U.S. Billionaire Funds NGO Evictions of Jerusalem Workers

SHEIKH JARRAH, EAST JERUSALEM, January 6 — Palestinian and Jewish activists, including PL’ers from Israel-Palestine and the U.S., held a rally protesting the racist eviction of Palestinian families from their homes in this neighborhood, minutes away from the center of Jerusalem. The demonstrators demanded real justice, the return of the families to their houses and the removal of violent settlers and brutal cops from the neighborhood.

Since the 1990’s, settlers, paid for handsomely by the El’ad and Ateret Cohanim NGOs (non-government organizations), used the Israeli courts to seize houses here. Despite the fact that the Palestinian residents, all working class, were the legal owners of their homes and had all the documents necessary to prove this, the court ruled for the settlers — upper-middle-class Jews — who only had very dubious documents of ownership. Obviously the Israeli court of “justice” is openly racist and prefers the “rights” of wealthy Jewish settlers over those of Palestinian or Jewish workers.

NGOs Serve Ruling Class

Both settler NGOs operating in East Jerusalem, El’ad and Ateret Cohanim, are heavily funded by Irving Moskowitz, a U.S. capitalist and “philanthropist” based in Miami, who has made his fortune from constructing private hospitals and casinos. Moskowitz pays the settlers to take over Palestinian houses and land throughout East Jerusalem so he can build real-estate projects (for wealthy Jews only) a few minutes drive from the city center, and reaps super-profits in the process.

PL’ers from both Israel-Palestine and the U.S. have visited the home of the al-Kurd family here. The family had received its home and land from UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Work Agency) in 1956. A few years later the Jordanian government, which ruled the West Bank and East Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, acknowledged the family as the owners of their house.

But apparently having full land title and living on the land for 56 years wasn’t enough for the Israeli court. In the 1990’s, the al-Kurd family built a small housing unit in their yard for one of their sons. The Israeli court ruled that this construction was “illegal” and repossessed the housing unit. From 1999 to 2009 it stood empty.

In 2009, however, teenage settlers were allowed to live in this unit, rent free, and were also paid to live there! These settlers are very violent towards the al-Kurd family; they order their dogs to attack the family members. However, if the al-Kurd family dares to report these attacks to the police, they themselves get arrested, not the aggressive settlers!

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Religion: Tool of Exploitation

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston/New York, 2006, 

God and His Demons, by Michael Parenti, Prometheus Books, Amherst/New York, 2010.

If you are reading this, you are probably eager to see the world move beyond exploitation of the many by the few, and away from continual inter-imperialist wars for control over the world’s resources.  We are aware that many CHALLENGE readers rely, to some degree, on religion to produce such progress.  But whatever you may think about religion and God, there is an inherent problem in religion that allows our profit-seeking exploiters and war-making executioners to get away with their daily theft and murder of our friends, our families, ourselves.  The problem is that religion — whatever comfort it provides, or whatever unity it encourages among fellow worshippers — is used by our exploiters to bind us to their needs over our own.

Bibles Celebrate Murder and Mayhem 

Religions of all sorts have been used for millennia to justify war and genocide in the name of god.  They have always been used to lead us to regard other members of our exploited class as enemies rather than allies and fellow-sufferers. Over thousands of years of human history, new religions evolve out of older ones whenever a rising class needs a new weapon of mass control. 

The God Delusion and God and His Demons are both worth reading despite their shortcomings.  Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist, concentrates on the logical and factual inconsistencies in the Judeo-Christian Bible. He shows the disconnect between religion and morality, describes the murder and mayhem celebrated in the Old and New Testaments, and alludes to the frequent modern-day abuse of children by religionists.  He also writes about the historical use of all religions, by clergy and other backers, to induce workers to kill other workers in endless wars for gain and profit.  Dawkins’ stated goal is to give skeptical readers enough evidence to argue against the belief in a supreme being. 

