed to our work in the faculty/staff union of a major public university. Comrades and friends from across the U.S. participated, intending to strengthen the Party's work in the D.C. Metro transit union, where a long-time comrade was elected president. These workers, a majority of whom are black, are in a fierce contract struggle against racist wage differentials and benefit cuts. We wanted to help draw Metro workers closer to PLP, develop leadership among new comrades, and win some comrades to join Metro for the long-term.

Many participants were recently-recruited high school and college students. Given that students and workers historically have had common interests in fighting capitalism, we emphasized the need for a WSA. These wonderful communist students leafleted and sold CHALLENGES to bus drivers and passengers, helping them to organize a contract rally. They stressed that this was one struggle in a broader war between bosses and workers, one in which racism is often used to divide and super-exploit workers. They linked the fascist attack on workers to the bosses' drive for imperialist wars. They injected disciplined militancy into the contract rally. And, through their words and deeds, they demonstrated the power of a WSA.

During the two-week Project, students, public university faculty and D.C. Metro comrades discussed plans for broadening the WSA, including having a contingent of D.C. Metro workers, students and university faculty and staff at the September 24 D.C. anti-war rally. They also proposed an anti-imperialist forum, jointly sponsored by academic and industrial unions, partly modeled after a recent political education forum organized by the Metro union.

These experiences and ideas contributed to our organizing at our university. There the link between students and workers is obvious: our working conditions are their learning conditions. However, this doesn't guarantee students will support struggling faculty and staff; indeed, administrators often claim that union gains will be paid for by increased student tuition. Many faculty and staff are fearful of any action that might "harm" the students. Therefore, active student support for faculty-staff demands has a tremendous effect on the willingness of passive union members to fight. In strikes, organized students can expand the efforts of union members - both side-by-side, or by protesting on campus if strikers must stay outside.

Such a united student/union effort presents a terrific opportunity to struggle politically with students and union members, helping to forge a strong WSA through which both groups can win significant short-term reforms and wage more unified long-term political fights. By participating in such a WSA, students won to the Party who then become workers will participate in other struggles - like D.C. Metro - and build PLP there. Thus, the WSA turns both student work and union work into a school for communism.

Northeast Comrade

RED EYE ON THE NEWS

Barbara says, Let them eat cake

...Barbara Bush yesterday walked past rows of poor and ailing refugees at the Houston Astrodome, then said, "So many of the people here you know were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.

"What I'm hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality," gushed the white-haired mother of President Bush.

"Almost everyone I've talked to says, `We're going to move to Houston!'

The former First Lady's comments were part of a broadcast on National Public Radio.

Later, on CNN `Larry King Live,' Barbara Bush appeared upbeat about the stricken evacuees' prospects while sitting alongside her hubby, former President George H.W. Bush.

It's been only a week since Katrina cut a deadly swath through the South, she said, "And look what's happened; Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated and are in comfortable shelters." (NY Daily News, 9/6)

Profit system puts safety last

Crash investigators will study the diary of the co-pilot, Pambos Charalambous, who secretly chronicled his concerns about technical problems with the doomed Helios Airways Boeing 737, which plunged into a mountain last month, killing all 121 people on board.

His son Yiannis, a trainee pilot, had said before the flight that the discovery of the diary...contained enough revelations to close Helios down . "...he logged every one of that plane's and [the] airline's problems," he said... "He once told me that if any of it ever got out the company would close...Initial findings have revealed that the airliner cabin failed to pressurize on take-off, which probably rendered virtually everyone on board unconscious. (GW, 9/8)

Israel: 8,000 move, 400,000 will stay

Even before Ariel Sharon finished [forcing] 8,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and a small part of the West Bank last week, the debate in Israel had turned to what happens next.

"Sharon will do nothing....Anyone who thinks that it is Gaza first is mistaken. It is Gaza only...

...Disengagement is a cover for Mr. Sharon to entrench more than 400,000 Jewish settlers living in the rest of the occupied territories while unilaterally imposing the borders of a rump Palestinian homeland. (GW, 9/8)

Workers' stress kills health, happiness

Richard Wilkinson is professor for social epidemiology, an expert in public health...surveying great sweeps of health statistics through sociological eyes. He has assembled a mountain of irrefutable evidence from all over the world showing the damage done by extreme inequality. However rich a country is, it will still be more dysfunctional, violent, sick and sad if the gap between social classes grows too wide. Poorer countries with fairer wealth distribution are healthier and happier than richer, more unequal nations.

...The people of Harlem live shorter lives than the people of Bangladesh. When you take out the violence and drugs, two-thirds of the reason is heart disease. Is that bad diet? No, says Wilkinson, it is mainly stress, the stress of living at the bottom...

Low status and lack of control over one's life is a destroyer of human health and happiness. (GW, 8/25)

Why other countries might want nukes

In May 1963, President John F. Kennedy and his aides discussed the feasibility of using nuclear weapons in the event China attacked India for a second time, according to newly declassified audio recordings that were released Thursday by the John F. Kennedy President Library and Museum in Boston.

Analysts pointed out that the so-called nuclear option, even if it was considered in the spring of 1963, would have been dismissed the following year, when China first tested its own nuclear weapon. (NYT, 8/26)

Imperialist US will keep Air Force in Iraq

Gen. John P. Jumper, who is to step down this week as the Air Force chief of staff, predicted that American fighter and reconnaissance aircraft would continue flying missions over Iraq for a long time.

"We will continue with a rotational presence of some type in that area more or less indefinitely," he said. "We have interests in that part of the world... (NYT, 8/30)

G.I. Bill pushed black vets into bad jobs

Katznelson reserves his hardest criticism for the unfair application of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, known as the G.I. Bill....

...Thousands of black veterans in the South -- and the North as well were denied housing and business loans, as well as admission to whites-only colleges and universities. They were also excluded from job training programs for careers in promising new fields like radio and electrical work, commercial photography and mechanics. Instead, most African-Americans were channeled toward traditional, low-paying "black jobs" and small black colleges, which were pitifully underfinanced... (NYT, 8/28)

US nuked Japan to threaten USSR

They incinerated Japanese cities in 1945 because they could and they wanted to, not because they had to.

...Did the Americans simultaneously believe the Japanese were a nation of fanatics who would fight to the last man, woman and child rather than surrender, and would suddenly see reason if two medium-sized cities were wiped off the map?

Of course not. What happened was that the Americans wanted a chance to test their new weapons on live targets, not merely to shock and awe the already defeated Japanese into unconditional surrender, but to show the Soviets who was in charge. (GW, 8/25)

Modern day fascists

"I can't help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting `Christian' fascists"

Harken to Dr. Adams' warning: "Fascists would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts...but would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance." (PYTHIAN Press)