Follow Stella D’Oro Workers’ Lead Against Rulers’ Attacks:‘Make the Bosses Take the Losses’

NEW YORK CITY, September 12 — Stella D’Oro bosses told its workers this week that they will be thrown on the street and that their bakery will be closed — the brand and some machinery having been sold to Lance, a non-union company. It will make the products at a bakery in Ashland, Ohio.

Stella workers, having struck for 11 months in a fiercely militant struggle against wage-cuts, descended with their supporters on the otherwise silent Labor Day parade today. Their contingent of 350 filled a city block with banners, signs, and chants of “Keep Stella in the Bronx: Fight, Fight, Fight!” and “The Workers, United, Will Never Be Defeated.” Cleaners from Domestic Workers United and musicians from the Rude Mechanicals group made the chanters’ rhythms dance and sparkle.

The effect on workers marching past was electric. Eyes brightened, fists went up, the booming chants echoed from scores of marchers, especially the many ranks of construction workers walking behind or riding on their heavy rigs. Imagine those rigs surrounding the Stella plant, preventing any machines being moved out!

“Keep Stella in the Bronx” struck a real chord with New York workers who identify the Bronx as a working-class borough. If they didn’t know about the Stella struggle, they do now.

PLP’s Stella supporters helped build the action from within our own unions and mass organizations, and continued the flow of CHALLENGE sales and chants like, “Kick the Bosses in the Ass: Power to the Working Class;” and “Make the Bosses Take the Losses: Keep Stella Open.” PL’ers added the chant, “Whose Factory? Our Factory!” which attacks the essence of capitalism, and the internationalist chant in Spanish, “From north to south, from east to west, we’ll win the battle, whatever the cost.”

The workers are planning a September 25 march and rally from Wall Street, site of Lance’s banker, Goldman Sachs, to City Hall. PLP members are backing the workers as they absorb this heavy blow, helping them contact the Ashland workers to explain what happened here, and planning how to fight for their jobs.

The bosses’ laws protect their ownership of the means of production, enabling them to move around assets indiscriminately without any thought  about the effect on workers. None of us is safe under their rule. The Communist Manifesto described this inevitable destructive effect of capitalism back in 1848: “Everything solid melts into air.”

But workers inevitably resist being discarded like a bad batch of cookies. We’re learning from such battles that the real war is against capitalism itself, and that our international revolutionary party can create an alternative, a communist society where workers rule and share all the value we produce. But for that to happen, we must melt capitalism into the air.

These are days of hard political debate and soul-searching struggle among the Stella workers themselves. Their communist party, the PLP, is among them with practical help and unbreakable friendships, with the ideas of CHALLENGE, and with trust in the working class.

It is workers such as this dynamic international group at a small Bronx bakery who will help make PLP a mass party able to destroy the whole rotten system.

Capitalist ‘SILO’ Tax Schemes Threaten All Transit Workers and Riders

LOS ANGELES, CA — You may never have heard of SILO, but this tax evasion scheme of the MTA is one of the reasons why school children lack books and clinics and hospitals in working-class neighborhoods have closed down. Taxes that should have gone to pay for these services were pocketed by the corporations in SILO: Sale In, Lease Out. Now that it has blown up in their face, the MTA and the public officials are going to make the riders and MTA workers pay in the upcoming contract.

Starting in the late 1980’s, Los Angeles MTA and Rapid Tranist Division (RTD) entered into rip-off tax deals with private investors. Over the years MTA sold $1.5 billion worth of transit assets to large banks for $65 million. In all, 1,000 LA Metro buses, trains, five transit divisions and even a parking lot were sold. (LA Times 10/18/ 08) After buying government property for pennies on the dollar, the banks stood to make extra money by leasing the property back to MTA. But, the big prize was the $4.4 billion nationwide tax swindle that these banks gobbled up.

LA MTA is one of the largest players in these illegal tax scams. After repeated IRS warnings, SILO’s were ruled an abusive tax shelter in late 2003. The investors had until the end of 2008 to settle up. Losing their huge tax break, banks searched for a way out.

As the U.S. capitalist economy plunged, the banks found their escape hatch. The insurer for the SILO’s was AIG, who crapped out so big they required two federal bailouts at $150 billion. When AIG’s credit rating dropped, the banks were off the hook. Thirty-one of the biggest public transit agencies in the U.S. were left holding the bag. Banks now own trains, buses and transit property valued at $16 billion that they no longer want to keep on leasing to the transit agencies but that these can’t afford to buy back.

