Caterpillar leads the way in US capitalism's war on workers

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

US workers and the middle class have taken a pounding over the past 40 years.  We have shown in previous blogs the increasing inequality gap between the haves and the have not’s in US society. According to the Economic Report of the President this trend is continuing as real wages fell 2% in 2012, the 40^th consecutive year they have been below their 1972 high. Along with these new historic lows when it comes to workers’ pay, corporate profits hit a 60-year high as a percentage of US gross domestic product.

Caterpillar is one of the world’s most successful companies, a global giant with 70% of its sales outside the US. It provides the machinery the Zionists use to demolish Palestinian farms and homes. In 2012 the company made $5.7 billion profit on $66 billion in sales. While Caterpillar machinery is used to wage a war of sorts on Palestinians, its political and economic muscle is used to wage an equally savage war against workers at home.  When Canadian workers rejected a 50% pay cut in 2012 Caterpillar closed the plant and moved to Muncie Indiana where “workers accepted lower wages” says Bloomberg Business Week.  “Accepted” is the key word here.  Workers accept lower wages in the same way a rape victim accepts rape; it’s forced upon them.  Caterpillar and its boss, Doug Oberhelman is in the forefront of the war on workers.  After discarding Canadian workers the company waged a successful battle against workers on strike in Joliet Ill who after three months on picket lines ended up with concessions and a 6-year wage freeze for senior employees.

CEO Oberhelman explains why American workers must accept a lower standard of living. “We have to be competitive if we’re gonna win. And frankly, if we’re not competitive … we’re not gonna be here in the next 30 years. That’s a simple message…..”  he tells BW adding that it’s a tough decision as all these characters do when they destroy people’s lives. “I always try to communicate to our people that we can never make enough money….we can never make enough profit.”

Caterpillar’s success at driving down wages has been stellar with some of its workers qualifying for welfare. In other words, the taxpayer is subsidizing capitalism again. “I don’t understand how a company can make billions and billions of dollars in profits and have people on welfare,”, John Arnold who has worked for the company for 14 years tells Business Week. Understanding why this is so is important if we are to move from being victims of history to making it.

As its employees qualify for government subsidies, CEO Oberhelman and the company’s executives have been raking it in.  Oberhelman received a 60% pay increase in 2011 breaking the $16 million annually mark.  Then in April this year his pay took a leap again to $22 million according to BW.  “The average pay for an executive officer at Caterpillar has risen 56 percent over the last six years, to more than $10 million.”  A Bloomberg study finds.

“I love Peoria” says Oberhelman, and we can see why.  Him and his wife own a couple thousand acres outside town and when he’s not savaging workers’ living standards he’s transforming a former coal mine they’ve purchased in to a nature preserve.  Anything these types do that appears egalitarian is all about satisfying their own personal desires this nature preserve is a gift from the workers at Caterpillar.

I remember a Caterpillar strike in Peoria back in 1991.  It went on for months around the same time as the uprising in LA around the Rodney King beating.  This was part of the generalized offensive that heated up in the wake of the PATCO strike 10 years earlier. Business Week describes the effect of that strike on workers and their families:

“As production employees went without pay for months, several small Illinois towns were devastated. Desperate scabs crossed picket lines, pitting brothers against each other. The divorce rate soared, and a handful of workers committed suicide.”

This description of the effect economic terrorism has on workers’ lives could apply to any of the battles fought to defend our living standards and the living standards of the next generation.  These class battles receive little mention in the mass media once they’re over and media coverage laced with lies and bias during them, but despite the propaganda of the 1%’s media that workers are “strike happy” the decision to strike is not taken lightly, it always means great sacrifice for the workers involved.

Like the strikes before it, the strike at Caterpillar in the 1990’s was defeated. It was defeated due to the failed policies of the Labor officialdom that leave strikes isolated, individual workplaces or local Unions fighting what are global corporations independently of the rest of the organized Labor movement and the working class as a whole.  Appeals are made to Democratic Party politicians to write a letter to this or that CEO or walk the picket line for half an hour.  When workers struck Caterpillar’s Joliet factory last May, Illinois governor, Pat Quinn came to the picket line with a $10,000 donation to the strike fund, ”When people are united they can’t be defeated” he told workers.  It’s the same old failed strategy.

At the time of the Peoria strike in 1991, the same forces waging war on Caterpillar workers were savaging workers in LA and creating the conditions that led to the uprising in that city. The economic conditions in these communities were akin to those in the third world and still are, unemployment, lack of opportunity etc. which was exacerbated by the fleeing of the aerospace industry.  Part of a winning strategy in that instance would have been to link the two struggles, mostly white Unionized workers in Peoria and mostly non-union workers and youth of color in LA.  We have the same enemies. But for the Labor officialdom, a victory is a dangerous thing as it inspires people and moves us forward.  Such a development threatens capitalism and the Labor officialdom having no alternative to it undermine any encroachment on its rights by their own members.

