Spartan Worker

What happened to my country?

2010-02-16T17:52:00.000-08:00

by: Delphi worker

February 8 2010

tags: autoworkers, plant closings, unemployment, Ohio

As I grabbed my grease-soiled lunch cooler and stepped out of my GM truck to head into work at Delphi Packard Electric I had to stop for a moment to digest the sight of a nearly 1/2 mile long, 1/8 mile deep parking lot that was literally empty. I reflected for a moment on two American brothers with the knowledge and ingenuity to develop high voltage ignition cable that in the early 1900s was only available abroad. From those beginnings in a factory near downtown Warren, Ohio, evolved the largest automotive electrical wiring and component business in the world.

Eventually the North River Road complex became the center hub of all engineering and development. Some of greatest advances in automotive electronics were birthed right here in Warren, Ohio. At its peak nearly 15,000 American workers filed through these doors. The huge parking lot that I gazed upon once filled to its capacity with American workers now looked like a deserted scene from an apocalyptic movie.

What happened to my country?

The regal blue engineering and research facility now stands totally empty. American engineering and manufacturing skills built this once huge empire with blood, sweat and gears. Once the hard work was complete and the business model set, little by little the corporate heads began to whittle away at this empire. Not for the sake of survival but for the seemingly insatiable desire to line their pockets in excess - at the expense of each and every American worker, union and salary, that they could eliminate.

What happened to my country?

I couldn't help but get a bit emotional as I reflected on my own family members who had helped to build this empire and the excitement I felt when I was hired into the fold. The future looked grand here at Delphi Packard. I remember vividly my first week of employment. Exiting the freeway, the first thing you saw was this gigantic parking lot with thousands of cars, the majority of them General Motors vehicles. The sense of security I felt working for such a huge America icon of this size was comforting to say the least. A place this large, I thought, could never be replaced. It was too vital an operation, if only due to its vast size, so I thought. But now each day is greeted with more uncertainty of the future of this once great American built business. No commitment from a company whose Internet pages are loaded with accolades and accomplishments of plants in China, Mexico, South America, Morocco, Turkey, and Romania - just to name a few - with their smiling faces pictured amongst brand new equipment and facilities, likely funded by a once prosperous American base. While - at what is left of the US operations - we continue to produce more product per employee to a much higher quality standard with some equipment dating back 3 or 4 decades. I can only imagine what we could do in Warren, Ohio, given a fraction of the resources that have been awarded to many of these foreign facilities.

What happened to my country?

So as I continued my walk on that cold January afternoon up the sidewalk toward the turnstiles, I could almost hear the voices and footsteps of the thousands of former employees that walked this same sidewalk, where now just a few hundred remain.

And for some reason the American flag that flies proudly at the entrance looked a bit different to me this day. I felt a bitter sense of betrayal and anger. Not toward my country which this flag proudly represents, but a company that seemingly manipulated and exploited the freedoms that the flag stands for. In my humble opinion Delphi Packard should no longer even be considered an American company considering how it has forsaken its homeland and the American workforce that played such an integral part in its success.

The sad truth is, this same scenario, in different scales of severity is being played out all over the manufacturing base of this "once" great nation. For the sake of making a chosen sect of the American populous extremely wealthy they have forsaken Joe and Jane American. What they are beginning to realize though is that Joe and Jane American are the people who drive the American and world economy. Not the CEOs and other corporate heads. Take away Joe and Jane's livelihood and you have the America that you see now. An America struggling to keep its head above water. A government attempting to operate on a tax-based income that shrinks with the loss of each living wage job as the deficit climbs to new highs.

What happened to my country?

Well I'm sure we may not all agree on the answer to that question. But one thing is for sure. The vision that drove this Nation to be a fully independent world power, and the dominating industrial force on the planet, has been lost, if not greatly blurred, due to that insatiable desire for more that I spoke of earlier. The United States of America has changed drastically in the last 15 years and, in my opinion, not for the better. Greater empires have fallen. May God Bless America ...

The author is "just another number on the Delphi roster."

Photo: 1922 Packard Model 126 Sport Phaeton steering wheel/dashboard. The Packard Electric Co. was founded in Ohio in 1890. One of its subsidiaries produced the first Packard car in 1899. In 1932 it became part of the General Motors Corp., and later became Delphi Packard Electric Systems. http://www.flickr.com/photos/nostri-imago/ / CC BY 2.0

Safeway janitors stop work, tired of intimidation

2010-02-16T17:49:00.001-08:00

People's World

Safeway janitors stop work, tired of intimidation

by: Marilyn Bechtel

February 12 2010

tags: unions, janitors, California

OAKLAND, Calif. - Dozens of janitors who clean Safeway supermarkets in northern California stopped work on the night of Feb. 10, frustrated by the intimidation tactics of Safeway's janitorial services contractors, including illegal threats of termination, and their proposals to sharply cut standards for wages and benefits. Talks for a new collective bargaining agreement are now in their fifth month.

"I walked out because Safeway's janitorial contractors are not working with us to negotiate a contract which will remedy unsafe and unhealthy conditions in the stores, and help us support and build a life for our families," said Santa Rosa janitor Leodegario Acevedo.

Talks for a new contract began last October between SEIU United Service Workers West, Local 1877, representing 450 janitors at area Safeway supermarkets, and janitorial services contractors ABM, Crystal, Premier and AMS. The four contractors are proposing a big increase in the number of hours a janitor must work to be eligible for health care benefits. They want to increase wages by just 10 cents an hour per year, and seek the right unilaterally to remove janitors from their pension plan. The contractors also propose to eliminate dental benefits for new hires, increase their waiting period for medical coverage, and lower their starting pay to just $8.60 per hour.

Safeway janitors now average just $10.24 per hour. Safeway, Inc. is the third largest U.S. supermarket chain, with an estimated $44.8 billion in annual sales and consistent profits in recent years.

Safety and health are also issues in the talks, with the contractors refusing to add "green cleaning" standards to the contract. Though Safeway janitors now use toxic industrial cleaning chemicals that cause serious health problems and may pose a risk to food safety and customers' health, neither Safeway nor the contractors have been willing to take responsibility. Each claims health and safety conditions fall under the other's jurisdiction.

"Safeway wants to be seen as a responsible, neighborhood grocery store, yet they sit quietly by while their contractors propose cuts to vital benefits and refuse to assure safe working conditions for the janitors who clean their facilities," said Denise Solis, Local 1877's northern California vice president. "Ultimately," she said, "both Safeway and their individual contractors are responsible for making supermarkets safe, clean and green."

After the work stoppage, janitors say they'll continue to mobilize against the contractors' intimidation and proposed cuts, and to speak out against Safeway's silence on the issues. While the union and the contractors have more bargaining dates in the coming weeks, the janitors may soon vote on whether to authorize their bargaining committee to call an unfair labor practices strike. The janitors' last extension of the collective bargaining agreement expired Feb. 9.

"It's insulting to sit at the bargaining table with Safeway's contractors, and hear them say that Safeway won't give them the money to increase our poverty wages, maintain our health care benefits, safeguard our safety and health, and protect their own customers," said Neri Macuixtle, a Salinas janitor and bargaining committee member. "Safeway must own up to its responsibility to ensure quality jobs, safe food and healthy communities."

Since the contract talks began, janitors have visited northern California supermarkets, letting customers know about the problems harsh and dangerous cleaning products can cause to both workers and the buying public, and pressing for a switch to new "green" cleaning standards.

Photo: Janitors make their point at a Nov. 5, 2009, demonstration on the "green cleaning" issue, at a San Francisco Safeway. (PW/Marilyn Bechtel)

The U.S. and the world

2009-12-08T11:25:00.000-08:00

From: People's World

by: Sam Webb

December 2 2009

tags: international, imperialism, cooperation, China, U.S. Brazil, India

Editor's note: Excerpted from Sam Webb's report to the CPUSA national committee meeting November 13th, 2009.

The world, it is generally acknowledged, has been torn loose from the old moorings that for decades structured life for billions of people.

This unhinging began with the Volcker "shock" in 1979 (when Federal Reserve Bank chairman Paul Volcker lifted interests rates to nearly 20 per cent), the election of Reagan a year later, and the meltdown of the Soviet Union at decade's end. But it reached a new stage with the rise of China, India, and Brazil, the resurgence of Russia, the social transformations in Venezuela and other Latin American countries; the Iraq war, and the recent world financial and economic crisis.

At the time of the Soviet collapse, defenders of U.S. imperialism declared U.S. imperial power was preeminent and that would remain the case, far into the 21st century. But obviously they badly misread the tealeaves. Though still dominant, the limits of U.S. power are narrowing and a multi-polar world is taking shape.

It is easy to imagine China rivaling the U.S. on the world scene. To go a step further and predict a civilizational re-centering from Europe and America to Asia, with all its implications, isn't out of the question either. (Although, it should be added that while trends are instructive, they become less so as they stretch far into the future. History can, and usually does, surprise.)

This transitional period, some theorists of international relations say, will bring instability, even chaos, and we should not dismiss this out of hand. In earlier periods, conflict, crisis, and war scarred the landscape as once dominant states declined and new ambitious rivals sought to take their place. Such rivalry turned the first half of the 20th century into a bloody and barbaric era.

At the same time, the past doesn't have to be prelude to the future. People and nations do learn. Historical memory can be a force for progress. The vast majority of humankind strongly desires an easing of tensions, an end to violence, and the normalization of international relations.

They want dialogue, negotiation, and a cooperative effort to address climate change, nuclear weapons proliferation, finite natural resources, swelling poverty and disease and broad-based and sustainable economic growth - not threats, war, and uneven economic development.

All of these challenges require speedy collective action. The global clock is ticking

While rivalry between states - especially in a multi-polar world - is built into the world system, the appetite and ambition of our imperialism constitutes the main obstacle to cooperation, peace, and equality.

A less malleable world
U.S. imperialism so far has been reluctant to yield ground to subordinate classes, nations, and regions entwined in the global world order. But reluctance is one thing; capacity to enforce your will is another.

U.S. imperialism doesn't have the same reserves and legitimacy as it had in the second half of the 20th century, its global power is far more circumscribed and collective resistance to the re-imposition of old imperial relationships, dressed in new forms, comes from many different quarters, including from the American people. Hundreds of millions are insisting that the new century not be a rerun of the second half of the old, in which a single country and its allies largely determined the path of global political and economic development. Such a path was unjust, unsustainable, and unacceptable then and is more so now. The world is far less malleable to the architects of imperial rule.

The current worldwide economic crisis has reinforced these sentiments. The turn to neoliberalism, financialization, and hyper globalization three decades ago not only resulted in financial and economic ruin on a world scale, but also, it is commonly understood, originated on Wall Street and in Washington.

Thus the global economic crisis has amplified the insistence of people worldwide that a new economic order be constructed - shorn of U.S. dominance. Not everybody is having it, especially in the seats of imperial power. Some want to reconstruct the old order, while some others are for minor changes that would not undercut in any significant way the dominant position of the U.S.
The outcome of this struggle is still to be decided in the decades ahead. And like everything else, it will be determined as much by human actions as the evolution of broader objective processes.
And given the immediacy of global challenges, history has to be speeded up. This is where humankind again comes in.

Foreign policy
President Obama is resetting U.S. foreign policy. In a series of speeches, he has accented human solidarity, diplomacy, cooperation, and peaceful settlement of contentious issues. In nearly every region of the world, he is engaging with states that during the Bush years were considered mortal enemies - Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, and others.

In Latin America, he expressed a readiness to put relations on a different footing. In a historic speech in Prague, he voiced his wish to reduce and ultimately abolish nuclear weapons. And in an unprecedented address in Cairo he indicated his eagerness to reset relations with the Muslim world, sit down with the Iranian government, and press for a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

No small achievements! What the president has said (and done) so far constitutes a turn from the policies of the previous administration and an acknowledgement that the U.S. has to adapt to new world realities and challenges
.
And he does so with support of some (more sober and realistic minded) sections of the ruling class.

At the same time, neither the current administration nor the more sober-minded sections of the ruling class are ready at this point to give up U.S. global primacy - top dog status.

Adjustments in policy are not the same as a change of policy. They are not equivalent to reentering the world community on the basis of reciprocity, equality and cooperation.

And yet, it would be a serious mistake to dismiss or "damn with faint praise" the new approaches of the president.

For these changes can make a difference in the lives of hundreds of millions of people. They also create a better political environment for the progressive and anti-imperialist movements to press for a new foreign policy.

That there are inconsistencies and contradictions in words and deeds of the president and others in his administration - on policy towards Cuba, Honduras, Afghanistan, Iran, the fight against terrorism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, etc - comes as no surprise. The opposition to any significant adjustments of foreign policy is enormously powerful and includes core sections of transnational corporate capital, the military-industrial and energy complexes, the Pentagon, right-wing extremists, the foreign policy lobbies, other elements of the national security state, and not least elements within the Obama administration itself.

Each, motivated by geoeconomic and geopolitical objectives and couch their imperial/hegemonic aims in the language of democracy, humanitarianism, and anti-terrorist bromides (terrorist actions are an undeniable danger and deserve a collective, proportionate, and many layered response, but shouldn't be turned into a rationalization for the protection and expansion of U.S. imperialist interests), is anxious to maintain U.S primacy in some form.

U.S. foreign policy, however, is not solely decided in elite circles. In the larger vector of struggle that determines our place in the world are found the American people and people and governments the world over.

An immediate task is to resolve the highly combustible trouble spots mentioned above in a peaceful, democratic, and just way, thereby easing tensions and weakening the hand of imperialism and political reaction worldwide.

What do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

2009-12-01T00:59:00.001-08:00

From: Compass

This is the weekly post from Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club Beyond Coal Campaign.

Know a college student? As this holiday weekend rolls in and many of you might have college kids coming back to your home with huge bags full of dirty laundry, we’ve got something for you.

Know a college student with a dirty room? If you're nodding your head 'yes' right now, send them this link so they can be part of our quest to find the dirtiest room in the nation (or you – the friends or parents - can take a photo and enter them yourself!).

We're betting the dirtiest room we find, no matter how filthy, is still not as dirty as the coal that powers many of our nation's campuses.

The owner of the dirtiest room -- dorm, fraternity, or apartment -- will win a free, green cleaning service from the Sierra Club.

This is another step in our Too Dirty for College Campaign, which I've written about before. We've already had folks tell university presidents that it's time to move beyond coal and power our schools with 100 percent clean-energy solutions.

Now we're proving that no matter how dirty college gets, it's not as dirty as coal.

Your room (or your kid's or friend's room) might be completely filthy, but it's still not as bad as toxic pollution, mountaintop removal and global warming. Coal is dirty, dangerous and far too old to be fueling our nation’s college campuses. It poisons people's water when we drag it out of our mountains, it fills our air with asthma and cancer-causing toxins, and then continues its dirty legacy when the waste is dumped in unlined ponds. We can do better and our schools must lead the way.

So show us that dirty room. To enter, go to this "2dirty4college" photo contest group, and join our online community. You can then upload your image by clicking "Add a photo" on the left-hand side of the page.

Again, the owner of the dirtiest room will win a free, green cleaning service from the Sierra Club. So, call that ex-boyfriend, pay a special visit to your friend's fraternity or call those gals living in the group house next door with the funky smell, and get them to enter today for the glory of being the dirtiest in country. (And a free clean up!)

Help us find the dirtiest room and show that while college can get pretty nasty, coal is still far, far worse.

Scary Movie - The Horror of the Employee Free Choice Act

2009-11-23T12:48:00.001-08:00

Committing heresy: Nazis and the Berlin Wall

2009-10-13T00:49:00.000-07:00

From: People's World

BERLIN — Close to my home here, I saw a frightening march Oct. 11 of Nazis, calling themselves the Nationale Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands, leaving out only the word "arbeiter" (worker) from the name Hitler used. Several thousand of them, almost all in black, many skinheads but also many all too "normal-looking" youngsters (and a smattering of very blonde girls), with the loudest loudspeaker I've heard in years blaring out their propaganda. They were agitating against democracy, denouncing the Bundestag representatives, even the cops, spreading hatred against all foreigners, but above all against the left and the leftists. At least one big banner contained a threat: "Make sure you know where the nearest antifascist club is located."

They started at Alexander-Platz, halted at the circle near my house to yell and chant for 20 minutes, then marched along to Platz der Vereinten Nationen (UN Square, once Lenin-Platz) and along Landsberger Allee, once Lenin-Allee, stopping for a meeting, perhaps by accident halfway between where the big Lenin statue was torn down after the end of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the quiet, hardly noticeable little memorial cemetery with graves and a monument to those who died in the Revolutions of 1848 and 1918-1919.

After a ranting speech in tones recalling Hitler or Goebbels, too loud for me to understand much, their leader read out 50 or more names of all their "martyrs," punctuating each name with a roll on a drum and his loud call for "rache" (revenge).

The only name I recognized was the big Nazi "hero" Horst Wessel, who died 200 meters from here in the hospital which the Nazis renamed after him until 1945. The song about his alleged murder served the Nazis as a main hymn and then as a second national anthem.

Along the main route from which began at the central Alexander-Platz there were hundreds of people walking along on both sides, shouting "Nazis raus" (Out with the Nazis"), often carrying handmade signs or some banners, including a few from the Left Party, the Young Greens, the new anti-establishment "Pirate Party" (which opposes laws limiting pirating of music) and a few from union youth and antifascist groups. Between the marchers and the protesters was a giant number of police, which walked along to protect the Nazis, or to keep the two groups apart. Scores of police vehicles, including a water cannon and an ambulance, were ahead of, next to or behind the marchers.

One man who was standing next to me watching the meeting noted that the anti-Nazis, mostly the same age as the Nazis, were also often wearing black jackets, the color in fashion these days, I guess. He seemed to lump both Nazis and anti-Nazis together, a worrisome development. I don't know how many others also thought that way.

Most of the crowd was decidedly antifascist. Some, perhaps those whose emotions led them to break though to attack the Nazis, got arrested.

Especially frightening for me: many Nazis were carrying big flags, totally black except, in white letters, the county or town they came from. These represented the "fighting groups." While some of those organized in the three officially permitted neo-Nazi parties are well-dressed and often clever tacticians (who profit from the fact that their legal parties still get state subsidies granted every party with a certain percentage of the vote), these hitherto semi-clandestine "fighting groups" are loosely allied with them, and are largely made up of the worst thugs, who go around beating up people of foreign background or of color and left-wingers, whom they call "zechen" or ticks. Even the most violent ones are rarely caught or arrested and, when they are, are usually dealt with very mildly. They gather in a number of bars and "youth centers" and purchase clothing with Nazi code-signs and paraphernalia at a number of shops in Berlin and most major cities. Some jackets have SS runes or the number 88, for Heil Hitler - H being the 8th letter of the alphabet.

They were especially excited because a few days ago two Molotov cocktails were thrown into one of their best-known bars and meeting places (aptly called "At the Executioner"), injuring a few of them, one severely. They immediately blamed this on leftist opponents of the bar, but the police are now convinced the bombs were thrown by disgruntled neo-Nazis, either because of turf quarrels or simply because the doorkeepers didn't let them in some evening.

The march, the number of pro-Nazi young people, the blaring noise and the clear dedication to a fearful past made for a frightening event stirring up countless recollections here in the middle of Berlin.

The media are currently overflowing with recollections of those heroic weeks 20 years ago and of how the oppressed people of East Germany chose freedom and forced the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is the usual blatant over-simplification of a fearfully complicated matter, told in a completely one-sided way. Somehow I could not help recalling how we in the GDR scoffed or laughed when the party officialdom rejected the word "mauer," or "wall" used almost universally for the Berlin Wall, and insisted, quite in vain, on the unwieldy term "antifascist protective barrier."

Of course, everyone knew that it was erected to keep people in, not out, which was why so many rejoiced at its fall. But watching this menacing parade made me wonder: was it perhaps, in a way and in the historical long run, also indeed a kind of protection against Nazis like these?

But even considering such matters these days, at least aloud, is of course pure heresy.

America needs warriors for justice

2009-10-05T00:27:00.000-07:00

From: People's World

by: Stewart Acuff

October 4 2009

tags: Labor,

Original Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

It is beyond doubt that we are living in a period of potentially great historical change in the United States.

Just a year ago we trade unionists, progressives, and Americans of good will made history with the election of an African-American President--something many of us never thought possible -- and large majorities of pro-working family Democrats in both Houses of Congress.

With the implosion of our financial services sector and the consequent economic crisis and recession, it has become abundantly clear that unregulated, unfettered free market capitalism doesn't work for anyone. We now have irrefutable proof that greed is not good, that the markets don't by themselves work for the common good in the nation's interest, that if all the money and resources go to the top, the middle and the bottom are starved. And speaking of the middle, we now know that the middle class is in peril -- endangered by the policies of free market economics -- unfettered corporate-driven globalization, illegal and immoral union busting, contracting out, working rat, privatization, benefit busting, wage thievery -- all the policies that have made up the 30 year assault on working families and unions. While some may have doubted these truths two or four or more years ago, these truths are beyond doubt today.

Those who once held themselves up to be leaders of our society and government are now scorned -- Wall St, Bush, Cheney, AIG. The recipients of the governments bailouts continue to shovel obscene amounts of our money to executives without a clue while we suffer 10 percent unemployment, continued loss of health care, and declining wages and a consequent declining standard of living, and a potentially frightening future for our kids and grandkids and beyond.

Most importantly, our people are ready for and even demanding change. By significant majorities, Americans want a public healthcare plan included in the larger health care reform package, and Americans want the Employee Free Choice Act to be passed to once again allow American workers to freely form unions and bargain collectively.

America is ready for change.

Why then is change so hard to achieve?

Those who've prosecuted and benefited from the 30 year financial assault on America's working families refuse to let go, to give up what they've come to see as theirs -- the insurance companies, the union busters, the ABC, the Comcasts, the Walmarts, Wall St and manipulators of our finances, the Radical Rightwing including Cheney and Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove and Dick Armey and the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute.

It is clear that if we are to win the change we voted for last fall and many of us have worked for for years, we are gonna have to fight, fight hard, and fight outside the normal Washington lobbying box.

Washington politics and lobbying does not work for workers and working families.

We cannot forget that we've gotten to the verge of passing the Employee Free Choice Act by running the largest national grassroots legislative campaign in the history of the American labor movement. Over the six year course of this campaign we've put literally hundreds of thousands of people on the street and more than a million workers in motion. We delivered one and a half million signatures to the Congress, sent half a million emails, wrote 300,000 handwritten letters and made 200,000 phone calls to Senators.

That's a ton of good work. But it is more than clear that we have to do more of it.

While the Employee Free Choice Act has not yet passed, we have realized many benefits -- more than a dozen states have passed new public employee collective bargaining laws including majority authorization. Public officials from town and county commissions to city councils to state assemblies to governors and mayors to the Congress to the President of the United States now realize what hell workers go through when they try to organize and bargain for a better life. More public officials than ever have weighed in to support workers trying to organize.

We have got to ramp up our grassroots lobbying by our members.

But just as importantly, we have to ramp up our effort to engage and organize workers who don't have a union, to make use of the progress and allies we've made and enlist unorganized workers in the struggle to organize their workplaces and to fight and struggle in the public policy fight to pass the Employee Free Choice Act. Every organizing campaign is a direct and clear reason to pass the Employee Free Choice Act.

It is not enough to wait for the Employee Free Choice Act to pass. We have to demonstrate its necessity with struggle--old fashioned struggle right now, today not tomorrow. And by their actions, unorganized workers have to demonstrate the necessity for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act.

It is not enough to wait on the law to change.

History is not made and humanity is not advanced by those who accept the status quo. History is made and the human condition is advanced by warriors willing to struggle for a better life for their kids and grandkids, warriors who understand what they have was won by the blood and tears and sacrifice of our forebears.

America today needs warriors -- warriors to organize and struggle, to fight for change, to fight the Radical Right and corporate domination, to organize and struggle, to dare the rat bastards to stop us, to refuse to lose, to challenge the status quo, to tell those who've run our country and too many lives into the ditch that change is now, that we will fight in Washington but that we will also fight all across America.

The future is ours. Let's take it.

This article originally appeared on HuffingtonPost.com and is published with the permission of the author.

New website

2009-10-05T00:26:00.000-07:00

People's Weekly World new website: People's World

09.24.2009 Young Communist League Weekly Update

2009-09-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

Este es un mensaje bilingue. This is a bilingual message.

"Politics begin where the masses are, not where there are thousands, but where there are millions, that is where serious politics begin." -Vladimir Lenin

Mass Action: Tell your Representative and Senators to support the DREAM Act

Thousands of students across the country are participating in the National Back to School DREAM Act Day of Action urging their Representative and Senators to support the DREAM Act that would allow thousands of immigrant students the ability to attend college. The United States Student Association (USSA) has a script you can use to email your Rep and Senators with (link to word "script" http://www.usstudents.org/our-work/legislative/dream-act-take-action . You can also find our more information and the importance of the DREAM Act here (link to word here http://www.dreamactivist.org/ ).

In the News: Obama opposition based on racism, Jimmy Carter says

Obama opposition based on racism, Jimmy Carter says
by Pepe Lozano

Former president Jimmy Carter, 84, believes much of the opposition directed at Barack Obama since his election stems from deep-seated roots of racism and a fear that an African American is at the head of the U.S. government. To read the full article, check the People's Weekly World Website (link to word "website" http://www.pww.org/article/view/17011 )

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. How much of the opposition to Obama's healthcare plan and other legislation do you think is fueled by racism? Obama himself has stated that he was "black before the election" as a response to the conservative opposition. Do you think that Obama would be able to say that the conservative opposition is fueled by racism?

2. Do Democrats and progressives gain/lose anything by focusing on racism over the the issues such as the role of the federal government and the need for the public option?

3. What happened to Van Jones? Why did he resign from office? What factors were at play?

Eastern Regional Collective

The Eastern Regional Collective first met on September 19^th, 2009 in Boston, MA. This collective is comprised of leaders and members of the YCL from Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Philadelphia, and New Jersey. This collective focuses on the triad of Culture, Education and Mobilization, with the emphasis on Cultural Work. They plan to hold Regional Marxism Schools, Music/Live Art Showcases, and to work together to build locally. At their first meeting, they demonstrated their advanced understanding of the current political climate, and displayed a high level of organizing skills.

WATCH OUT FOR THEIR BLOG: ycleast.blogspot.com, and if you want to get involved, email them @ ycl.east@gmail.com

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Este es un mensaje bilingüe. Este es un mensaje bilingüe.

"La política comienza donde están las masas, no donde hay miles, pero donde hay millones, que es donde la política seria empezar". -Vladimir Lenin

Acción: Dígale a su Representante y los Senadores a apoyar la Ley DREAM

Miles de estudiantes de todo el país participan en la Vuelta a la Escuela Nacional de DREAM Act Día de Acción insta a su representante y los senadores a apoyar la Ley DREAM que permitiría a miles de estudiantes inmigrantes la posibilidad de asistir a la universidad. La Asociación de Estudiantes de Estados Unidos (USSA) tiene una secuencia de comandos que puede utilizar para enviar su representante y con los senadores (enlace con la palabra "script" http://www.usstudents.org/our-work/legislative/dream-act-take- acción. También puede encontrar nuestros más información y la importancia de la Ley DREAM aquí (enlace a la palabra aquí http://www.dreamactivist.org/).