Like the nearly bankrupt Detroit auto bosses, but with much less publicity, the heads of major transit agencies, including MTA’s Roger Snoble, scurried to Washington for help to buy back the equipment. Unlike the auto bosses, they didn’t get it.

They need public transit to get workers to work. But as with the auto industry, whether bailout or bankruptcy, a re-organization will land squarely on the backs of the workers and riders of public transit. Black and Latino workers who rely on public transit to get to their jobs will be disproportionately affected by racist cuts. If we look at the give -backs forced on auto workers by union misleaders, we can see what capitalism is planning for workers at LA Metro: lower wages, trashed work rules, costlier medical and pension plans.

The grinding economic train wreck is teaching us an old lesson anew: we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by getting rid of a system that has one ugly surprise after another for masses of workers, including those of us who work in and use public transit.

Our CHALLENGE in LA Transit

All three LA Metro contracts are up June 30, 2009. The heads of the unions, together with MTA’s new boss, will prepare take-away contracts for us. Our PLP transit club met to plan how to put CHALLENGE, in the hands of many more of our co-workers. By raising the number of readers and communist political discussions, transit drivers, mechanics, and clerks can advance under attack. With CHALLENGE’s revolutionary outlook and with deep, long-term relationships with our friends who read the paper, we can fight the bosses’ attacks and build a growing hatred of the racist profit system that threatens us, and finally steer it to the junkyard of history where it belongs.

RULERS TO OBAMA: SELL WAR EXPAND WAR RECRUIT FOR WAR

Soon after Barack Obama’s election, U.S. rulers spelled out his most pressing new task: preparing for widening wars in an intensifying imperialist rivalry. Public notice came through a November 16th New York Times editorial entitled, “A Military for a Dangerous New World.”  Putting economic crises on the back burner, the Times demanded, “the Obama administration will have to rebuild and significantly reshape the military.”

Times editors identified near- and long-term enemies of U.S. imperialism requiring varying levels of mobilization: “The United States and its NATO allies must be able to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan — and keep pursuing Al Qaeda forces around the world. Pentagon planners must weigh the potential threats posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions, an erratic North Korea, a rising China, an assertive Russia and a raft of unstable countries like Somalia and nuclear-armed Pakistan.”

The editorial, triple the usual length, bore the marks of a significant policy declaration. The leading members of the Times editorial board belong to the Council on Foreign Relations ((CFR), U.S. imperialism’s most influential think-tank.

U.S. RULERS COUNT ON OBAMA TO EXPAND ARMY AND NAVY

The Times’s specific recommendations to Obama focus on waging wars to seize and occupy territory, like oil-rich Iraq, while avoiding Bush & Co.’s on-the-cheap errors (Rumsfeld’s “hi-tech,” small mobile force, “shock-and-awe” bombardment). First is “more ground troops.” The rulers’ “newspaper of record” endorses Obama’s campaign call for 92,000 additional soldiers and marines to total “759,000 active-duty ground troops.” It also notes that the U.S. had 200,000 more foot soldiers than “at the end of the Cold War.”

The rulers’ plan implies that Obama, especially with his appeal to so-called “minorities” — who began abandoning the military under Bush — can boost troop strength significantly before resorting to a draft. However, his appeal includes white youth as well. A big part of his “National Service” program includes youth in general, considering ROTC a “service organization,” returning it to the Ivy League colleges, as well as using “National Service” as an umbrella to re-build the entire military — officers, non-commissioned officers and GI’s.

The Times says Obama’s enhanced forces can multiply U.S. might by creating U.S.-led colonial armies in conquered lands. “The military also must field more specialized units, including more trainers to help friendly countries develop their own armies to supplement or replace American troops in conflict zones.”
The rulers, speaking through the Times, also want Obama to ensure that the U.S. war machine can invade wherever it pleases: “The country must ensure its ability — so-called lift capacity — to [transport] enormous quantities of men and material quickly around the world and to supply them when necessary by sea.” In addition to building more fast cargo ships, “the Pentagon needs to spend more on capable, smaller coastal warcraft” says the Times manifesto.