When we read the more serious journals of capitalism like Business Week, journals the capitalist class produce for themselves about how best to manage the system they govern as opposed to the mass media which is designed for the rest of us, we can see why the Labor hierarchy’s strategy of damage control, of blaming individual CEO’s and having inflated rats on picket lines to discredit this individual or that has led to defeat after defeat for organized Labor and workers in general.

Guys like Oberhelman, Gates, Buffett, and their political representatives in the two Wall Street parties recognize they are in a class war and wage it consciously as they deny publicly that it exists.  They understand they are defending a system of production; that they are defending capitalism, they are fighting for their system.  Speaking of the former Caterpillar boss Don Fites who oversaw the concessions forced on workers in the nineties, “What we had going on was what I would call a labor rejuvenation,” Oberhlman tells Business Week, “It was over who was going to run the company.” 

We need to take heed of such statements. Every strike is about who is running the company.  But we are taught not to think of it that way.  We are taught not to think of economic systems except when their media talks of communism. When Stalinism collapsed it was the failure of communism.   The causes of the Great Recession or the failure of capitalist states in the former colonial world are not due to the failure of capitalism but of crooked individuals, corrupt CEO’s “accounting errors” and most commonly as “crony capitalism” which is in some way different to regular capitalism. There are crony (greedy) capitalists and good capitalists.  We must join with the good capitalists and help them make their profits at the expense of the bad capitalists for without the capitalists we cannot work; there will be no jobs.  Even if we work for good capitalists we must remain competitive, keep wages low, unions out so that our individual employers can increase their market share and profits. Profits that come from the unpaid labor of the working class.

When looked at objectively, the war waged by American capitalists on American workers has been far more violent and more successful than any terrorist attacks from forces outside our borders.  The rade Union hierarchy has no answer to such an offensive accepting as they do the bosses’ view of the world, that the market and capitalism is the only possible way society can be organized. They have moved from a pathetic almost childish response to open collaboration.

My first thought on writing this commentary was to direct it not to other socialists and leftists, not that I am not interested in those who have similar political views, but to those workers who are drawing conclusions about the battles we have fought and lost over the last 30 or 40 years, the defeated strikes, endless picket lines that accomplish nothing as individual locals are left to fight a global corporation, the state and the police.  We can see that all the gains we have made over 150 years are being taken back and that the US ruling class is becoming ever more aggressive in its assault on our material well being.  For the youth, there is only a future of debt, low wages, war and environmental degradation.  There must be many, many workers in the same position I was in before I was introduced to the ideas of scientific socialism as described by Marx, Engels and others. I was trying to understand the world around me; why they do what they do.

It is this competition, this rapacious struggle for profits that drives the bosses’ to attack our living standards as profits have their source in the unpaid Labor of the working class. It is not personal; it’s business as they say in mafia circles. They are driven by the laws of the system to attack us and it is the system that we have to change if we want to stop that.

This blog exists not simply to provide some information to readers or to satisfy the authors’ need for expression.  We have an agenda, a point of view.  In a nutshell, that point of view is that the way human society is organized, and by human society I mean how we produce, distribute and exchange the necessities of life and the superstructure that supports it, is not only driving us back to Dickensian conditions, conditions that are already the norm for millions of workers under its sway in the former colonial world; it is leading us down the road to extinction through its destruction of the environment, its complete disregard not only for human life but for the natural world that nurtures us.

We argue that we must transform society.  Capitalism, as Rosa Luxembourg once said, has “forfeited its right to existence”.  The class that governs the system has forfeited their historical right to govern. Capitalism when it emerged from the ashes of the decaying feudal system, socialized production. We must now socialize ownership of production if we are to feed the world’s hungry, end poverty, wars and disease and avoid environmental catastrophe.

While we defend every gain no matter how minor. While we wage every individual battle whether a strike, an occupation at our school or university, a rent struggle against slumlords or any other fight to keep what we need to live a decent and productive life, we must do so with the idea firmly entrenched in our mind that any victory is only temporary as long as the system remains intact, as long as the means of producing the necessities of life or the machinery that helps us produce the necessities of life like the products made at Caterpillar remain in private hands and are set in motion only if it swells the bank accounts of the 1%.

As I pointed out in a previous blog, in order to do that we must study our own history and events like the Seattle General strike and rise of the CIO and the US civil Rights movement as well as the great social struggles, strikes, revolutions, battles fought by our ancestors, workers throughout the world from the factories of Bangladesh to the mines of Asturias and South Africa.  We must learn the lessons of our victories and defeats. We must read the writings of revolutionists and writers who have waged an ideological struggle over the centuries against the propaganda and world-view of the mouthpieces of capitalism. We must not be afraid of these ideas and make up our own mind about them rather than rely on our history brought to us by the 1% and their institutions.   It is important always to remind ourselves that those that own the means of production of goods (economic power) also own the means of producing the dominant ideology in society.

