Chilean Mine Disaster a Capitalist Crime!

Billions of people cheered the recent rescue of 33 heroic Chilean miners. This outpouring of admiration and sympathy for the workers and their families encourages our revolutionary communist Party. It shows that worldwide class-based solidarity is indeed possible.
But the cheers and tears that filled the world’s media for the miners rescued from the San Esteban Primera Company’s San Jose copper and gold mine occurred amid an orgy of Chilean patriotic nationalism led by billionaire President Sebastián Piñera. It should not obscure the collaboration of profit-hungry mining bosses with Chile’s capitalist government which caused this disaster and many others.
José Rojo, a 20-year veteran miner, charged that the bosses had “turned a blind eye to the San José mine. They told us it was coming down; every so often there were cave-ins. They knew it was going to happen. At times when I was there with the Jumbo drill, I had to stop because I saw that the roof was coming down on me.” (Argentine daily, “Pagina 12”) On the day of the cave-in, he was lucky — the machinery he operated was broken, so he was not at work!

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Billionaire’s Payoff: More Capitalist Control of NJ Schools

NEWARK, NJ, October 15 — So what do you get when you put Oprah Winfrey, Newark Mayor Corey Booker, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on a stage to talk about how to reform the Newark public schools? Another attempt by the U.S. ruling class to make schools more efficient warehouses, producing capitalist ideas and maintaining class inequality and racist divisions of the working class. Especially in a place like Newark, where the “official” unemployment rate is well over 14%, and over 70% of students can’t pass state tests, the bosses need to cover up their racism with a U.S. nationalist “We are all in this together” mentality. This is where Zuckerberg comes in.
On September 24, Zuckerberg announced that he is setting up a foundation, like fellow billionaire Bill Gates, to focus on the improvement of education in the U.S., and particularly Newark.

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Transit Workers, Riders Blast Racist Bankers; Union Backs Politicians

NEW YORK CITY, October 16 — TWU (Transport Workers Union) Local 100 representing most of NYC’s transit workers sent 20 buses to the October 2 “one nation” rally in Washington, D.C. However, many buses were largely empty. The international TWU “contingent” of mass transit, airline and railroad workers was nothing more than a distribution point for lunch, T-shirts and temporary tattoos. Many Local 100 members, including recently laid-off transit workers, were motivated to go to fight for jobs and against MTA bosses. But the rally was nothing more than a big pre-election photo-op for Democrats.
Preparing for the rally, in September PLP protested at two of five MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) public hearings on fare hikes, confronting the MTA Board face to face. Along with a few spirited transit riders and workers, PLP pointed out that layoffs, service cuts and fare hikes hit the city’s mainly black, Latino and immigrant workers the hardest.

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Students, Parents and Staff Know We Must: Probe School Bosses, Not Students and Teachers

BROOKLYN, NY, October 12 — “What’s the purpose of these schools? Is it for you to get educated OR to keep you under control?” This is what one PLP member asked his class last week in response to this schools’ administration harassing students about their participation in the October 2 March for Jobs in Washington, D.C. Many students attended this event, sponsored by the United Federation of Teachers, with family and friends, as well as staff members.
The administration has pursued campaigns of intimidation before when students and staff members have attended various events together, such as when teachers and students worked alongside each other in helping to rebuild New Orleans. This effort to create a climate of fear and hysteria has backfired on them before and will again. The Washington rally was attended by politicians as well as thousands of students from all over the East Coast.

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Mexico: Seeds of Emerging Struggle Fertile Ground for Revolution

PLP must go where the workers are, get our newspaper around and motivate the class struggle. Reforms are not the workers´ way to victory but can be used as a way of learning to fight, since what we really need is to destroy this murderous system. The workers of the Mexican electricity company have been on strike since March, and they need solidarity as much from the outside as the inside. We need to make our presence known there. We will also motivate the workers from Volkswagen with our solidarity.

Our class ties will grow as well as our feelings of brotherhood. We will grow and learn from the class struggle there. That´s what we communists do. We learn a lot from strikes such as the one from Stella d’ Oro in New York, and they elevate our level, encourage our revolutionary spirit and our commitment to fight until we accomplish our objective. We contribute collectively and win new comrades to communism in the struggle, and we expand the distribution of our newspaper.