But it also warns that the U.S. should not abandon its lethal carrier groups, which may come in handy against China some day. “China is expanding its deep-water navy, much to the anxiety of many of its neighbors. The United States should not try to block China’s re-emergence as a great power. Neither can it cede the seas. Nor can it allow any country to interfere with vital maritime lanes.”

WARMAKING RULERS ALWAYS EMPLOY BIG LIE

The editorial mentions the rulers’ need to portray their deadly imperialist adventures as “righteous causes.” It calls “the fight in Afghanistan, the war on terror’s front line,” when the war, in fact, represents U.S. imperialists’ efforts to check their Russian rivals’ expansionism. The U.S. and Russian bosses are locked in a bitter, ever-sharpening struggle to control the vast oil and natural gas of the Caspian Sea region, their exploitation and the transport routes to market them.

Bush, Jr. bungled the Big Lie maneuver with his blatantly false “weapons-of-mass-destruction” pretext for invading Iraq. Bush, Sr. had played the Big Lie like a violin, marshalling world support against Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which the U.S. had, in fact, encouraged.

Bill Clinton also proved a master of the Big Lie. Vowing to stop “ethnic cleansing,” Clinton unleashed a bombing campaign — bigger than anything since World War II — on the former Yugoslavia. Here too, the real target was securing pipeline routes to transport Caspian Sea energy riches to the European market, by-passing Russia and erecting military bases to encircle Russia in preparation for global war.
Each of these “noble” U.S. efforts claimed over a million lives, mainly civilian.

The war agenda the Times outlines explains Obama’s bait-and-switch choice of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Deceitfully courting anti-war voters in the primaries, Obama had attacked Clinton’s 2002 Senate vote for invading Iraq. Firmly under the bosses’ control, president-elect Obama makes warmaker Hillary a major agent of U.S. foreign policy.

On the economy, Obama’s appointment of Timothy Geithner to Treasury Secretary signals that whatever the new administration does will favor U.S. imperialists over workers. Geithner is a protégé of the biggest U.S. war criminals. He has toiled for the profit system both at Kissinger Associates and the CFR.

Basically, the Times’ ruling-class plan is a warning to the international working class that U.S. rulers are hell-bent to maintain their military supremacy worldwide, to be in position to launch wars whenever and wherever they feel their “strategic interests” — mainly control of oil — are threatened. Their past adventures which killed millions will seem paltry compared to what’s in the works.

All the more reason for the working class to challenge these murderers, and build PLP into a mass communist party capable of winning millions of workers, soldiers and students to answer their bloodbath with revolution to destroy this hellish, war-producing profit system.

Unite vs. Racist Murders of Immigrant Workers

PATCHOGUE, LONG ISLAND, NY, November 18 — Hundreds attended the November 16 funeral service for Marcelo Lucero held at a local church. The day before, a few thousand people attended a vigil protesting the racist murder of Mr.  Lucero, a laundry worker from Ecuador, who was walking with a friend when a racist gang of drunken teenagers attacked them.

The gang told cops they were “hunting for Mexicans.”  Mr. Lucero tried to defend himself, but was outmanned. Swastika-tattooed Jeffrey Conroy plunged a knife into Mr. Lucero’s chest, killing him. Conroy has reportedly been involved in other anti-immigrant attacks. Shortly before the gang assaulted Mr. Lucero, it beat up a restaurant worker from Colombia who managed to get away.

PLP’ers at the vigil distributed 200 CHALLENGES and gave out hundreds of leaflets titled, “Don’t Be a Sucker for Racism: Racist Hysteria Pushed by Bosses, ICE and Politicians Behind Murder of Marcelo Lucero.” [ICE is the Immigration and Customs Enforcement cops].

The people at the rally were mostly Latino, but were joined by many blacks, Asians and whites who came to demonstrate their outrage over this racist crime. Those who read the PL leaflet readily agreed that this murder was not an isolated incident but part of a national campaign to terrorize and scapegoat immigrants.
Though speeches by preachers and politicians were pretty lame, the mood of the crowd wasn’t. When Patchogue’s mayor spoke the crowd started shouting “Justice! Justice!”

One older Jewish teacher there told a retired PL teacher that she had attended County executive meetings to oppose the anti-immigrant proposals of Steve Levy, Suffolk County chief. She asked rhetorically: “Do you think these stupid kids would have done this without years of people being riled up by politicians like Levy?” When asked about Levy’s party, she said: “Oh, he’s a Democrat. You know they’re all the same!”