En las noticias: La oposición de Obama basada en el racismo, Jimmy Carter, dice

La oposición de Obama basada en el racismo, Jimmy Carter, dice
por Pepe Lozano

El ex presidente Jimmy Carter, de 84 años, cree que gran parte de la oposición dirigida a Barack Obama desde su elección se deriva de las raíces profundas del racismo y el temor de que un afroamericano está a la cabeza del gobierno de EE.UU.. Para leer el artículo completo, consulte el People's Weekly World Web (enlace con la palabra "sitio web" http://www.pww.org/article/view/17011)

Preguntas de discusión:

1. ¿Qué parte de la oposición al plan de salud de Obama y otra legislación crees que es alimentado por el racismo? El propio Obama ha declarado que era "negro antes de la elección", como una respuesta a la oposición conservadora. ¿Cree que Obama sería capaz de decir que la oposición conservadora está alimentada por el racismo?

2. Los demócratas y los progresistas de ganar-perder nada por la lucha contra el racismo en el de las cuestiones como el papel del gobierno federal y la necesidad de la opción pública?

3. ¿Qué pasó con Van Jones? ¿Por qué ha cesado en su cargo? ¿Qué factores estaban en juego?

Colectivo Regional del Este

El Colectivo de la Región Oriental reunió por primera vez el 19 de septiembre de 2009 en Boston, MA. Este colectivo está compuesto por líderes y miembros de la YCL de Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Nueva York, Maryland, Filadelfia y Nueva Jersey. Este colectivo se centra en la tríada de Cultura, Educación y Movilización, con el énfasis en la obra cultural. Que planean celebrar el marxismo Regional de Escuelas, Música / Live Art vitrinas, y de trabajar juntos para construir a nivel local. En su primera reunión, que han demostrado su comprensión avanzada de la actual clima político, y muestra un alto nivel de capacidades de organización.

¡OJO CON SU BLOG: ycleast.blogspot.com, y si quieres participar, them@ycl.east correo electrónico @ gmail.com

Why is Pat Buchanan Defending Hitler?

2009-09-06T17:32:00.000-07:00

Link

MSNBC conservative commentator and former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan has a history of insensitivity to issues surrounding the Holocaust. Yet again, with the 70th anniversary of the start of World War II, Buchanan posted a telling column on his own website and on Townhall that seems to blame Poland for World War II.

In a piece titled "Just how crazy is Pat Buchanan," Ethan Porter writes on his blog, "Mr. Obama's Neighborhood," that Buchanan's latest comments reflect "revisionism that comes perilously close to denial:"

Despite his current position, as a friendly sparring partner with Rachel Maddow and in-house winger on MSNBC, the guy has been a very-thinly veiled fascist sympathizer for decades. And in his column this week, he all but removes that veil.

Available here, the column is titled "Did Hitler Want War?" Buchanan believes the answer to be no. He pins the blame for World War II on Poland, and Britain's guarantee of protection to it. As evidence, Buchanan points to a string of inexplicably dumb decisions made by Hitler-so dumb that, to Buchanan, they negate the myths about the war and the man thought by nearly all sentient beings to be its instigator.

You might think that Buchanan would have stopped using this sort of unrepentant rhetoric as his career moved from a Republican firebrand to a commentator on one of the nation's top cable news channels - but you'd be wrong.

Buchanan has the sort of history that has earned him an entire page on the Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) website. The ADL goes so far as to describe Buchanan as one who "publicly espouses racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and anti-immigrant views." The site features a sampling of more than 2,000 of Buchanan's own words, but maybe more telling are the thoughts of the late conservative intellectual William Buckley, who was included in a Newsweek's article "Is Pat Buchanan Anti-Semitic:"

Buchanan also wrote that if the United States went to war, the fighting would be done by "kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzales, and Leroy Brown." Buckley, in his usual opaque writing style, argues that this amounts to charging Jews with starting a war they wouldn't fight in a genuine slur against them. He adds: "I find it impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism, whatever it was that drove him to say and do it: most probably, an iconoclastic temperament."

These are rough words coming from Buckley, who goes to great pains to distinguish between anti-Semitism and simply voicing criticism of Israel.

It is hard to be surprised by a man who has written many columns concerning World War II revisionism, but this may be his worst yet.

However, what may be most surprising is why Buchanan still has a job.

Actually, there is a place on MSNBC where he may belong - you would have to ask Keith Olbermann about that one.

UPDATE: MSNBC is currently promoting Buchanan's column on MSNBC.com. This is beyond ridiculous. The National Jewish Democratic Council just issued a statement that says: "This sort of historical revisionism is deplorable. Buchanan's latest column should be removed immediately from MSNBC.com, and no worthy news organization should employ a commentator who engages in such vile fiction."

UPDATE II: Within an hour of our press release, MSNBC has removed Buchanan's column, "Did Hitler Want War," from their website. Here's a response from David A. Harris, NJDC's President: "MSNBC took the responsible action and removed Pat Buchanan's column defending Adolf Hitler from their website, but no worthy news organization should employ and promote a commentator who engages in such vile fiction."

Follow Aaron Keyak on Twitter: www.twitter.com/akeyak

Plot to kill Post Office cloaked by right wing ‘recess rally’ chaos

2009-08-12T19:32:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 08/11/09 13:13

Even as it works overtime to disrupt the national debate on health care reform, the radical right is taking advantage of the chaos to quietly destroy yet another public service Americans take for granted – the United States Postal Service.
Working through Sen. Thomas Coburn, R-Okla., they have rolled a huge boulder onto the road lawmakers are taking to close a $7 billion budget deficit hanging over the agency for the year ending Sept. 30.

Coburn attached a killer amendment, just before the Senate’s August recess, to legislation that would grant the Postal Service the $5 billion it needs to cover health care costs for retirees. Without the legislation the agency says that on Sept. 1 it will have to fire more than 50,000 workers, close down hundreds of post offices and kill Saturday pickup and delivery.

The right-wing amendment effectively squashes the collective bargaining rights of the entire Postal Service workforce by ordering arbitrators to place the fiscal condition of the Postal Service ahead of any contractual obligations the agency has to its workers or retirees.

The law, as amended by Coburn, would allow the Postal Service, for example, to withhold a $5.4 billion payment it must make within a month to cover retiree health care costs.

The postal worker unions are warning that attachment of the Coburn amendment to the rescue bill forces them to withdraw their earlier support for the legislation.

“The Coburn amendment serves only to upset collective bargaining procedures,” said Bill Burrus, president of the American Postal Service Workers Union.

The new Letter Carriers president, Frederic Rolando, told senators in a hearing just before the recess, that his union also could not support a bill containing the Coburn amendment.
Witnesses at the Aug. 6 Senate hearing pointed out that health care costs are only part of the problems the agency faces.

Mail volume has dropped by 12 percent in the last year and the drop is expected to reach 16 percent by the end of fiscal 2009, in September, according to the Government Accounting Office.

Postmaster General John Potter told senators that the USPS has lost much of its volume because of the Internet.

Potter, who was named by a GOP-appointed Postal Board during the Bush administration, has proposed cuts in the workforce as the solution. He says that at least 677 post offices should be closed, most of them in major cities, and that 55,000 workers should be fired.

The USPS workforce, the unions note, has already shrunk, through retirements and buyouts, to 603,000 workers, from 773,000 several years ago.
The unions are saying there is a better way than job cuts.

Both union leaders are angry about the radical right amendment to the rescue bill because they have already been working with USPS management on money-saving plans.

The Letter Carriers and the agency, for example, are reviewing 168,000 city letter carrier routes, examining them for possible consolidations.
Senators at the Aug. 6 hearing were non-committal on the Coburn amendment.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Ind., Conn., was among the group of supposedly pro-labor Democrats who weren’t saying too much.

He asked Rolando and Burrus to submit conditions they would attach to any arbitrations.
Both restated their opposition to the anti-labor amendment attached by Coburn but declined to offer any others.

Limbaugh’s Nazi slurs draw condemnation

2009-08-12T19:30:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Susan Webb
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 08/11/09 14:43

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi threw Rush Limbaugh into a snit when she objected to use of Nazi symbols by anti-health-reform protesters.

On Aug. 5, when a reporter asked Pelosi if she thought the right-wing-organized protests were real grassroots expressions, she replied, "I think they are Astroturf, you be the judge."

Astroturf, the fake grass used in sports arenas, is being used to refer to fake “grassroots” happenings that are a specialty of far-right groups, going back to the “Brooks Brothers riot” in December 2000 that intimidated Miami-Dade election officials into stopping the vote recounting.

"They're carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town hall meeting on health care," Pelosi noted.

Limbaugh, the next day on his radio talk show, accused Pelosi of being “deranged” because “she's running around now claiming that we're Nazis, that not only are we an unruly mob but that people are showing up wearing swastikas.”

But a spokesman for Pelosi told FOXNews.com that Pelosi was referring to a photo taken at a Massachusetts town hall meeting hosted by Democratic Rep. Ed Markey. The photo showed a protester holding a sign bearing a swastika crossed out over Obama's name and a question mark.

Also in Massachusetts, according to news reports, one protester compared Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern to the Nazi Josef Mengele, who did ghastly medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners.

At a photo site linked to the right-wing freerepublic.com, someone named Dallas59 posted a photo of people at an unidentified rally holding a giant photo of Obama with a Hitler mustache drawn on.

On Aug. 7, CNN’s Rick Sanchez identified the same photo as from a rally outside a health care forum in Romulus, Mich.

Sanchez also displayed a photo from Texas of a man holding a sign depicting Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett as the devil, next to another sign with the symbol of the Nazi SS and a slogan talking about stopping socialism.

Today, Rep. David Scott, D-Ga., told reporters that his district office in Smyrna was vandalized with a four-foot swastika last night.

Viveca Novak, at factcheck.org, writes, “Pelosi did not actually accuse opponents of being neo-Nazis; that’s just the way Limbaugh and others chose to interpret her phrase, ‘carrying swastikas and symbols like that.’ It is clear from the images in hand that the anti-Obama protesters were the ones accusing others of Nazi-like tendencies. And Pelosi turns out to be right.”

In fact, Limbaugh spent much of his Aug. 6 radio diatribe invoking the Nazis and Adolf Hitler in a highly provocative way, with a strong paranoid streak.

Limbaugh declared, “The Democrat Party and where it's taken this country, the radical left leadership of this party bears much more resemblance to Nazi policies than anything we on the right believe in at all.”

“The Obama health care logo is damn close to a Nazi swastika logo,” Limbaugh claimed, calling it “right out of Adolf Hitler's playbook.” He likened Obama to Adolf Hitler, saying President Obama is “not who he said he was” and cannot be trusted.

An event today showed that Limbaugh’s provocative language is not just an abstract matter.

MSNBC today aired footage of the crowd gathering before Obama’s afternoon town hall meeting on health care in New Hampshire, and pointed out one man in a group holding protest signs with a gun in a holster on his hip.

The gun-toting protestor was holding a sign reading “It is Time to Water the Tree of Liberty.” It is a reference to the Thomas Jefferson quote: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Police said the man is legally carrying the gun, is nowhere near where the president will be, and is "under constant surveillance," Talking Points Memo reports.

Last Friday, major Jewish groups condemned the use of Nazi comparisons and images to attack health care reform.

David A. Harris, president of the National Jewish Democratic Council, called the Nazi references "not funny" and "profoundly troubling."

"At these too-well-organized 'mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore' town hall meetings around the country this August, more and more of these disturbing Nazi comparisons are cropping up — and they all seem to be coming from the heart of the Republican base," he said. "And it has to stop."

The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement condemning the use of Nazi imagery by some reform opponents as "outrageous, offensive and inappropriate."

The ADL, the nation's largest Jewish civil rights group, specifically condemned Limbaugh’s Nazi comparisons.

“The use of Nazi symbolism is outrageous, offensive and inappropriate," said ADL national director Abraham H. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor.

"Comparisons to the Nazis are deeply offensive and only serve to diminish and trivialize the extent of the Nazi regime's crimes against humanity and the murder of six million Jews and millions of others in the Holocaust," said Foxman. "I don't see any comparison here. It's off-center, off-issue and completely inappropriate."

The National Jewish Democratic Council has an online petition “Tell Rush: Nazi Rhetoric Must Stop.” It calls on Clear Channel Communications (the parent company of Premiere Radio Networks which produces “The Rush Limbaugh Show”) to “stop allowing Limbaugh to abuse the memory of the more than 12 million Holocaust victims who suffered and died at the hands of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime.”

suewebb @ pww.org

SickForProfit: Video Series Highlights Insurance Company Greed

2009-08-10T20:40:00.000-07:00

From: AFL-CIO Now Blog

by Mike Hall, Aug 7, 2009

United Healthcare’s “mission is to help people live healthier lives,” CEO Stephen Hemsley told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in March.

But the health insurance giant’s real mission is to maximize its profits and executive pay and to defeat health care reform that threatens that pot of gold, says the new website SickForProfit.com.

Launched by Brave New Films, SickForProft will feature a series of Web videos spotlighting several large insurance companies—their profits, their CEOs’ astronomical compensation and the stories of everyday families insured by those firms but denied coverage or turned away altogether.

Welcome to the American health insurance industry. Instead of helping policyholders attain the health security they need for their families, big insurance companies get rich by denying coverage to patients. Now they’re sending lobbyists to Washington, D.C., to twist the arms of lawmakers to oppose reform of the status quo. Why? Because the status quo pays.

United Healthcare’s Hemsley finds the status quo quite comfortable, with nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars in unexercised stock options and millions in annual salary, according to the first film posted at Brave New Films.

But that same status quo made the first few years of Isabella Griggs life miserable and painful for the little Watertown, Wis., girl, and heartbreaking for her parents. Isabella was born with several life threatening conditions, says her mother, Stephanie, including the inability to eat solid food.

Isabella was forced to use a feeding tube that delivered liquid nourishment straight to her stomach, a painful and frightening treatment for a young child. But when her parents discovered and were accepted into a treatment program for which doctors said Isabella was “an ideal candidate,” United Healthcare refused to pay. Of course, the company had gladly accepted the Griggs’ premiums for years.

After waiting weeks for approval, Stephanie says:

First, we were told that the paperwork was lost, and then we were told that it was being denied….They make all that money off the backs of people like us.

It was only after Stephanie posted a YouTube video chronicling their battle and United Healthcare’s despicable denials, that the Griggs’ family saw some action. After thousands of views, posting on insurance watchdog websites, United Healthcare, seeing the quick viral growth of the video, suddenly had a change of heart and agreed to cover the treatment.

Click here to see Isabella’s story and those of two other United Healthcare customers coldly denied the life-changing treatment. Click here to find out how much insurance industry CEOs are making out of the broken health care system and here to tell your own story of insurance industry abuses.

Labor issues call for a new New Deal

2009-07-29T23:05:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/29/09 13:13

The executive council of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, called for a massive second economic stimulus package yesterday, modeled after FDR’s Works Progress Administration, noting that the agency put 3.5 million people to work in 1935 alone. The council, after a one-day meeting yesterday in Silver Springs, Md., declared:

“President Roosevelt’s strategy can be re-engineered to help revitalize the modern manufacturing sector by putting the jobless to work renovating factories and public structures, while others can develop financing and marketing plans to support domestic production and jobs.”

In addition to the WPA-type program the federation said the second stimulus plan must include an additional seven weeks or more extension of jobless benefits, another increase in food stamp benefits, more aid to state and local governments to prevent further layoffs and service cuts and more spending on infrastructure and clean energy products.

The federation said the measures are called for because the current recession is much deeper than anyone had first thought.

The call for the second stimulus was issued after the executive council met in a closed-door session with Jared Bernstein, a top economic aide in the Obama administration. During the session Bernstein talked about the administration’s pro-labor moves, said the first stimulus is slowly beginning to work and that the administration is not yet ready for a second stimulus.

AFL-CIO Policy Director Thea Lee said, in a phone interview, that Bernstein told the council that “one third of the stimulus money has been spent or is in the pipeline.” Lee said the union leaders directly pushed the administration spokesman for a second stimulus package and that “Bernstein said they’re not ready to talk about that yet.”

Labor has, of course, been more than ready to discuss a second stimulus.

Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer, has been calling for one for several months.

Earlier this month Trumka said the first stimulus, at $787 billion, was “too small for an economy with a 9.5 percent jobless rate, falling industrial production, rising foreclosures and declining gross domestic product.”

The union leaders went further in their warnings about the economy yesterday than they have gone in any statement thus far. Their statement said that, within 12 months, one third of all U.S. workers could end up finding themselves in either the category of unemployed or underemployed.

The executive council also announced plans for two big labor mobilizations in August – one on health care and another on the Employee Free Choice Act.

Both campaigns are intended to counter the on-going business backed efforts against both health care reform and labor law reform.

Sources say the labor leaders were angry about the decision of the Democratic-run 111th Congress, due to divisions within the Democratic majority, to put off final decisions on health care until after Sept. 8.

Even as the council was meeting unions were funneling 50,000 phone calls to members of Congress as part of a national day of action on health care reform.

Discussing the Employee Free Choice Act after the meeting, AFL-CIO Organizing Director Stewart Acuff said, “The important thing is to preserve the essential elements of the Employee Free Choice Act: Restoring the freedom to organize and bargain collectively. That’s the measure by which any tweaking of the law will be judged.”

The council itself reaffirmed the federation’s strong support for the bill’s majority sign-up provision, which calls for recognition of a union as soon as a majority of workers sign cards indicating that they want representation by that union.

Acuff said that alternatives to majority sign-up, including mail-in ballots, mail-in authorization cards and quick NLRB elections were not discussed much at the meeting but were also not ruled out. “These would be dramatically better than what we have now,” he said.

Current law allows long campaigns that give employers the opportunity to harass, intimidate and fire union organizers.

Senate sponsor Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, continues to insist that majority sign-up is still on the table. “Nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to,” he is saying.

After the meeting AFL-CIO Legislative Director, Bill Samuel and AFSCME President Gerald McEntee described some of the discussion on health care reform.

“We reviewed what’s happened so far and talked about our success in beating back the idea of taxing health benefits,” Samuel said.

“But if the Senate Finance Committee decides to let employers off the hook and to ax the government run public option, we’ll have to see what to do,” said McEntee.

McEntee’s union, alone, has some 16,000 members out campaigning for health care with a strong public option and is running a national television ad campaign on the issue.

White House school reform plan draws mixed reaction

2009-07-28T00:14:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Susan Webb
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/27/09 14:41

Teachers unions and advocates gave a mixed reaction to a $4.35 billion education reform initiative announced by President Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan last week.

Billed by Obama as “one of the largest investments in education reform in American history,” the new program is part of the $787 billion economic stimulus plan passed by Congress and signed into law by Obama in February.

Under the “Race to the Top” program, states will compete for federal funding grants for innovation in education.

"Rather than divvying it up and handing it out, we are letting states and districts compete for it,” Obama said as he and Duncan announced the program last Friday. “That's how we can incentivize excellence and spur reform and launch a race for the top in America's public schools.”

Duncan said his department will be “scrutinizing state applications for a coordinated and deep-seated commitment to reform.”

Among the more controversial elements of Race to the Top are requirements that promote the growth of charter schools, link teacher evaluation and pay to student performance and push for national student performance standards — presumably measured by standardized tests.

Duncan said states will be awarded grants based on their readiness to implement four core reforms:

* “adopt common, internationally-benchmarked K-12 standards that truly prepare students for college and careers.” To speed this process, Duncan said, the Race to the Top program will set aside $350 million to fund the development of” rigorous, common state assessments.”

* “monitor growth in student learning—and identify effective instructional practices.”

* “identify effective teachers and principals, reward and retain more top-notch teachers—and improve or replace ones who aren't up to the job.”

* "institute far-reaching reforms, replace school staff, and change the school culture.”

Duncan emphasized that the four reforms are interrelated, and “one reform reinforces the others.”

“When teachers get better data on student growth,” he said, “it empowers teachers to tailor classroom instruction to the needs of their students and boost student achievement.”

“When principals are able to identify their most effective and least effective teachers, it makes it easier for them to place teachers where they are needed most—and provide struggling teachers with help.”

“When superintendents have the authority to tackle their lowest performing schools by replacing staff and shaking up the school culture, they will have the ability—for the first time—to close or remake the dropout factories in our urban districts that are at the root of our dropout problem.”

Obama said the Race to the Top competition “will not be based on politics or ideology or the preferences of a particular interest group.”

“We will use the best evidence available to determine whether a state can meet a few key benchmarks for reform — and states that outperform the rest will be rewarded with a grant,” the president said.

Many education reform advocates, including teachers and their unions, are concerned that the competition guidelines appear to place excessive reliance on standardized multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank tests

National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel said in a statement that the NEA would “encourage the Education Department to think more broadly about what it views as the basic tenets of a student’s educational experience.”

“If we continue to focus narrowly on test scores, then students in need of the most support will continue to get more test prep rather than the rich, challenging, engaging education they deserve,” Van Roekel said.

“Teachers should be evaluated on their practice using multiple criteria, not just one,” he said.

Likewise, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said on the AFT website, “Hopefully we will agree that teacher evaluations must be improved the right way. We need meaningful, fair and multiple measures for supporting and evaluating teachers so that evaluations aren't based on one observation by a principal or one standardized test score."

Weingarten and Van Roekel along with state and local teachers union leaders were among the invited guests at the July 24 announcement of the Race to the Top initiative.

One of the local leaders, Jean Clements, president of the Hillsborough (Fla.) Classroom Teachers Association, a joint affiliate of the AFT and the NEA, addressed the gathering. "There is no 'one thing' that will improve teacher quality or student achievement," she said.

She cited successful joint initiatives by her local union and school district including high-quality mentoring and coaching, well-trained principals who work collaboratively with teachers, adequate resources, and professional growth opportunities at all career stages.

Noted educator and reform advocate Deborah Meier says the drive for national standardized testing gives her “chills.”

In a July 14 interview posted on her web site, Meier condemns reliance on standardized tests. “We have made what can be measured cheaply (and thus is easily ranked) the definition of being ‘well-educated’,” Meier says. “We have defined ‘achievement’ and even ‘performance’ to scores on paper-and-pencil tasks, largely of the multiple choice variety, without any evidence that this is wise policy, or will produce either a stronger economy or a stronger democracy. (Or even stronger college performance!)”

The two national teachers unions said they would study the details of the Race to the Top proposal and, in Van Roekel’s words, “use the 30-day comment period to find common ground with the administration.”

suewebb @ pww.org

Raul points the way for Cuba on July 26

2009-07-28T00:12:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Morning Star
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/26/09 16:40

Original source: morningstaronline.co.uk

Raul Castro has said that the global economic crisis means tougher times ahead for Cuba, but the country has no-one to blame but itself for poor farm production.

In a speech marking Revolution Day, the Cuban president said that the island can't simply pin all its problems on Washington's 47-year-old trade embargo.

He implored Cubans to take better advantage of a government programme initiated last year to turn unused state land over to individual farmers.

"The land is there, here are the Cubans," he said, pounding the podium. "Let's see if we get to work or not, if we produce or not, if we keep our word."

The 78-year-old Mr Castro called agricultural production Cuba's top priority and a matter of national security.

"It is not a question of yelling 'Fatherland or death! Down with imperialism! The blockade hurts us'," he said.

"The land is there waiting for our efforts."

On the third anniversary of the last time his 82-year-old brother Fidel was seen in public, the younger Mr Castro showed signs that he is getting more comfortable with national addresses.

He opened his speech with a joke about the stage's lack of shielding from the sun.

Tens of thousands of supporters, most wearing red T-shirts or caps, filled a grassy plaza dotted with red and black July 26 flags.

Revolution Day commemorates the date in 1953 when the Castros led an attack on the Moncada army barracks in the eastern city of Santiago.

Cubans consider it the beginning of the revolution that culminated with dictator Fulgencio Batista's ousting on New Year's Day 1959.

An eight-story tall banner on a building behind the crowd featured a picture of both Fidel and Raul thrusting their arms skyward under the words The Vigorous and Victorious Revolution Keeps Marching Forward.

Mr Castro has asked Cubans to be patient as he implements "structural changes" to a struggling economy.

He also has said he'd be willing to meet US leaders over any issue.

Officials from Cuba and the US discussed immigration this month for the first time since 2003.

The Obama administration lifted restrictions on Cuban-Americans who want to travel or send money to the island.

But the US has said it wants to see small political or economic reforms before going further.

Young Republicans elect a new leader who's under fire for racist remarks

2009-07-20T22:50:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Sue Sturgis
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/19/09 13:18

Original source: southernstudies.org

The Republican Party has been trying to revamp its image as more inclusive of diversity -- but the newly elected leader of the party's youth branch may set that effort back.

At their annual convention in Indianapolis last week, the Young Republican National Federation elected as their new chair Audra Shay (in photo) of New Orleans, the group's former vice chair at large. Shay, a 38-year-old Arkansas native, defeated Rachel Hoff, the group's director of media relations, by a vote of 470-415, according to The Daily Beast.

The online news site has been covering the story in depth, revealing racially offensive comments made by Shay on Facebook:

Specifically, a thread where one of her friends posts that "Obama Bin Lauden [sic] is the new terrorist... Muslim is on there side [sic]... need to take this country back from all of these mad coons... and illegals," and Shay responds eight minutes later with: "You tell em Eric! lol."

When two Facebook friends including the head of the African-American Young Republican Chapter complained about the racist remarks, Shay reportedly responded by unfriending them. She later released a statement disavowing her support for the remarks and pointing out that under her chairmanship the Louisiana Young Republicans raised $90,000 for a minority outreach media campaign.

But the Daily Beast also reported that in October 2008, following news that Sarah Palin was being hung in effigy outside a home as an offensive Halloween decoration, Shays posted to Facebook, "What no Obama in a noose? Come on now, its just freedome [sic] of speech, no one in Atlanta would take that wrong! Lol."

She later added, "Apparently I could not spell last night. I am wondering if the guys with the Palin noose would care if we had a bunch of homosexuals in a noose."

House bill: Taxes the wealthy to keep America healthy

2009-07-20T22:49:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/16/09 13:27

The health care bill presented by the House leadership this week pays for the health insurance of the 20 percent of the people who cannot afford it with a surtax on the richest 1 percent.

Nothing like this has ever emerged from the leadership of a U.S. Congress.

At best, throughout American history, Congress has, under pressure from labor and the peoples’ movements, closed various tax loopholes for the rich, given tax credits to workers or created programs like Medicaid for the poor. The programs for the poor were paid for with funds raised from a progressive income tax system that everyone pays into, and never by any type of transfer of wealth from the rich to those in poverty.

It is a testimony to the power of the massive labor-led coalition that has been battling for health care reform that the House is saying, for the first time ever, that those in society who can afford it should pay for the health insurance of those who cannot.

While the right wing is doing everything and anything, including coughing up blood, in its effort to kill the proposal, the labor movement is out there telling everyone how fair it really is.

“The wealthiest 1 percent of American households take home 20 percent of all income in the country – the highest percentage since the time just before the crash that started the Great Depression,” said the AFL-CIO in a statement it released after the Senate health committee approved its version of a health care reform bill a day later.

The federation noted that, unlike the House bill, the Senate’s health committee bill “does not address financing.” Labor is calling upon the Senate to adopt a bill that includes the House’s funding strategy.

“Instead of taxing working families’ health care benefits, as some senators propose, the House bill lands on the side of fairness. In most cases, all or a large part of the surcharge (on the rich) is offset by the savings they will realize from comprehensive health care reform,” says the AFL-CIO.

That point is well taken because many of the lawmakers most opposed to taxing the rich have been leaders on the bandwagon calling for taxes on workers who currently have employer provided health insurance.

The AFL-CIO points out that no one making less than $192 (yes, that’s one hundred and ninety two) an hour would be affected by the surcharge.

The right wingers in the Senate say the House funding mechanism is a deal breaker they can never support because it means more taxes for the very people who supposedly invest, innovate, hire and thereby keep the economy humming along. The result, they claim, will be to hurt everyone, including the working people and poor who the plan means to help.

Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, countered that argument today when he said, “There’s no reason to suppose that taking a tiny sliver of the incomes of the top 1 percent will reduce all that much of their ardor to invest, innovate and hire in the future. Yet if this tiny sliver means affordable health care for a far larger number of Americans, who will be able to get regular checkups and stay healthy and productive, the positive effect on the American economy is likely to be far greater.”

Another major argument conservatives are making against the House funding mechanism is that it will hurt small businesses.

The facts are that less than 5 percent of small business owners would be paying any surcharge.

Only the profits of a small business would be taxed. A couple whose income comes entirely from a small business would have to earn more than $350,000 in business profits, after paying all their expenses, including salaries, before the surcharge would affect them at all.

Still not willing to cede the point, right wingers say, “even so, it will be a job killer because it will reduce the incentive small businesses have for expanding and hiring more workers.”

This argument also is false because those add-on workers are paid out of pre-tax income.

Purchasing of new equipment by small businesses would also not be discouraged because most small businesses can write off up to $250,000 of the costs of such equipment.

The AFL-CIO summed it up this way: “A small surtax on the wealthiest 1 percent buys health care reform for America. That’s not much to finally get a handle on costs that are dragging down the entire economy. Even the wealthy will get a big chunk of their money back in savings. Their premiums won’t go up as fast, and no one will have to pay the hidden $1000 insurance premium add-on to cover costs for uncompensated care. The House health care surtax is a fiscally responsible investment. It will pay steady returns every year.”

Obama reported firm in his support for EFCA

2009-07-15T13:48:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/13/09 17:24

A top aid to one of the union leaders present at a White House meeting with President Obama today said the president remains firmly committed to passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, the bill that would make it easier to unionize.

“He told the leaders that his administration is firmly committed to the bill but as of now there is no formal timeline on when it would get to his desk,” the aid said.

Lawmakers have been struggling to work out a “compromise” on the bill because several Democrats have been wavering and a 60 vote majority is needed to break any Republican filibuster.

The aid also said that the labor leaders, who emerged from the meeting with the president late in the afternoon, assured him that the administration has labor’s full support on health care reform.

Union leaders present at the meeting represent unions in both labor federations, the AFL-CIO and Change to Win. The independent National Education Association was also represented.

For more information: "Union leaders meet with Obama" at pww.org/article/articleview/16353/.

The Faces of the Communist Party

2009-07-10T11:42:00.000-07:00

From: CPUSA Online

Here is a great video developed and produced by some participants in the recent National Marxist School of the Communist Party.

Happy Independence Day!

2009-07-10T11:39:00.000-07:00

(a little late, I know)

From: CPUSA Online

Author: CPUSA

First published 07/04/2009 22:25 by {article_topic_desc}

Today is our nation's birthday. It commemorates the great struggle that severed our colonial dependence on Britain and gave a fresh impulse to the unending struggle for freedom.

Revolutions are never complete. While expanding the boundaries and possibilities of freedom, our revolution also had its limitations: the abominable institution of slavery remained; political rights were limited to white male property holders; the new nation was formed on lands unlawfully and violently expropriated from Native American peoples; and the revolution unfolded in a nascent bourgeois society, which over time widened many of the inequalities that were embedded in colonial life.

Nonetheless, the American Revolution constituted a landmark in human history. For the first time sovereignty and consent rested, not with a king, not with an aristocratic order, not with a church, but with the people. Freedom was proclaimed a universal right of humankind. And many old modes of deference and hierarchy melted away.

The revolution of 1776 set the stage for the second American Revolution in 1865—culminating in the abolition of slavery—and subsequent struggles to expand boundaries and impart new content to freedom.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the greatest leader in our land in the 20th Century, was well aware of the limitations of our revolution. Yet he heralded its achievements and ideals and challenged the nation to live up to full meaning of its creed.

That challenge has yet to be fulfilled, although in electing President Barak Obama our nation took another step down freedom road.

Let's celebrate this Independence Day with family and friends, while recommitting ourselves to complete that journey in the years ahead.

Call-in day presses Congress to pass public option

2009-07-08T19:09:00.001-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Tim Wheeler
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/08/09 15:06

The grassroots health care movement mobilized thousands of phone calls to Capitol Hill July 8, demanding enactment of health care reform with a strong public option that goes into effect immediately with no delaying “trigger.”

The Campaign for America’s Future initiated the July 8 call-in, urging supporters, “No month will be as critical as the month of July in the fight to win health care for all.”

The House and Senate are both moving fast to complete the drafting of health care reform legislation before they recess in early August.

Prospects for a public plan option are improving, thanks to increasing grassroots pressure, the CAF statement, signed by co-director Roger Hickey, said. But, it warned, “the massive lobbying effort from the insurance and drug companies is far from finished and several senators have yet to take a stand.”

The group pointed to a victory: Sens. Arlen Specter, D-Pa., and Kay Hagen, D-N.C., both endorsed the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee bill that includes a public option after first saying they opposed it. Both changed their positions after MoveOn.org mobilized the senators’ constituents to demand they support inclusion of a public option.

“The lesson,” the center said, is: “when we mobilize the grassroots, we make democracy work for the common good.”

The phone number of the Capitol Hill main switchboard is (202) 224-3121 or toll-free 1-877-762-8762.

This reporter phoned his congressman, Elijah Cummings of Maryland, for no charge from Washington State to express appreciation for his support of the public option.

MoveOn.org also initiated a second call-in campaign, this time to the White House, to protest Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s support of a “trigger” mechanism that would postpone implementation of a public option until the nation reaches some point of extreme crisis in the future.

“The ‘trigger’ is a trap to kill health care reform,” says a statement from MoveOn. “It would delay the public health insurance option for years even though we’re facing a health care crisis now.”

Right now, when key committees are finalizing health care legislation, “Emanuel’s remarks will only embolden conservative opponents of reform,” MoveOn continued. “He should be standing with the majority of Americans for a strong public health insurance option — not disastrous half-measures like the ‘trigger.’”

The Huffington Post reports that Emanuel has been floating the idea of a “trigger” since January, a “Trojan horse” of the medical-insurance lobby.

The White House public comment line is 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414. (Again, this reporter phoned the White House and, after a three or four minute wait, was connected to a receptionist who listened to my message supporting the public option but opposing the “trigger.” She thanked me for the call and assured me my views would be conveyed to the president).

greenerpastures21212 @ yahoo.com

Communist Party Statement on Honduras Crisis

2009-06-29T18:42:00.000-07:00

From: the Communist Party USA

The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) joins with the world in denouncing the coup d’etat this morning against the legally elected president of the Republic of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, by the Honduran military, in which, according to a statement by the president’s wife, Mr. Zelaya was threatened and beaten before being sent into exile in Costa Rica.

• The CPUSA denounces alarming reports of physical attacks by troops against the ambassadors of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua in Tegucigalpa, and calls for protection of all diplomatic personal; and, if the reports of the attacks are confirmed, punishment of all the responsible parties for this gross violation of Honduran and international law.

The CPUSA further:

• Demands that president Zelaya and other members of his government be returned to power immediately, and that the troops return to their barracks.

• Demands the immediate release of all labor, community and student leaders who have reportedly been rounded up by the army, and the restoration of freedom of the press.

• Recognizes that the Obama administration has repudiated the coup, and insists that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton hold firm to this position, refusing diplomatic recognition and any military aid to Honduras until President Zelaya is restored to power.

• Calls upon unions and other people’s organizations in the United States to actively support our brothers and sisters in Honduras in resisting this brutal military coup d’etat.

EMERGENCY RALLY IN SUPPORT OF HONDURAS

2009-06-29T16:59:00.000-07:00

From: The Official YCL Facebook group

END THE COUP NOW! RESTORE DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED MANUEL ZELAYA TO POWER!

NO TO US INTERVENTION! YES TO SELF DETERMINATION FOR THE PEOPLE OF HONDURAS AND ALL OF THE AMERICAS!

WHEN: Monday, June 29, 2009, from 3-6 PM

WHERE: In front of the Honduran Mission to the United Nations, 866 UN Plaza (to the east of 1st Avenue, between 48th and 49th streets), Manhattan, NYC

WHY:

At 6 AM on Sunday, June 28, 2009, Honduras’ popular president Manuel Zelaya was kidnapped, removed from power, and brought to Costa Rica, where he remains at this moment. It is no coincidence that this is the day that millions of Hondurans were preparing to vote on whether they wanted to reform their constitution – similar to what the people of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia have done in recent years.

Manuel Zelaya is backed by a majority of labor unions and social movements in Honduras. This coup was carried out in a way that mirrors the removal of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from Haiti and the attempted coup against President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who was brought back to power by the Venezuelan people. Clearly, this is an act of economic and political elites in Honduras, the US, and elsewhere who are desperate to prevent Honduras from continuing to unify with the more leftist and socialist countries in Latin America.

Following the kidnapping of Zelaya, Honduras’ foreign minister and ambassadors from Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua have also been kidnapped – in clear violation of international laws. Now, the people of Honduras of taken to the streets in protest and Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, and others have made public statements condemning the coup d'etat in Honduras and calling on the international community to react to ensure democracy is restored and the constitutional president is reinstated. Washington, on the other hand, remains silent as of now.

JOIN THE PEOPLE OF HONDURAS AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY IN CONDEMNING THE COUP D’ETAT AND DEMANDING THAT MANUEL ZELAYA AND THE KIDNAPPED FOREIGN MINISTER AND AMBASSADORS BE REINSTATED.

(Some of the information above is excerpted from an article by Eva Golinger at http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4554. Additional information is available at http://www.venezuelanalysis.com)

This rally is sponsored called by the Alberto Lovera Bolivarian Circle of NY and other progressive organizations and movements throughout NYC. For more information, email cbalbertolovera@gmail.com.

YCL weekly update

2009-06-24T12:46:00.000-07:00

I. Register for the YCL National Marxism-Leninism School

Registration is open for the YCL National Marxism-Leninism School happening on August 15th-23rd in NYC. Join with other young people from around the country in discussing the current economic crisis, the Obama Administration, the fights against racism and sexism, what does socialism mean for young people today and more! You can sign up with our online registration form!

II. In the News: Iranian Presidential Elections

On Friday, June 12th, 2009 Presidential elections were held in Iran. The election polls predicted the presidency going to Mr. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a refortmist candidate, by a significant majority. Incumbent President Mahoud Ahmadinejad however, claimed victory by 66% of the votes with Mousavi receiving only 33% of the votes. Some reports have claimed that Ahmadinejad won because of rural votes, contradicting the reality that only 32% of the population is rural. Millions of Iranians, from all over the country, have been protesting in city squares, at universities and in main streets over the last week demanding a new election. Read the Tudeh Party's Statement.

1. What is the difference between the two candidates?

2. Would the election of a reformist candidate allow for fundamental change in the Iranian governemt?

3. Why do people on the left support Ahmadinejad?

III. Mass Action: National (and local) D.R.E.A.M. Act Graduations and rallies.

The D.R.E.A.M. Coalition is holding a national graduation for many senators and other elected officials. The D.R.E.A.M. Act that, if passed, would allow undocumented immigrants the right to instate to instate tuition and a path way to citizenship. Dreamactivist.org lets us know, "The D.R.E.A.M. Act has four basic requirements which are: You entered the country before the age if 16; You graduate high school or obtain a GED; You have good moral character (no criminal record); and You have at least five years of continuous presence in the US. Find a "graduation" or rally in your area and learn more at dreamactivist.org

IV. Green Workers Cooperative Struggles for a Green Economy

NYU-YCL club member, Andrew King, with a group of other students from the New School developed a youtube video about the Green Workers Cooperative in the South Bronx. This organizatio, along with others, is working to combat environmental racism and unemployment in the South Bronx Community. King says, "Let us look to them as a model for building a new green-collar economy nationwide, because, as their slogan states, Your work should not kill you, your community or the earth..." Want to watch the video? Click on this link or go to youtube.com, type in monimiddle, then click on "Green Worker Cooperative Presentation".

In Poll, Wide Support for Government-Run Health

2009-06-20T19:06:00.000-07:00

From: The New York Times

By KEVIN SACK and MARJORIE CONNELLY

Published: June 20, 2009

Americans overwhelmingly support substantial changes to the health care system and are strongly behind one of the most contentious proposals Congress is considering, a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The poll found that most Americans would be willing to pay higher taxes so everyone could have health insurance and that they said the government could do a better job of holding down health-care costs than the private sector.

Yet the survey also revealed considerable unease about the impact of heightened government involvement, on both the economy and the quality of the respondents’ own medical care. While 85 percent of respondents said the health care system needed to be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt, 77 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the quality of their own care.

That paradox was skillfully exploited by opponents of the last failed attempt at overhauling the health system, during former President Bill Clinton’s first term. Sixteen years later, it underscores the tricky task facing lawmakers and President Obama as they try to address the health system’s substantial problems without igniting fears that people could lose what they like.

Across a number of questions, the poll detected substantial support for a greater government role in health care, a position generally identified with the Democratic Party. When asked which party was more likely to improve health care, only 18 percent of respondents said the Republicans, compared with 57 percent who picked the Democrats. Even one of four Republicans said the Democrats would do better.

The national telephone survey, which was conducted from June 12 to 16, found that 72 percent of those questioned supported a government-administered insurance plan — something like Medicare for those under 65 — that would compete for customers with private insurers. Twenty percent said they were opposed.

Republicans in Congress have fiercely criticized the proposal as an unneeded expansion of government that might evolve into a system of nationalized health coverage and lead to the rationing of care.

But in the poll, the proposal received broad bipartisan backing, with half of those who call themselves Republicans saying they would support a public plan, along with nearly three-fourths of independents and almost nine in 10 Democrats.

The poll, of 895 adults, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Mr. Obama and many Democrats have argued that a public plan would be essential, in the president’s words, to “keep insurance companies honest.” But Mr. Obama has also signaled a willingness to compromise for Republican support, perhaps by establishing member-owned insurance cooperatives instead.

It is not clear how fully the public understands the complexities of the government plan proposal, and the poll results indicate that those who said they were following the debate were somewhat less supportive.

But they clearly indicate growing confidence in the government’s ability to manage health care. Half of those questioned said they thought government would be better at providing medical coverage than private insurers, up from 30 percent in polls conducted in 2007. Nearly 60 percent said Washington would have more success in holding down costs, up from 47 percent.

Sixty-four percent said they thought the federal government should guarantee coverage, a figure that has stayed steady all decade. Nearly six in 10 said they would be willing to pay higher taxes to make sure that all are insured, with four in 10 willing to pay as much as $500 more a year.

And a plurality, 48 percent, said they supported a requirement that all Americans have health insurance so long as public subsidies are offered to those who cannot afford it. Thirty-eight percent said they were opposed.

In a follow-up interview, Matt Flurkey, 56, a public plan supporter from Plymouth, Minn., said he could accept that the quality of his care might diminish if coverage was universal. “Even though it might not be quite as good as what we get now,” he said, “I think the government should run health care. Far too many people are being denied now, and costs would be lower.”

While the survey results depict a nation desperate for change, it also reveals a deep wariness of the possible consequences. Half to two-thirds of respondents said they worried that if the government guaranteed health coverage, they would see declines in the quality of their own care and in their ability to choose doctors and get needed treatment.

“It is the responsibility of the government to guarantee insurance for all,” said Juanita Lomaz, a 65-year-old office worker from Bakersfield, Calif. “But my care will get worse because they’ll have to limit care in order to cover everyone.”

When asked their opinion of specific changes being considered in Washington, three-fourths of those surveyed said they favored requiring health insurers to cover anyone, regardless of pre-existing medical conditions. Only a fifth supported taxing employer-provided health benefits to help pay the cost of coverage for the uninsured. And there was deep uncertainty about whether employers should be required to either help insure their workers or pay into a fund for covering the uninsured.

Three of four people questioned said unnecessary medical tests and treatments had become a serious problem, suggesting that they would support calls by health researchers for a payment system that would better reward appropriate care. But an even higher number, 87 percent, said the inability of people to have the needed tests and treatments was a serious problem. One in four said that in the last 12 months they or someone in their household had cut back on medications because of the expense, and one in five said someone had skipped a recommended test or treatment.

The poll found that Americans were far less satisfied with the cost of health care than with the quality of it. Mr. Obama, who has emphasized the need to reduce costs, has found an audience for his argument that health care legislation is vital to economic recovery. Eighty-six percent of those polled said rising costs posed a serious economic threat.

Yet only a fifth of those with insurance said the cost of their own medical care posed a hardship. And only a fourth said that keeping health costs down was a more urgent need than providing coverage for the country’s nearly 50 million uninsured. That was a notable change from a Times/CBS poll taken in early April, when 40 percent said that controlling costs was more pressing.

Marina Stefan and Dalia Sussman contributed reporting.

Elena Mora on CNN discussing Cuba

2009-06-18T18:44:00.001-07:00

National organizing director of the Communist Party Elena Mora talks with CNN's Rick Sanchez about normalizing relations with Cuba. Skip to about 1:06 on this video clip.

New religion commission begins work

2009-06-17T21:00:00.001-07:00

Reprinted from the People's Weekly World

CHICAGO — The Communist Party USA has established a new Religion Commission to strengthen its work among religious people and organizations. In its leadership are activists representing various religious traditions from around the country. Tim Yeager, a Chicago trade unionist and a member of the Episcopal Church, serves as its chair.

“We want to reach out to religious people and communities, to find ways of improving our coalition work with them, and to welcome people of faith into the party,” Yeager said. “We invite questions and responses from people who would like to dialogue with us on matters pertaining to religion, Marxism and the struggle for more peaceful, just and secure world.”

There is a common misconception concerning the position of the Communist Party USA about religion, Yeager noted. Many who are unfamiliar with the party wrongly assume that all Communists are atheists, or that the party requires its members to be atheists. Nothing could be farther from the truth, he said. Religious people are welcome to join. The party’s Constitution specifically states that membership is open to “[a]ny person living in the United States, 18 years of age or over, regardless of race, color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, or religious belief…”

Yeager acknowledged that relations between some Marxist parties and religious institutions in other parts of the world have been marked by conflict. In tsarist Russia, the Russian Orthodox Church had been an arm of the state, and its leadership was opposed to the Revolution. The Bolsheviks adopted an official atheist position, and for many years waged a struggle against organized religion. Elsewhere, such as in Latin America, Marxist parties and religious progressives have worked together against repressive regimes and imperialist intervention.

“There has been no state church in the United States since shortly after we gained our independence, and we have a tradition of religious diversity,” Yeager said. “The so-called Christian Right in recent years has certainly made progress, but some of the greatest leaders in our history have been men and women of faith, and our party has been proud to work with them. The best known example, of course, would be the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

The Religion Commission will be producing articles on matters pertaining to religion and social progress, he said. Its goal is to share with the broader people’s movement the party’s thinking on the religious aspects of current struggles, taking up theoretical questions, and discussing the relationships, contradictions and commonalities among science, Marxism and religion. The commission also announced plans to hold a series of gatherings around the country, open to the public, to discuss how people from religious traditions and the party can better work together, building toward a national conference in 2010.

“As Marx said, the goal is not merely to explain the world, but to change it. We hope that the new Religion Commission will help build greater unity toward that end,” Yeager said. “We welcome people from faith communities to join us.”

For more information, contact Tim Yeager at rtyeager @ gmail.com

Israelis and Obama

2009-06-15T03:58:00.000-07:00

Two videos with two very different opinions of President Obama:

Feeling the Hate In Jerusalem on Eve of Obama's Cairo Address

Israelis to Obama: "Save Us From Ourselves!"

Tiananmen Square Is None of Your Business, Congress

2009-06-15T02:23:00.000-07:00

I know, a tad late, but it's a great article.

From: Hands Off China

Statement by Congressman Ron Paul before the US House of Representatives, June 3, 2009

I rise to oppose this unnecessary and counter-productive resolution regarding the 20th anniversary of the incident in China’s Tiananmen Square. In addition to my concerns over the content of this legislation, I strongly object to the manner in which it was brought to the floor for a vote. While the resolution was being debated on the House floor, I instructed my staff to obtain a copy so that I could read it before the vote. My staff was told by no less than four relevant bodies within the House of Representatives that the text was not available for review and would not be available for another 24 hours. It is unacceptable for Members of the House of Representatives to be asked to vote on legislation that is not available for them to read!

As to the substance of the resolution, I find it disturbing that the House is going out of its way to meddle in China’s domestic politics, which is none of our business, while ignoring the many pressing issues in our own country that definitely are our business.

This resolution “calls on the People’s Republic of China to invite full and independent investigations into the Tiananmen Square crackdown, assisted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the International Committee of the Red Cross…” Where do we get the authority for such a demand? I wonder how the US government would respond if China demanded that the United Nations conduct a full and independent investigation into the treatment of detainees at the US-operated Guantanamo facility?

The resolution “calls on the legal authorities of People’s Republic of China to review immediately the cases of those still imprisoned for participating in the 1989 protests for compliance with internationally recognized standards of fairness and due process in judicial proceedings.” In light of US government’s extraordinary renditions of possibly hundreds of individuals into numerous secret prisons abroad where they are held indefinitely without charge or trial, one wonders what the rest of the world makes of such US demands. It is hard to exercise credible moral authority in the world when our motto toward foreign governments seems to be “do as we say, not as we do.”

While we certainly do not condone government suppression of individual rights and liberties wherever they may occur, why are we not investigating these abuses closer to home and within our jurisdiction? It seems the House is not interested in investigating allegations that US government officials and employees approved and practiced torture against detainees. Where is the Congressional investigation of the US-operated “secret prisons” overseas? What about the administration’s assertion of the right to detain individuals indefinitely without trial? It may be easier to point out the abuses and shortcomings of governments overseas than to address government abuses here at home, but we have the constitutional obligation to exercise our oversight authority in such matters. I strongly believe that addressing these current issues would be a better use of our time than once again condemning China for an event that took place some 20 years ago.

Union flag flies from Mt. Everest

2009-06-14T07:13:00.001-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Building and Wood Workers' International
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 06/11/09 12:19

Reposted from http://www.bwint.org
Bro. Dorje Khatri, Union of Trekking, Travel & Rafting Workers –UNITRAV (Nepal), successfully conquered Mt. Everest fourth time and hoisted BWI flag on top of the world. BWI have hearty congratulated Com. Dorje Khatri for his successful expedition.

One more page of History has been made at 5:30 AM of May 26, 2009, BWI flag has been hoisted in top of the world- the Mt. Everest. It is first time that International Trade Union's flag has been hoisted in the highest peak of the world.
After successfully succeeding Mt. Everest, news had been informed to BWI Nepal Affiliates Committee office through satellite phone from the peak. "I make my victory on Mt. Everest and BWI flag is waving" Bro. Dorje Khatri informed.

The fall of GM — new thinking needed

2009-06-10T14:56:00.000-07:00

From: People's Weekly World

Author: John Rummel
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 06/08/09 15:23

DETROIT — It was a little more than 30 years ago that General Motors had 395,000 United Auto Workers hourly employees. Two years from now, GM will have 38,000 union workers, a decline of over 90 percent.

How did this giant corporation, which once commanded 54 percent of the U.S. market (now under 20 percent), come to be in this situation?

* The company focused on building big gas-guzzling SUVs. While they were a source of big profits, they fell out of favor when gas prices went up.

* For several decades, GM and its fellow domestic auto companies have fought government regulations and fuel efficiency standards — even when those same kinds of regulations made them profitable in Europe and elsewhere.

* An emphasis on employer-based health care and pension plans, instead of fighting for universal plans that covered everyone, eventually caused the Big Three auto companies to be responsible for the benefits of hundreds of thousands of retirees and their dependents. The non-union “transplants” — foreign automakers like Toyota and Honda who have opened plants in the U.S. — with a much younger workforce and shorter history of operation do not have these costs.

* What once happened within the borders of the U.S., with GM either absorbing or out-competing and forcing the closure of other domestic auto manufacturers to become the country’s largest manufacturer, is now played out on a world scale. Worldwide there are multiple producers of autos for the U.S. and world market, and there has been a growth of non-union auto production in the South.

* Of course, the economic crisis has been the final nail in the coffin. But this is a worldwide contraction affecting auto producers throughout the world.

A deadly ripple effect

In announcing its Chapter 11 bankruptcy, GM said it would be closing 14 plants. Some 21,000 hourly workers will be losing their jobs. An estimated 2,100 dealerships will be closing. Seven of those shuttered plants will be here in Michigan.

Chrysler is closing eight plants —three in Detroit, and almost 900 dealerships.

The combined loss of dealerships will be approximately 3,000. With an average of 50 employees per dealership, total job loss from the dealer closings will be in the neighborhood of 150,000.

Parts suppliers will be closing and shedding employees, and white collar workers at GM and Chrysler are seeing huge job losses.

It has been said that every job at an auto assembly plant supports tens of others. That explains why Midwest states see their entire economy taking a hit.

For example, a steelworker from Pittsburgh said recently that 125,000 steel jobs have been lost in the recent period due to the crisis in auto, which is why steelworkers have been organizing rallies to protest the shutdown of auto plants. “When you don’t make cars, you don’t make steel” a steelworker told me at a recent rally.

Michigan — with seven times the auto jobs of the next highest state, Ohio — currently has a 12.9 percent unemployment rate.

Plant closures are taking place in cities like Pontiac, Flint, Ypsilanti and Grand Rapids in addition to Detroit.

The plants are often the largest or second largest taxpayer in town. For example in Pontiac, GM is the largest taxpayer and the city will lose one-fifth of its revenue for its general fund. A poor city already struggling with its finances will now see the ripple effect with more cutbacks in city services, public schools, fire, police and more.

Plunging pay, health care at risk

A question being asked is who is going to have the money to buy the new, green cars of the future? The 2007 contracts between the UAW and GM, Chrysler and Ford ushered in a two-tier wage system where new hires would be paid about one-half of the regular wage — $14 an hour instead of $28.

The bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler further deteriorated the bargaining power of autoworkers, and the new union concessions include: a no-strike pledge until 2015, work rule changes such as shorter break times and elimination of job classifications, and changes to how the union-administered Voluntary Employee Benefits Association (VEBA) that handles health care for retirees will be funded.

The VEBA was created in the 2007 contract and was to be mostly funded with cash from the company, $20 billion in the case of GM. Now it will mainly be funded with stock from the new, post-bankruptcy, reconstituted GM. The fund will have a 17.5 percent interest in GM. At Chrysler the fund will be similarly financed but will have a more than 50 percent stake in the new company.

At GM and Chrysler the UAW will appoint half of the VEBA board but an independent fiduciary, not the union, will run the fund for the benefit of the retirees. This is not union control of a company.

Back in 2007, many said the VEBA would be under-funded, considering how quickly health care costs skyrocket. Last week a commentator predicted, “Now it will fail in six years instead of 15.” Whatever the scenario, it is evident that the fight for national health care is today more critical than ever.

In exchange for its concessions the UAW was given assurances that GM will not propose terminating its pension plans. And the union was given assurances that a sub-compact originally scheduled for production in China would be made here at home.

The president’s auto task force also insisted that the new Fiat-Chrysler alliance build a new small car in a U.S. factory if they intend to sell the car in the United States.

Big political risk

Bankruptcy is a big political risk and gamble for the president and one which Republicans are waiting to pounce on.

However if Sen. McCain had won the election, there would have been no government loans, and a chapter 7 bankruptcy — a complete liquidation of GM and Chrysler — would likely have taken place. The companies would have been ripped apart, sold piecemeal, with even more job losses. Health care and pension assurances would have been non-existent.

