Occupy Newark Makes Anti-Racism Key Fight

NEWARK, NJ October 30 — While there are certainly many weaknesses in the Occupy Wall Street movement, one positive aspect is that it has motivated many workers and students to begin fighting back.  Around 25 students and workers in Newark gathered for a General Assembly meeting to figure out how to proceed.  From the beginning, many workers began to talk about the budget cuts made by Mayor Cory Booker while giving himself a raise in the last budget. 

One of the students then proposed creating a different budget and getting a petition to deliver it to the city council for recognition.  Then, a black worker jumped in and said, “They create these illegal laws to get away with this stuff.”  She described how workers are struggling just to survive and that we need to think about different ways to fight back beyond “protesting.”

Many people in the group agreed that we need to do more.  Then a longtime worker and resident of Newark raised the role of racism under capitalism and why we need to look at these problems (housing, unemployment, health care) as a systemic issue and not just one brought about by particular individuals. 

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Steve Jobs Polished Capitalist Apple for I-Slavery

People around the world mourned the death of Steve Jobs on October 5. Jobs, one of the founders of Apple, is credited with changing the world with stylish and easy-to-use gadgets like the iPhone, iPad and Macintosh computer. Apple built an image of ingenuity that would make life better through its products.

While Jobs and Apple can be credited for these devices, they were and are no friends of the working class around the world. In the past 14 years under Jobs’ leadership, Apple became the world’s largest company, recently surpassing Exxon Mobil. It made so much money that it held over “$76 billion in cash and investments” in a bank in Nevada to avoid California corporate and capital gains taxes (Newsweek, 9/5/11).

How did they make all that money? Pure inventiveness, creativity and will? No, they made it off the backs of the working class. Even though Apple is a U.S. company, it chose to produce the bulk of its products in China, where average wages of workers are extremely low. In 2010, the average salary for a Chinese worker in Shenzen, home city to Taiwanese electronics company Foxconn, is about 900 yuan a month, or about  $132 (Bloomberg, 5/28/10).  Foxconn is the company that manufactures most of Apple’s products.

Sweatshop-like conditions have permeated these companies. According to the UK’s Daily Mail, workers clocked almost 98 hours per week, standing most of the time. When the iPad was in high demand, workers were only “allowed to take one day off in 13.” If they performed poorly they were humiliated in front of co-workers (www.dailymail.co.uk 5/1/11). Conditions at these plants are so horrendous that workers were committing suicide. Workers at Foxconn were made to sign an agreement that if they killed themselves, their families would not be compensated.

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Student Groups’ OWS Trips Building PLP

NEW YORK CITY — Our study/action Group has been taking students to participate in Occupy Wall Street (OWS). The students looked forward to going to OWS because they’ve been inspired by the protests.   We meet for lunch, read CHALLENGE and discuss the contradictions between reform and revolution. 

The most valuable element of the OWS protest has been the fact that it is capturing the imagination of workers and youth as well as inspiring them to fight back.  Our students were quick to point out that these protests were similar to those in Egypt.  The massive uprising there led to a dictatorship without a dictator in Egypt. In Tunisia, Islamists won an  election. Both were a losing proposition for the working class.

A few days later, another group of students and some teachers went down with a PL’er who works at the school.  They saw the limits of reform for themselves, and each of them moved closer to the Party as a result.  One of the students now takes and distributes CHALLENGE, having his own CHALLENGE network. 

A week after our first trip, another teacher in our group was able to convince his students to go.  Our students then met up together and distributed CHALLENGE and had conversations about our politics.  These conversations strengthened their commitment to our Party’s ideas.  Hopefully, they too will join the Party.  The OWS movement should be seen as an opportunity for us to build the Party by discussing it, going to it, and struggling over the politics of it.J 

Pro-Boss Union Hacks Divert Workers into Arms of Rulers’ Electoral Hoax

The recent upsurge in militant class struggle, as seen in Greece, Egypt, Spain, England, Syria, Israel/Palestine, Pakistan, and the United States, is a heartening development. Over the last two months, the trade union movement in New York City has moved thousands of its members to participate in its Labor Day march and at various rallies connected to Occupy Wall Street (OWS). This display of the potential power of the working class has encouraged still more organized workers.