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Battle Rulers, Cops, Politicians: Militant Moms Holding Fast

CHICAGO, IL, October 1 — The occupation of the Whittier field house is in its third week. It appears that following one week of direct confrontation with the CPS (Chicago Public Schools) security (see CHALLENGE, 10-6-10), the city’s police, politicians, ruling class and their school board are waiting them out.

CPS, planning the demolition of the building, refused the mothers’ demand for a library and after-school facility, so they have begun transforming this place into the library and community center they want. Volunteer librarians and donations of hundreds of books have transformed the field house into a near-functioning library, proving we don’t need these politicians and the banks and businesses they serve to provide for our needs.

The predominantly Latina mothers are beginning to see this as more than a struggle for a school library because they now know it is simply 1 of 160 Chicago schools, mainly black and Latino, that don’t have libraries!

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U.S. Bosses’ Tactical Split on Iran War, Army Loyalty

A fierce tactical debate is heating up within the U.S. imperialist camp. Confronting Iran’s nuclear-arming ayatollahs is becoming increasingly urgent for those bosses Obama is struggling to serve. An Iranian A-bomb, closer by the day, could effectively erase 60 years of a major cornerstone of U.S. imperialism: its domination of the oil-rich Mid-East. The stakes are high. It boils down to: U.S. (or Israeli) air strikes right now or a major invasion (with more allies) as soon as possible.

Imperialists Split on Iran Tactics: Strike Alone Today or With Allies Tomorrow

The dominant imperialists had leaned towards the latter course until recently. Their top think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), published an article entitled “After Iran Gets the Bomb” in its Foreign Affairs journal (March-April 2010). It said Iran’s nuclearizing was unavoidable but would give the U.S. an excuse to spread its own nuclear umbrella over the region while it gathered allies for a massive invasion of Iran.  Now, however, the CFR, led by David Rockefeller who personifies its imperialist Exxon Mobil-JP Morgan Chase backing, entertains a shorter timetable.

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France: 3,000,000 Slam Pension Cuts; Strikes Exploding

PARIS, October 2 — Today nearly 3,000,000 people across France turned out for union-sponsored demonstrations against the government’s retirement “reform,” the third giant protest in a month. With opinion polls showing 70% of the population opposed to raising the retirement age, President Nicolas Sarkozy’s prediction that the movement “would run out of steam” has been proven wrong.

The government wants to increase the minimum age for retirement on a partial pension from 60 to 62, and the age for retirement on a full pension from 65 to 67. This attack on pensions is part of a general Europe-wide bosses’ assault on past social welfare gains in order to maintain and increase profits, forcing the workers to pay for the bosses’ general financial crisis.

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D.C. Rally: PL’s Red Line Antidote to Liberal Rulers’ Poison

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 3 — This past weekend the liberal wing of the ruling class tried their best to motivate its base to elect Democrats on November 2. The PLP joined thousands of other workers at the Lincoln Memorial to expose the dead-end politics of voting and to spread the revolutionary communist ideas crucial to fighting the endless attacks workers have been facing. On the buses going to and from the rally and at the rally itself, PL members distributed over 7000 issues of CHALLENGE while making many new friends.

The event, entitled, “One Nation Working Together,” was an attempt by the liberal rulers to rally their base. Through various unions — the UAW, CWA, AFSCME and SEIU 1199 — they had hoped, for a number of different reasons, to bring hundreds of thousands to Washington.

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The Fight’s On! GM Rebels Reject Bosses, Pols, Union Hacks

INDIANAPOLIS, IN October 3 — While UAW President Bob King was addressing the mass “rally for jobs and justice” in Washington, D.C. yesterday, he forgot to mention the ongoing struggle here by GM workers in UAW Local 23, who refuse to knuckle under to King and the UAW leadership, GM and JD Norman Industries, or the Governor of Indiana.  On September 27 they rejected a tentative agreement between the UAW and GM by a more than 10-1 margin that would have cut their wages so that GM could sell the plant.

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