And while you do hear acknowledgement here that the president has intervened to keep this industry going, those losing their jobs are not going to enjoy the benefits and if in the end bankruptcy does not result in a viable company, there is danger that anger will be directed at the president. Some already is.

There is also anger that money is going to GM but plants are closing here while production increases are planned for GM plants in Mexico, Korea, China and elsewhere. The UAW did press for GM to agree to build a sub-compact in the U.S. and received a commitment that may keep one plant running.

The Obama administration, wrongly I believe, is taking the view that it will not get involved in the day-to-day management and so far has not demanded that the taxpayer money received by GM be used for keeping production here (an exception being the sub-compact).

Yes, it is good the administration’s auto task force is meeting with communities that are facing job losses to assess their needs, but more — much more — needs to be done.

New thinking needed

A fundamental problem is that plants are being closed without a well-thought-out alternative plan to retool for other production, whether that is mass transit, high-speed rail cars, green products such as wind turbines and solar panels, or any number of products needed to rebuild our infrastructure.

It is an old way of thinking that has a plan for saving the corporation but not the workers and not the needs of the country as a whole, a country that needs a manufacturing base.

While the government now has a majority stake in GM, this is not socialism as the right maintains.

The “Save Jobs, Reinvest in America” rallies that have been taking place across the Midwest are being organized by the Steelworkers union. The UAW, for whatever reason, has not endorsed them. Many feel that a strong push by the UAW, that unites all of labor and the community, is needed to rally the forces necessary to keep manufacturing in Michigan and in the U.S.

Two reactions to the crisis that are gaining ground will not fundamentally alter the outcome and may prolong it. One is “Buy American” and the other is a focus on erecting trade barriers.

Both approaches take the heat off the companies for exporting jobs and lowering working standards throughout the world. GM has operations in some 30 countries as it seeks to pay the lowest wages possible, avoid union representation and pit workers in one country against those in another.

The popular Ford Fusion is made in Mexico and is just one example of American nameplates that are not “made in America.”

It is right to demand that most taxpayer money given to the companies should be used for production here, and we do need to rid ourselves of trade pacts like NAFTA that have made it easier for capital to exit the country. But it is important to remember that the loyalty of the auto companies is to profits, not to the workers.

The impact of the auto crisis in the main urban areas of Michigan and the Midwest falls heavily on African American, Latino and all racially oppressed.

The unemployment rate in these areas is 30 percent and higher. mmediate help is needed.

While Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke worries about the future effect of an increasing deficit, the real worry is who is going to feed, clothe, house, educate, train and give medical care to the millions who have no future?

And this danger far outweighs Bernanke’s concerns. We are most likely facing a prolonged downturn. In the past, manufacturing helped the country come out of a recession (every job in auto driving 10 others shows why). It will not be able to have that same effect for this downturn.

As good as President Obama’s first stimulus was, we need a second stimulus to insure that those in our urban core, and other communities devastated by this crisis, have a future at all.

jrummel @ pww.org

Biden refuses to cross fire fighters picket line

2009-06-09T16:20:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Mike Hall
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 06/09/09 06:52

Original source: AFL-CIO Now

What’s the difference between a president who supports working families and their unions and one beholden to corporate and anti-worker interests? As President Obama has shown, there’s a lot, but last Friday the Obama administration did something the Bush administration would never have imagined doing.

The White House announced that Vice President Joe Biden and a delegation of top administration officials—including Labor Secretary Hilda Solis—will not cross a Fire Fighters (IAFF) picket line to attend the U.S. Conference of Mayors Annual Meeting scheduled to begin Friday in Providence, R.I.

Providence Mayor David Cicilline has waged a nearly seven-year campaign against the men and women of IAFF Local 799, refusing to bargain a fair contract, forcing the union into arbitration over each contract, and even going so far as to introduce anti-union ordinances and calling for similar state legislation.

Local 799—along with the Rhode Island AFL-CIO and several other unions—plans to picket the mayors’ conference when its gets underway to highlight Cicilline’s anti-worker actions and lack of a fair contract.

Says IAFF President Harold Schaitberger:

The administration deserves credit for its full support of our members in this fight. And by refusing to attend this high-profile conference, they have sent a strong message to the entire country—that unions and workers rights matter, too.

Providence Fire Fighters have fought a long battle with city officials who forced contract talks into arbitration for several years before Cicilline took office. He was propelled into office in 2002 with strong support from Local 799 after he promised to end years of stalemate and negotiate a fair contract. But the last contract expired in 2005, and the local has been forced back into binding arbitration each year.

Says Local 799 President Paul Doughty:

We tried to settle our differences with the mayor, but he continues to antagonize the hard-working firefighters of Local 799, so we will use this opportunity to shed light on the mayor’s epic mismanagement and his disdain for workers.

Along with the lack of a fair contract, Fire Fighters say Cicilline has sought to cut jobs, implemented “adverse and demeaning internal policies and conditions” and spent more than $1 million of taxpayer money on legal fees to fight the union.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters:

Because of the circumstances surrounding the conference, administration officials will not be participating in this year’s meeting….We have always respected picket lines, and administration officials will not cross this one.

The Obama administration’s action, says AFL-CIO President John Sweeney,

is an important statement in support of the firefighters, police and teachers who go to work every day in order to help others. In supporting them, and respecting the picket line, the Obama administration supports all working families in Providence

Specter tells labor: You're gonna like my EFCA vote

2009-06-09T16:18:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 06/08/09 13:48

Congressional backers of the Employee Free Choice Act are closer than ever to the 60 Senators they need to break a planned Republican filibuster after Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) told a crowd of trade unionists in Pittsburgh June 6, “I believe you’ll be satisfied with my vote on this issue.”

Specter made his statement to activists demonstrating outside a meeting of the Pennsylvania Democratic Committee that he attended.

U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, Specter’s potential challenger in his Senate re-election contest next year, also addressed the demonstrators, pledging to support the Employee Free Choice Act.

Meanwhile, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is denying reports that she had said she was opposed to the bill. Feinstein is one of a handful of Democratic senators who were quoted as saying they could not support the bill in its original form.

“She will not vote for the bill,” Jeri Shaffery, vice president of the Santa Clarita Valley Chamber of Commerce, told the press last week.

Reached by phone, Gil Duran, an aide to Feinstein, said, “This guy does not speak for the senator. This must be his first rodeo because the story has not changed. It has remained the same. She is looking for a compromise. And anyone who says otherwise is engaging in wishful thinking.”

The World has reported that senators are discussing at least five possible compromises on one of the bill’s key provisions, majority sign-up. The discussions were confirmed last week by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), the leader of the effort to win Senate passage.

The Press Associates Union News Service told the World today that it has received confirmation from Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) that a mail-in ballot is one option being considered.

If the ballot provision becomes part of the bill, workers would vote by mail to authorize a union as their representative. The cards would be mailed to the National Labor Relations Board. If the union receives a majority of the votes it would be automatically recognized.

The majority sign-up clause of the original bill says that the union must get signed cards from an absolute majority of workers at a shop. The union could then demand and get automatic recognition or it could choose to go through the NLRB elections process.

Sen. Brown has confirmed that still another compromise is on the table. This one would shorten the length of time between the submission of authorization cards and an election for representation. The argument goes that shorter campaigns would give companies less time to engage in illegal intimidation, harassment, spying, threats and firings that they now use to fight union organizing.

In addition to Specter and Feinstein, the discussions are designed to win over the two Democratic senators from Arkansas.

While some labor leaders say they could accept mail-in ballots for majority sign-up, two union presidents – Communications Workers President Larry Cohen and Steelworkers President Leo Gerard – told the World at the America’s Future Now conference in Washington last week that they are still pushing for the original provision.

Cohen noted, “The problem with courting the wavering senators is that they want to water down the bill before deciding how to vote on the filibuster. We also have to contend with the Chamber of Commerce putting a lot of pressure on them.”

Harkin said that if all the compromises fall through he has the assurances of Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the majority leader, that the bill would come to the floor in its original form for a straight up or down vote that will allow voters to see where everyone really stands.

Cohen received a standing ovation at the America’s Future Now conference when he declared, “We need to say to every Democratic senator: ‘Which side are you on?’”

jwojcik @ pww.org

Employee Free Choice will pass without gutting main thrust

2009-06-09T16:14:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Doug Cunningham
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 06/05/09 07:29

Reposted from http://www.laborradio.org
AFL-CIO Legislative Director Bill Samuel says labor’s number one priority – the Employee Free Choice Act labor law reform – will become law. It makes it easier for workers to join unions by taking employer intimidation out of the picture. And Samuel says the bill won’t be gutted by compromise that destroys its original intent.

[Samuel]: “Yes, I think the Senate Democrats and particularly those in the leadership understand that this bill has to be meaningful. Although a very small number have said they might not be able to support the bill as it’s currently crafted, that’s really code for suggesting that there may need to be some small changes. But not changes that would undermine the basic thrust of the bill.”

Business has mounted a strong effort to derail the labor law reform, but Samuel says once Minnesota’s Al Franken is seated in the U.S. Senate Democrats will pass the legislation despite business opposition.

[Samuel2]: “Clearly the business community is going to spend more money than us, they have more money and they’re determined to protect their privilege and their right to block workers from exercising this basic right. But I think at the end of the day we’re gonna pass this bill and Democrats are going to be proud to be on the side of working families.”

GM bankruptcy spurs demand to ‘reinvest in America’

2009-06-05T19:24:00.001-07:00

by John Rummel, 06/04/2009

Reprinted form the People's Weekly World

LANSING, Mich. — The General Motors bankruptcy, announced Monday, was expected, having been predicted for weeks if not months. But the enormity of how far this once mighty giant of U.S. monopoly capitalism has fallen is shocking nevertheless. For many it seems like not so long ago when GM was not only the leader of all auto producers with a commanding 54 percent of the U.S. market, it was also the undisputed dominant corporation in the country’s economy.

In filing for bankruptcy yesterday, GM said it will close 14 plants in the U.S., half of them here in Michigan. It will leave less than 40,000 GM autoworkers nationwide, a tiny fraction of the 395,000 employed by the company in its heyday in the 1970s.

Nowhere is the shock greater than Michigan, GM’s birthplace. Today, the state has an official unemployment rate of almost 13 percent, and because it has seven times the auto jobs of the next highest state, Ohio, people here fear things will only get worse as the job loss in auto ripples through the economy.

At a “Keep the Dream Alive — Reinvest in America” rally that drew several thousand here yesterday, Jim Chapman a steelworker at Great Lakes Works in Ecorse, Mich., which makes steel for auto bodies, said he is a victim of that rippling effect. This father of five has been laid off for six months. “If you’re not selling cars, you’re not making steel,” he said. “It trickles down.”
Lansing, Mich., rally demands, "Keep the Dream Alive — Reinvest in America."

Under a plan announced by President Obama on Monday, the federal government will provide up to another $30 billion to keep GM afloat while it emerges, restructured, out of bankruptcy. That is on top of $19 billion in federal money the company received earlier. The Canadian government will chip in another $9 billion as part of the deal. The downsized company will have 60 percent U.S. government ownership, with smaller portions of its stock held by the United Auto Workers union, bondholders and the Canadian government.

Ron Bloom, who heads Obama’s auto task force, told reporters the government will be a “reluctant shareholder” and will not get involved in day-to-day management. But, he said, with taxpayer money now keeping GM afloat, the government “has to demand something in return for this capital."

In exchange for the new government aid, GM agreed to go through bankruptcy to eliminate more than $27 billion in debt held by bondholders. It also agreed to build a new small car in idled UAW factories and to increase the share of U.S.-based production from 66 percent to 70 percent, the White House said. The union has agreed to a no-strike pledge until 2015.

The White House noted that "the UAW has made important concessions on compensation and retiree health care that, while difficult, will help save jobs for active employees, pensions and health care for retirees."

UAW leaders pointed out in a press statement that "the biggest sacrifices will be made by the tens of thousands of workers who will lose their jobs as a result of the numerous plant closings that GM is announcing in its restructuring plan."

Addressing yesterday’s rally here, Lansing Mayor Verg Bernero said, “D-Day for GM is a sad day.” He said he was “grateful for an administration that is grappling with a problem it did not create, but certainly inherited.”

Many at the rally were angry that GM, while receiving bailout money which may total $50 billion or more, is shutting down 14 plants at home while it increases production outside the country.

“When you offshore jobs, you export the American Dream,” said Bernero.

Bill Parker, president of UAW Local 1700 at Chrysler’s Sterling Heights, Mich., Assembly plant, which is also scheduled to close, said workers are outraged that Chrysler wants to close an additional five plants. His plant employs about 1,400 workers and produces the Sebring sedan and convertible, along with the Dodge Avenger. He asked the crowd of several thousand to join him in calling on the Obama administration to demand that Chrysler reverse its decision.

“Chrysler got the money but they did not get the message,” said Parker, referring to the more than $7 billion in federal bailout money the company has received. The intent of that government assistance was to help people, Parker said. Now, he declared, “our sons and daughters face the prospect of doing worse than we are.”

Referring to GM’s export of jobs to low-wage countries, Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow told the crowd that she is “tired of talking about the race to the bottom. I have been doing it for 10 years. We have to raise others up, and not keep pushing us down.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson emphasized the effect the bankruptcy and closing of GM plants will have on communities. When you close 14 plants and hundreds of dealers, you also close auto suppliers; you cut off a town’s tax base, you close their schools, and cause their teachers, police and fire departments to also shut down, he said.

As details of the GM bankruptcy plan emerged, some 3,000 labor and progressive activists were meeting at the America’s Future Now conference in Washington.

“Loss of jobs and the economic devastation that has spread across this country results from corporate greed,” Change to Win labor federation chair Anna Burger said there. Economic recovery means “more than just companies making a profit,” she said. Echoing Lansing Mayor Bernero, Burger said, “It means good secure jobs, decent incomes and the prospect of a secure retirement — in short, the American Dream.”

Another labor leader, speaking informally, noted that the auto union was caught “between a rock and a hard place” and was able to come out of the bankruptcy negotiations with a few things including a little less pain for some active workers and retirees. But, he said, “Once again, we have workers making the sacrifices while companies close plants and ship operations overseas. Once again we are doing what the finance industry says we should be doing to make a company 'viable' even if that means more massive job loss and continued de-industrialization.” This is a continuation of an approach that “just doesn't cut it,” he said.

“The problem with doing business this way is that it leads to disaster for workers and in the end it doesn't do much for GM either — by doing it their way they ended up deep in debt,” the labor leader said.

“What we really need,” he said, “is a bold new approach that retools our old plants to build mass transit, light rail, green cars and all the things we need for the future. Globalization is here to stay. We need to make it work for the majority, not just for the few, by creating a real plan to keep good paying manufacturing jobs and green jobs here in America. Let’s use our leverage to fight for this approach.”

John Rummel is the Chair of the Michigan District of the CPUSA. jrummel @ pww.org. Joel Wendland and John Wojcik contributed to this story.

Impressively massive and vibrant pre-election rally of KKE in Athens A strong message for a powerful KKE

2009-06-05T19:15:00.000-07:00

From: The Communist Party of Greece

A strong message for a powerful KKE

A strong message for a powerful KKE

In an impressively massive and vibrant rally, the Secretary General of the CC of KKE, cde Aleka Papariga, addressing the party's main election rally in Athens on Wednesday evening, stressed the need for its strengthening in the Euroelections. She underlined that "with KKE's ticket in the ballot box, now is the time for the people to take the case in their hands."

Aleka Papariga spoke of an "EU’s massive attack against social security, health and welfare from the day after the elections, based on the EU decisions taken in Prague," while noting that those are issues to which neither the government nor the main opposition PASOK party refer to.

KKE, she further said, "remains an irreconcilable rival of the bourgeoisie political system which is rotten, not only due to the scandals but above all because this system organises the accumulation of capital, strengthens monopolies everywhere. It legalises antilabour and antipopular laws that lead to the continuous worsening of day-to-day life."

Papariga went on to say that a strong radical pole must be created that will constitute the rival awe for the dominant policy, the monopolies, in cooperation with every radical movement in European countries and even further.

"In KKE we are not alone, we are many, let us show our strength on June 7 an as of June 8 we shall go for new and more effective struggles," she concluded. On behalf of the Portuguese Communist Party, cde Rosa Rabiais, member of the CC of PCP transferred a warm greeting message and the best wishes of the Portuguese communists for the reinforcement of KKE in the Elections for the European Parliament.

A greeting speech was delivered in the rally by the head candidate of the list of KKE, cde Thanasis Pafilis, member of the CC of KKE. The opening was made by a young Greek immigrant in Germany, MEP candidate in the list of KKE, Anna Grigoriadou.

After the big success of this rally Greek communists intensify all their efforts until the last moment, for a powerful KKE in the ballot box of the June 7th.

Assassin part of shadow anti-choice terror network

2009-06-03T02:22:00.001-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Daniel Frontino Elash
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 06/02/09 16:29

The assassination of Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, this week has sent waves of revulsion across the country, renewing fears of escalating violence at reproductive health care clinics across the nation. It has also prompted a fresh look at the network of anti-abortion activists who have long used violence in their efforts to make abortion, if not illegal, then at least effectively inaccessible to most American women.

After the shooting, President Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, immediately took the unprecedented step of offering federal marshal protection to targeted clinics, though at the time of this writing, it was unclear whether even clinics with a long history of violence were eligible for such protection.

Dr. Tiller was one of three doctors in the United States known to offer late-term abortions. His Wichita clinic has its own security regimen, and despite being the target of “Operation Rescue” actions in the past, and despite himself surviving previous armed assaults, Dr. Tiller refused to be intimidated. He was known for wearing a button that said “Attitude Is Everything.”

His assassin, 51-year-old Scott Roeder of Merriam, Kansas, was known to associate with Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue, an anti-abortion group famous for its systematic targeting of clinics with mass sit-ins designed to deny access. His associations with the shadowy fringe beyond Operation Rescue, such as the Kansas City-based “Army of God,” who are known to advocate the assassination of reproductive healthcare workers, sometimes on internet “hit lists” that offer demographic information on clinic workers to potential assassins, is less well known so far. However, Roeder’s links to militia-type, hard right anti-government elements are already being reported.

Nevertheless, most of the corporate press has continued to propagate a “lone gunman” theory, choosing to ignore the well-known, bloody history of violence on the part of a network of violent anti-abortion activists, a network to which Roeder seems to have had connections.

Dr. Tiller’s assassination has further resonated in the public consciousness because America is several years into a “war on terror” that has seen us invade two countries with the ostensible goal of curbing religious fundamentalist-based terrorism against U.S. interests. The cognitive dissonance of locking up and torturing random Afghan Muslims in Guantanamo, and other more secretive prisons around the world, while simultaneously ignoring a long and deep history of such violence conducted by self-described “Christians” in the United States, has been difficult for the authorities to ignore for long. Progressive activists have called for a deeper investigation by the Obama Justice Department of possible terror networks and criminal conspiracies underlying repeated anti-clinic violence.

President Obama has been walking a political tightrope on the abortion issue. While he is clearly pro-choice, he has taken tentative steps to call for a de-escalation of rhetoric around the abortion polemic in American politics. His inclusive approach has made him hesitant to seem too partisan for choice, and an investigation of the hard-right anti-abortion terrorist network would almost surely uncover a whole wing of the reactionary movement in America that has long used violence and supremacist rhetoric to rally its forces and to try to intimidate progressive Americans. To prosecute and incarcerate such elements is to play with fire, since they are quietly tolerated by hard right forces in American society, as evidenced by the support such spokespeople as Bill O’Reilly publicly offer the likes of Scott Roeder.

Whether President Obama’s Department of Justice is willing or able to finally turn the tide against anti-abortion violence by bringing the full weight of federal law enforcement down on the network of “Christian” terrorists that have fought a low-level but very real war against American reproductive health care clinics remains to be seen. If it were to do so, though, it would transform the atmosphere of siege surrounding our clinics. Such enforcement would strike a powerful blow against the American hard right, in a place it is very vulnerable and in which it has a hard time defending itself from accurate accusations of being soft on terrorism, at best.

Not least, it might lend meaningful federal support to the right to access reproductive health care services, securing not only the right to abortion, but self-determination for all women in a way that perhaps no law, in itself, unenforced, ever might.

Daniel Frontino Elash has been active in the struggle for reproductive rights since the 1970s.

‘Card check’ remains on table, Senate leader of free choice battle says

2009-06-03T02:20:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 06/02/09 14:20

WASHINGTON — Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) told the World today that he is holding onto majority sign-up as a key component of the Employee Free Choice Act, in rounds of “intense negotiations” with senators whose support is needed for passage of the landmark labor law reform measure. Although Harkin would not specify the precise form in which majority sign-up might emerge from the negotiations, he said “there are about five versions of it that are being talked about.”

The senator made the statement as he emerged from a panel discussion on the Employee Free Choice Act this morning at the America’s Future Now conference here.

Former Michigan Rep. David Bonior, now chair of American Rights at Work, reminded several thousand progressive leaders and activists who attended the panel discussion that majority sign-up (also known as “card check”) is already widely used. “It is an efficient, fair and democratic organizing process whereby a majority of employees sign cards to demonstrate their desire to form a union.”

Labor Department records show that since 2003, more than half a million American workers have formed unions through majority sign-up.

Bonior explained how under current labor law, management can refuse to recognize a union even when 100 percent of employees have signed union authorization cards, and even if the employer has no reason to doubt the validity of the cards.

Instead, employers can insist on an election process that enables them to take advantage of weak labor laws and launch a one-sided campaign to intimidate workers out of supporting a union.

“When workers try and form unions,” Bonior said, “90 percent of employers force employees to attend one-on-one anti-union meetings with their supervisors, 50 percent coerce workers into opposing unions with bribes and special favors, and 30 percent fire pro-union workers. These elections don’t measure up to the most fundamental standards of democracy.”

Harkin, who took responsibility for shepherding the Employee Free Choice Act through the Senate after Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) became ill, also told the World that he would not allow a bill to go to the floor of the Senate if it “in any way compromises core principles."

"There will be a card check compromise but the form it takes must give workers real freedom to choose a union," Harkin said. "The final bill must incorporate, for workers who form a union, strict deadlines for companies to agree to a contract and there must be meaningful penalties levied against those who violate labor laws.”

Although the senator said he did not want to jeopardize ongoing talks by specifying what the “card check compromises” look like, PWW sources have described several versions. One involves workers mailing completed authorization cards to the National Labor Relations Board, rather than handing them to a union organizer. Another involves checking a box on the card that expresses the individual’s preference for a secret ballot election, and still a third involves workers checking off a box that says “union” or one that says “no union” and mailing that card to the NLRB. In all three scenarios the company would be required to respect the choice of the workers.

Harkin warned that “if, in the final analysis, the negotiations don’t work and some senators refuse to compromise, I have the assurances of Harry Reid (leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate) that the Employee Free Choice Act will go to the floor of the Senate in its original form for a straight up or down vote. Then the voters will see for themselves who in the Senate is really with them or against them.”

The Employee Free Choice Act would put the decision of how to form a union in the hands of workers, not employers. Under the measure, if a majority of workers sign cards voting for a union, and if those cards are validated by the National Labor Relations Board, the agency will certify the workers as a union. The employer would be legally required to recognize the union and bargain with it. Employees could still choose to use their signed cards to petition for an NLRB election.

Larry Cohen, president of the Communications Workers of America, brought the crowd at the America’s Future Now conference to its feet when he said every Democratic senator must be made to answer the question, “Which side are you on?” (With the expected seating of Al Franken from Minnesota the Democrats will have the 60 votes that could stop a Republican filibuster.) Cohen said, “Either you are for the Chamber of Commerce which makes the same anti-labor arguments now that it made back in the 1930s or you are for the working Americans you represent.”

Cohen said he expected that the Republicans in the Senate would vote “in lockstep” against the bill, “as they voted in lockstep against Social Security in the 1930s.”

jwojcik @ pww.org

New Study Confirms Intense Employer Opposition to Workers' Unions

2009-06-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

From: American Rights at Work

Findings Highlight Need for Employee Free Choice Act

Overall, 16.1 million, or 12.4% of U.S. workers are represented by unions, though polling indicates tens of millions more want a union to represent them. In fact, studies have shown that if workers’ preferences were realized, as much as 58% of the workforce would have union representation.

In the private sector just 8% of workers belong to unions. It’s not that private sector workers are less likely to want to be in unions, it’s that their employers are intensifying their opposition to them joining unions.

Employers Continue to Punish Workers for Supporting a Union

Compared to the 1990s, employers are now more than twice as likely to use 10 or more tactics in their anti-union campaigns, with a greater focus on more coercive and punitive tactics designed to intensely monitor and punish union activity.

63% of employers interrogate workers in mandatory one-on-one meetings with their supervisors about support for the union;
54% of employers threaten workers in such meetings;
57% of employers threaten to close the worksite;
47% of employers threaten to cut wages and benefits; and
34% of employers fire workers.

Employers have increased their use of these more punitive tactics while being less likely to offer “incentives,” such as unscheduled raises, positive personnel changes, bribes, special favors, social events, promises of improvement, and employee involvement programs.

Many Employers Resist Collective Bargaining Long After Their Workers Form Unions

Even if employees make it through a hostile employer campaign it can take years before they ever obtain a collective bargaining agreement. And some never do. The reasons include an absence of penalties or fines for employers who bargain in bad faith and the fact that employers can legally replace strikers permanently – effectively firing them if they strike for a first contract.

One year after a successful election, 52% of workers’ unions had no collective bargaining agreement.
Two years after an election, 37% of workers’ unions still had no contract.

Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act Would Restore Workers’ Rights

These statistics highlight how broken our current labor law system is for workers, and why reform is critically needed. The bipartisan Employee Free Choice Act would enable working people to bargain for better benefits, wages, and working conditions by restoring workers’ freedom to choose for themselves whether to join a union. It would:

Give workers a free choice and a fair path to choose to form a union, free from intimidation
Ensure real penalties exist for employers who break the law
Prevent companies from engaging in endless delays and stall tactics to deny workers a collective bargaining agreement

Based on new research from Dr. Kate Bronfenbrenner, No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing. For more, read the fact sheet and full report.

Chavez: My Next Gift For Obama Will Be Lenin Book

2009-06-02T16:38:00.000-07:00

From: The Huffington Post

In this photo released by Miraflores Press Office, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez gesture during his radio and television show "Hello President" in Maracaibo, Venezuela, Thursday, May 28, 2009. Chavez began what he says will be a marathon four-day television and radio program as he marks the 10th anniversary of his program. (AP Photo/Miraflores Press Office)

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chavez says he has a new book for President Barack Obama: "What is to be Done?" by communist Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Soviet state.

Chavez says he'll "give it to Obama at the next meeting."

"What is to be Done?" is Lenin's political treatise on the role of intellectuals and the proletariat in promoting revolution, written more than a decade before he led the Bolshevik takeover of Russia in 1917.

Chavez gave Obama a copy of "Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent" by Eduardo Galeano at an April summit.

The book jumped the next day to the No. 2 seller on Amazon.com.

Chavez spoke Friday on a marathon, anniversary edition of his "Hello President" television show.

Anti-union bill defeated in Missouri

2009-05-29T13:10:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Tony Pecinovsky
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 05/28/09 13:12

ST. LOUIS -- The fight to pass the Employee Free Choice Act recently won a victory here in Missouri. House Joint Resolution 37, better known as Save Our Secret Ballots, went down in defeat when the Missouri legislature adjourned May 15.

HRJ37 would have amended the Missouri constitution to require secret ballots for all union elections. The Missouri legislation is part of a nation-wide campaign by big business, anti-union forces designed to give the impression that workers are against the Employee Free Choice Act, organized labor's top priority.