Black, Latino, Asian and white workers from scores of unions, in both the public and private sectors, have made what appears to be a statement of solidarity and unity. Once you get past surface appearances, however, the essence of this activity is something very different. Progressive Labor Party was present at the Labor Day march and lifted the struggle level by raising questions like:

What was the focus of the unions’ Labor Day march? Did it aim to stop the racist threat of public hospital closings at Brookdale in Brooklyn or Peninsula General in Queens? Such a fight would do much to stop the erosion of desperately needed medical care in the predominately black and Latino communities that these hospitals serve — and the layoffs that these closings would require. PL’ers have supported these struggles by joining picket lines and demonstrations at the hospitals, along with our coworkers and friends. Our solidarity efforts, communist ideas and CHALLENGE were warmly received by rank-and-file hospital workers, many of whom have become our friends.

It would have been great if the Labor Day march had taken a stand against the racist crisis of unemployment that grips every segment of the working class at an “actual” rate (including underemployed and “marginally attached” workers) of more than 21 percent (shadowstats.com). We say that unemployment is racist because black, Latino and immigrant youth are victimized by joblessness by a multiple of three times the overall rate. But the union “leaders” have no plan to fight either health care cuts or massive, racist unemployment.

What if workers organized to force the New York City Central Labor Council (NYCLC) to call for a citywide general strike to stop the layoffs of some 800 public school support workers? The struggle led by PL earlier this year at the John Jay High School campus in Brooklyn showed how students, teachers and parents could be won to unite and militantly confront the racist Department of Education.

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Capitalism Still Reigns in Algeria: Gas Workers Battle for Stolen Wages

HASSI R’MEL, ALGERIA, November 1 — The Arab Spring that overturned three neighboring dictatorships has been meaningless for natural gas workers in Algeria, who still suffer from the capitalists dominating the country. They’ve been fighting for back pay and are demanding a 30% wage hike.

On October 27, about 400 workers sat in at the Sonatrach regional headquarters here, the site of Africa’s biggest natural gas field, and attempted a second one two days later. On October 30, the movement spread to workers in the Amont division, who staged a protest outside company headquarters in Algiers.

Multinational Sonatrach is Africa’s biggest oil-and-gas company and the 12th biggest in the world. It has 22 subsidiaries and employed 48,062 workers in 2010.

Rank-and-file workers say they will radicalize their movement if management does not meet their demands. In particular, they’re threatening to repudiate their newly elected union representatives for failing to back their demands, which also include an end to the job promotions freeze.

The movement began in the summer, after management failed to pay the wage hikes obtained in the April 2011 union contract. In June, the workers upped their demands to a 25% across-the-board wage hike (now 30%) instead of the previous contract’s 8% to 25%, depending on one’s work category.

Since then, the workers have held numerous meetings and general assemblies and have drawn up a 15-point platform of demands.

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Only Revolution, Not Voting, Can End Capitalism’s Racism, War and Unemployment

NEW YORK CITY, October 17 — Occupy Wall Street (OWS), spreading across the U.S. and worldwide, holds both promise and danger for the working class. It’s now clear that large numbers are seeking an end to the profit system’s misery and injustice. At the same time, Obama and union misleaders are embracing this protest for their own reasons. For the capitalists, OWS represents yet another ruling class effort to funnel workers’ anger down the dead-end road of reforming capitalism, especially through electoral politics (see page 2). 

The good news is that many in the movement’s growing ranks reject the patriotic goals of the “one-percenters.” On a subway headed to Wall Street, a rider asked, “Are you going to the protest? I’m with you. Your banner says ‘Fight for communism’? I’m not so sure about that, but it sure is true the current system is failing. Stronger regulation of capitalism won’t work. We need to learn from the mistakes of past communist movements because a revolution is what’s needed. Okay, I’ll read this paper.”

When this kind of political discussion breaks out between strangers on a train, it’s a sign that things are changing. The growth of OWS is driven by a profound frustration with capitalism’s inability to provide a decent future for the broad masses of workers. In the face of repeated police repression, brave demonstrators have taken to the streets of New York. More important, many are open to communist ideas and to having the Progressive Labor Party participate in their movement.

On the October 15-16 weekend, as PL members chanted some slogans — “It’s not just Wall Street, it’s capitalism”; “The 99% needs revolution, not reform”; “The 99% need communism” — they were met with near-universal agreement. More than 500 PL leaflets were distributed among protesters and others who came to Zucotti Park to check things out. Friends of PL have been critical in helping spread the communist message, an important step forward toward real change.

U.S. Flag A Banner for Imperialist War

Previously, a larger group of PL’ers, including several youth, had met with a similarly positive response, but they also encountered the dangerous patriotic ideology — the bosses’ ideology — that has infiltrated the movement. A protester holding high a large U.S. flag took issue with a Party banner that read, “Fight for Communism, Join PLP.” A lively exchange ensued in which we attacked his flag and defended our banner as being more in tune with the future that protesters were demanding and deserved. Others gravitated to the debate, and several political discussions spun off.

