Capitalism has just dealt the U.S. working class two major blows: Hurricane Sandy and Barack Obama’s re-election as president. While the U.S. ruling class is ever ready to allocate trillions of dollars for wars to preserve its profits and oil dominance in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, it has refused to spend a dime on seawalls to prepare for storms like Sandy, not to mention Katrina in New Orleans or Ike in Texas.
The system’s profit-driven lack of preparation for the latest storm, fueled by profit-driven global warming, killed more than a hundred U.S. workers and made life miserable for hundreds of thousands more without power, water and food along the East Coast. Sandy also devastated the Caribbean, especially Haiti, where racist U.S. bosses have concentrated on milking profits from poverty-level wages following the 2010 earthquake. Their ruthless neglect left those workers wide open to the devastation of Sandy.
In the hurricane’s wake, the bosses brought militarization rather than relief to ravaged black and Latino neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Obama — who managed the crisis by landing Marines in New York and New Jersey — won four more years to spread war and fascism abroad and at home on behalf of his U.S. imperialist backers. The only storms those rulers care about are World War III and its deadly preludes.
The Exxon Mobil/JPMorgan Chase wing of U.S. finance capital backed war-maker Obama’s re-election. These owners of U.S.-based, globally oriented companies face increasing competition from China’s rising capitalists and a resurgent Russia for control of worldwide markets and resources. Using armed force to protect U.S. domination of Middle East and North African oil and gas, especially in Saudi Arabia, has been Obama’s top priority since day one of his first term.
On behalf of Exxon, he has broadened the U.S. war theater far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan to Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan. Next on Obama’s hit list are Chinese and Russian proxies Syria and Iran — and, after them, quite likely, China and Russia themselves. He is already landing Marines in Australia and troops in the Philippines as U.S. rulers turn their eyes toward Asia.
Meanwhile, Obama has presided over massive cuts in wages. He has slashed newly hired workers’ pay in half (part of his much-lauded bailout deal with GM and Chrysler) and has frozen federal workers’ earnings. His policies have ravaged education, health, housing and other workers’ needs in favor of trillion-dollar-plus funding of the U.S. war machine. Capitalism’s New Depression sharpens both the Pentagon’s scramble for cash and workers’ crushing poverty.
Sandy approached New York City with predicted devastation to low-lying, working-class areas. But billionaire Mayor Bloomberg saved his imperialist allies big bucks by declaring mandatory evacuation of flood zones but not spending a nickel to carry it out. He refused to deploy the city’s 5,900 transit buses when hundreds of thousands of workers, the great majority without cars, required relocation to higher ground. Many workers drowned. Thousands more still freeze and fester without heat, electricity or clean water. And they have become “criminals” for defying evacuation orders.
Mayor’s Racism Hits Projects
In a further racist move to humiliate mostly black and Latino workers in devastated city projects, Bloomberg is distributing adult diapers to waterless project residents instead of fixing their plumbing. But in Lower Manhattan, home to U.S. capitalism’s Wall Street, the bosses spared no effort or expense to rebuild exploded power stations, pump out vaults and repair thousands of miles of pipes and wires. The stock exchange lost only two days of trading. But workers in neighborhoods like Brooklyn’s Red Hook and Queens’ Far Rockaway have no basic services well into the third week after the storm.
In anticipation of broader wars and police-state fascism, Obama, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg have used the storm to justify a martial law crackdown far tighter than the one after 9/11. Workers traveling from Brooklyn to Manhattan had to wait for hours in holding pens before boarding buses. They still face gasoline rationing. More significantly, Marines have joined the National Guard in patrolling streets in Brooklyn, Queens, and Hoboken, New Jersey.
It used to be that relatively integrated National Guard “citizen soldiers,” under the command of local governors, would assist in disasters. But in and around New York, racist rulers at the highest Pentagon levels are deploying mainly white Marines, trained to kill Arabs and Asians, against potentially rebellious black and Latino workers. In some blacked-out areas, residents are restricted at night to their apartments. They lack light, heat and water while cops and troops patrol the streets.
Obama’s Latest Surge —
The Marines
While terrorizing our class, Obama’s surge of Marines into New York warms the hearts of racist killer cops and their ruling-class patrons. The Obama-boosting New York Times featured triumphal, D-Day-style photos of Marines taking the beach at burnt-out Breezy Point, Queens, the guarded, gated, most segregated enclave in New York.
Meanwhile, undocumented workers face double suffering. Ineligible for FEMA assistance, they may be used at below the minimum wage to clear devastated areas, like what happened in post-Katrina New Orleans, Louisiana.
All of this adds up to the rulers expanding their social control over the working class. While they make no plans to ward off “natural” catastrophes, the bosses use these opportunities to exert control over workers and pave the way for more open fascism. In hard-hit cities like New Orleans and Galveston, Texas hundreds of thousands of workers — most of them black and Latino — have lost their jobs and homes and are never coming back. Housing projects and private homes are not being rebuilt. The ruling class treats workers like garbage, to be thrown away when they cost too much to sustain.
On the opposite side, workers’ collective answers to Sandy shows how working-class control of society would both deal constructively with weather disasters and also plan to prevent widespread damage in the first place. (See box on the Soviet Union and China and its former communist leadership, page 1.) This bodes well for our class and the Progressive Labor Party’s goal of replacing the bosses’ profit-minded dictatorship with workers’ rule.
“In the void left by the slow and inadequate institutional emergency response, improvised relief networks sprang up. Neighbors helped one another” (Village Voice, 11/7/12). While police arrested volunteer water distributors as “looters,” and troops grudgingly dispensed meager Army food rations, workers shared real meals with one another. They cooked on sidewalk and rooftop grills and at churches and community centers they took over (see letter on page 6). Workers, not cops or Marines, organized water-hauling brigades to bring a semblance of decency to those without plumbing.
Our Party’s members were out in the streets, in the projects and the hospitals, delivering food, water and clothing to those who had lost everything. PL teachers organized their students, in solidarity with their parents, to distribute aid to the stricken. PL doctors administered medical assistance to workers bereft of needed medicine. (See page 3.)
Glimpse of Communism
Imagine an entire society organized and run on the principle of workers tending to workers’ needs. Our Party understands that it will take a revolution to achieve it. One of the biggest obstacles to our class’s seizing power for itself is the trap of electoral politics. More than 62 million people, most of them workers, voted for Obama. They believed, against all evidence, that he would bring progress and improve their lives. But Obama’s vicious suppression of the working class in his first four years and in Sandy’s aftermath proves that he will continue to serve war-bent imperialists.
Progressive Labor Party calls on all of its members and friends to go to the devastated areas with material aid and political aid, as well. We need to use CHALLENGE to point out how a communist society, run by and for the working class through collective action, can overcome any and all problems workers face.
Once profits and bosses — and the racism, sexism and poverty they create — have been eliminated, the working class can conquer any storm.