It is the task of the class that does not earn its means of subsistence from the profit of capital to change society and change society we must if we are to survive as a species. We owe this to our children and future generations.

The Death of Baroness Thatcher

The Death of Baroness Thatcher

after Patricia McGuigan and Alexander Pope

Her hair was a headmistress dreaming

of again being allowed to use the cane.

Her ambition was a brass door knocker

on what was once a council house.

Her brain was a conversation about money

Sir Keith Joseph had with himself.

Her back passage was Basil Fawlty

complaining about car strikes to the Major.

The look in her eyes was a shoot to kill policy

in Northern Ireland.

Her sentimentality was a spinster’s thimble

in which you could fit what’s left of the Tory Party

in Scotland, Liverpool, Manchester,

Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle...

Her clenched fist was a skinhead

in nothing but Union Jack y-fronts.

She said the word ‘Europe’

like a woman coming down

from a severe overdose of Brussels Sprouts.

Her Christmases were dinner at Chequers

with a recently deceased sex offender.

Her ‘out’, ‘no’, ‘never’

were striking print workers

being given the cat of nine tails.

Her fingers and thumbs

were ten riot shields in a row.

Her final nightmare

was the silent, black eyed ghosts

of Joe Green and David Jones *

who did nothing but each offer her

a hand.

KEVIN HIGGINS

---

* David Gareth Jones, from Wakefield, died amid violent scenes outside Ollerton colliery in Nottinghamshire on 15 March 1984. On 15 June Joe Green was crushed to death by a lorry while picketing in Ferrybridge, West Yorkshire. 

Kevin Higgins is a poet in Galway Ireland

Global retailers look to cover their asses in wake of Bangladesh disaster

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1100 dead, worst industrial disaster since Bhopal

by Richard Mellor

The deaths of more than 1100 workers has brought the usual limp cover-our-asses response from the global retailers that have their products made in Bangladesh. Many of these firms are deciding its time to get on board the proposal from the Workers Rights Consortium, an NGO made up of liberal academia, the trade Union bureaucracy (US AFL-CIO that refuses to defend its own members), and some student groups. The AFL-CIO officialdom is a bit embarrassed at their impotence in the face of this capitalist brutality and indifference when it comes to human life. The Rana Plaza collapse is the worst industrial accident since the Bhopal disaster.

Prior to the Rana Plaza collapse only two firms had signed on to what is a toothless proposal anyway despite it being referred to as an “ambitious” proposal in the big business media.  For these corporations toilet breaks are ambitious proposals when it comes to workers’ rights in impoverished countries like Bangladesh.

As I pointed out in a previous blog with regards to this “ambitious” effort on the part of corporations to protect workers lives and rights:

“To ensure effectiveness, the program advises, the agreement would "establish" a chief inspector.  This inspector would be, and here's why Business Week is OK with it, "independent of companies, trade unions and factories to execute a safety program."

Here's how BW describes the process:
"Audits of hazards would be made public. Corrective actions recommended by the inspector would be mandatory. Retailers would agree to pay factories enough so that they could afford renovations, and retailers would be forbidden from doing business with noncompliant facilities.”

This would all be enforced through the courts in "retailers home countries" which means here in the US or in Europe for most of them.”

The idea that an individual like the program's inspector is actually independent is nonsense.  The whole idea is to strengthen the control of the capitalist class.  The only independence this individual will have is from the influence of the workers and our organization while representing the interests of the capitalist class.   Workers cannot rely on bourgeois justice, legal system or political parties to defend our interests. 

1100 deaths does put a little pressure on the coupon clippers who profit from the workers of Bangladesh, many of them women and children, and anyone with a brain knows that despite the factory owners in Bangladesh being corrupt thugs and the government with them, the real power lies in the board rooms of Wall Street and other financial centers. They want to ensure they have some cover when the next disaster hits. 

Despite more retailers finally jumping on board the WRC’s proposal, companies like Abercrombie and Fitch, Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger; the Gap and WalMart have declined to do so.  The Gap says it leaves it open to litigation and WalMart claims it will be upgrading its own plan it initiated after earlier disasters.

The Workers Rights Consortium opposes WalMart’s plan because, “unlike its plan, it contains no binding commitment to help fund improvements to make factories safe.” according to the British bourgeois journal The Economist. WalMart doesn’t agree and claims its plan will result in faster closures of unsafe factories than the WRC’s plan.

All this petty bickering between would be reformers as workers die like flies, never mind living in squalor, misses the point. Neither WalMart nor any of these giant multinationals will be bound by such an agreement.  The WalMart family heirs are worth about $100 billion.  The GDP of Bangladesh is about three times that.  It’s worth noting that in a country whose industry is dominated by huge global corporations, 31.5% of the population is below the poverty line according to the CIA World Fact Book data. This is how wealth is made.