Levy has been a major force in the anti-immigrant hysteria sweeping the U.S., which in many areas has become ethnic cleansing. Last year, Levy asked county cops and ICE cops to raid homes where undocumented immigrants were believed to be living.

This led to one immigrant being found dead in the woods near Huntington Station. Mr. Lucero’s killers came from an area near Farmingville, L.I., where, in 2000, two Mexican day-laborers were kidnapped and beaten. In 2003, five racist teens set fire to a Mexican family’s house.

A group of anti-racists, including PLP’ers, were arrested back then after confronting a racist harassing day-laborers in the area. After a lengthy trial, the anti-racists defeated the frame-up charges.
Even after these racist incidents, Levy continued preaching his poison, actually appearing on national TV on the CNN Lou Dobbs program, another anti-immigrant racist.

The murder of Mr. Lucero occurred as a murder trial is beginning in Shenandoah, Pa. Over the summer, in a similar incident, a gang of white high school football players killed Luis Ramirez, 25, a laborer from Mexico.
Meanwhile, even the FBI has reported that since 2003, hate crimes against Latinos have increased by 40%. But another branch of Homeland Security, ICE (the Immigration police) is intensifying this racist trend with its Gestapo-like raids of factories nation-wide, separating children from their parents. Of all hate crimes targeting national origin and ethnicity, 62% are committed against Latinos.

This racist assault against undocumented immigrants is based on the big lie that these workers “take away jobs” and social services from “Americans.” Those who fall for this garbage — like these racist teens or workers who applauded when fellow immigrant workers were arrested in a plant raided by ICE (tipped off by the pro-boss union) — are just dividing our class. They are cutting their own throats by helping the bosses, the source of all  our problems. It’s no accident that amid this racist pogrom against immigrants, millions are losing their homes and jobs and social services are being slashed. Meanwhile, the government is bailing out the big bankers and bosses guilty of these attacks and is spending trillions on the oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, without any major fight-back by workers.

In New York State, NYC Republican Mayor Bloomberg, a multi-billionaire, and Democratic governor David Paterson have just announced massive layoffs and cutbacks in all public services, and increased tolls and fares in public transportation.

Those who think that Obama will help workers are in for a big surprise. Obama has shown that his first loyalty is to the same bankers and bosses behind the economic meltdown.

As communists, PLP’ers say that when workers and youth get suckered by racism, the entire working class suffers from the resulting disunity. One example of how racism disarms all workers and youth politically: one of the teenagers who attacked Mr. Lucero is the son of a Puerto Rican and African-American family, themselves victimized by racist attacks when they first moved to Long Island several decades ago. So this youth, instead of fighting the racist rulers and their thugs, joins in an attack against other victims of racism.

Unless we overcome racial divisions and wage a united fight against capitalism, we will never be able to achieve a society that serves our needs, not those of the billionaires and their bought-and-paid-for politicians.

South Africa General Strike Shows Power of Workers

PRETORIA, SOUTH AFRICA, Aug. 6 — A massive general strike shut down this country’s economy today as tens of thousands of workers marched against rising fuel and food prices. Today’s nationwide strike, which followed several regional ones, was called by the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), under pressure from nearly two million members.

The Mail and Guardian (8/7) said, “The South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union…reported that 93% of its members had not gone to work….Gold mining operations…were affected substantially, with AngloGold Ashanti saying no shafts were operating while Harmony and Gold Fields said its operations were limited. Volkswagen’s…factory in Uitenhage…halted production, and Toyota South Africa closed its Durban plant for the day, as did Mercedes-Benz…in East London. Many…schools had been closed…”

Masses marched in many cities. In Pretoria, thousands marched to the Union Buildings, giving a memorandum of grievance against soaring electricity prices to Labor Minister Membathisi Mdladlana. Some 6,000 workers marched in East London, while about 5,000 took to the streets in Mthatha. The closure of Mercedes-Benz’s East London plant and other automotive factories in the province had the most obvious impact on the Eastern Cape economy.

This massive strike again showed the power workers have to shut down any modern economy. It is the road workers and their allies worldwide must follow to fight the bosses’ growing attacks in this age of economic meltdown and wars. Such an action is also one way to counter the recent racist pogrom fueled by lies blaming immigrant workers from Zimbawe, Mozambique, and elsewhere for the rise in prices and lack of jobs for all.