Manufactured Religious Precepts

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PLP Militance Rolls Over Police Plan: BLOCK THE LONG BEACH PORT

LONG BEACH, CA, December 12 — Seven hundred workers shut down business at the Long Beach Port. This march revealed a split between the Occupy movement’s liberal organizers and the rank-and-file occupiers, including Progressive Labor Party comrades who gave key leadership at the protest.  

The liberals’ plan, orchestrated with the Long Beach Police Department, was to funnel the march along a narrow sidewalk, with the ocean on one side and the cops on the other. But with PL leading a communist chant of “Shut it down, shut it tight, workers of the world unite!” the march quickly turned militant. PL’s friends in the movement were evident as we crossed the line of cones and took the streets leading to the port.

The kkkops responded by attempting to use their motorcycles as barricades, splitting the protest into two halves. It was a potentially dangerous situation, with one group facing a wall of cops in riot gear. But we quickly organized ourselves and led the march back and sandwiched the police!  At first, the other half of the march was hesitant to walk through the police barrier, but our comrades again led the way and soon the whole march followed.

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Youth Lead Fight against Hospital’s Racist Killer Cuts

CHICAGO, December 14 — On an unseasonably warm and rainy day, about twenty PL’ers and friends gathered in front of Stroger hospital, under an overhang, to protest the deadly cuts in the Cook County public hospital system. Stroger Hospital was moving forward with planned layoffs even though the holidays were almost here. We handed out fliers while calmly holding our signs and giant photographs of patients who are losing their healthcare, including one who recently died as a result. CHALLENGEs were distributed.

It wasn’t long before the kkkops told us to move from “private property.”

“What are you talking about? This is a public hospital and I work here!” a protester snapped. Together, we decided to march twenty-five yards away, but still on county property. We marched as a group chanting, “They say cut back, we say fight back!”

After establishing a picket line, we took turns on the bullhorn, denouncing the layoffs and service cuts. A few union hacks tried to talk to the demonstrators to divert our anger, but we kept spreading the word to the hundreds streaming by. We distributed all of our fliers and made a few contacts with patients and their families who were inspired to see workers fighting for their county healthcare system.

Last week the administration laid off eight respiratory therapists. This is a direct result of the closing of Oak Forest Hospital (see CHALLENGE, 11/2/11). Respiratory therapists from Oak Forest with more seniority are being transferred to Stroger Hospital. Rather than increase the staff of respiratory therapists at Stroger to help take care of the flood of new patients, management decided to fire the therapists with less seniority.

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Obama, Iran Threaten New Mid-East Oil War

U.S. imperialists’ face-off with Iran’s nuclear-bent bosses is escalating towards war. At stake is control over the Middle East and its increasingly strategic energy resources. According to CNN, Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “is quietly leading the ongoing military planning for an attack against Iran’s nuclear weapons in the event the president gives the order to do so” (12/20/11).

In the latest round meanwhile, Obama tried to slap tighter financial sanctions on Iran unless it gave up its nuke program. In turn, Iran’s naval brass threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz. Virtually all of the oil and gas exports of Iraq and Kuwait and more than half of Saudi Arabia’s pass through that waterway sails. All of these resources are dominated by U.S. and British oil giants.

Then Obama sent an aircraft carrier group through the strait while the Iranian navy practiced maneuvers nearby. Obama also pointedly announced a “$30 billion sale to Saudi Arabia of advanced-model U.S. F-15 fighter jets and associated weapons systems” amid “recent irrational behavior by the Tehran government” (Voice of America, 12/29/11). In direct response, Iran “test-fired a medium-range surface-to-air missile near the strategic Strait” (VOA, 1/1/12). Iran warned it would not accept return of the aircraft carriers.  