Attacking the U.S. flag as the flag of imperialist war, the most hated banner in the world, brought out pointed disagreement. Attacking the U.S. Constitution as a slave-owners’ document provoked other sharp exchanges. But through it all, a friendly tone of struggle won most people, some of them initially hostile, to weigh our message against their assumptions. We will continue participating in even larger numbers.

Opportunistic Democratic politicians and their union boss allies are striving to subvert OWS into re-electing war-maker Obama. “[A] consensus is emerging among Democrats that the ‘Occupy’ movement is worth tapping into, even helping along and joining with in some instances” (ABC News, 10/10/11). “I support the message to the establishment,” House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said on ABC’s “This Week” (10/9/11). “Change has to happen.” Labor hacks from the AFL-CIO to AFSCME to the SEIU are lending huge financial support. SEIU boss Mary Kay Healy found “incredible inspiration” in OWS (“The Hill,” 10/15/11).

But meanwhile, these union sellouts do absolutely nothing to fight the layoffs of 660 NYC school aides and other low-paid workers, the 99 per-center victims of the one per-centers’ crisis. Goldman Sachs’ brokers stole $15 billion in bonuses while billionaire NYC Mayor Bloomberg can’t find the money to keep these  $14-an-hour school staffers on the job. As leaders from the United Federation of Teachers spout their lip-service support for OWS, they make not a peep as workers are thrown out of their classrooms and their jobs. Why this seeming contradiction? These union leaders are in the hip pockets of the one percent.

Rulers’ Shill Jesse Jackson Tells OWS’ers, ‘Don’t Fight’

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Protest Nazi Killing Machine at Chicago Hospital

CHICAGO, October 13 — Students, hospital workers, and patients’ family members gathered in the rain in front of Stroger Hospital of Cook County this morning to denounce the institutionalized murder of ventilator-dependent patients. “Does a system that kills its weak to save money deserve to exist? No, it does not,” one speaker said.

As public hospitals like Oak Forest Hospital (OFH) are being shut down here, the bosses have trained their sights on the last remaining patients — those too sick and dependent to escape on their own — transferring these patients to poorly-staffed, for-profit nursing homes.

In early September, Michael Yanul, a 58-year-old ventilator patient with muscular dystrophy, who had lived at OFH for 17 years, was forced tomove. At a nursing home called Oak Lawn Respiratory and Rehab, Michael only survived three weeks before succumbing to pneumonia.

According to the national ratings Web site nursinghomerating.org, this 143-bed facility has an overall rating of one out of five stars. They have “widespread administrative deficiencies” and show a “pattern of quality-care deficiencies.” Among short-stay residents at that nursing home, 34% have bedsores and fewer than half received flu vaccine.

Another one of the long-term ventilator patients from OFH, David Moreno, 34, is particularly concerned about what happened to his former friend. Michael lived down the hall from David on the OFH vent unit. David suffered paralysis from a spinal cord injury 12 years ago and, like Michael, cannot breathe without a machine.

After OFH closed on September 2, he was moved to the Coronary ICU at Stroger Hospital until a long-term placement could be arranged. His social worker told him that the hospital administration plans to move him to Oak Lawn Respiratory and Rehab, where Michael died last month. “I’m scared of going to that place,” he said in a recent interview.

By attacking the most vulnerable patients first, the bosses expect to desensitize workers and prepare the way for more murderous attacks. The Nazi Holocaust began as coordinated, hospital-based murders of physically and mentally handicapped patients (see box).

We distributed CHALLENGE and passed out flyers to patients and workers arriving for the morning shift, exposing the hospital administration’s plans to kill off the few remaining ventilator-dependent patients through deliberate decisions that result in completely predictable deaths.

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Expose ‘Dream Act’ Nightmare Anti-Racists Blast Fascists At Liberal NPR ‘Forum’

Recently, “liberal” National Public Radio’s “Fronteras” program staged a “town hall” in Texas to discuss the DREAM Act, a proposed law to allow immigrant youth without papers to stay in the U.S. and go to college or join the military. The composition of the panel and the conduct of the event showed that the purpose was to promote racism and fascism. Anti-racist students from local colleges came to confront this panel.  