Naturally, the trade Union bureaucracy welcomes the WRC proposal as a significant victory which is no surprise as they are a part of it. But as I wrote in previous comments on this issue, only workers self organization and workers ownership and control of society’s dominant industries including the finance industry both in Bangladesh and throughout the world, will prevent catastrophe’s like the deaths of 1100 of us in the Rana Plaza disaster.

Read earlier blogs on this subject here and here.

Environmental crisis: Capitalism destroying the future

The comments below are an excerpt from the  Facts For Working People Global Warming/Environment issue that we published in 2007 when we were putting it out more frequently as Labor's Militant Voice, which is no longer in existence. Since then the environmental crisis has not improved and as we pointed out in 2007, capitalism cannot solve it; instead, it drives humanity down the road to extinction, threatening to destroy life as we know it. Included is the front page of that FFWP that we sent out to our subscriber list.  The information in it is as relevant today as a socialist solution to the environmental crisis as it was 6 years ago.  If you would like to receive that issue send your e mail to: we_know_whats_up@yahoo.com and if you would like to receive future issues let us know.  We still publish it as resources allow.

***********

The competition inherent within capitalism cannot help but create wasteful duplication. Your average grocery store may stock fifty breakfast cereals and dozens of shampoos, each one slightly different from the next. But each brand represents a different production facility, different packaging, and a different distribution network.

How often have we heard people complain about television: hundreds of channels and nothing to watch. Each program represents a huge amount of money and resources to produce, and yet most have little value. They are produced to sell advertising: to sell other products.

It is through these consumer choices that capitalism equates itself with freedom. Genuine self-expression, personal development and self-awareness are not encouraged. Individuality boils down to your consumer choices, the shoes you wear, the shows you watch, or the color of your i-pod. This “individualism” is more valued than community or co-operation. Genuine freedom begins where this profit addicted system ends.

EU Economy: Europe deep in the mire

by Michael Roberts

European capitalism remains deep in the mire.  In the first quarter of this year, Eurozone GDP fell 0.2%, according to figures out today – and that was worse than expected. The Eurozone economy has contracted by 1% in the first quarter from the year before, marking the longest recession since the introduction of the single currency in 1999.  Italian GDP fell by 0.5%, the seventh straight quarter of decline. This makes the current Italian recession the longest on record. Portugal fell 0.3%, producing a decline of nearly 4% from last year, and making ten consecutive quarterly declines.
Most worrying, French GDP shrank by 0.2%.  Investment fell a further 0.9%, after 0.8% in the fourth quarter.  Exports fell and construction output fell.  Revisions to previous quarterly data meant the country avoided a ‘triple dip’ recession, but the economy has shrunk in three of the past four quarters.  Germany managed to grow, but only barely (graph below). First-quarter GDP grew 0.1%, up from a downwardly revised contraction of 0.7% in the fourth quarter of last year.  Investment continued to fall.  Dutch GDP shrank by 0.1% and Spain has already reported a 0.5% contraction.
T
Outside the Eurozone, the UK grew slightly in the first quarter.  And the Bank of England has now revised up its growth forecast for the current second quarter to 0.5% (graph below).  But this forecast assumes that there is zero to positive quarterly growth in the Eurozone in the current quarter.  Fat chance!

For some time, the UK government has been crowing that employment is much better then in the rest of Europe despite ‘austerity’.  Well, the latest UK jobs figures are starting to rain on that sunny idea.  The UK unemployment rate rose 0.1% pt to 7.8% in the first quarter from the quarter previous and the employment rate simultaneously dropped by 0.2% to 71.4% of the working age population compared with the last quarter of 2012.  And even worse, British households took another hit to real incomes as total pay growth was just 0.4%, while annual inflation is currently at 2.8%, so eating further into real wages.   Indeed, since 2005 Britain has fallen from 5th to 12th in the OECD’s ranking of countries by household disposable income. That’s bigger fall than anyone else in the top 10.

Europe’s depression is increasing the centrifugal forces that threaten to break the Eurozone up.  We all know that about the British scepticism towards the euro and the European Union, with talk of referendum to leave the EU.  But that disillusionment is now even worse in some Eurozone countries.  According to a Pew center survey, just 26% of Brits believe that economic integration has strengthened the economy, but only 22% of French, 11% of Italians, 11% of Greeks and 37% of Spanish voters do.  Of the large countries, only the Germans still think EU integration has been good for their economy – and even then, only just over half do (54%).   The findings also reveal disaffection with the EU among all groups, including the young.   That’s especially so in France, where there now less French support for the EU than among Brits!