China-Russia-Iran Axis Speeds Ayatollahs’ A-Bomb

Iran’s rulers have since eased off shutting Hormuz, since its closure would also deprive themselves of oil export revenue and cut off their main customer, China. But aided by the anti-U.S. coalition, they remain determined to build a bomb. The Washington Post (11/7/11) reported:

Intelligence provided to U.N. nuclear officials shows that Iran’s government has mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon, receiving assistance from foreign scientists to overcome key technical hurdles....Documents and other records provide new details on the role played by a former Soviet weapons scientist who allegedly tutored Iranians over several years on building high-precision detonators of the kind used to trigger a nuclear chain reaction....Crucial technology linked to experts in Pakistan and North Korea [both heavily influenced by China — ed.] also helped propel Iran to the threshold of nuclear capability.

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Using CHALLENGE to Battle Growing Fascism in Chicago Schools

Recent CHALLENGE articles about fascism’s growth in Haiti (see issue 12/14/11) and its attacks on the Occupy movements worldwide inspired me to report recent efforts to build PLP amid growing fascism in Chicago.

I am a laid-off black schoolteacher here, among the disproportionate number of laid-off black teachers. These racist layoffs and those of all groups reflect the economic and political crises of capitalism.

Global fascism and its imperialist wars make workers’ lives miserable, attacking the working class in many ways. One tactic is forcing government employees (teachers, health workers, among others) to accept lower living standards — reduced wages, skimpier benefits and lousier working conditions. For teachers, this includes layoffs, denied pay raises (or lower pay scales, inducing them to move to a growing number of higher-paying charter schools), more expensive health care coverage and increasingly poor working conditions.

In education, one such condition is overcrowded classrooms. More students per teacher are cheaper for capitalists, whose gain is the working class’s loss in schools. Classroom overcrowding reduces the quality of education for students, often implemented in a racist way. Black and Latino students, already enduring racist oppression, are stuffed into learning environments ill designed to meet their needs.

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Fight Back Against Homelessness Killing AIDS’ Victims

WASHINGTON, DC, December 1 — Progressive Labor Party members today joined a bold group of activists rallying in front of the DC Department of Health to demand housing for the city’s 922 people with AIDS. They are living in shelters or from couch to couch. In a chant aimed at the federally funded program called Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA), we called out:  “Housing yes! Racism no! HOPWA wait list has got to go!”

Demonstrators from DC Fights Back and the Metro Washington Public Health Association held signs shaped like homes and took over the sidewalk and median strip. People with HIV need secure housing to adhere to lifesaving medications that reduce the spread of the virus. Homelessness kills!

During World AIDS Day, many organizations hold vigils, educational events, and offer HIV tests and condoms. Meanwhile, liberal politicians make hypocritical pledges they have no intention of fulfilling. All the bosses’ politicians care about is the disease’s destruction of a labor market that they could exploit for profit, especially in Africa.

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Eurocrisis Could Trigger Global Crash and World War III

The “Eurocrisis” is first and foremost about the failure of capitalist over-production as well as about inter-imperialist rivalry. French and German bosses are fighting to make sure their own bankers are not stuck with losses coming from the inability of other European governments to pay their debts. Chinese bosses are looking for opportunities to gain greater economic influence on the European continent. And U.S. bosses are worried about the possibility that the Eurocrisis will trigger a second worldwide financial crash. To analyze the current crisis, we must first look at how current European power relations developed. 

After the mass destruction of World War II, the main political goal of U.S. bosses was to limit post-war communist influence in a devastated Europe. According to General Lucius D. Clay, Deputy Governor of the U.S. Occupation in Germany: “There is no choice between being a communist on 1,500 calories a day and a believer in democracy on a thousand.” Although crudely anti-communist, this quote shows why the U.S. backed the resurgence of what was then the West German economy in 1946. French bosses, the long-time enemies of the German ruling class, were initially opposed to this move. But by 1950, under U.S. pressure, they went along. 

In 1952, Stalin had written, in Economic Problems of Socialism: “To eliminate the inevitability of war, it is necessary to abolish imperialism.” Marxist analysis of capitalism showed workers how big economic crises led to mass destruction of productive forces in imperialist wars. But liberal and social democratic politicians claimed that the various national bourgeoisies could reconcile their differences peacefully. To that end, European economic unions like the Coal and Steel Community (founded in 1951) were promoted as a way for countries to avoid the terrible consequences of war. These unions, however, were maintained within the context of U.S. dominance.