According to the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, “The Save our Secret Ballot” organization is pushing similar anti-union constitutional amendments in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, South Carolina and Utah. The group is based in Nevada.

Free Choice will strengthen the rights of workers to form unions by signing cards authorizing union representation (often called card-check); it will also place stiffer penalties on employers who violate the law.

Current labor law allows for card check representation or a secret ballot. However, the choice is not made by the workers. It allows the employer to decide which process will be used.

According to a Cornell University study, 92 percent of private-sector employers force employees to attend closed-door, captive audience meetings where they are forced to listen to anti-union propaganda; 80 percent of employers require supervisors to attend training sessions attacking unions; and 78 percent require that supervisors give anti-union messages to workers they oversee.

Employee Free Choice would let workers, not their bosses, decide how they want the union recognized: through card check representation or through an election.

Many see state-level campaigns for bills like Save Our Secret Ballots as dangerous not only because they weaken workers' rights, but also because they help the right-wing and big business build momentum as it tries to stop Free Choice at the federal level.

Senator Robin Wright-Jones, who helped block HJR37, told the World, "HJR37, the so-called Save Our Secret Ballots initiative, would have done nothing to protect workers' rights. It would keep a broken system in place. Big business' unsolicited interest only underscores the fact that the current system by which union elections are held does not meet the needs of today's workers. So why keep it?"

Additionally, Wright-Jones asked, "Why is the Chamber of Commerce concerned about workers' rights? They've never cared about workers before."

Wright-Jones was referring to a spirited Jobs with Justice rally held earlier in May outside of the Clayton, Mo., Chamber of Commerce meeting where Karl Rove, who is staunchly anti-EFCA, was the keynote speaker.

"The Employee Free Choice Act would give workers power in the workplace -- power to fight for and win better wages, working conditions and benefits," Wright-Jones added.

HJR37 failed in Missouri because the MO AFL-CIO and Change To Win affiliates mounted a grassroots campaign that highlighted workers' struggles for a better life, while shedding light on employer misconduct. Labor's mobilization - from phone-banks to legislative visits -- showed right-wing, anti-union forces that Missouri isn't just the Show Me State. It's a union state.
tonypec@cpusa.org

Steelworkers walk out in France

2009-05-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: World Combined Sources
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 05/29/09 13:45

Steelworkers from the Fos-sur-Mer Arcelor Mittal plant demonstrate in Marseille, southern France, May 26. This was the fourth strike in recent months by French workers angry with the Sarkozy government’s handling of the economic crisis and failure to help workers and their families. The banner reads “Steelworkers sacrificed.”

AP photo.

Socialist International calls for closer ties on global issues with China

2009-05-23T13:10:00.000-07:00

From: The People's Daily Online

Socialist International (SI) hopes to promote closer relationship with the Communist Party of China (CPC) on both regional and global issues, SI president George A. Papandreou said in Beijing on May 15.

Papandreou is leading a 15-member delegation to Beijing for a sustainable growth seminar jointly sponsored by CPC and SI.

“We plan to establish partnership with China on both regional and global issues of strategic importance, particularly in sustainable development and the exchanges of party practices. SI represents 170 parties in the world, and 50 of them are in government. We also want to draft a recommendation paper to leaders in Copenhagen when they meet at the end of this year on the issue of sustainable development,” Papandreou said in an exclusive interview with People’s Daily Online.

Voices of developing countries need strengthening

Since its establishment in 1951, SI has been strengthening the United Nations (UN). Papandreou said the world is now in a period in which issues are all global. One corner of the world affects the other corner. The rapid globalization process is often accompanied by the negative phenomenon such as conflict and violence, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the current A H1N1 outbreak. “We need to have a stronger UN, which can ensure an equal voice for all, and truly represent the interests of all the regions and countries,” he noted.

According to Papandreou, SI would like to see the voice of the developing countries strengthened, because the world’s major institutions, especially the financial institutions have been dominated by developed countries. Therefore the needs and voices of emerging economies have very often been neglected.

“If you want to combat issues such as poverty, equality and want to have a sense of justice, you need to have a more equitable and representative system at global level within the UN and other global financial institutions,” Papandreou added.

Development of Sino-Greece relations

“This is a very important relation for us. We (Greece and China) are two countries of different size but both rich in cultural heritage,” Papandreou said. The 2008 Olympic Games offered a good opportunity to draw the two countries together. He said Greece is very proud that the Chinese people have hosted a splendid Olympic Games in a magnificent way. It’s very moving for Greeks to see how their tradition was interpreted and given new meaning by another culture.

Papandreou also expressed his sympathy and solidarity for the earthquake China suffered last year. “We have particular sensitivity in that we are a country with frequently earthquakes. I would like to express my solidarity to the Chinese people and their effort in disaster relief and post-quake construction,” he added.

Bilateral relations between the two countries have also experienced tremendous progress. Papandreou said he followed the tradition of his father. “Bilateral relations have been further enhanced following my father’s visit to China in 1986 when he was Greek Prime Minister and during which time he also met with late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1986. Recently, I was honored to meet Chinese President Hu Jintao and was able to discuss several issues with him.“ He said he was confident that Greece and China can further enhance trade, tourism and cultural relations, and he looks forward to welcoming further relations between Chinese and Greece.

By People's Daliy Online

Quote of the Week

2009-05-23T13:04:00.000-07:00

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

-former Marine Major General (one of the most decorated Marines ever, 2 time Medal of Honor recipient) Smedley Darlington Butler

Also, read about him in the fascist plot to overthrow FDR:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

Kucinich on The Ed Show

2009-05-23T12:59:00.001-07:00

Workers Face Increasing Abuse in Attempts to Form Unions

2009-05-21T18:47:00.000-07:00

From: AFL-CIO Now Blog

by Seth Michaels, May 20, 2009

Today on Capitol Hill, labor law experts and a California worker exposed the ugly truth about corporate abuses of workers trying to exercise their freedom to form unions and bargain for a better life.

At the center of the discussion: Kate Bronfenbrenner’s new report, “No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing,” released by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the American Rights at Work Education Fund. The report shows that the problems the Employee Free Choice Act would address are getting worse.

Bronfenbrenner has studied these issues for decades as the director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial Relations. This is her fourth survey over 20 years, enabling her to put into historical perspective the obstacles workers face today.

At the Capitol Hill briefing, Bronfenbrenner said weak laws and a hostile environment have emboldened corporations, over the past decade, to step up their abuses against workers trying to form unions.

The research provides a detailed portrait of a system that has failed private-sector workers. Workers have come to understand what our data confirms: Employers are using an arsenal of legal and illegal tactic to interfere with workers trying to organize, and they are doing it with impunity.

The study is the result of an in-depth examination of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) documents, examination of companies, interviews with workers and investigations of unfair labor practice filings, to give a clear picture of what the process of forming a union really looks like. And it’s not pretty:

63 percent of companies have supervisors interrogate workers in mandatory one-on-one meetings.
57 percent of companies threaten workers with plant closings.
47 percent threaten to cut wages and benefits.

What’s more, even if they win representation, a majority of workers still don’t have a first contract after a year.

Angel Warner, a working mom from California, offered a compelling story of these coercive tactics in action. Warner is a Rite Aid warehouse worker who tried to form a union through the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) at a large warehouse with 600 workers. The warehouse was inadequately heated in the winter and cooled in the summer, and the work was difficult and at times unsafe. That’s why Warner and her co-workers hoped to form a union. Wages and benefits were an issue, she said, but not the only issue. Mostly, they were concerned about job security and improving safety on the job, especially after management imposed a quota system that encouraged unsafe behavior.

You walk a fine line of taking a trip to the hospital or a trip to the unemployment line.

We like our jobs, we just want dignity, respect and a voice in our workplace. A person can only take so much—we decided it was time to stand up for ourselves.

Warner said that, as she and her-co-workers tried to form a union, management pulled union supporters aside for threatening meetings and singled out potential supporters for harassment. Pro-union employees were fired, and the workers filed 49 labor law violations against Rite-Aid—but the only repercussion for Rite-Aid is having to re-hire two employees and post fliers saying they would no longer engage in unfair practices.

Warner and her co-workers won the election by only a handful of votes, even after getting two-thirds of the employees to sign up, because of the extended election period and the abuses by management during that time. The election was held two years after starting the process of gathering signatures, Warner said, and even after a year of having won a union, the company still hasn’t offered a contract.

Our labor laws are not working, they’re not protecting the working class. We played by the rules. Even after harassment and threats, we voted for a union, and yet we’re still working without a contract. People are terrified of losing their jobs. It puts such a psychological and emotional pressure on you. It’s hard to function in the workplace because you’re so scared—you walk through the door and you don’t know, is this going to be the day that I walk out with my pink slip?

We have responsibilities to our families, our children. The working class needs help, we’re tired of waiting for justice. I urge Senators and Congresspeople that are on the fence, or have changed their minds, to look at people like me and the people I work with, and the thousands like me, because we’re not unique.

Workers’ rights need to be upheld. We’re ready to stand up for ourselves.

Fred Feinstein, a former NLRB counsel and a University of Maryland professor, agrees that existing labor law isn’t protecting workers. Warner’s story isn’t an exception, Feinstein said—it’s one vivid example of a pervasive failure of labor law:

There’s room for better enforcement and better strategies but fund the law itself is defective.

There’s considerable evidence that over the last decades, new tactics have been developed, weaknesses in the law have been discovered, refined and more successfully exploited, so that conditions on the ground have changed…we need to change the legal framework if we’re going to protect people.

Extended delay is a powerful weapon for employers, Feinstein said, because it ensures years of litigation to prevent remedies for their misbehavior.

And, said EPI President Larry Mishel, that this isn’t just an issue of fairness, it’s an economic issue. We’ve seen a 30-year period of rising inequality that didn’t allow people to have a good paycheck, he notes, which has undermined our economy by cutting back on workers’ purchasing power and security. As we rebuild the economy, we need to make sure it’s on a strong foundation.

One clear foundation is to fix the fundamentally broken labor market system—we have an economy that has been producing higher productivity, but most workers haven’t been able to benefit.

Companies are trying to pre-empt union campaigns, targeting union supporters and interrogating workers to find out how they’re going to vote. (Yes, that’s the reality of the “secret ballot” corporate lobbies are trying to impose.) Corporate tactics are designed to make the process less secret and less secure for workers who hope to join unions. Increasingly, management is working to monitor and punish union activities and force workers to choose sides. Said Bronfenbrenner:

We’ve found a climate of employer opposition that revealed a clear pattern of interrogation and surveillance…followed by threats and harassment to make sure that workers who pursue a union do so at clear personal risk.

Bronfenbrenner said that although she studied many unfair labor practice filings, many abuses aren’t even reported, because a climate of fear, weak remedies and long delays prevent workers from protesting unfair practices.

Warner said the common corporate complaint—that workers could act coercively as they campaigned to get their co-workers to form a union—was laughable and unsupported by facts.

From a worker’s point of view, the harassment and intimidation I’ve seen has come from the company side.

Bronfenbrenner and Feinstein both agreed that decades of research into organizing campaigns show this to be the case across the board. Historically, the number of unfair labor practice filings against unions is extremely low—only 42 cases of misconduct over seven decades—while there are nearly 30,000 unfair labor practices against workers by companies every year. People who say both sides are at fault aren’t to be taken seriously, Bronfenbrenner said:

Unions wouldn’t function if workers were coerced. The whole idea of having a union, of the organizing process, relies on workers feeling they have a democratic process, and believing in their union. Workers can vote their way out of a union at many phases—you don’t get to vote against your boss, and employers have enormous power over workers. They can fire you, they control your schedule, your pay, your working conditions.

Obama budget: A 180 degree turn on how workers will be protected

2009-05-12T16:07:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 05/11/09 12:55

“If we expect our workers to come to work, every day, we have to protect them,” declared Jordan Barab, acting head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, when he spoke to union nurses at their legislative gathering in Washington D.C. last week.

Talking about his boss, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, Barab said, “She is assuming and hoping that most employers want to do the right thing, but those who don’t will be targeted for strong enforcement action.”

If the Obama budget is any indication, the administration seems, on the issue of workplace safety, to be putting its money where its mouth is.

In the budget sent to Congress on May 7, OSHA would get a 10 percent increase in its budget and staff and would close the door on its failed Bush-pushed “voluntary compliance” approach.

The Obama plan to allocate $51 million more to OSHA, raising its funding to $568 million, is, in fact, just one of many pro-worker changes in the budget. It is also proposing major changes in discretionary programs that would help workers.

The number of federal OSHA inspectors, in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, will rise from 38,600 to 40,900. The number of state inspections would rise from 50,000 to 57,650. Money for federal OSHA enforcement would increase 14.6 percent to $227 million.

During the Bush years the Department of Labor lacked sufficient funding, also, to pursue and prosecute employers who violated minimum wage and overtime laws. The new budget boosts funds for enforcement in this area.

Another area to which increased funding will be devoted is Trade Adjustment Assistance, designed to help workers who lose their jobs to subsidized foreign imports. These funds will double, to $1.8 billion, covering larger numbers of workers. Trade Adjustment Assistance includes extensions of jobless benefits and even subsidies for health insurance coverage to workers who lose their jobs.

In the Obama stimulus bill which Congress passed, Trade Adjustment Assistance was expanded to include service-sector workers and workers at firms who lose jobs because their companies depended upon business from laid off workers at other companies affected by foreign trade. Under this new approach a restaurant worker in Mahwah, N.J., for example, who lost his job when the Ford plant there closed, could be eligible for benefits under Trade Adjustment Assistance. This new eligibility begins May 18.

The Obama budget will actually slash one section of the Department of Labor’s enforcement apparatus – the section created by George Bush to harass and “investigate” unions – the Office of Labor-Management Standards. That office, a favorite of the radical right’s National Right to Work Committee, will be cut by 10 percent to $41 million.

Solis has already killed a recent Bush rule that would have forced union officers and staffers to publicly disclose virtually all of their personal finances, something corporate leaders and staffers are, of course, not required to do.

For the first time, ever, the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division has set a goal to secure for 350,000 or more workers back pay owed to them by their companies.

Additional funding has also been provided to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which pays out pension plans when employers,, usually due to bankruptcy, dump them. The Department of Labor expects that it will take over plans affecting 692,484 retirees in the year starting Oct. 1, up from 665,000 this year. It expects another 100 corporate pension plans to be dumped this year.

The National Labor Relations Board will get a small increase, up $21 million to $283.4 million. The number of workers employed by the board will increase by 48, to 1,285, still, however, well below levels it had reached during the Clinton Administration.

In a statement, Solis said, “The president’s budget launches new and innovative ways to promote economic recovery and the competitiveness of our nation’s workers.”

Most in the labor movement are hoping that the efforts in the Obama budget to protect people who go to work every day are the beginning of a permanent departure from the way business was done during the Bush years.

Vietnam celebrates Dien Bien Phu anniversary

2009-05-11T15:19:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: David Pena
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 05/11/09 15:28

On May 7 Vietnam celebrated the 55th anniversary of its decisive victory over U.S.–backed French colonialist forces at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu during the First Indochina War. At Dien Bien Phu City in mountainous northwestern Vietnam, solemn ceremonies and military parades, as well as artistic and sporting events, were held to celebrate the anniversary.

The battle was fought between the Viet Minh, led by General Vo Nguyen Giap (now 98 years old) and a 13,000 strong French military force garrisoned in the Muong Thanh Valley, where Dien Bien Phu is located. In an amazing logistical feat, the Viet Minh moved infantry and artillery into the steep mountains surrounding the French garrison. After a 57-day siege lasting from March 13 to May 7, 1954, the Viet Minh charged down from their mountain bases and overran the French.

Widely regarded as one of the most important military engagements of the 20th century, the Viet Minh victory at Dien Bien Phu was the first time that a non-Western national liberation army was able to defeat a modern Western military force. It led to French withdrawal from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and eventually to the massive U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia during the Second Indochina War, known in the U.S. as the Vietnam War, and in Vietnam as the American War. During the battle, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower first put forward the infamous Domino Theory, which articulated the U.S ruling class’ fear of Communist expansion in Southeast Asia.

The immediate aftermath of the French defeat was the signing of the Geneva Accords, intended to temporarily divide Vietnam into a North and a U.S.-controlled South until the country could be unified on the basis of internationally supervised elections scheduled for July 1956. Certain of a Communist electoral victory that would make Ho Chi Minh leader of a unified, socialist Vietnam, the U.S. and South Vietnam refused to hold the elections. South Vietnamese citizens opposed to this treacherous move formed the Communist National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong, which fought a war of national liberation against U.S. occupation forces and the South Vietnamese military. The Viet Cong, with the support of the North Vietnamese Army, defeated the United States, which withdrew its forces in 1973. The South Vietnamese army was defeated and the country unified on April 30, 1975.

In the 55 years since the battle, the people of Dien Bien Phu, along with the entire Vietnamese nation, have worked hard to overcome the legacies of colonialism and war. Today, Dien Bien Phu is a thriving city of approximately 98,000 people, and the capital of Dien Bien Province. Recent decades have seen advancements in local agriculture that have eliminated hunger and improved living standards. One-hundred percent of villages in the province have telephones, schools, and medical clinics. Once entirely dependent on agriculture, the region now boasts a diversified industrial and service-based economy which grew an average of 8 percent annually from 2001 to 2005 and 11 percent annually from 2006 to 2008.

At the victory ceremony, Dien Bien Province was awarded the Order of Ho Chi Minh in recognition of its contributions to economic renewal and the construction of socialism in Vietnam. It was the second time the province has won the award.

New report shows millions lost health coverage during the recession

2009-05-11T15:17:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Lauren McGlothlin
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 05/10/09 11:22

Original source: civilrights.org

A new report on health care coverage over the last 15 months by the Center for American Progress shows that rapid increases in unemployment have increased the number of uninsured Americans.

Nearly 60 percent of Americans get health care through their employers. However, employers have cut 5.1 million jobs since the recession started and the report estimates that in that time 2.3 million people have lost their health insurance.

The report states that the highest number of losses occurred during the first four months of 2009, with over 1 million workers losing health care coverage – about 42 percent of the total losses since 2007.

These numbers only include those Americans who receive employer-provided insurance and doesn't reflect the number of families that have indirectly lost health coverage due to spouses or parents losing their jobs.

The report calls on the Obama administration to work on comprehensive health care reform now so that every American can have access to quality health care.

Video Review: Capitalism Hits the Fan

2009-05-11T15:15:00.000-07:00

From: Political Affairs Online

By Arthur Perlo

click here for related stories: capitalism

5-08-09, 8:52 am

Capitalism Hits the Fan
Produced by the Media Education Foundation
2009.

Richard Wolff (Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) has released a DVD titled Capitalism Hits the Fan. It contains a lecture he gave on November 19, 2008, along with some supporting graphics.

Wolff begins by emphasizing that the economic crisis is severe, that it will not be temporary or short, and it is not simply a financial crisis but rather it comes out of the whole economic system. (These points might seem obvious today, but at the time the lecture was given, the extent and severity of the crisis were not as widely recognized.)

To understand the crisis, Wolff recounts US economic history. From 1820 to 1970, the US was probably unique with steadily rising productivity, and with real wages rising at about the same rate. But beginning in the 1970s, real wages declined, while productivity continued to increase. Plotting these on a graph, the pre-1970 trend lines for wages and productivity overlap, while the post-1970 trend lines diverge dramatically. (This is where Wolff's graphs are really useful).

While much could be said about what was included and what was left out of this history, one feature is striking. There is no mention of class struggle anywhere (in this or in later sections of the talk); no mention of the role of unionization and New Deal programs in raising real wages in 1930s and beyond; no mention of the full scale capitalist counter-offensive – political and economic – against the working class launched in the 1970s. The economic history seems to have taken place in a social and political vacuum.

Wolff then lists four reasons for the divergence between wages and productivity since 1970: 1) computers replaced workers; 2) Growing competition from European and Japanese corporations, leading to large-scale export of jobs by US corporations; 3) increase supply of workers due to large-scale entrance of women in the workforce; 4) increase in immigration.

One could question this analysis on many economic grounds. One example, there are earlier periods of large-scale immigration, as well as waves of internal increases in the workforce from the century-long displacement of farmers. These occurred when, according to Wolff, real wages kept pace with productivity. What's different about the recent period? Wolff does not explain.

But far worse is the lack of any political or historical context for his assertions. Wolff's formulation leads to the conclusion that immigrants and women are to blame for declining real wages. And nowhere in this lecture is anything to correct that impression.

The next section explores the current crisis. The narrative is expressed quite well. Looking at the graph of productivity vs wages since 1970, we see a huge gap – which fed a huge increase in profits and executive pay. Instead of raising workers' wages, the capitalists allowed for rising consumption (and continued sales) by lending to the working class – graphs show the exponential increase in mortgage and credit card debt. Wolff states that credit solved the problem of rising expectations of the working class, which had been conditioned by 150 years of rising living standards. Hours of work increased in order to finance increased consumption. And the credit markets provided an outlet for all the profits that the capitalist class was accumulating. But it all reached a limit: workers are now working as many hours as they can, and can't borrow any more; the system has come crashing down.

The section is presented effectively, and I like the formulation that the money the capitalist class loaned to the working class represents wages that workers should have been getting. But as in the historical section, there is a feeling that these economic events simply happened, without a social or political context. No recognition that social policies (subsidy of suburban housing and highway transportation, moving jobs out of cities, growing segregation, state/local government funding issues, etc.) drove large sections of the working class to depend on and aspire to individual solutions (big suburban home, three cars per family). And again, no mention of class struggle.

What is to be done? Wolff emphasizes that this is not primarily a financial crisis, but a crisis of the system. He lumps together and ridicules both monetary and fiscal measures. (in fairness, the lecture took place last November, before the Obama administration took office and introduced a real stimulus program and budget). Wolff ridicules the idea that regulation will solve the crisis. The same corporate boards that dodged, undermined, and eventually repealed the New Deal regulations will similarly shred any new regulations. Economists, says Wolff, frame the discussion as between "free market" (unregulated) and Keynesian (regulated) models. They don't deal with the fundamental conflict between the people who run the enterprise and the people who work in it. What we need is fundamental change.

Class struggle is implicit in this view, but it is entirely absent from the solution Wolff presents. People who work should own each enterprise, he says. Why should democracy be in politics but not in economics? As an example of what is possible, look at Silicon Valley. A few engineers would leave IBM or Cisco and start a company in someone's garage. They would share the work and the rewards, and one day a week they would devote to meetings to discuss all the technical and administrative aspects of running the company. This, says Wolff, replicates Marx's idea of a Communist enterprise. It is also cited as an ideal by Republican-oriented business publications. All the achievements usually attributed to “capitalist entrepreneurship” are really achievements of communist organization.

Wolff's recognition that this is not primarily a financial crisis, and is in fact a crisis of the capitalist system, is welcome, if hardly unique. But that thesis is mainly supported by assertion. I would agree that Keynesian economics is inadequate either to explain or provide solutions to capitalist crises. But Wolff does not discuss any of the limitations of Keynesianism, aside from asserting that regulation will eventually be undermined.

I find Wolff's utopian vision of an economy based on workers' coops a little silly, and his example of Silicon Valley amongst the worst he could have chosen But Wolff's utopianism is not the main problem with his Solutions section.

What do we take away from this lecture, which was made shortly after the November election completely changed political possibilities in Washington? No mention of the need for working class organizing. No mention of unions. No mentions of the urgent problems facing the people – jobs, foreclosures, health care – all of which were evident at the time of the lecture. No mention of the policies that are necessary to address these needs. Viewing Wolff's lecture, political action appears almost irrelevant. We are left with the impression that the political and social struggles now under way are pointless because they fall short of the fundamental systemic change that is necessary.

But contrary to Wolff, one does not have to be a Keynesian, or accept the idea that capitalism can be “saved” or regulated, to join with progressives in fighting for the positive measures the administration is introducing, and to push beyond them. Wolff, in fact, does damage to the anti-capitalist cause, by painting it as being in contradiction with other progressive currents, and proposing to divert it into a relatively sterile utopian channel that can, at best, be a small part of the range of anti-monopoly and anti-capitalist struggle.

Wolff's lecture contains valuable material and useful formulations. It is important to find ways of using online and video methods of presenting an anti-capitalist economic analysis. If I were conducting a class on the economic crisis, I would not use the whole video for reasons both of form and content, but I might well use parts of it.

The DVD is available at CapitalismHitstheFan.com, and you can watch a low-res version online. If you get the DVD, I suggest going to the /Extras/ menu and selecting the abridged version. I watched the full-length (1-hour) version, and the flourishes and repetition that may have gone down well in person become a bit tedious in your living room.

US Soldiers in Afghanistan Told to "hunt people for Jesus... so we get them into the kingdom"

2009-05-04T20:14:00.000-07:00

From: RebelReports.com

Military officials at Bagram are caught on tape urging US soldiers to evangelize in the Muslim country.

By Jeremy Scahill

New video evidence has surfaced showing that US military forces in Afghanistan have been instructed by the military’s top chaplain in the country to “hunt people for Jesus” as they spread Christianity to the overwhelmingly Muslim population. Soldiers also have imported bibles translated into Pashto and Dari, the two dominant languages of Afghanistan. What’s more, the center of this evangelical operation is at the huge US base at Bagram, one of the main sites used by the US military to torture and indefinitely detain prisoners.

In a video obtained by Al Jazeera and broadcast Monday, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, is seen telling soldiers that as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility “to be witnesses for him.”

“The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down,” he says.

“Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.”

The translated Bibles appear to be the New Testament. According to Al Jazeera, US soldiers “had them specially printed and shipped to Afghanistan.” On the tape, one soldier describes how his church in the US helped raise money for the bibles. Al Jazeera reports that “What these soldiers have been doing may well be in direct violation of the US Constitution, their professional codes and the regulations in place for all forces in Afghanistan.” The US military officially forbids “proselytising of any religion, faith or practice.” But, as Al Jazeera reports:

[T]he chaplains appear to have found a way around the regulation known as General Order Number One.

“Do we know what it means to proselytise?” Captain Emmit Furner, a military chaplain, says to the gathering.

“It is General Order Number One,” an unidentified soldier replies.

But Watt says “you can’t proselytise but you can give gifts.”

Trying to convert Muslims to any other faith is a crime in Afghanistan. The fact that the video footage is being broadcast on Al Jazeera guarantees that it will be seen throughout the Muslim world. It is likely to add more credence to the perception that the US is engaging in a war on Islam with neo-crusader forces invading Muslim lands.

Former Afghan prime minister Ahmed Shah Ahmedzai told Al Jazeera there must be a “serious investigation,” saying, “This is very damaging for diplomatic relations between the two counties.” Sayed Aalam Uddin Asser, of the Islamic Front for Peace and Understanding in Kabul, told the network: “It’s a national security issue … our constitution says nothing can take place in Afghanistan against Islam. If people come and propaganda other religions which have no followers in Afghanistan [then] it creates problems for the people, for peace, for stability.”

A US military spokesperson, Major Jennifer Willis, denied that the US military has allowed its soldiers to attempt to convert Afghans and said comments from sermons filmed at Bagram were taken out of context. She said the bibles were never distributed. “That specific case involved a soldier who brought in a donation of translated bibles that were sent to his personal address by his home church. He showed them to the group and the chaplain explained that he cannot distribute them,” she said. “The translated bibles were never distributed as far as we know, because the soldier understood that if he distributed them he would be in violation of general order 1, and he would be subject to punishment.”