But much more is needed. The plight of workers won’t be solved by changing one politician or union misleader for another. For many years the COSATU leadership supported the African National Congress (ANC) government led by Mbeki and whose IMF-imposed austerity measures worsened workers’ lives here. COSATU, along with its allies in the “Communist” Party, which also supported Mbeki, are now backing the presidency of Jacob Zuma, who until 2005 was one of Mbeki’s deputy vice-presidents.

Zuma supported the privatization of Eskom, the government-owned electric utility. The recent electricity price rises are supposed to help Eskom, whose failing system has caused blackouts affecting capitalist operations like the gold mines. Privatization didn’t go through because investors realized that Eskom’s current sad state won’t be profitable.

The power struggle between different factions of the ruling ANC for control of state power, and the fruits of their being the main servants of local and international capitalists, again show that workers’ fight-back cannot limit itself to backing one set of bosses (such as African nationalists like the ANC) as the past militant anti-apartheid struggle did.

Many workers and youth in South Africa consider themselves pro-communist and revolutionary, but they must realize that the ANC-“C”P-COSATU leaders are far from that. The best lesson to draw from general strikes like today’s is to turn them into schools for communism, and rebuild a red-led workers movement. But this time it must break with all capitalists and fight for the only society capable of freeing workers from capitalism and its racism — communism.

Autoworkers Need International Solidarity to Fight Bosses, Union Hacks

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL — Almost 200 delegates from 27 countries met June 16-18 for the 12th International Metalworkers Federation (IMF) World Auto Council “to address fundamental challenges of [the] industrial and enterprise restructuring process sweeping the auto sector.” But little could be expected to deal with the problems faced by autoworkers worldwide at a meeting where the keynote speaker was Ron Gettelfinger, president of the UAW and the IMF Automotive Department.

While parroting, “We must develop a pathway to build union strength at the major global auto producers and suppliers,” in practice under Gettelfinger’s leadership the UAW has done the opposite. The last example was the sellout of the Axle strikers in Detroit and other U.S. cities (see CHALLENGE, June 4).

Gettelfinger and most union hacks worldwide have done everything possible to help companies cut autoworkers’ wages, jobs and benefits. Nationalism and pro-company unionism have been the norm for these hacks, and not just the UAW. The Canadian Autoworkers Union has just seen its strategy of “trading concessions for job security” blown to bits when GM announced the closing of its big Oshawa, Ontario plant. In Mexico, union hacks have announced their willingness to accept even lower wages, making them competitive with “China’s low wages.”

On June 17, IMF delegates attended a strike solidarity rally with workers at the Cummins Engine plant in Guarulhos. It followed the meeting’s closing speech by IMF General Secretary Marcello Malentacchi pledging to end precarious (non-permanent, low-paid) work. But this symbolic rally was just for show, to pretend these hacks are actually fighting union-busting.

The IMF is calling for a Global Day of Action on October 7. Class-conscious and militant autoworkers must turn this day into one of real international solidarity, blasting the hacks’ nationalism, exposing how the attacks workers suffer worldwide are caused by an international capitalist system faced with sharpening competition for markets, resources and cheap labor, which is leading to endless wars.

This is the only kind of political leadership that can confront the auto bosses growing attacks, and it won’t come from the UAW, CAW or IMF hacks. It requires a red leadership whose goal is, “Workers of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our chains!”

Brazil’s GM Workers Need International Solidarity

Not far away from the IMF meeting place, GM has been trying to hire 600 new non-union workers with lower wages at its assembly plant in São José dos Campos. Meanwhile, the local city government has given GM tax exemptions and other concessions. The company, the local government and the media have attacked the workers opposing this wage-cut scheme, claiming they “oppose the creation of new jobs.” Now GM is threatening to transfer jobs to a plant in São Caetano do Sul, which has a pro-boss union leadership and already has 1,500 workers earning less and with less benefits.

Contrary to the U.S., Canada and Europe, Brazil’s auto industry is enjoying a boom because of the rise of the local market. GM controls 20% of it, making huge profits.

A coordinated struggle of rank-and-file GM workers in Brazil, Canada, Mexico and the U.S. behind the slogan, “Same enemy, same fight, autoworkers of the world, unite!”  would go a long way to fight these bosses’ attacks, something they won’t get from the IMF’s pro-capitalist leaders.