After the fall of the Soviet Union and German reunification, European bosses began asserting their independence. The European Union (EU) was formed in 1993. In 1999, eleven EU countries, led by France and Germany, established a common currency, the Euro, in a subset of the EU known as the Eurozone. Now a majority of EU countries use the Euro.

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Israeli Bosses’ Racism Exploits Both Jewish and Arab Workers

HAZOR HAGLILIT, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, November 12 — After declaring Israel an independent state in May 1948, the racist Zionist bosses faced a problem they call: “The Demographic Problem.” Despite expelling some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and demolishing around 540 of their villages, 20% of the population of the newly created State of Israel, were Palestinian Arabs. The majority of Palestinians, within Israel, were concentrated in two areas: The Triangle (Central Israel) and the Galilee (northern part of Israel). In those areas, Palestinians constituted the majority of the population. In order to change this, the Zionist government started a racist campaign to “Judify” the Galilee.

The heart of the project consisted of creating new settlements called “Maabara” (transitional camps — mostly tents and huts made of wood and metal sheets.) These settlements were populated by Jewish immigrants, mostly Jews from Arab countries and from North Africa.

Jewish Immigrants Source of Cheap Labor

The new immigrants served as cheap labor for local industries set up by the government and the bosses. The new settlers  increased the Jewish population in the Galilee which led to a Jewish majority. The new settlements populated “The Frontier” in the north and south and could serve as cannon fodder and as a first barrier in case of an invasion by a neighboring Arab country. The Zionists gave these settlements a special name calling them a “Development Town”(Ayarat Pituach). Shderot in the South, known as a target for Kassam rockets from Gaza, is one of them, while Hatzor Haglilit is one in the north.

The policy of the Zionist bosses was similar in most of the “Development Towns.” A cheap labor force was at hand so the government, with money from local taxes and donations from rich Jewish bosses overseas, gave grants and subsidies to local bosses who established industrial factories in those towns. They employed the local new immigrants at a minimum wage making millions of dollars, while maximizing their profits. As a result of this policy the “Development Towns” turned out to be towns owned by the local industry. Most of the town’s life revolved around the factory. In Hazor Haglilit it was Vita Inc. producing pickled vegetables in cans.

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France: Joblessness Tops 17%, Union ‘Leaders’ Help Bosses Shift Crisis onto Workers

PARIS, December 29 — Unemployment in November hit new record levels in France, and the bosses’ government and the union misleaders agree: shift the burden of the crisis onto the backs of the working class by putting workers on short time, cutting their income, in order to help maintain the bosses’ profits.

Pôle emploi, the unemployment office, reports an “official” jobless rate of 10.1% — 2,844,800 jobless in an active population of 28,269,000 — a level of unemployment unseen in the past 12 years. However, the real rate rose to 17.1%.

The 1,400,000 persons working part-time but actively seeking full-time work raises the rate to 15.0%. An additional 589,600 workers on the unemployment rolls were sick, in job training or had a government-subsidized job so were not counted in the “official” rate because they were not obliged to actively look for work. This ups the real unemployment rate to 17.1%.

All this hits black and Arab immigrant workers from sub-Saharan and North Africa, and their children, particularly hard (see box). Because of racist discrimination, they are already at the lower end of the jobs and income level and now are being driven deeper into poverty.

On December 27, the Minister for Labor said that a January 18 summit on jobs “will make it possible … to put forward quick-action solutions to limit the effects of the economic crisis as much as possible.” He notably favored making it easier for companies to put workers on short time. French President Nicolas Sarkozy will preside over the labor-management summit.

On December 27, France’s largest trade union confederation, the CGT, said it will propose to the summit “the elimination of untaxed overtime hours; reinforced checks on financial aid granted to companies, with a firm commitment to maintaining jobs; and the establishment of a mechanism to avoid layoffs by working short time.”

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