The video footage was shot about a year ago by documentary filmmaker Brian Hughes, who is also a former US soldier. “[US soldiers] weren’t talking about learning how to speak Dari or Pashto, by reading the Bible and using that as the tool for language lessons,” Hughes told Al Jazeera. “The only reason they would have these documents there was to distribute them to the Afghan people. And I knew it was wrong, and I knew that filming it … documenting it would be important.”

The broadcast of this video comes just days after a new poll of White Americans found that, in the US, church going Christians are more likely to support the use of torture than other segments of the population. The Pew Research Center poll found: “White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.”

This is certainly not the first scandal where US military forces or officials have been caught on tape promoting an evangelical Christian agenda. Perhaps the most high-profile case involved Lieut. Gen. William Boykin, who was a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence under Bush. Boykin was part of Donald Rumsfeld’s inner circle at the Pentagon where he was placed in charge of hunting “high-value targets.” Boykin was one of the key U.S. officials in establishing what critics alleged was death-squad-type activity in Iraq.

In October 2003, Boykin was revealed to have gone on several anti-Muslim rants, in public speeches, many of which he delivered in military uniform. Since January 2002, Boykin had spoken at twenty-three religious-oriented events, wearing his uniform at all but two. Among Boykin’s statements, he said he knew the U.S. would prevail over a Muslim adversary in Somalia because “I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” Boykin also charged that Islamic radicals want to destroy America “because we’re a Christian nation” that “will never abandon Israel.” Our “spiritual enemy,” Boykin declared, “will only be defeated if we come against them in the name of Jesus.”

As for President Bush, Boykin said, “Why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there? And I tell you this morning that he’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.” In another speech, Boykin said other countries “have lost their morals, lost their values. But America is still a Christian nation.” He told a church group in Oregon that special operations forces were victorious in Iraq because of their faith in God. “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to impress upon you that the battle that we’re in is a spiritual battle,” he said. “Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.”

May Day in Baghdad

2009-05-03T23:34:00.001-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Special to the World
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 05/02/09 13:54

Original source: http://iraqiletter.blogspot.com/

Iraqi Communists, waving red banners, joined thousands of workers and trade unionists in celebrating International Workers' Day in central Baghdad on Friday, 1st May 2009.

The marchers started off from under Nasb al-Hurriya (Freedom Monument), the national historic landmark in Sahat Al-Tahrir (Liberation Square), moving towards Firdos Square and eventually ended at Andulus Square where a mass rally was held.

The rally, held in front of the headquarters of the Iraqi Communist Party, was addressed by the Secretary of its Central Committee, comrade Hamid Majeed Mousa.

Many democratic organisations joined the march and rally, with banners and slogans calling for working class and national unity, and for defending workers' rights and democratic freedoms.

Greetings to the Workers of Iraq and the World

On the 1st of May .. International Workers' Day

From the Iraqi Communist Party

Hundreds of millions of workers and people around the world and also in Iraq will celebrate International Workers' Day, the1st of May, which has been associated with the revolutionary and democratic movement and the struggle to end all forms of exploitation and subjugation by the classes that control wealth and dominate political power and society. It is an occasion to highlight the pioneering role played the workers, since the dawn of history, as the main force in building human civilization and as the real creators of material wealth.

The 1st of May entered the annals of the history of international class and political struggle after the strike organised by trade unions in Chicago on 1st May 1886, when protesters clashed with the police that were acting on behalf of big business, resulting in large numbers of casualties among the workers, with many arrested and several of them sentenced to death.

Since that day, the1st of May has become a symbol of the struggle against poverty, hunger, unemployment, social injustice and marginalization in all its forms, and to raise the standard of living, improve working conditions, reduce working hours, regulate wages and enjoy social security.

In Iraq, the workers celebrated this glorious day openly for the first time after the 14th July 1958 Revolution, when the 1st of May was declared a national holiday. Baghdad still remembers, to this day, that million-strong demonstration organised by the Iraqi workers and their trade unions, supported and backed by the Iraqi Communist Party, on the 1st of May 1959. That historic event was echoed in towns and provinces all over Iraq with carnivals and celebrations unparalleled in the history of our country.

Before the 14th July 1958, Iraqi workers used to celebrate this occasion, dear to their hearts, in clandestine conditions, away from the eyes of the secret police of the monarchic regime. Since the formation of the first trade union organisations and the birth of the Iraqi Communist Party in 1934, the emerging Iraqi working class led the struggles of the people and their strikes, economic, social, political and class battles and courageous uprisings. These struggles have become shining landmarks in Iraq's contemporary history and a memory that haunts dictatorial rulers, parasitic elements and the enemies of freedom, democracy and social justice. The role played by the Iraqi Communist Party in those demonstrations and uprisings, by coordinating with the patriotic and democratic forces, was instrumental in deepening the content of those battles and giving them a broad national and democratic character.

Under Saddam's dictatorial regime, the Iraqi working class was subjected to various forms of exploitation, political repression and the falsification of its will. Trade unions and professional associations were turned into "yellow" organizations and empty fronts for the ruling Baath party and its security and intelligence organs. In the aftermath of the war and collapse of the dictatorship on 9th April 2003, despite the extremely difficult and complex conditions that existed under occupation, trade union work and other forms of political and social activity began to emerge and develop. But exceptional circumstances, especially the vicious terrorist campaign waged against our country and the presence of occupation forces, curtailed that promising start and prevented the Iraqi working class and people from reaping its fruits on the level of organisation and in the broad arena of labour.

In addition, government interference in the affairs of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers, and other associations and unions, played a negative role that hampered its activities in defense of the rights of workers. For example, successive governments have continued to give a deaf ear to persistent workers' demands for abolishing Decree No. 150 (1987) that was issued by the so-called "Revolution Command Council" under Saddam's dictatorship, which turned state sector workers into government employees, prohibiting them from setting up their own trade unions.

Decree No. 45 (2003), issued by Bremer's occupation authority, which suspended the election activities of trade unions and put them under the mercy of a ministerial committee, is still in force. Furthermore, the government is still insisting, till this day, on its unjust Decree No. 8750 (2005) that called for freezing the movable and immovable assets of the unions, in a blatant manifestation of interference in their affairs that resulted in paralysing unions' work and activities. The position of the government has regrettably remained unchanged in spite of many appeals and several meetings between the representatives of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers and key government officials, and despite the many promises given by these officials to find quick solutions to these outstanding issues.

Iraqi workers and our people in general have been following closely the positive steps witnessed by our country in terms of pursuing the networks of terrorism and acts of sabotage and tightening the noose around criminal elements and outlaws. They are also aware of increased stability, the acceptance of the peaceful political process, and Iraq's expanding regional and international relations. While expressing support for these developments, they also look forward to practical, quick solutions to the problems of unemployment, high prices, health and education, providing protection for national products, restoring the status of industry and agriculture in Iraq, finding solutions to the crisis of housing, transport, water and electricity, developing social welfare programs and the laws of retirement and health insurance, and addressing the disparity between the salaries of senior officials and those of government employees.

In addition, millions of workers are looking forward to bold steps to be taken by the government in order to strike with an iron fist at the corrupt, big and small, who are stealing people's food and wealth, and who are hostile to the aspirations of the poor, the widows and orphans, and the families of martyrs and the "disappeared".

Today, as the spectre of unemployment creeps and the gains made by broad strata of the population in advanced capitalist societies are eroded because of the nature of the capitalist system and its mechanisms, and as a result of the new global financial and economic crisis, the struggle of workers' unions and professional associations in the developed capitalist countries is intensifying. This struggle enjoys broad support and active participation of all the forces that are opposed to savage capitalist globalization and are calling for a truly humanitarian globalization. There is an escalation of struggles to preserve the gains that the workers, those with low income and wage-earners in general, had achieved through struggles for more than a century, particularly the gains made in the areas of reducing working hours, increasing wages, obtaining health and social security and to strive to enrich these achievements in line with the development of society and the requirements of modern life. We have great confidence that the workers and toilers of our country, Iraq, will spare no effort to contribute to these struggles, for a better future for themselves and for all mankind.

We salute, once again, the Iraqi working class people, as well as the workers of the world, on their International Day... the 1st of May.

_______________

** Excerpts from the editorial of "Tareeq Al-Shaab" (People's Path), the central organ of the Iraqi Communist Party .. issued on 27th April 2009.

Obama, reform and the role of the left

2009-05-02T01:34:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Sam Webb
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 05/01/09 15:54

Sam Webb

After the first, perhaps over analyzed, hundred days of the Obama administration, it is fair to say that President Obama is a reformer and we are entering an era of reforms, possibly radical reforms.

Some on the left (ignoring the right wing talk shows and their fantastic claims about Obama’s socialist pedigree) mockingly dismiss the new president and his reform inclinations, saying that his main mission is merely to save capitalism. Even if that is true, and there is no reason to doubt it, what does it tell us — that he is neither a politician of the left nor an advocate of socialism? Well, we already knew that.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, had no aspirations to change the foundations of capitalist society. But he realized that in order to preserve capitalism it had to be modified (and, yes, it can be modified), and he had to respond to the anger and yearnings of millions of Americans caught in the web of a seemingly intractable economic depression.

Given the contemporary economic crisis, Obama appears to be of a similar mind, though he comes to the White House with deeper democratic and reform sensibilities than FDR.

So far, Obama’s presidency has not only broken decisively from the right-wing extremist policies of the Bush administration, but has also taken measures domestically and internationally that go in a progressive direction.

Whether this continues and takes on a consistently progressive, pro-people, radical reform character isn’t a sure bet, however. Much like with the New Deal of the 1930s, it will be the outcome of contested and fluid process stretching over time, taking multiple forms, and pivoting around the expansion of citizenship rights (socialized health care, for example) and the reconfiguration of the role of government to the advantage of working people.

Socialism may be an objective necessity for our country, an appealing idea to many ordinary Americans (a recent Rasmussen poll found that 20 percent favored socialism over capitalism and another 27 percent were unsure which was better), and a vision that we on the left want to vigorously popularize, but it isn’t yet on the immediate political agenda — clearly, neither the current balance of forces nor the thinking of millions of Americans is at that point.

We are still in a democratic, increasingly anti-corporate, phase of struggle. In the course of this, political conditions could mature over time to the point where more advanced solutions – such as military conversion to peacetime and green production, a shorter work week, a “war” on poverty and inequality, public democratic ownership of critical economic sectors, and, depending on the dialectics of struggle, socialism – come to the fore of the people’s agenda.

But that is ahead of us. Currently, the level of mobilization of the diverse coalition that elected Obama doesn’t match what is necessary to win his administration’s immediate legislative and political agenda, let alone more far-reaching reforms.

A favorable alignment of forces exists, to be sure. But political majorities are consequential only to the degree that they are an active and organized element in the political process.

Moreover, the opposition is formidable. Right-wing Republicans experienced a crushing defeat, but no one should write them off; they have consolidated their grip on the Republican Party, are well funded, and are clever at exploiting popular grievances and resentments.

Finance capital will attempt to minimize losses to its balance sheet, rob the public till where it can, and restructure the regulatory environment along lines that favor speculation and a casino economy.

Other powerful sections of big capital – energy, military, health care, pharmaceutical and other giants of corporate America – will also fiercely resist measures that collide with their political and economic interests.

Finally, there are political groupings of considerable influence in the administration and the Democratic Party who, while supporting Obama, will use their influence to cut down on the sweep and anti-corporate character of his initiatives.

Thus, the struggle of the nation’s progressive majority — the working class, the racially oppressed, women, young people and others — is two-sided.

On the one hand, it has to battle stop-at-nothing right-wing extremists and their backers who are intent on defeating Obama and the people’s coalition that supports him.

On the other hand, it has to struggle (but in a constructive, unifying way) within the multi-class coalition that Obama leads, to put their essential pro-working-class and democratic stamp on the reform process and the political direction of the country.

And herein lies the role of the left. Its main task, as it has been throughout our country’s history, is to assist in reassembling, activating, uniting and giving a voice to common demands that unite this broad majority as well as draw in other people who didn’t vote for Obama.

The left's political analysis, solutions to today's pressing crisis and a vision of socialism, rooted in a democratic ethos and practices, and not tied to a universal “model” imported from the 20th century, will receive a fair and favorable hearing from millions of Americans to the degree that left activists are active participants in the main labor and people’s organizations struggling for vital reforms today — jobs, health care, retirement security, quality public education, equality and fairness, immigration reform, a foreign policy of peace and cooperation, and a livable environment and sustainable economy.

Those who narrow down the role of the left to simply being a critic of every move of the Obama administration and/or insist on left demands as the only basis of broad unity limit the left’s capacity to be a part of a much larger coalition that could make America “a more perfect union.”

Sam Webb (swebb@cpusa.org) is national chair of the Communist Party USA, founded in Chicago in 1919. Before being elected to that post, he served as the Communist Party state organizer in Michigan from 1978 to 1988. He received a master’s in economics from the University of Connecticut.

VP Biden affirms Obama admin.'s support for EFCA

2009-05-02T01:25:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Joel Wendland
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/29/09 15:25

Rumors of the demise of the Employee Free Choice Act are greatly exaggerated. In a teleconference with reporters April 29th to tout the administration's accomplishments in its first 100 days, Vice President Joe Biden told reporters that the president continues to support and work for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

"We believe the present system is tilted against what was initially intended by the NLRA," Vice President Biden noted. "If you go back and look at the legislation from back in those days it says that one of the purposes is not to guarantee unions but to promote, though, promote the ability of people to organize."

"We think, as my grandfather used to say, it has been stood on its head," Biden added, referencing the current state of federal labor law.

Biden expressed optimism that EFCA will pass. "We're supportive of it, and we will continue to support it," he said.

Biden refused to speculate too much on what Sen. Arlen Specter's defection from the Republican Party would mean for the bill's chances for passage, except to say that Sen. Specter would likely keep an open mind on compromise proposals that may arise in the future.

Specter, a former co-sponsor of the legislation, earlier this month flip-flopped his position on the bill by publicly stating that he would support a Republican filibuster against it. Immediately after his resignation from the GOP April 28th, he reaffirmed that stance on EFCA.

As reported exclusively in the People's Weekly World late yesterday, some union leaders have suggested that a compromise proposal which keeps the basic principles enshrined in the bill but overcomes objections held by Specter and others could be in the offing.

Biden pledged to work with labor, business and Congress to get the legislation passed and to remove "significant inequities" for working Americans.

HAPPY MAY DAY!

2009-04-30T22:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.cpusa.org/article/articleview/1044/1/27/

Happy May Day to working people everywhere from the Communist Party USA!

May First is celebrated as International Workers' Day around the globe, but was born here in the United States in the struggle for the eight-hour workday. For many years, May Day was not celebrated in the country of its birth as it was internationally, but in recent years May Day has been reborn.

Larger and larger sections of the labor movement and the immigrant rights movement in the United States have embraced May Day as a day of struggle for workers rights and of celebration of the contribution of all workers: men and women, gay and straight, every race, language, religion or nationality.

We join with all struggling people around the world in celebrating May Day and continuing the fight for a better world.

Below are links to articles on the history and origins of May Day, thoughts on the workers movement today and more.

Born in the USA
Reclaiming the May Day tradition: "Through unity we find our strength"
Labor on the road to unity
Haymarket landmark finally established
Historical Interpretation: Haymarket Square, May 4,1886

Home child care providers are paid so little, they’re losing homes, cars

2009-04-30T00:17:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: John Rummel
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/24/09 09:57

LANSING, Mich. — They are 40,000 strong and they feed, clean, and teach Michigan’s young, in their most formative pre-school years. And for doing such an important job, what do they earn? “In Wayne County, we earn $1.66 an hour for each child,” said Daisy Jackson, an American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees organizer from Detroit.

AFSCME organizer Daisy Jackson

In addition, Jackson said, the books, food and toys these home-based child care providers supply each day are “on your own dime.” Not to mention the wear and tear on their home and furnishings.

The child care providers are paid by the state of Michigan. In 2006, under the joint leadership of the United Auto Workers and AFSCME, the 40,000 home-based providers were organized into a new union: Child Care Providers Together of Michigan (CCPTM). They won wage increases of 8 percent for each of three years, but due to the state budget crisis, the state Legislature hasn’t allocated the funds to pay for the raises that were negotiated and agreed to.

To win justice, providers from throughout the state descended on the state Capitol here April 21. They visited every member of the state Senate and House and demanded what was rightfully theirs.

Home child care providers gather at the Capitol

Herbert Sanders, the union’s AFSCME director, said, “There was a promise made and that promise hasn’t been kept. That’s why we are here today.” He argued that monies from the federal stimulus package, targeted for child care, are sufficient to fund the contract.

Grant Grace, the UAW coordinator for the union, told the child care providers gathered here, “For too long the state has not respected what you do. We keep our word, we raise the next generation,now we want the state to keep their word.”

Providers Becky Hardesty and Lu Hilden, from Flint and Owosso, respectively, stated their case effectively with each official they visited.

“We do a very important job — taking care of children,” said Hardesty. “We are so far below poverty level — the [state budget] cut cannot come from us. We have providers losing homes, phones and cars.”

Hilden told the lawmakers that some children don’t thrive with institutional day care and really need the attention and atmosphere a home setting provides. But when home care providers earn so little, she said, it is getting to the point where some won’t take state-funded children. “Children are treated special in home-based care and that option is being threatened,” she said. “Strong providers make strong children — and less children ending up in foster care and the penal system.”

Northwest Detroit resident Violet Meadows is one of those strong providers. She currently takes care of five children but is licensed to care for up to eight. She has provided for children since 1994. “Word of mouth” helped to advertise her child care. Meadows said the children begin to get dropped off at her house at 8 a.m. and may be picked up 10 or 12 hours later. She joined the union because she had a brother and nephew, employed in the auto industry, who knew that being in a union was “good,” she said.

Child care provider Violet Meadows

Meadows is a person any parent would want taking care of their children. She takes the children on field trips and to restaurants to teach them how to behave in public and to eat properly. She tells them they can be anything they want in life: doctors, nurses, teachers and lawyers. She helps them plant a garden in her backyard.

When Katrina devastated New Orleans, she took the kids to a big box store and gave them $5 each to buy items for a care package.

Jonathan Fung, from Interfaith Worker Justice, traveled on the bus from Detroit. He summarized the incredible contradiction child care providers find themselves in. They “are some of the most unappreciated workers in Michigan,” he said. “What is more important than caring for our children?”

jrummel @ pww.org

You and What Movement? A Response to Naomi Klein

2009-04-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

From: Political Affairs Online

Original source: Narco News Bulletin

Naomi Klein is suffering, along with some other sectors of the academic North American left, an existential crisis.

In a recent column she published in The Nation and in The Huffington Post, she complained about “the awkward in-between space in which many US progressive movements find themselves” now that Barack Obama is president of the United States.

Revealing a bizarre contempt and college-educated condescension toward a vast multi-racial swathe of progressive supporters and sympathizers of Obama and his movement, Klein seeks to explain us away as dupes. We (I use the first person plural proudly and without hesitation) are, according to Klein, part of a “superfan culture,” that, she says, believes we can “save the world if we all just hope really hard,” and that suffers from the following psychological ailments: “Hopeover… hoper coaster… hope fiend… hopebreak… and hopelash.”

Her theory, that progressive Obama supporters are now inflicted by buyer’s remorse, flies contrary to all objective measurement. The pollster.com aggregate of all recent public opinion surveys finds that 61.8 percent of Americans view Obama (less than 100 days into his presidency) favorably, compared to 32.9 percent that view him unfavorably. As Gallup notes, President Obama’s first-quarter average favorability of 63 percent exceeds that of the first three months of his eight immediate predecessors: Presidents Bush II, Clinton, Bush 1, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon or Johnson.

Ah, but Klein is talking about “progressives,” so let’s take a look at the hard data that is available. Separate out the crosstabs, and those numbers are even sky higher among progressive demographic groups. Among Democrats, according to an early April Pew survey, 88 percent view the young president favorably, so it’s not really clear who Klein is talking about, imagining or inventing out of thin air when she devotes an entire column to claim a non-existent demographic trend.

Among African Americans (without which there can be no successful “progressive movement” in the United States), a towering 94 percent approve of how the president is doing his job, according to the Quinnipiac survey. Among Hispanic Americans (just as important to any progressive future in the US), 73 percent feel the same way. Among Americans that earn less than $50,000 a year (the working class and the poor), a solid 60 percent approve. The question must be asked: What “movement” does Klein thus imagine? An exclusively white and college educated one? I fear that the truth may not be far from it if she is so quick to insult and dismiss such a large bloc of people who skew non-white, poor and working class.

There is currently no quicker way for white progressives to further divide themselves from African American, Hispanic American, working class and poor Americans – all sectors without which serious and successful progressive movements in the US would be impossible – than to invent derogatory psychobabble terms for us because we do not share Klein’s tendencies to feel somehow demoralized by the country’s first African American head of state, and demonstrably its most progressive since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

That such complaint comes after less than 100 days, when the President has just eased the Cuba embargo that was foolishly embraced by Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, is nothing less than pathetic. In the same week, Obama made the classified torture memos public (and as any working journalist or investigator knows, every department of his administration now responds quickly – usually overnight – to our Freedom of Information Act requests for information; a sea change from all previous administrations). The passage of Obama’s economic Stimulus bill marked the single largest expenditure ever on jobs and social programs like unemployment insurance, Medicaid and public education in the history of any country. He has already made the orderly withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq official policy with a timeline that has most of it done before the 2010 midterm elections. And in three short months, Obama has restored the principle of progressive taxation to the United States.

Yesterday, at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad [Ed. – this article first appeared on April 18th], the US president extended a long overdue hand of friendship to his Venezuelan counterpart, a democratically elected leader that suffered an attempted military coup d’etat that was cheered, if not planned, by Washington. The President, in short time, has already defused an entire string of similar policy time bombs left by previous administrations (Republican and Democratic alike). Will there be more tensions between Chávez and the US? Very likely the answer is yes, but the gravity and context of them has shifted positively. This hemisphere is already a safer place for dissident journalists, community organizers, governments of the left and other grassroots change agents. That, alone, makes it more possible for us to organize and make bigger and better changes – of the kind for which we do not need any government’s permission – in the days and years ahead.

I quite agree with Klein’s belief that “demanding” is better than “hoping” when it comes to changing public policy. But where I get off her bus is upon her inference that we who are supportive of – and more happy than not about – Obama’s presidency somehow believe differently. Her claim only demonstrates her gross ignorance toward the important sector of the left (including parts of the Obama movement) that are community organizers. “Demanding” is necessary but without “organizing” to back it up it is merely an act of intellectual masturbation. It accomplishes nothing. It never has won a single battle. And that’s why, until 2008, the US left in particular – so busy demanding without doing the hard work of organizing – went through at least three “lost decades.”

The problem with too much of the “activist left” in North America is that so many of its adherents don’t really want to do the hard work of community organizing. I wonder: when was the last time that Klein went door-to-door, or staffed a phone bank, or otherwise reached out directly to real people demographically different from her? Any journalist or writer that hasn’t, at minimum, accompanied organizers doing that real work of change should shut the fuck up when it comes to opining about “the people.” They don’t have a clue as to who “the people” are. Activism that doesn’t involve one or more of those tasks does not rise to the level or effectiveness of organizing. And those that don’t do it really have no idea where the public is at: the masses (or “the multitude” in current jargon) are imaginary cartoon characters to these people. Their view of us is as elitist as it is condescending.

They can complain about, for example, US policy toward Israel and Palestine, seemingly oblivious to how US public opinion on the matter keeps those very bad policies in place. If they got off their duffs and knocked on doors to ask real people about it, they’d get a lesson in civics, and perhaps learn better ways to move public opinion in a better direction. They can bemoan the “bailouts” (essentially government loans to financial services industries) ignorant of the fact that when big corporations fall they land hardest on the workers and the poor, as would a 1929-level crash of the kind that nearly occurred last October. They can demand “nationalization” of the banks, without offering any detail as to what that would look like. I live in Mexico where the 1982 bank nationalization proved disastrous for the country’s workers, and helped destroy its middle class. The devil is always in the details.

I am not a member of the Democratic Party, and I did not vote for twelve years prior to 2008 until Obama’s candidacy gave me a reason to do so. While the academic North American left went jet-hopping from summit protest to social forum across the globe, I went to Latin America, lived, worked and reported alongside the authentic social movements that many of them came to visit for a weekend or maybe a month. I’m more comfortable with an anarcho-syndicalist view of the kind of society that I daily work toward than I am with electoral politics. Socialist, although it’s a moniker that seems a bit statist and conservative for me, is still a term that I’m more comfortable with than “Democrat.” And yet every day I see the President moving the United States closer to my own version of utopia, after a lifetime of watching each of his predecessors pull it farther away. More importantly, for me, as a journalist and an organizer, the Obama presidency has created much more space for people like us to get out there and do this hard work without the repression and marginalization that we have struggled under for decades.

Here’s what the academic left – hopping mad, frustrated and now, like Klein, lashing out at those of us in the working left – doesn’t get: It was Obama – not Klein’s post-Seattle ’99 milieu of “anti-globalization activists” – who opened the doors of the American left for the first time since the Civil Rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s to the building of an authentically multi-racial movement. It was Obama – not Klein and her colleagues – that got working class whites struggling alongside working class blacks and Hispanics in the United States, and who turned a new generation onto the art of community organizing that the activist left had abandoned.

When colleagues like Klein so summarily insult Obama supporters and sympathizers, they are driving yet another stake between their white college-educated ghetto and the 94 percent of African-Americans, and the 73 percent of Hispanic Americans, and the 60 percent of the entire American working class, that is pleased, as I am, that this unique historic figure is, for the next four years at least, the President of the United States.

I’m reminded of the scene from the Martin Scorcese motion picture, The Aviator, in which Kathryn Hepburn (Cate Blanchette) brings Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) home to meet her family. “We’re socialists,” the mother tells Hughes. And then, when she thinks Hughes is speaking ill of President Franklin Roosevelt, she nearly runs him out of the house. FDR, like Obama, wasn’t a socialist (and unlike Obama, he was born into privilege). But a great many socialists, communists and even anarchists of the era understood that their work was made so much more possible by his presidency. And that cultivated an intense synergy, not to mention a renaissance of labor and community organizing during that epoch. In retrospect, that synergy between the working left and the FDR presidency brought with it many of the 20th century’s most progressive advances.

The same is happening now – although Klein and others haven’t done the investigative or organizing spadework to recognize it – and that (even without the many progressive policies enacted by the Obama administration already, and those important ones like immigration reform yet to come) makes me an unabashed, eyes wide open, Obama sympathizer, guilt-free, without any of the feelings of remorse Klein seeks to assign to me and millions like me. That enthusiasm hasn’t turned us into blind followers: these pages are already filled with hard-hitting critiques when the Obama administration has been wrong; on Plan Mexico, on the drug war, and other deadly serious matters. And yet even on those fronts, our ability to push back and serve as a check and a break on the extremities of those bad policies vastly outweighs what we were able to do for many previous decades.

But I’m not going to sit back silently while some white progressives – dripping with the nastiest forms of envy because, truth be told, the Obama movement succeeded at resurrecting community organizing and multi-racial struggle whereas their tired tactics and strategies had failed again and again to do so – try to claim to me or anyone else that they’re the ones doing the demanding while we’re somehow sitting back and thinking we can “save the world if we just hope really hard.”

Memo to Ms. Klein: Go back to the only school that ever got the left – in which I take no back seat to you in either mileage or scar tissue – anywhere: that of community organizing. We’re doing it. You’re not. And when you go to give your next speech at some university or activist hall, look around at the white, privileged faces that occupy more than half those seats. Study how many of them choose to self-marginalize from workers or racial minorities with their freak-show narcissistic – and yet humorless! – antics. You know what I’m talkin’ about. And you probably wince regularly as they ask you to sign your book for them.