The depression in Europe is destroying people’s livelihoods, reducing their confidence that governments can do anything about it and increasing their opposition to the existing institutions of ‘European’ capitalism built up over the last 6o years.   Europe’s political elite is in real trouble.

The world is rich. The problem is the rich control the world.

by Richard Mellor
Afscme 444, retired

We hear day in day out about the massive poverty and hunger that exists in the world. NGO’s and various non-profits have been around for decades appealing for assistance in feeding the world’s poor.  In the third world, water is as precious as gold.  Sewage and water sources run parallel in the streets due to the lack of modern infrastructure systems.

More often than not, the experts in the universities and think tanks of the 1% drag the age-old Malthusian explanation out of the closet.  There is simply an overpopulation problem. It is the poor that are to blame, if only they’d have fewer children.

But as I have pointed out in previous blogs, it is not too many people that are the problem.  It is not the lack of medical knowledge or technical expertise that leads to staggering infant and adult death rates in some parts of the world. It is the lack of social infrastructure and the capital needed to provide it.

The world produces enough food to feed everyone according to Hunger Notes.org 17% more calories today than it did 30 years ago.  But food is a commodity and its production does not take place if the end product cannot be bought and the value added during the production process realized.  The capitalist class would call this lack of demand. But in the world of the market, if you can’t pay you can’t play. No money for food, then you starve. This is the absurdity of capitalism that Marx wrote about, that we starve amid plenty. He wrote in 1848:

“It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”

Unicef estimates that between 2000 and 2010 92 million children died form hunger and diseases, “…many of the illnesses and conditions that children suffer are easily preventable, technically.”  says Global Issues, in other words, they are really what we might refer to as “man made” deaths.  They are in actuality, market induced deaths. Almost 2 million children a year die form diarrhea due to lack of safe drinking water, another market induced crisis with which even the UN seems to agree:

“We reject this [Malthusian perspective that global water problems are a problem of scarcity and population growth]. The availability of water is a concern for some countries. But the scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical availability.” (2006 UN Human Development Report P. 2)

The cost of bringing people safe water is negligible when compared to the concentration of wealth.  “The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — were worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP).” says the World Bank.  The world’s richest, Business Week claims, have a collective net worth of $2.8 trillion.  Either way you measure it, there is plenty of money in the world. These characters spend half their time hiding this wealth to protect it, form ex-wives, estranged children and the rest of us. But how do they get it?

Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who is squabbling with his wife over a $9 billion nest egg

Dmitry Rybolovlev

and who has his cash stashed all over the world, made most of his money (including $500 million in art, $36 million in Jewelry and an $80 million yacht) “…from the sale of two potash fertilizer companies for a combined $8 billion…” Business Week adds.

But how did he come to own these huge operations; and in such a short period?  It’s quite simple really and one of the reasons Gorbachev was so popular with the B movie actor and US president Ronald Reagan and the global 1%. Gorbachev was a former leading Stalinist bureaucrat.  He was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the period when one of the most repressive totalitarian regimes in history began to draw its last breath and collapse under its own bureaucratic weight.

Gorbachev and his old buddies including many former KGB thugs like Putin who reached the ranks of Lieutenant Colonel, wasn’t about to go down with the sinking ship. What happened in a nutshell, and why we see so many prominent Russian millionaires and billionaires is that the old KGB and moribund party men appropriated the collective and collectivized  wealth of the Soviet and Russian people.  The US capitalist class welcomed the plunder and their former KGB credentials were a thing of the past as long as capitalism could flourish.  That’s where Rybolovlev and other Russians like him got their wealth.

No doubt readers are getting a bit bored with it but there is a need to hammer it home to counter the propaganda of the world’s bourgeois that there is not enough money to feed, clothe, house and provide humanity with a decent and productive life. I am talking about the claim by the Tax Justice Network that wealthy individuals, (we’re not talking corporations here) stashed as much as$32 trillion in offshore accounts in 2010 in order to avoid taxes.  This amounts to the combined GDP of the U S and Japan. “Fewer than 100,000 people own $9.8 trillion of offshore assets..”  BW claims.  This exists as more than 9 million people die worldwide each year because of hunger and malnutrition; 5 million of them are children.

This situation is not something that cannot change.  It is not an insoluble dilemma. It is not the fault of the victims, of  “human greed” in the abstract or of “natural disasters” or the by-product of supernatural squabbling between a benign god and his disgruntled fallen angel. It is a very simple; the Russian billionaires for example attained their rapid billionaire status simply through the transfer of the collective wealth of society to individuals including the means for generating that wealth.  We solve the problem by transferring collective wealth, and more importantly, the means by which it is created, the ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, from private individuals to the collective.

Through this process, we can emerge from the depths of depravity to the apex of civilization.  True freedom.