S.F. Bay Area: PLP’s May Day Activities Cover the Waterfront

BAY AREA, CALIF. — PLP members and friends celebrated May Day in activities throughout Northern California, providing many opportunities to advance our communist politics. Despite the limitations of liberal-led marches and rallies, workers were open to our revolutionary message. The ongoing struggle to develop newer Party members and recruit new ones remains the main limitation of our potential. Despite this we spread our communist ideas throughout all the May Day events.

In the inland port city of Stockton, Party members made contacts with longshoremen who had struck for eight hours to protest the war in Iraq. In San Francisco, by selling CHALLENGE and distributing leaflets to the dockers, significantly we brought a communist revolutionary analysis to this otherwise liberal-led march and rally. Previously, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehouseman’s Union (ILWU) had struck against the World Trade Organization in Seattle; for the framed Mumia Abu Jamal; and an “unofficial” one-day protest of an on-the-job death of one of their comrades.

These actions refute the lie that workers won’t fight around “political issues.” But they’re all framed to appeal to the capitalist electoral system. This ties into those capitalists who trace the Iraq war to the Bush administration attempt to run the Iraq war “on the cheap,” while undermining the overall U.S. world position. This is a far cry from the workers taking the bosses’ war head on. (See box.) Our challenge is to push beyond these limits and bring revolutionary politics to the forefront.

We also attended a rally and March in Dolores Park where a PL teacher met with former students who helped distribute our literature there.

In Oakland, PLP members joined the immigrant rights march. Those around us picked up our chants, focused on internationalism, working-class unity and revolutionary ideas. The march grew larger as it progressed and was the most multi-racial in recent years. Four student friends of the Party from a local university marched with us. Several Party members have already followed up contacts made there.

Elsewhere in the inland Bay Area, a young teacher comrade participated in a march organized by teachers against the budget cuts at their school. We hope to continue to develop this class struggle.

Transit workers, teachers and college students attended a May Day dinner this weekend. Old friends enjoyed good food, great speeches, and an afternoon of communist celebration. A conversation with an old friend revealed how the reality of life can be used to show workers that capitalism is the root of our problems. Our challenge is to present communist revolution as the answer. Overall, this May Day helped build the influence of the Bay Area Party.

BOXXXXXX

During the May 1st West Coast dock strike, the ILWU continued to load military supplies bound for Iraq. They said, “We wanted to show we oppose the war but support the troops.” This position undermined the protest as one opposing the war.

Ninety years ago, Seattle dockworkers showed a clearer resolve. Then U.S. bosses had landed troops in Siberia to back Russian counter-revolutionaries opposing the Soviet revolution, one of 17 capitalist countries trying to destroy it. When a shipment of 50 rail cars loaded with “sewing machines” arrived in Seattle for dispatch to Russia, the longshoremen, thinking it odd that a country embroiled in civil war would need so many sewing machines, “accidentally” dropped a crate.   It was filled with rifles bound for the U.S.-backed Russian general Kolchak. The longshoremen refused to load it and called for a permanent boycott of shipments to Russia. When 40 scabs showed up to load the weapons, they were met by 400 longshoremen.

Of course, it was a different world in 1918. The despair that had gripped communists when the Second International had caved into supporting their national governments’ war efforts was wiped away by the success of the revolution in Russia. Revolutionary optimism became primary. Thousands of pamphlets, leaflets and newspaper articles had influenced workers in Seattle about the struggle to support the first Workers’ Republic. Dock workers can learn from this international workers’ solidarity by U.S. workers.

SEAN BELL KILLERS SET FREE BY RULERS’ COURTS

While the liberal bosses prance around and pat themselves on the back for “making change” and proclaiming the end of racism in the U.S., three cops have been set free for the murder of Sean Bell in November 2006. Seems like the cops and the courts never got the memo.

Bell and two friends were shot at by plainclothes kkkops after leaving a bachelor party at a bar in Queens, NY. The cops claim that Bell and his friends first tried to run them over and that one of the men inside the car appeared to be grabbing for a gun in his waist. The cops then wasted no time shooting 50 BULLETS into the car, killing Bell and injuring his friends.