Ask yourself, “are these the so-called masses that are going to make a progressive movement succeed?” You know damn well, in your heart, that they’re not. They do buy hardcover books though, a lot more than the workers and the poor ever will. With all due respect I must ask: Have you become an intellectual prisoner of what you think it takes to pander to your own college-educated consumers?

No thank you, Ms. Klein: When it comes to the United States, I’ll take my chances with the multi-racial community organizers of the Obama movement, and the tens of thousands of young organizers they’ve inspired and trained, at least until the non-electoral North American left gets its shit together, which, after reading a column like yours, seems still a long and far away struggle.

Nationalize General Motors? UAW and U.S. government could own 89 percent of company under GM's plan

2009-04-28T14:46:00.000-07:00

by The Associated Press
Tuesday April 28, 2009, 8:12 AM

AP Photo General Motors says it will cut 21,000 U.S. factory jobs by next year and phase out its storied Pontiac brand as part of a major restructuring effort needed to get more government aid. The struggling automaker also says it will offer 225 shares of common stock for every $1,000 in notes held by bondholders as part of debt-for-equity swap.

General Motors, once the colossus of American capitalism, will become a leaner, government-owned company if the Obama administration goes along with the automaker's plan to slash jobs, close plants and eliminate the legendary Pontiac brand.

As GM laid out the proposal Monday, new agreements fell into place between Chrysler and its unions in the United States and Canada, making it apparent that the future of both companies now rests with their creditors.

General Motors CEO Fritz Henderson said the company would offer the Treasury Department more than 50 percent of its stock to absolve GM of $10 billion in government loans.

GM has thousands of employees at several facilities in Ohio, including a major assembly complex in Lordstown, near Youngstown.

The automaker also proposed that the United Auto Workers take GM stock for at least half the $20 billion the company owes to a union-run trust that will assume retiree health care expenses starting next year.

Combined, the union and government would own 89 percent of the century-old automaker, which has been bleeding red ink and is saddled with more than $62 billion in debt.

"It is unprecedented, but it signifies the importance of the automobile industry," said David Lewis, a retired professor at the University of Michigan who taught business history for 43 years.

Although the government has loaned money to corporations in the past, including to Chrysler in the 1970s, Lewis could not recall a time when it had taken a majority stake in a company.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the administration does not want to own GM or any other auto company.

"This administration has no desire to run an auto company on a day-to-day basis," Gibbs said. "We strongly back an auto industry we believe can, and should, be self-reliant of government funding."

But GM's plan depends on persuading unsecured bondholders who have loaned GM $27 billion to forgive that debt in exchange for a 10 percent stake in the company.

Current GM shareholders would own only about 1 percent.

GM's announcement sent its shares up 21 percent to $2.04 Monday, meaning bondholders would get about 46 cents on the dollar. But that does not take into account dilution of GM's shares once the government and the union get their giant piece of the pie.

Analysts estimated that the value was closer to 5 cents on the dollar.

General Motors is surviving on $15.4 billion in government loans, and said Monday in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it envisions getting an additional $11.6 billion.

GM Chief Financial Officer Ray Young said that's all the company will need under its new plan.
But if GM's restructuring plan cannot put all the pieces in place by June 1, the struggling company could go into bankruptcy protection.

Meanwhile, Chrysler is surviving only because of $4 billion in government aid. The company has until Thursday to adopt a partnership with Italy's Fiat Group SpA and to devise a restructuring plan that satisfies the government so it can get an additional $6 billion.

Just hours before GM gave its progress report, Chrysler announced it had a tentative concession agreement with the UAW that had been blessed by the government. United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger said the union's factory-level leaders voted unanimously Monday night to recommend that members approve concessions that could give a union-run trust 55 percent ownership of a restructured Chrysler LLC.

Union leaders say ratification votes across the nation should be finished by Wednesday. The deal, designed to keep the automaker out of bankruptcy, would see workers no longer get most of their pay if they are laid off but instead receive supplemental pay from the company equal to 50 percent of their gross base pay.

The Chrysler deal almost certainly will be the template for GM, although Young said negotiations with the union had not yet resumed in earnest. In addition, both companies have deals with the Canadian Auto Workers.

If successful, the plan for the government to own a majority of GM's outstanding common shares would wipe out $44 billion of GM's $62.4 billion debt. Bondholders have until May 26 to accept the offer, which is contingent on the deals with the government and the UAW falling into place.

Young said the Treasury Department always expected some of the government debt to be exchanged for GM stock, but the government issued a statement saying it had not decided to do it.

The company still prefers restructuring outside of court, but Henderson acknowledged bankruptcy is more likely now than a few weeks ago.

"The task at hand in terms of what we need to get done is formidable," Henderson said. "But it can be done."

GM said it would speed up six factory closings announced in February and close three additional facilities in 2010. Henderson expects to identify the plants in May and said they will include assembly, engine, transmission and parts-stamping factories.

GM will also cut 21,000 hourly jobs in the U.S. by 2010 -- 7,000 more than what the company outlined just two months ago.

With the factory cuts, GM will be a mere fraction of its old self. At the end of 1991, the company had 304,000 hourly workers in the U.S.; by the end of 2010, it would have 40,000.

Also, General Motors Canada said it plans to slash its hourly work force from 10,300 to 4,400 by 2014. Young said the reduction follows previously announced plant closures.

In addition, GM plans to cut additional U.S. salaried jobs beyond the 3,400 cuts completed last week, and it plans to reduce dealerships 42 percent by 2010.

Mark LaNeve, vice president of North American sales, said many of the 450 dealers to be cut would be dropped with the elimination or sale of the Saturn, Hummer and Saab brands by the end of this year.

GM also said it will end its storied Pontiac brand no later than next year, killing a brand known for muscle cars such as the Trans Am and the GTO.

David Westcott, a Burlington, N.C., Pontiac dealer who also holds Buick, GMC and Suzuki franchises, was saddened, but not surprised.

"The bad thing is they make some great, great products," said Westcott, who has been selling Pontiacs for more than a decade. "But over the last few years, the volume has been decreasing."

Equal Pay Day: April 28

2009-04-28T14:44:00.000-07:00

From: AFL-CIO blog

by James Parks, Apr 28, 2009

April 28 is Equal Pay Day and workers across the country will commemorate the day by reaffirming their determination to make sure women are paid equally as men for the same work. Equal Pay Day symbolizes how far into the year a woman must work, on average, to earn as much as a man earned the previous year.

Equal Pay Day 2009 comes at an exciting time for those who support equal pay for women. President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law on Jan. 29 and established a White House Council on Women and Girls in March. Yet more than 45 years after the Equal Pay Act was signed, women in the United States still earn only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns—even with similar education, skills and experience—and African American and Hispanic women earn even less.

Members of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) will commemorate Equal Pay Day with rallies around the country in support of the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Employee Free Choice Act. CLUW is urging all workers to wear red on Equal Pay Day to symbolize how far women and minorities are “in the red” with their pay!

While the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act ensures workers can seek restitution for unequal pay, the Paycheck Fairness Act, which still needs Senate approval, would update the Equal Pay Act by creating stronger incentives for employers to follow the law, empower women to negotiate for equal pay and strengthen federal outreach and enforcement efforts. It also would close a significant loophole in the Equal Pay Act to allow for full compensation for sex-based wage discrimination. Learn more about the Paycheck Fairness Act here.

Says CLUW President Marsha Zakowski:

Two bills in Congress would dramatically change the economic lives of women. Union women earn, on the average, 32 percent more than unorganized women. The Employee Free Choice Act would allow women and men workers to form unions at their work places without fear of employer intimidation and unlawful firings. The Paycheck Fairness Act would correct wage discrimination.

You can act now to help women workers gain equal pay. Urge your state’s representatives and senators to vote for the Employee Free Choice Act and the Paycheck Fairness Act by calling the U.S. Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121.

You also can download a CLUW fact sheet on The Importance of the Employee Free Choice Act to Women and other materials here.

CLUW also is calling all bloggers to sign up at www.cluw.org to Blog for Fair Pay Day 2009.

The need for the Employee Free Choice Act for women is obvious, CLUW says. Union participation benefits society as a whole because union members earn higher wages and have greater access to health care and pensions. The Employee Free Choice Act ensures that employees have the freedom to form unions and take advantage of these benefits.

A recent study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that for the years 2004-2007, union women were much more likely to have health insurance (75.4 percent) and a pension (75.8 percent) than women workers who were not in unions (50.9 percent for health insurance, 43 percent for pensions).

Equal Pay Day was originated by the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) in 1996 as a public awareness event to illustrate the gap between men’s and women’s wages. The day, observed on a Tuesday in April, symbolizes how far into the year a woman must work, on average, to earn as much as a man earned the previous year. (Tuesday is the day on which women’s wages catch up to men’s wages from the previous week.)

The book Chavez gave Obama

2009-04-27T03:28:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: W. T. Whitney Jr.
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/24/09 16:44

A few national security partisans realize now there’s more to worry about than guns, bombs and rogue states. That would be ideas, and last week, a book. It’s a “really dangerous one that can put the White House at risk,” warned a not-very-serious David Brooks, the Mexican daily La Jornada’s Washington correspondent. He was referring to the book Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave Barack Obama during the recent Summit of the Americas.

“Open Veins of Latin America,” written by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano in 1971, is a famous, superbly written account of 500 years of Latin American distress under colonialism and imperialism. The notable Chilean author Isabel Allende writes that on going into exile following the 1973 Pinochet coup in her country, she took along clothes, family pictures, “a small bag of dirt from my garden, and two books: an old edition of the ‘Odes’ by Pablo Neruda and the book with the yellow cover, ‘Open Veins of Latin America.’”

“That book has a power that scares many,” Brooks notes. One is Otto Reich, former State Department official under Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush. Quoted on Newsmax.com, Reich opined that the presidential staff “should not have put President Obama in that embarrassing situation because this is very much an anti-U.S. book. Anti-Europe as well.” Galeano is “a far-left Latin American, a very unknown author,” he claimed.

For Miami Herald columnist Andrés Oppenheimer, the book is “a diatribe whose underlying theme is that Latin America’s poverty is caused by U.S. imperialism.” And Obama showed misplaced appreciation for the gift “considering that Chávez’ gesture was the equivalent of presenting Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ to an Israeli president.”

Meanwhile, an Air France flight was proceeding from Paris to Mexico City. Writer Hernando Calvo Ospina was on board, citizen of Colombia and resident of France. Calvo Ospina was heading for Nicaragua on behalf of Le Monde Diplomatique. His books include “Bacardi: The Hidden War,” “The Cuban Exile Movement: Dissidents or Mercenaries” and most recently, “Colombia: Laboratorio de Embrujos” (Laboratory of Curses), which analyst James Petras sees as “the most important study of Colombian politics in recent decades.”

Over the North Atlantic, passengers heard the captain’s voice announcing their Mexico City arrival would be delayed five hours, because U.S. air space was off limits. One of their fellow passengers, he explained, “was not welcome because of national security reasons.” Calvo Ospina learned later from the co-pilot he was the offending party.

The airliner took on extra fuel in Martinique. Flight crew members said restrictions on over-flying the United States were new for Air France.

The traveler later caught a flight to Managua, after questioning by immigration officials in Mexico City. Asked about experience with weapons, Calvo Ospina, writing on Rebelion.org, indicated his “only weapon was writing, especially in denouncing the U.S. government which I regarded as terrorist.” His interrogator commented, “That weapon is often worse than rifles and bombs.”

As if in confirmation, Amazon sales rankings of “Open Veins of Latin America” vaulted overnight from number 54,295 to second place.

atwhit @ roadrunner.com

THINK BEFORE YOU DRINK: WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT BACARDI

2009-04-25T20:51:00.000-07:00

link

Rock around the Blockade, which campaigns in solidarity with Cuba, has launched a Boycott Bacardi campaign to highlight the organised attempts by the Bacardi company to undermine the Cuban Revolution – a stance belied by its publicity for its apparently ‘Cuban’ rum.

In advertising its lead brand white rum, Bacardi plays on its Cuban roots, misleading drinkers into believing that Bacardi still has some links with the island. In fact the Bacardi empire is based in the Bahamas and the Bacardi company broke all ties with Cuba after the Revolution of 1959, when its cronies in the hated Batista dictatorship were overthrown by a popular guerrilla movement led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.

Since then the Bacardi company has backed illegal and violent attempts to undermine the Cuban Revolution, including funding the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), a virulently anti-Castro right-wing exile organisation based in Miami, which has been responsible for systematic acts of terrorism against Cuba. Bacardi’s lawyers also helped draft the US Helms-Burton Act, which extends the United States’ blockade of Cuba to third countries, in breach of international trade law. So central was the role of Bacardi’s lawyer, Ignacio E Sanchez (a CANF member) in establishing Helms-Burton that US Senator William Dengue said the law should be renamed the Helms-Bacardi Protection Act.

The Helms-Burton Act was designed to tighten still further the United States blockade of Cuba. The blockade prevents the sale of food, medicines and other essential supplies to Cuba and threatens other countries (including Britain) if they trade with Cuba. It has been estimated that the blockade has cost Cuba over $40 billion in lost production and trade. Every year the US blockade is overwhelmingly condemned by the United Nations.

The blockade is responsible for severe shortages and suffering among the Cuban people. For instance, the prestigious American Association for World Health (AAWH) reported in 1997 that the US blockade is contributing to malnutrition and poor water quality in Cuba and that Cuba is being denied access to drugs and medical equipment which is causing patients, including children, to suffer unnecessary pain and to die needlessly. The AAWH gave examples of a heart attack patient who died because the US government refused a licence for an implantable defibrillator, of Cuban children with leukaemia denied access to new life-prolonging drugs and of children undergoing chemotherapy who, lacking supplies of a nausea-preventing drug, were vomiting on average 28 times a day.

The AAWH concluded that a humanitarian catastrophe had been averted only because the Cuban government has maintained a high priority for a system designed to deliver primary and preventive care to all its citizens. It is worth recording that, despite the effects of the blockade, Cuba last year received a World Health Organisation (WHO) award for meeting all the WHO targets for all countries by the year 2000 – the only country so far to have done so.

This is the humane, socialist system that Bacardi seeks to destroy.

Through its support for the blockade and its funding of CANF, Bacardi shares the responsibility for the suffering imposed on Cuba over the last 40 years by those who refuse to accept the socialist path chosen by the Cuban people. At the beginning of June 1999, the courts of Cuba issued a lawsuit against the US government and its representatives for human damages as a result of aggression perpetrated against Cuba for the last 40 years, based on witness statements and recently declassified US government papers. These crimes include the destruction of ships and civilian aircraft, biological and guerrilla warfare, the firebombing of factories and crops, assassination and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by US-trained mercenary troops in April 1961. The death toll from these activities is set at at least 3,400 Cuban citizens. These are the sort of terrorist acts supported by the Bacardi empire.

Not content with this, Bacardi has now resorted to stealing the Havana Club label. Although the blockade means that Cuban rum cannot be sold in the USA, in 1974 Cubaexport registered the Havana Club trademark there to prevent its use by other companies. The rights to the trademark were bought by the French company Pernod Ricard when it set up a joint venture with Havana Club Holdings in 1994 - in the face of threatening letters from Bacardi.

In 1996, Bacardi started illegally marketing its own Havana Club. Pernod Ricard sued. But, thanks to a section (section 211) hastily tacked onto last year’s US budget after frantic lobbying by Bacardi’s lawyers, Bacardi won. Section 211 arbitrarily stipulates that no court in the USA may recognise or in any way validate any claim regarding trademarks and commercial names related to properties ‘confiscated’ by the Cuban government. Bacardi claims Havana Club uses former Bacardi assets nationalised by Cuba in 1960. Section 211 contravenes international trade law, and Pernod Ricard is taking the case to the World Trade Organisation. As Castro pointed out, ‘I hope no one will now complain if we start marketing a Cuban Coca-Cola.’

Boycott Bacardi!

The Boycott Bacardi campaign launched by Rock around the Blockade will use petitions, protests, leaflets, stickers and direct action to expose the truth behind Bacardi’s ‘Cuban’ image and persuade consumers not to buy Bacardi. People throughout Britain will be asked to pledge not to buy any Bacardi products and pubs, clubs, student bars and shops will be asked not to stock them.

The campaign aims to threaten Bacardi’s profits and force them to get off Cuba’s back. It will build on the success of similar campaigns against other multinational companies involved in inhumane activities, such as that against Nestle for promoting powdered baby milk in underdeveloped countries and that against Shell for its involvement in atrocities committed against the Ogoni people in Nigeria. These campaigns attracted worldwide support and forced the companies involved to reconsider their policies.

Already a number of student bars and pubs have decided to make a stand against Bacardi’s activities by no longer stocking Bacardi and replacing it with Havana Club, a genuine Cuban rum whose sales bring much-needed hard currency into the Cuban economy. The challenge from Havana Club worldwide has left Bacardi sales down an estimated $25 million since 1990.

Don’t drink Bacardi – it’ll leave a bad taste in your mouth!

For further information contact Rock around the Blockade
c/o FRFI, BCM Box 5909, London WC1N 3XX

Tel: 020 7837 1688 Fax: 020 7837 1743
e-mail: rcgfrfi@easynet.co.uk

New moves by administration seen as step toward bank nationalization

2009-04-25T20:25:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/20/09 13:15

In a major change of course, Obama administration officials are saying they don’t have to ask Congress to add money to the Bush administration’s bank bailout and that they can convert the government’s existing loans into common stock. Although the move would turn federal bailout money already handed out into available capital for the banks, it would give the government a major ownership stake in the nation’s largest 19 banks.

Some Republicans are already complaining that the move will make the government the largest shareholder in several banks and that it is really just a back door to nationalization. Others are saying the administration is making the move because it is unwilling to ask Congress for more money when mass opposition to bank bailouts is so high.

In the next few weeks federal bank regulators will finish the so-called stress tests they are conducting on the nation’s largest 19 banks. Several major banks, including Bank of America, are expected to fail those tests with results showing that they need billions. Under the administration’s new approach the “stress” would be relieved, not by pumping in more federal tax dollars, but by changing existing loans to common stock.

Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, said, on a television news program Sunday, that the government had enough money to shore up the banks without asking Congress for any additional money. He did not elaborate further. The shift in administration strategy announced today clarifies his statement.

The 19 big banks have received more than $140 billion from the government, and all of that has been in exchange for nonvoting preferred shares that pay an annual interest rate of 5 percent.

The Obama administration already decided in January in its deal with Citibank what it is now prepared to do with more of the big 19 banks. The Citibank deal would convert $25 billion of preferred stock, in effect, a loan, into common stock, which represents equity for taxpayers.

After doing this, the government would hold 36 percent of Citigroup’s common shares, making it the largest shareholder and bringing it close to having nationalized a major bank.

If the common stock deal is done with all the other large banks that don’t perform well on the stress tests, the government could end up with the controlling interest in several major banks.

Republicans can’t be happy about the Obama administration’s apparent ability to gain so much political space on this issue. Some Republicans could hardly conceal their glee over what they expected would be a tough struggle for the administration in Congress, where Democratic leaders had warned that they would not be able to muster votes in support of more bailout money for financial institutions that had precipitated the economic crisis.

The Republicans are even less happy that there appears to be more support for steps that go in the direction of nationalization than there is for either the approach of more tax cuts for big business or for the approach, as some Republicans have advocated, of doing nothing about the economic and financial crises.

The labor movement has been, since the AFL-CIO’s January executive council meeting in Miami, calling upon the Obama administration to get some control over the institutions bailed out by taxpayers with measures up to and including nationalization.

If anything, labor can be expected to continue “upping the ante” by putting forward additional bold solutions for the nation’s economic problems. Author and economist William Greider, speaking to a crowd of 200 at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington D.C. April 17, said “It’s time for labor to dream bigger dreams” and that “our current economic crisis runs deeper than just the financial meltdown.” He urged workers and their unions to “jump into the discussion of the nation’s future in a large way. It is time for the union movement to lay down the markers and tell Congress, including the Democrats and the White House, that when they meet the marks, we are with them and when they won’t, we can’t support them. The ongoing economic meltdown demonstrates what working people have been saying for years – an economy built on what’s good for Big Business is not good for the country as a whole.”

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker, in her introduction of Greider, quoted from one of his books: “Our problem was made in America, not in foreign nations…defending society means not being willing to throw people over the side. Profit making is important, but it should not trump society.”

The Problem of Transition: Development, Socialism and Lenin's NEP

2009-04-24T14:18:00.000-07:00

From: Political Affairs Online

By C.J. Atkins

Editor's note: This article is excerpted from a larger thesis by Atkins titled, "Competing Agendas: Class Struggle, the Chinese State and the World Economy."

Socialism can be defined as a phase of social-economic development during which ever-larger numbers of people in society are increasingly empowered to collectively control the direction of their lives through the process of incrementally crafting new democratic means of ownership and institutions for running the economy and other areas of social life. It is a society in which surplus labor is shifted away from individual, private profit toward allocation based on social needs and the public good, thus moving toward the resolution of the contradictions of capitalist social relations.

But socialism is not just democracy and collectivity for their own sake; it is not simply a project for spiritual freedom or equalitarian psychological satisfaction. It is also very much about ensuring ever-rising standards of living and material security to the members of society as a whole. In other words, egalitarianism is a laudable goal, but only if society actually has the material resources to give it substance. There must exist the capability to produce a sufficient economic surplus to satisfy the ever-growing needs of society. And that surplus has to be produced in a manner that is efficient in the employment of natural resources and productive forces (means of production and labor power) and which supplies use values in accordance with the social and economically realistic need for them – a point on which too often the existing socialist countries fell short. A "socialist" system of common poverty, shared underdevelopment or wastefulness is not something to strive for.

While definitions of socialism are of course not blueprints to be drafted in advance with all the details predetermined, there are a few basic aspects that can be delineated. Socialism, as a socio-economic system succeeding capitalism, would be characterized by the social ownership and control of the decisive sectors of an economy, such as the most important industrial firms, the banks and financial institutions, the energy and natural resources industries, health care and social services, and probably much of the national distribution/transportation system. Democratization of the workplace would be central to gradually altering the exploitative relations which characterize the capitalist enterprise, making it possible to begin to develop in practice a new kind of economy in which those who create value have more meaningful collective control over their conditions of work and the disposition of that surplus value through social control of investment. As socialism becomes consolidated, services such as health care, education through university level, the ending of illiteracy, malnutrition, and unemployment would be priorities if they had not already been achieved. Social ownership would not necessarily be straight-jacketed into the two simple categories of "state property" and "collective property," as was the distinction made in Soviet political economy. Ownership could conceivably take various forms depending on the goals of planned production and social needs: public or state ownership at various levels, publicly-invested and controlled enterprises, cooperative/collective and joint ownership forms, and likely some role for private ownership in certain businesses or industries for at least some length of time. The exact forms of ownership cannot accurately be predicted beforehand. Rather, they have to be crafted in the course of political development and in line with the needs of a balanced economy and sustainability. The political system would be one in which the interests of the working class of a society are the dominant, but not necessarily the only, political force. State institutions may vary temporally and geographically and be characterized by long periods of flux as the political and economic tasks change. The governing party or coalition would be subject to regular elections and the necessity of constantly winning anew its popular mandate. As Wu Yiching reminds us, “socialism without meaningful democracy is unfeasible.”

The definition of socialism given above, prefaced as it is as a period successive to capitalism, implies the pre-existence of highly-developed productive forces and the means of common prosperity – or at the very least access to them from other countries or economies. While it may be true that high levels of human development (social, economic, and cultural) have been achieved by the socialist countries with low levels of income in the past, the reality is that in order to prevent stagnation and promote further development, a modern industrial foundation has proven a necessity.

Looking at the first attempt at building socialism in the Soviet Union after the 1917 revolution and how it came up against a wall of economic underdevelopment can provide an insight into some of the challenges which many underdeveloped countries find themselves facing today. For example, many today dismiss China’s economic reform as a return to capitalism. Lenin and the Bolsheviks, however, also faced criticism during the early years of Soviet power for the course of their economic program. Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) was often characterized, both outside and inside the Communist movement, as an abandonment of socialism and Marxist ideology. It seems to be the case that any recognition of the aforementioned fundamentals of historical materialism and practical policy which ensues from them (whether in Moscow in 1921 or Beijing in 1978) will inevitably give rise to the charge of heresy in certain sectors.

In the early years of the Russian Revolution, Lenin understood the underdeveloped position of Soviet Russia and was aware of the difficulty of constructing socialism under the kind of conditions which Marx and Engels had believed ill-suited to its success. Initially, he still believed that revolution would break out in one or more industrialized capitalist countries and that they would then assist Russia. “Soon,” he said, “after the victory of the proletarian revolution in at least one of the advanced countries, a sharp change will come about. Russia will cease to be the model and will once again become a backward country.” When such assistance ultimately failed to materialize, Lenin was forced to look for new ways to build up Russia’s productive forces in order to lay the ground for an eventual socialist transformation. He concluded that there could be no successful advance to socialist relations of production without highly-developed productive forces to sustain socialist methods of distribution and went about formulating a pragmatic response. Addressing the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party in March of 1921, on the necessity of cooperation with foreign and domestic capitalist elements, Lenin stated, “We are now in a transitional stage, and our revolution is surrounded by capitalist countries. As long as we are in this phase, we are forced to seek highly complex forms of relationships.”

A component of these “highly complex forms of relationships,” of course, was the institution of market methods of distribution in first the agricultural, and later other, sectors of the economy. In further remarks to the Congress, Lenin assured delegates that the gravest problem in the immediate period was not the policy of concessions to capitalism as some, particularly those on the left, warned. Rather, it was the very low level of productive forces that threatened the survival of the October Revolution: “We must not be afraid of the growth of the petty bourgeoisie and small capital. What we must fear is protracted starvation, want and food shortage, which create the danger that the proletariat will give way to petty-bourgeois vacillation and despair.” Many of Lenin’s writings from the early 1920s demonstrate that he gradually came to the conclusion that in a predominantly peasant country with low levels of productive forces, education, and culture there could be no leap to socialist or communist lines of production or distribution. He began to see that the rapid nationalizations and high hopes for broad planning in the economy that had characterized the early years had gone “too far, too fast.” Instead, the transition would have to take place in stages. These kinds of measures were intended to build up the material-technical foundations for socialism that Marx and Engels had envisioned being already developed by capitalism in advanced industrial societies, where they had foreseen the first socialist revolutions taking place. The proletarian revolution, as we have seen, was expected to occur in the most technologically and economically advanced capitalist countries because of the development of a large industrial working class and the acute contradictions of advanced capitalist relations of production which would serve as the catalyst for raising class consciousness.

The victory of socialist revolutions in poor, underdeveloped, and usually agrarian countries of course presented a new challenge; once working class-based parties succeeded in capturing state power, they were confronted with the task of trying to develop socialism in economies that were in no way prepared to support it. Lenin and the Soviet Communists were the first to face the real-life situation of building a socialist system on an underdeveloped base.

Shortly after the victory of the October Revolution, Soviet Russia became embroiled in a civil war and came under attack by interventionist armies from fourteen nations, among them the United States, Britain, Canada, France and Japan. Under these conditions, with food and industrial shortages plaguing the country, a harsh system of surplus extraction from the peasants was introduced and wages were leveled – the policy of "war communism." Almost all industrial enterprises were seized and production was carried on under a strict command basis. Money and markets were, for all practical purpose, eliminated in every area of the economy. Some among the Bolsheviks believed that war communism was not just a time of intense struggle and difficulty, but that it actually represented the beginnings of true socialism and communism – the fulfillment of the revolution’s purpose. Others, like Trotsky, saw such measures as an unavoidable result of the particular situation the Bolshevik government found itself in and not the preferred method of building socialism. With domestic counterrevolutionary forces attempting to make a comeback at precisely the moment of an outside military attack, the Soviet government was not in a position to go about following any preplanned theoretical models. Writing in 1920, he said:

Once having taken power, it is impossible to accept one set of consequences at will and refuse to accept others. If the capitalist bourgeoisie consciously and malignantly transforms the disorganization of production into a political struggle, with the object of restoring power to itself, the proletariat is obliged to resort to socialization, independently of whether this is beneficial or otherwise at the given moment.