LGBTQ supporters protest S F Pride Board's shunning Bradley Manning

I went to a protest last night in San Francisco.  The event was organized by members of the LGBTQ community and supporters demanding that the board that organizes Gay Pride reinstate Bradley Manning as San Francisco Pride Grand Marshal.  This is a significant event in San Francisco. Manning is the young soldier who is in prison facing life for releasing the US diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. Manning is also gay.  The speakers also condemned the increasing corporate influence in the SF Pride event and the control of it by wealthy members, basically the capitalist class, of their community.

There were maybe 60 or 70  people there including some members of the military. I managed to video some of the speakers at the open mike but missed one speaker who gave some interesting history about this movement, of which I am not so familiar. I spoke to him at the end.

Oakland Teacher Speaks Truth to Those Who Won't Assert Power

by Jack Gerson

On Saturday, Oakland public school teacher Craig Gordon  received the 2013 Human Rights Award from the Alameda/Contra Costa Counties Service Center (ALCOSTA) of the California Teachers Association, the statewide affiliate of the 3-million member National Education Association (NEA, the largest union in the U.S.) Here's a video of Craig's acceptance speech, in which he argues that CTA and NEA (and their local affiliates) must abandon their strategy of collaborating with and caving in to the demands of management, politicians, and corporate billionaires and undertake direct action and strikes statewide and nationally to fight privatization and to demand a bailout of schools and services not banks and corporations.

As you'll see on the video,  the audience gave Craig a standing ovation. But many of those standing and applauding are the very local and statewide CTA leaders who have for years blocked our efforts to fight, insisting that collaboration with management and reliance on Democratic politicians at the local and state levels was the most that could be done. Now, after mass teacher / student / community strikes and actions in Chicago last fall, these "leaders" no longer openly bash every mention of the word "strike" and / or the call for mass action at the local, state, and national level. But they still won't act. And it's not the word that matters, but the deed.

Worker's viewpoint: Which is "our" side in the Syrian conflict?

What is the goal of this revolution and which class leads it?

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

The situation in Syria is critical.  The Assad regime is hanging on despite calls from Obama's White House for his removal and for those of us not on the ground nor having contacts or reliable sources on the ground, it is very difficult to figure it all out.  I found the previous blog very interesting and it helped me to think more definitively about the situation.

There is no doubt Assad and his regime is a corrupt one.  Like Hussein he is a Baathist. Assad is also an Alawite, a minority religious grouping belonging to Shia Islam like the majority of the Iranian people. The fact that there are so many factional elements in this struggle, Shia, Sunni, Kurd, Christian and when we add to that the ominous presence of US imperialism and Israel on the one hand and Russia and Iran on the other, plus  Islamic fundamentalists, we have quite a mix. The one element missing from that mix is the organized (politically and economically) working class.

I was thinking about this more today as I have been very reluctant to take a position on Syria.  But I have seen numerous statements on the internet and in articles calling for victory to the Syrian Revolution and for a victory for the "Free Syrian Army".  But what revolution are we talking about?  And what is the composition of the so-called "Free Syrian Army."

As far as I can tell, US imperialism is once again supporting any group that might enable it to continue to plunder the resources of the region, namely oil, and increase its presence in the region with regard to Russia and Iran.  The Iranian regime, a backward, undemocratic and misogynistic theocracy supports Assad and his minority regime amid the Sunni majority.  The Syrian Christians from what I have read are extremely concerned about the overthrow of the Assad regime as they have lived in relative security during its rule and the FSA, comprised of it is of many religious Islamic factions including those of the al Qaeda strain, might not be so generous.

But despite the autocratic and corrupt nature of the Assad regime, like Saddam's Iraq, major industries are state owned and the Baath party does have a history, albeit fragmented and turbulent, of support for nationalization and state ownership of major industry. Much of the country's major industry was nationalized and even in agriculture and other sectors, government regulation is considerable. US imperialism isn't supporting the FSA because of its democratic credentials.  Let's not forget the US supported to Mubarak dictatorship for years despite the torture and murders.

Libyan Similarity
The opposition forces trying to overthrow Assad, especially the intervention of US and European imperialism, are not forces that will act in workers' interests as far as I can gather, the ex KGB thugs that run Russia are no friends of the workers of the world either.  It is similar to Libya.  Gaddafi had many friends.  The British trained his secret police and he considered Blair a friend.  "Gaddafi’s son Saif, speaking in his private suite in Mayfair’s five-star Connaught Hotel, told the British Daily Mirror in June 2010":

Tony Blair has an excellent relationship with my father.
For us, he is a personal family friend. I first met him around four years ago at Number 10. Since then I’ve met him several times in Libya where he stays with my father. He has come to Libya many, many times.