In preparation, we passed out a leaflet on our campus and at the town hall that criticized the DREAM Act as a tool to force immigrant youth into the military. It exposed the composition of the panel: Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, who had approved the torture at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and is now running as a Democratic candidate for the Senate; a member of the racist, vigilante Minutemen/Border Watch; George Rodriguez, the head of a regional “Tea Party” organization; as well as an immigrant student and an immigration lawyer.

We called on students, teachers and workers to unite as one working class to “smash all borders and the capitalist profit system.” On the day of the event, we brought signs with slogans like “Workers’  Struggles Know No Borders.”   

As the event opened, the moderator, who had selected the panelists, gave each a few minutes to speak. None of the liberals took a critical approach to the Dream Act. In defending youth who were “illegal through no fault of their own” and who could “contribute” to U.S. society, they demonized undocumented parents as “law-breakers.”

When pressed by a college student, General Sanchez reluctantly admitted that the DREAM Act would force people into the military since “dreamer” students would not be allowed federal financial aid for college or work permits. But, he continued, this was good for the military since immigrant soldiers were more likely than citizens to complete their service “honorably.”

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Mexico: Marchers Honor Historic 1968 Anti-Government Struggle

MEXICO CITY, October 2 — Thousands of students, teachers, and workers participated in massive marches to honor the memory and struggles of the 1968 anti-government protests. The Party participated in the marches in Mexico City and in Oaxaca, distributing hundreds of flyers and putting forward its communist politics.

The marches were marked by the strong presence of youth and it was heartening to see that women led the groups coming from rural schools. We face the great challenge of helping those young people abandon the reform struggles to join the fight for an egalitarian society, communism. The massive police presence indicated that the repression experienced in ‘68 will remain a threat as long as the same oppressive class is in power.

Students, organized in the National Strike Council, mobilized close to a million and a half people. One of their essential demands was to abolish the repressive state apparatus and the laws that supported it.

On October 2, 1968, a peaceful demonstration of several thousand students and workers were violently repressed. The business and financial oligarchy, represented by President Diaz Ordaz and the Governing Secretary Luis Echeverría, ordered the military, the police, and paramilitary groups to murder hundreds of protesters. When the demonstrators realized there wasn’t a legislative way to achieve the reforms they sought, many of those youth joined the guerrilla struggles of the 1970s.

By and large, the media distorted the truth about the movement, making it evident that they were just tools of the ruling class. Print media and television promote, to this day, the criminal idea that one should not protest, because “nothing ever changes.” But the historical struggles of ‘68 demonstrate that workers’ aspirations for freedom can only be accomplished if we change the social and economic system in which we live. That was one of its more important contributions.

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Need to Occupy Plants, Union Halls GM, Ford, Union Hacks Agree On Low Wages, Big Profits

DETROIT, MI., October 19 — While the International UAW leadership was drumming up support for the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests, they were also signing new four-year agreements with GM, Ford and Chrysler, the first since the federal bailout and bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler in 2009. These new contracts show that the “progressive” union leaders share the rulers’ vision of a low-wage, highly productive workforce that will keep the profits flowing from the GM Building to Wall St.

GM made more than $1 billion in profit last year and Ford about $4 billion. The new contracts continue the wage freeze of senior workers that began in 2005. Instead, there is a series of signing bonuses and lump-sum payments (as high as $16,000 to senior Ford workers, at least 50 percent less at GM and Chrysler) that do not go into our base pay or begin to make up the concessions taken from us. For new second-tier workers, base pay could rise by $4/hr. over the life of the Ford contract, but there is no bridge from the second tier to the first.  There is no increase in the pension and the retirees’ Christmas bonus has been ended.

‘Improve Competitiveness’ on Workers’ Backs

John Fleming, Ford’s head of global manufacturing and labor affairs, said the new deal “will continue to improve our competitiveness...” Harley Shaiken, a labor professor at the University of California, Berkeley said the union tried to win bonuses and new jobs without creating additional costs.

In fact, overall labor costs could go down. GM and Ford are reopening a few plants and bringing more work to some others, promising as many as 12-15,000 new jobs, all at the lower-wage second tier. At the same time they are starting a new round of buyouts of senior workers. Now, second-tier workers are about 5% of the total workforce. By 2015 they could be as much as 20%. And in the industry as a whole, including the transnational assembly plants and the hundreds of supplier plants, probably two-thirds of the industry is at or below the GM, Ford and Chrysler second tier.

The UAW’s efforts to keep the Detroit Big Three “more competitive” has turned the U.S. into one of the low-wage, non-union centers of the international auto industry. And any promise of new jobs at any wage assumes the economy doesn’t crash again, taking the auto industry with it.

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