The bosses enlisted the ex-FBI informer and pacifier of black workers’ anger, Al Sharpton. Our class should not be led by this bosses’ agent who pervasively sells  the snake oil of justice under capitalism. He’s done it before with Amadou Diallo who was shot 41 times by the fascist police, and Patrick Dorismond in Manhattan and countless others. The cops’ main role is to protect and serve the bosses’ private property and terrorize workers, especially black and Latino youth, so that they do not turn their anger into rebellion.

With the coming elections the bosses need to win black, and all  workers, to U.S. imperialism to stay ahead of their rivals like China, Russia and Europe. Barack Obama and the bosses need to give them hope that the system can work for them in the face of years of slavery, Jim Crow racism, segregation, police terror, poverty like in New Orleans and after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Workers and students should organize their friends and co-workers to expose the cops’ role in the racist system of capitalism. No court will guarantee workers justice.

MARCH ON MAY DAY AGAINST POLICE TERROR,

RACIST CAPITALIST SYSTEM

MAY 3rd 12 p.m.

NEW YORK CITY, LOS ANGELES, CHICAGO

for more info, cd188@juno.com or write to this blog

Pope Heils Anti-U.S. Europe-China Bloc

Obama got it wrong. Embittered workers don’t “cling” to religion by choice. The ruling class he serves shoves it down their throats, as the media’s non-stop coverage of the pope’s visit reveals. The Catholic passivity Benedict preaches is — like all faiths — so useful to capitalists in stifling working-class anger that they made his every utterance and gesture front-page, prime-time “historic events.” But nevertheless, the pope’s visit is a mixed blessing for U.S. rulers. While they benefit from his spreading religious ideology among workers, they must also win mass political support for their widening wars. And, just as he did as a Hitler Youth in pre-World War II Germany, Benedict represents European bosses increasingly at odds with U.S. imperialism.

RULERS AIM SCANDAL AT CHURCH FOES OF U.S. BOSSES

His predecessor John Paul II mildly criticized the 1991 invasion of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition that included large European contingents. At the time, Catholic bishops in the U.S. cooked up a theological justification for that war. Europe’s oil majors, like Total of France and Eni of Italy, scored big deals with “rescued” Kuwait. But by the 2003 invasion, when it became clear the U.S. would not share Iraq’s oil spoils with European firms, the prelates defied the Pentagon. Late in 2002, the National Council of Catholic Bishops declared, “We…find it difficult to justify the resort to war against Iraq….[W]e fear that resort to war, under present circumstances…would not meet the strict conditions in Catholic teaching for overriding the strong presumption against the use of military force.”

U.S. rulers punished the Catholic leaders severely for their heresy. Starting with the Boston Globe that year, the bosses’ media let loose a flood of exposés detailing sexual abuse of children by priests, pointedly blaming bishops for enabling and protecting pedophiles. Hardly breaking news — sex abuse has been rampant in the church for centuries. But imperialist U.S. rulers played it up to rob pro-European clergy of all credibility. Referring overtly to the abuse scandal but implicitly to geopolitics, a New York Times editorial (4/17/08) reminded pope-struck readers of “stunning failures of the overwhelming majority of U.S. bishops.”

VATICAN COZYING TO CHINESE RULERS

Now, as its European backers cement ties with China’s rulers, the church is following suit, increasing the likelihood of an armed U.S.-China clash over U.S. protectorate Taiwan. The London Sunday Times (2/17/08) reports,  “Tempted by the prize of a historic visit to China by Pope Benedict XVI, the nation’s leaders have authorised a renewed effort…to heal their rift and inaugurate diplomatic ties….

[T]he Vatican is prepared as part of an eventual settlement to move its embassy from Taipei to Beijing.” The Times quoted a senior Vatican official, “There is no problem with breaking relations with Taiwan….we have a duty to spread the values of the gospel.” Those “values,” no doubt, embrace China’s recent purchase of a $2.8-billion stake in French oil giant Total.

But U.S. rulers tolerated and even welcomed Benedict because religion hinders a rational analysis of the world’s two opposing classes and prevents workers from fighting back accordingly. “Pie-in-the-sky” promises of heavenly rewards and meaningless, mystical concepts of “good” and “evil” devoid of class content can help lead workers into militaristic patriotism. Parochial schools preaching “Church and Country” furnished millions of recruits for the U.S. war machine in the last century.

Grossly underpaid teachers in one New York Catholic school union have the right response to papal pandemonium — strike. Our Party’s goal is to organize working-class militancy like this into a mass communist party that will eliminate the warmakers and their religious apologists.