This blog opposed the NATO war on Libya but also opposed Gaddafi's murderous regime.  As we commented in our introduction to the previous blog, what inevitably happens when there is no united movement of the working class present as capitalist crisis unfolds is society begins to fragment as we are witnessing in the Middle East.  In to the vacuum steps all sorts of fanatical groupings.  It is important to note that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism was boosted by US foreign policy and the CIA as US capitalism assisted corrupt regimes by helping them wipe out all political opposition from the left.  Al Qaeda is Washington's baby.

With regard to Libya, we said back in 2011:

"So generally my alternative to supporting the pro US/EU Libyan bourgeois alliance, is that workers must support the strengthening of already existing community, workplace and youth communities that have arisen and expanding these formations.  The demand must be for a national constituent assembly to which these committees which would obviously be dominated by workers and youth , would send elected delegates for the purpose of drawing up a new constitution.  This would be a constitution that would represent different class interests than one drawn up by editors of US theoretical journals and businessmen, most who played no role in the heroism and sacrifice that the Libyan workers and youth have shown."

It seems to me that this has to be the position: no support for Assad, no support for the FSA. Western imperialism and NATO does not support a regime or enter such a situation with good intentions and imperialist intervention as occurred in Libya must be opposed by socialists.  Personally speaking I am not convinced by the proclamations that we are seeing a revolution in Syria that will bring democratic reform. The US has 30,000 troops in Bahrain that have sat and watched the murder of peaceful protesters calling for democratic rights we in America take for granted.

The fact is that we are living in a period of capitalist decline.  A period wracked by crisis, one after the other.  The "failed" nation states are examples of this.  Capitalism cannot advance human society.  It's own historical creation, the nation state as we know it, is under threat.  Yes, more so in the former colonial world where nation states were artificially drawn in to existence by the imperialist countries.  But even in Britain we are witnessing the possible break up of a 300 year old  agreement between nations albeit an agreement made between unequal powers but that's how agreements are made between ruling classes.

No section or faction of society based on capitalism and the private ownership of the means of production can resolve the crises affecting nations and the global community.  This includes the looming environmental crisis.  The missing link in all of this is the world's working class.  There is a historic and militant history of working class resistance to capital and to imperialist intervention on the part of the Arab workers.  As I pointed out in a blog the other day, even in the US where we have never had a national mass party of the working class, there have been huge upheavals from the Seattle strike of 1919 to the CIO and the Civil Rights Movement where workers took steps along the road to independence from the capitalist class in ideology and action. The Occupy Movement also helped transform the political debate in the US.   There are always lessons learned.  The working  class is not going away.

Arguing that the working class and only the working class can head off social and environmental disaster will no doubt bring accusations of utopianism especially here in the US where we have not seen movements like those in Europe, Africa and Latin America.  In China, under a dictatorship, workers have waged major battles in the factories and on the land over acquisitions and environmental degradation.

So these are my thoughts about Syria.  I do not support the  Free Syrians as I don't know who they are although I see they have some rather nasty allies and imperialist intervention will always weaken the working class of that country.  These views on Syria are my own, I am not speaking for other writers on this blog. I admit I am not an expert on Syria and welcome any comments about these views from others and am open to hearing why I might be wrong.

Challenge Magazine: Israel, Assad, and the world

From Challenge Magazine. This blog is not affiliated to Challenge Magazine and reprint this article

Source. Image not part of original article

for the interest of our readers. What is clear is that the crisis in Syria and the Middle east cannot be solved on the basis of capitalism.  This fragmentation of society, along with the rise of sectarian and religious fundamentalist groupings is inevitable in the absence a united working class movement that can show a way forward and open the road to the democratic socialist alternative.

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by Yacov Ben Efrat
At the outbreak of the revolution in Syria two years ago, the Israeli government announced that events there were none of its business and it would not interfere. Forty years of quiet on the Golan Heights had led Israel to prefer Assad over any conceivable replacement. Now, however, when the rebels rule wide areas, when the Syrian army is falling apart, and when the regime's survival is in the balance, Israeli policy appears to have shifted from passivity to active intervention.

The pretext is to prevent the transport of Iranian arms through Syria to the Hezbollah, but the real purpose of the policy change is to influence the future of Syria in case Assad falls, as Israel thinks he will; Israel wants to push a future Syria away from its alliance with Iran. The weakness of Assad's regime, especially its loss of control over areas bordering Turkey, Iraq, and Lebanon, has created a new strategic situation. "The free Syrian army" has established a territorial base on which it can erect an alternative administration. This development has led Hezbollah to enter the fray, and that, in turn, has opened the chink through which Israel could worm its way in.

Hezbollah's involvement in Syria began in secret, with Nasrallah denying it absolutely. But the battles in the city of al-Quseir near Homs, and the ethnic cleansing of the Sunni villages by Hezbollah, have exposed his interference. Hezbollah has lost all its political capital in the Arab world. Indeed, the "guru" of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yussef Kardawi, has gone so far as to damn Nasrallah and call for American intervention. Such a moment, with Assad in free fall and Nasrallah in disgrace, offers Israel a golden opportunity to demonstrate its power and thus ensure deterrence.

Israeli intervention

Israel makes a simple claim: We aren't attacking the Syrian regime—we've gotten along fine with Assad and appreciate the quiet he's maintained on the Golan. Our problem is with the Hezbollah and the arms from Iran, which threaten our security. However, this claim suffers from several flaws: First, the arms warehouse that Israel blew up was beside Assad's palace; the fireworks panicked people in Damascus and severely harmed what little is left of Assad's prestige. Second, what sense does it make to strike in the heart of Damascus—rather than simply wait for Assad's fall, an event that in any case will cut off Hezbollah's military lifeline? Instead, Israel chooses the very approach which the US and Europe avoided for fear of chaos.

Assad's initial reaction has been to preserve the calm with Israel. There were several hours of tension, and then, as a sign that no reprisal was expected, Israeli PM Netanyahu boarded a plane for China. Al-Hayat reports that before the flight he spoke with Russia's Putin, assuring him that the target was Hezbollah and not Assad. Putin passed the message to Assad, and apparently he also repeated his demand on Hezbollah that it not interfere in Syria (a demand made earlier by his Deputy Foreign Minister in a face-to-face meeting with Nasrallah). Israel emerged unscathed, but with hunger comes appetite, and Assad's present restraint is no guarantee as to what the response will be the next time.

America on the Defensive

The bombing of Damascus occurred a few days before the visit of the American Secretary of State John Kerry in Moscow. After an Israeli intelligence officer revealed that Assad had used chemical weapons, crossing the red line set by President Obama, the White House went on the defensive. Obama acknowledged that such weapons had indeed been used but he claimed a lack of definitive evidence concerning the culprit; in addition, he ruled out putting American soldiers on Syrian soil. To all who demand US military intervention in Syria, above all to Senator John McCain, Obama has always replied that this would be dangerous and complicated.

Kerry's visit became crucial. On top of 70,000 killed and four million refugees, Hezbollah and Israel have now taken Syria as their battleground. After meeting Putin and holding nighttime discussions with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, Kerry released an innocuous statement that leaves the situation as is: America and Russia have again agreed on the Geneva approach from last June, which calls for talks between the regime and the opposition. Assad's future remains in dispute: the Americans want him out while the Russians support him.

The Russians and Americans have also said that they will convene an international conference by the end of this month that will bring about negotiations between the opposition and the regime, but no specific time or agenda have been announced. Kerry does not believe that Assad can take part in a transition to democracy after the mass killing of innocent civilians, while Lavrov thinks that an opposition victory would break Syria into ethnic cantons.

And so the routine of horrors goes on. The regime continues with its ethnic cleansing, now in the village of al-Baida and the city of Banias, where the Alawite shabiha slaughtered men, women, and children with knives and the survivors fled.

Internal chaos

The American refusal to provide military aid for the democratic opposition has contributed greatly to the internal chaos. Al-Qaeda-affiliates, though in the minority, are able to set the tone. They unwittingly supply the regime with grist for propaganda, for Assad can argue that he is fighting a joint al-Qaeda–Zionist plot. The fact that the US line is unclear, while Iran and Russia continue to arm the regime, sows confusion within the Syrian opposition.

This state of things is evident in the fact that soon after Moaz al-Khatib was elected to head the National Coalition of the Syrian Opposition Forces, he quit. He had agreed to enter negotiations with the regime, but the latter had responded by rocketing civilians. When the West nonetheless remained unwilling to supply arms, al-Khatib resigned. Until today no replacement has been found.

The world's hands-off policy has led to general confusion that also affects nearby countries. Iraq is on the verge of civil war between Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the west, and Shiites in the south, while Iran stirs the kettle. Lebanon is split between the supporters and opponents of Assad. The Syrian regime seeks to built an Alawite state, some of the rebels in the north dream of a Sunni emirate, and the democratic opposition gropes in the dark. For fear of the turmoil in Syria, Turkey has smoothed things out with Israel after the troubles of the Marmara affair, while achieving reconciliation with its Kurdish minority.

The Israeli bombardment does not contribute to regional stability, nor even to the security of Israel itself. It is the latest chapter in a lengthy process, which began when Israel stuck its hand into strife-ridden Lebanon in the early 1980's, supporting the Maronites, an act that would spawn the Hezbollah and years of bloodshed. Syria's fate lies solely in the hands of its citizens, who have demonstrated their readiness to risk their lives for democracy and social justice. That is the reason why they first went into the streets to demonstrate, and that is the reason they keep on fighting.

A democratic Syria is the historical imperative dictated by the Arab Spring. The hour demands that the world spare further suffering by supplying arms to the opposition and providing safe zones for civilians, so that the Syrian people can fulfill its right to peace and freedom.