After the civil war was won by the Red Army and the foreign interventionists were pushed out of the country, the Soviet economy was in ruins. The productive capacity of the nation had dwindled; agriculture was below even pre-1914 levels. The working class which the party had purported to represent was decimated, leaving only the party itself and the old state bureaucracy to pick up the pieces. Peasant farming was now an even more dominant part of the economy, but it was in need of industrial products which the state was unable to provide. There was an urgent need to raise capital and jumpstart the development of the productive forces if the country was to survive. After these few years of immense difficulty, Lenin proposed what has recently been described as a “socialist market economy in embryonic form.”

In 1921, he introduced the NEP to replace the extreme measures of war communism, “with which,” in his words, the country had been “saddled by the imperative conditions of wartime.” The NEP allowed limited denationalization, foreign-domestic joint ventures, some foreign-owned enterprises, cooperatives running on market principles, and the use of economic administrators who had been trained in capitalist management methods. Many of these administrators came from the former bureaucracy and managerial strata who had been removed from their positions shortly after the revolution but were now the only ones with the knowledge and expertise to run the national economy. The remaining state-owned enterprises, which for the most part would now only occupy the commanding heights of the economy, had to be self-reliant and operate on profit/loss principles. The commanding heights referred to the lifeline sectors of the economy, such as energy, transport, finance/banking, and steel – those sectors that effectively control or support most other areas of the economy. Under the NEP, the state still formulated an overall plan for the economy, but it was achieved primarily through market, not administrative, means. Production of individual goods and services would be based on supply and demand, not on the decree of a central planning authority. Economic competition defined relations between public and private sectors. Of primary importance in this competition was which sector would win out. Addressing the Second Congress of Political Education Departments in the fall of 1921, Lenin stated the matter bluntly:

We must face this issue squarely – who will come out on top? Either the capitalists will succeed… Or the proletarian state power, with the support of the peasantry, will prove capable of keeping a proper reign on these gentlemen, the capitalists… The question must be put soberly.

Lenin admitted that such an arrangement was not the kind of socialism the Bolsheviks had earlier had in mind. “Retreat is a difficult matter, especially for revolutionaries who are accustomed to advance.” He realized, however, that market relations and a commodity economy were necessary until the capacity and infrastructure of a fully socialized economy could be constructed and secured. This was a task which he foresaw encompassing years, even decades of transition. Nove has pointed out that Lenin believed “the new policy was to be carried through 'seriously and for a long time.'" Lenin spent much time trying to explain what the NEP was and why it was an absolute necessity:

What is free exchange? It is unrestricted trade, and that means turning back towards capitalism… How then can the Communist Party recognize freedom to trade and accept it? Does not the proposition contain irreconcilable contradictions? The answer is that the practical solution of the problem naturally presents exceedingly great difficulties. How this is to be done, practice will show.

And,

Since the state cannot provide the peasant with goods from socialist factories in exchange for all his surplus, freedom to trade with this surplus necessarily means freedom for the development of capitalism. Within the limits indicated, however, this is not at all dangerous for socialism as long as transport and large-scale industry remain in the hands of the proletariat.

The development of such a form of capitalism controlled and regulated by the state, which Lenin time and again referred to as "state capitalism," if directed carefully by a socialist state, would be not only advantageous, but even necessary, especially in an underdeveloped country.

The NEP, though, was effectively ended by the latter half of the 1920s, for reasons both political and economic. In the years following Lenin’s death, Joseph Stalin had positioned himself as a moderate and a centrist among the party leadership, always promoting himself as a faithful disciple of Lenin. Early on, he allied himself with Bukharin in advocating pro-peasant policies and the extension of the NEP. As long as the NEP approach seemed to be working in its efforts to revive agriculture and industry, Stalin criticized proposals by Trotsky and others for increased investments in heavy industry as well as those by E. Preobrazhensky for a "primitive socialist accumulation" of squeezing the private peasants for the sake of industry. Portraying himself as the pragmatist, he progressively undercut support for Trotsky and his other opponents. Whenever the NEP started to experience imbalances and industrial development reached a plateau, however, Stalin rapidly swung to the left, adopted those same policies he criticized when Trotsky and the others had proposed them, and dumped his erstwhile ally Bukharin. Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International, had been a critic of the NEP as well as of Stalin and Bukharin’s plan to build "socialism in one country." When Stalin decided to drop the NEP but not "socialism in one country," Zinoviev had to go as well. Within a matter of a few short years, Stalin was able to successfully move from one policy position to another in accordance with the needs of the moment while simultaneously eliminating (first politically and later physically) all other party leaders from any positions of authority.

In his power struggles with these other party leaders, Stalin began to argue that the concessionary measures of Lenin’s NEP were intended only to be of the most temporary nature, not guiding developmental policy. He accused those who wanted to continue the NEP or extend it to more areas of the economy, like Bukharin, of wanting to restore capitalism and of spreading a “most harmful, anti-Leninist interpretation of NEP.” This was one of the earliest occasions in which those who followed Lenin’s ideas were branded "anti-Leninist," a hallmark charge of the Stalin era. There was now to be only one recognized successor to the cause of "Leninism." Trotsky and other critics were denounced as a "petty bourgeois opposition" and faced either exile or execution. Trotsky himself would eventually suffer both.

Instead of continuing to build up the productive forces under the auspices of the NEP, Stalin pushed the Party to opt for forced collectivization of agriculture and complete state or cooperative ownership of all other means of production in line with rapid industrialization under the first five-year plan – the same "leftist" line he had spent much of the twenties arguing against with Bukharin by his side. The Fifteenth Soviet Party Congress was convened in December 1927, and at Stalin’s urging decided that “with respect to the elements of private capitalist economy which have increased absolutely…a policy of even more squeezing out can and must be pursued.” This marked the beginning of a particular stream of ultra-leftist thought which branded the market as eternally incompatible with socialism and christened the comprehensive plan and total public ownership as the necessary and sufficient conditions for building a socialist system.

1,500 Indian farmers commit mass suicide: Why we are complicit in these deaths

2009-04-19T18:54:00.000-07:00

(Reposted from www.alternet.org)

The headline has been hard to ignore. Across the world press, news media have announced that over 1,500 farmers in the Indian state of Chattisgarh committed suicide. The motive has been blamed on farmers being crippled by overwhelming debt in the face of crop failure.

The UK Independent reported:

The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.

"The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago," Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine.

"Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well."

While many may have been shocked by these deaths, farmer suicides in India, and increasingly across the world, are not new.

In the last ten years, the problem has been reaching epidemic proportions. In one region of India alone 1,300 cotton farmers took their own lives in 2006, but the culprit cannot rest solely on a falling water table.

As the Independent article continues:

Bharatendu Prakash, from the Organic Farming Association of India, told the Press Association: "Farmers' suicides are increasing due to a vicious circle created by money lenders. They lure farmers to take money but when the crops fail, they are left with no option other than death."

But there's more to the story than that. Farmer suicides can be attributed to, "something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops," the UK's Daily Mail reports.

Shankara, like millions of other Indian farmers, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if he switched from farming with traditional seeds to planting GM seeds instead.

Beguiled by the promise of future riches, he borrowed money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, he was left with spiraling debts -- and no income.

So Shankara became one of an estimated 125,000 farmers to take their own life as a result of the ruthless drive to use India as a testing ground for genetically modified crops.

And no company has been as notorious in the business as the U.S. agra-giant Monsanto. As Nancy Scola explained in a piece for AlterNet:

Here's the way it works in India. In the central region of Vidarbha, for example, Monsanto salesmen travel from village to village touting the tremendous, game-changing benefits of Bt cotton, Monsanto's genetically modified seed sold in India under the Bollgard® label. The salesmen tell farmers of the amazing yields other Vidarbha growers have enjoyed while using their products, plastering villages with posters detailing "True Stories of Farmers Who Have Sown Bt Cotton." Old-fashioned cotton seeds pale in comparison to Monsanto's patented wonder seeds, say the salesmen, as much as an average old steer is humbled by a fine Jersey cow.

Part of the trick to Bt cotton's remarkable promise, say the salesmen, is that Bollgard® was genetically engineered in the lab to contain bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterium that the company claims drastically reduces the need for pesticides. When pesticides are needed, Bt cotton plants are Roundup® Ready -- a Monsanto designation meaning that the plants can be drowned in the company's signature herbicide, none the worse for wear. (Roundup® mercilessly kills nonengineered plants.)

Sounds great, right? The catch is that Bollgard® and Roundup® cost real money. And so Vidarbha's farmers, somewhat desperate to grow the anemic profit margin that comes with raising cotton in that dry and dusty region, have rushed to both banks and local moneylenders to secure the cash needed to get on board with Monsanto. Of a $3,000 bank loan a Vidarbha farmer might take out, as much as half might go to purchasing a growing season's worth of Bt seeds.

And the same goes the next season, and the next season after that. In traditional agricultural, farmers can recycle seeds from one harvest to plant the next, or swap seeds with their neighbors at little or no cost. But when it comes to engineered seeds like Bt cotton, Monsanto owns the tiny speck of intellectual property inside each hull, and thus controls the patent. And a farmer wishing to reuse seeds from a Monsanto plant must pay to relicense them from the company each and every growing season.

The cycle of debt continues into a downward spiral. And to be sure, water problems are adding to the crisis. In this most recent instance dam construction nearby was a significant contributor. While changes in water availability may be the jumping point for some farmers in India, it has been the globalization model of agriculture hyped by companies like Monsanto and Cargill that have led farmers to the cliff in the first place.

As renown physicist and anti-globalization activist Vandana Shiva (who has also fought against big dam construction) said in an interview with Democracy Now! in 2006:

A few weeks ago, I was in Punjab. 2,800 widows of farmer suicides who have lost their land, are having to bring up children as landless workers on others' land. And yet, the system does not respond to it, because there's only one response: get Monsanto out of the seed sector--they are part of this genocide -- and ensure WTO rules are not bringing down the prices of agricultural produce in the United States, in Canada, in India, and allow trade to be honest. I don't think we need to talk about free trade and fair trade. We need to talk about honest trade. Today's trade system, especially in agriculture, is dishonest, and dishonesty has become a war against farmers. It's become a genocide.

The recent mass suicide in India should be a wake up call to the rest of the world. The industrial agriculture model is literally killing our farmers.

YCL Weekly Update

2009-04-19T18:47:00.001-07:00

I. In The News: 'Pirates' Strike a U.S. Ship Owned by a Pentagon Contractor, But Is the Media Telling the Whole Story?

II. Mass Action: Tell Congress to put Education Before Profits

III. YCL College Call

IV. Montana YCLers hold House Parties for EFCA

I. In The News: 'Pirates' Strike a U.S. Ship Owned by a Pentagon Contractor, But Is the Media Telling the Whole Story?

By Jeremy Scahill

"Coverage of the pirates is similar to the false narrative about "tribalism" being the cause of all of Africa's problems. Of course, there are straight-up gangsters and criminals engaged in these hijackings. Perhaps the pirates who hijacked the Alabama on Wednesday fall into that category. We do not yet know. But that is hardly the whole "pirate" story."

To read the whole story visit Alternet's website.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

1. Do you think the pirates were justified in taking over the ship?

2. Do you think the pirates that took over the ship were interested in addressing the larger issues of unregulated fishing and the dumping of toxic waste?

3. What actions could Obama take to address the issue of piracy off the coast of Somalia?

II. Mass Action: Tell Congress to put Education Before Profits

Over a month ago President Obama addressed the nation and proposed some of the firmest commitments to education we've seen in a generations. His bold plan promised all of us that the government would permanently fund the Pell Grant programs so that anyone who wanted to go to college and needed help paying for it would be able to get the support they needed without taking out bad loans that would put them into decades of debt.

Today the private loan companies came out of the shadows to tell Congress they must choose between investing in America's future or funding the private loan companies.

Our country shouldn't be forced to choose between the Pell Grant and funding the private loan companies- WE NEED TO INVEST IN EDUCATION in order to rebuild America's economy and our future.

Sign the petition from the United States Student Association (USSA) and Studetnt Labor Action Project (SLAP) telling your Congressperson and Senators to invest to put our education before the profits of private loan companies.

III. YCL College Call

Our next YCL College Call will be next Thursday April 23rd. Get updates from the Unites States Student Association (USSA) on upcoming legislative and national actions impacting students, discuss what is happening on campuses across the country with other YCLers, and get new ideas to build a club on your campus.

If you are interested in attending the call, email Ursula at ursula@yclusa.org

IV. Montana YCLers hold House Parties for EFCA

The YCL in Butte, Montana held an EFCA letter-writing house party (complete with red-frosted communist sugar cookies with hammer and sickles, and course, Lenin-lime punch!) this week that brought youth and students together to urge their Senators to support EFCA. After writing personal letters at the party, they drafted an open letter and spent the day tabling at Montana Tech and gather over 40 signatures from students on campus.

At 4 o'clock they took their packets of letters to the Senators' local offices. The United Students Against Sweatshops club at the University of Montana in Missoula coordinated with them and took theirs in at the same time. The Senators weren't in but their staff at the offices were really stoked to see and hear from young people getting active for the Employee Free Choice Act.

"I'm really excited about how things turned out. It seemed like just about everyone we approached was really cool with what we were doing, and we made a few new friends that are down with the what our YCL Club is doing. I don't know if they'll turn out to be YCLers, but I know I can count on them to help us out and come to our future events. I'm still really stoked, I feel like we might have really made an impact and at the same time got our YCL club into the public and made some new connections," said club member Jesse Jack.

Wowza, New CEO Pay Numbers‏

2009-04-17T15:26:00.000-07:00

Dear Peter,

Do Something
About It

Just as passing the Employee Free Choice Act is central to securing the economic future of America's working families, so is ensuring that our financial markets are regulated.

Take action today and tell Rep Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), chairs of the House Finance Committee and the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, that we're counting on them to draft legislation that truly strengthens our financial regulations and begins curing the disease that has infected our economic system.

In 2008, CEOs and other executives responsible for our current financial crisis pocketed millions of dollars from bonuses and golden parachutes, while our government spent billions of our dollars bailing out their companies.

Vikram S. Pandit, CEO of Citigroup Inc., received more than $38 million in total compensation in 2008, the same year his company took $50 billion in U.S. taxpayer money.

To shed light on executive pay, the AFL-CIO released Executive PayWatch 2009 earlier today. In this report, we learn that CEO perks alone grew in 2008 to an average of $336,248—or nine times the median salary of a full-time worker.

This comprehensive report includes much more information, including:

Detailed CEO compensation data for some of the country's largest companies.
Tools that allow you to compare your pay to the CEOs.
Close-up case studies focusing on 10 executive compensation practices that define a broken system that leaves the American taxpayer holding the bag.
The anatomy of a double standard: Executives enjoy job and retirement security while fighting the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow workers to form unions and bargain for basic security.
Action for you to take to put balance back into our economy.
Boot the CEO, a satisfying online game.

Outrageous executive pay is a symptom of a disease that has infected our entire economic system. It is a disease of greed and corruption made worse by the Bush administration’s obsession with further deregulating Wall Street and ideological aversion to oversight and accountability in our financial system.

Check out Executive PayWatch 2009 today and pass it around to your family and friends. It’s time to shed light on outrageous executive compensation, particularly while America’s working families are bearing the brunt of the worst economic crisis in our country since the Great Depression.

In Solidarity,

Marc Laitin
AFL-CIO Online Mobilization Coordinator

P.S. Mad about overpaid CEOs? So are we. The most important thing to do right now to curb executive pay is to fix our broken financial system by regulating our financial markets. Tell your representatives to draft legislation that truly strengthens our financial regulations and begins curing the disease that has infected our economic system.

Michigan ACLU Update

2009-04-17T15:25:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times editorial features the ACLU of Michigan and the increasing practice of throwing poor people in jail because they're poor. The Times discusses our case on behalf of Edwina Nowlin, a resident of Escanaba, who was sentenced to 30 days in jail for being poor. Ms. Nowlin couldn't afford to reimburse the state for her son's stay in a juvenile detention facility; the fact that Ms. Nowlin had lost her job and was homeless didn't matter to the judge.

Unfortunately, Edwina Nowlin is just one of many Michigan residents who have found themselves sentenced to jail or kept in the system because they are too poor to get out.

For years, David Sutton's probation was extended because he could not afford his court supervision fees.

In 2003, Mr. Sutton, from Detroit, had fulfilled all the conditions of his one-year probation, including community service. But with a $262 monthly disability check as his only source of income, he was unable to pay the supervision fee. Consequently, a Wayne County Circuit Court judge extended Mr. Sutton's probation year after year. In February 2009, we successfully represented Mr. Sutton at a hearing where the state had once again moved to continue his probation.

You can help us fight the re-emergence of debtor's prisons with two actions:

Spread the word about these cases by forwarding this e-mail or link to our press release on your Facebook or Twitter account. The ACLU suspects that many more low-income people in Michigan are being kept in jail because of their poverty but may not know they can call on us for help. Making sure your friends, family and colleagues know about these stories and asking them to spread the word is an important first step in protecting the rights of poor people.
Make a donation of any amount to the ACLU of Michigan to keep us strong and able to respond to these cases wherever they take place across the state. If you're not a member, join us. Visit our website here to make a tax-deductible contribution or become a member.

For the last fifty years, the ACLU of Michigan has worked to protect the fundamental rights of all Michigan residents, rich or poor. Help us continue to fight for freedom today.

Thank you for all you do,

Kary Moss
Executive Director

Thousands rally for public takeover of big banks

2009-04-14T22:06:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Tim Wheeler
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/13/09 17:25

Thousands of protests staged 60 rallies and vigils across the nation, April 11, to demand nationalization of the banks, many still insolvent despite hundreds of billions in taxpayer bailouts.

The actions were organized by the online group A New Way Forward (ANWF) that signed up 11,000 supporters in just three-and-a-half weeks to demand a public takeover of the crisis-wracked financial system.

It included 100 people standing in the pouring rain in New York City’s Union Square, 300 in Portland, Oregon, and 400 in Los Angeles. A group who had met online staged a vigil at a street corner in Anchorage, Alaska. In Raleigh, N.C. 200 people put on a “nest egg hunt” in observance of Easter and in solidarity with millions of retirees whose nest eggs have been stolen.

The protests demanded, “temporary bank nationalization and structural reform including a new decentralized banking system where no bank can ever again become too big to fail,” said an email sent out by ANWF.

Tiffany Cheng, and a friend, Donny Shaw, both technologists and bloggers in Massachusetts initiated AWNF out of frustration that the Obama administration and Congress continue to pour hundreds of billions into the coffers of bankers who created the problem with no signs that it has restored the flow of credit or stabilized the economy.

“People of all races and backgrounds joined in the April 11 protests who had thought about the bailouts and were angry,” Cheng (email address info@joetrippi.com) told the World in a phone interview. “These are people who want to learn more about solutions. We’re not seeing policies coming out of the White House that are actually going to help us get out of this crisis. The main thing we want to point out is that the bankers are becoming the middle-men between us and this crisis. We need to own-up to this crisis and deal with it head-on. Stop feeding the bankers, the middle-men.”

Cheng said Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, deeply influenced ANWF with his open advocacy of nationalizing the banks. Joseph Stiglitz, former Senior Vice President of the World Bank has also advocated public takeover of the banks as the only solution.

Polls show that 94 percent of the people disapprove of the current bail-out plans while another poll shows that 50 percent favor temporary nationalization of the banks. “So we have the job ahead of us of talking to each other about sound solutions we can all believe in,” Cheng said. “We are calling on everyone to talk with five people every week about the economy and about nationalizing the banks.”

ANWF is planning four or five large panel discussions across the country on the topic “What is Nationalization?”

There is some evidence that the Obama administration, itself, is divided on the way forward to solve the crisis with some, especially Obama’s political advisers at odds with the President’s financial advisers on the issue of a public takeover of the banks.

“It does seem like there is a possibility that (nationalization) might be the next step,” she continued. “As long as the bankers are so influential, the chances of pursuing a policy that is actually beneficial to the people is low. We have to let President Obama know, ‘We are here to support you in these policies. We’ve got your back.’ We need to pursue economic and financial policies that will enable all people to prosper, not just the bankers.” That, she said, is the goal of bank nationalization.

greenerpastures21212@yahoo.com

National unions form coordinating committee; AFL-CIO president announces retirement plans

2009-04-14T20:57:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Mark Gruenberg
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/13/09 09:09

WASHINGTON (PAI) AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney formally told top leaders of the federation that he will retire at the AFL-CIO Convention in September. At the same time, Sweeney, Change To Win leaders and National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel announced creation of the National Labor Coordinating Committee, a group of presidents of the nation’s 12 largest unions.

In arrangements worked out by American Rights At Work President David Bonior, the committee is the first concrete step towards reunifying the labor movement all under one roof. And that includes the 3.2-million-member NEA, which is both unaligned with either labor federation and the nation’s largest union.

Sweeney’s retirement was expected. The former Service Employees president, who will turn 75 in May 5, has led the now-56-union group since 1995, when his slate ousted incumbent Tom Donohue, who took over from Lane Kirkland months before.

Sweeney’s departure also comes at a key time for labor: Workers played a top role in electing pro-worker Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama to the White House and increasing pro-worker ranks in the Democratic-run Congress.

Increased political activism and mobilization, to enhance the chances of pro-worker legislation in Congress and nationwide, was and is a top Sweeney cause. The results were that unionists and their families were more than one-fifth of the electorate in 2008, almost double the share (12.4%) of union members in the workforce.

But even as Sweeney leaves, problems remain:

* Labor is still split. One of the leading events of Sweeney’s 14 years at the federation’s helm was the 2005 withdrawal of seven unions -- the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Teamsters, the Laborers, SEIU, UNITE HERE, the Carpenters and the United Farm Workers -- to form Change To Win. CTW wanted more emphasis on organizing and less on politics, but it has joined the AFL-CIO’s political efforts. The new coordinating committee is the first step to heal the split.

But Change To Win has its own problems: UNITE HERE has divided and a majority of its board voted to talk with Sweeney on re-affiliation with the AFL-CIO. UNITE HERE also charged SEIU was trying to take it over. SEIU has an internal battle with its biggest West Coast local. The Laborers, while not back in the AFL-CIO yet, are half-in, half-out, as members of its Building and Construction Trades Department.

* The Employee Free Choice Act, labor’s #1 legislative priority, which Obama supports and pledged to sign, faces a planned GOP Senate filibuster. It has yet to get the 60 committed senators it needs to break a fatal talkathon. A key senator, past co-sponsor Arlen Specter, R-Pa., defected under pressure from business and his party’s Radical Right, which wants to beat him in a primary next year. Several Democrats, notably Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., have drifted away.

The bill would help level the playing field between workers and bosses in organizing and bargaining, by writing into law that workers -- not employers -- get to choose how they want their union recognized: Through an NLRB-run election or through the agency’s verification that the union collected authorization cards from a majority of employees at a worksite.

The bill would also increase penalties for labor law-breakers and mandate binding arbitration for a first contract if the two sides can’t agree within 120 days of starting bargaining. The Executive Committee spent part of its Meany Center session discussing the proposal’s prospects and labor’s nationwide campaign for it.

* Even without the CTW unions, the number of members in AFL-CIO-affiliated unions declined by a net of 43,326 from 2007 to 2008, and by 139,474 from 2003 to 2008, the federation’s own figures show.

That decline in turn has hurt the AFL-CIO’s finances, which depend on remittances -- calculated on a per-member basis -- from its 56 member unions, plus payments from its affinity credit card. The federation asked for voluntary contributions last year to pay for the big political push, but the payments fell short of goals.

* Successorship questions. Until Sweeney ousted Donohue at the 1995 convention in New York City, AFL-CIO presidents were often succeeded by their #2 officers, the secretary-treasurers. Current Secretary-Treasurer Richard L. Trumka, a former Mine Workers president, is a leading candidate to succeed Sweeney. But at least one CTW union that might return to the AFL-CIO would not do so if Trumka is in the top job. And other names have been floated for Sweeney’s post.

* Structure. Any new, unified labor federation must figure out its structure -- the consensus-based but sometimes-slow AFL-CIO, the leaner top-down CTW, or a mix of both. And it must figure out what to emphasize and what to leave to member unions.

A first for N. America: A union contract at Wal-Mart

2009-04-14T20:56:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Special to the World
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/13/09 17:36

Canadian workers at the Wal-Mart store in Saint-Hyacinthe, Québec became the only Wal-Mart employees in North America to be covered by a union contract when an arbitrator April 8 ruled in their favor more than four years after they voted to certify the United Food and Commercial Workers as their union.

People in the labor movement are keeping a close eye on the situation since the retail giant has a history of continuing to fight unionization efforts even long after workers win a battle for union representation. The company has closed entire stores in order to avoid having to deal with unions.

Andrew Pelletier, vice president of corporate affairs for Wal-Mart Canada said he couldn’t speculate on any store’s economic future, when asked about whether the Saint-Hyacinthe store would close. “We’ll have to see,” Pelletier said, “Our objective has always been to run a viable store in Saint-Hyacinthe.”

Pro-labor support groups are cheering the ruling in favor of the workers.

“We’re glad to see that these employees finally have a union contract,” said Meghan Scott, director of WakeUpWalmart.com. “They voted to be represented by a union, and that choice should be respected. After nearly four years of legal stalling by Wal-Mart, the employees at this store finally have a voice on the job.”

The support group is warning, however, that workers can expect Wal-Mart to resort to its usual anti-union tactics. “While this is a victory for the workers,” the group said, “it looks like Wal-Mart will use the same old dirty tricks to avoid treating the workers fairly.

“Wal-Mart has a history of simply shutting down stores when its workers win union representation.” The retail giant already shut down an auto shop in Gatineau and an entire store in Jonquiere when workers at those locations voted for union representation.

Union supporters believe that Pelletier’s comments leave open the door to a similar shut-down scenario in Saint-Hyacinthe.

Wake Up Walmart said, “Closing the store down would mean employees there would not just lose a rightful voice in the workplace, it would mean they’d lose their jobs. Walmart cannot be allowed to fire hundreds of employees because they voted for union representation.

“We hope Wal-Mart keeps the Saint-Hyacinthe store open and honors the contract with its workers. It is the right thing to do, and Wal-Mart has a responsibility to their employees. Firing hundreds of workers rather than allowing them a voice on the job would show a gross disregard for that responsibility.”

Morales on hunger strike over election delays

2009-04-14T20:54:00.001-07:00

Author: Morning Star
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/12/09 11:13

Original source: morningstaronline.co.uk

Bolivian President Evo Morales has announced he is going on hunger strike to put pressure on Congress to set a firm date for general elections that are likely to return him to power.

Bolivia's opposition-led Senate has failed to approve a law to handle the elections, which are mandated by a Morales-backed constitutional reform approved by voters in January.

The socialist president, who took office in 2006, has suggested that opposition leaders are trying to block the planned December elections with delaying tactics.

He said on Thursday he was starting the strike "to defend the vote of the people."

Fourteen leaders of labour and social groups said they were joining Mr Morales on the hunger strike.

They did not say how rigorous it would be, but such protests in Bolivia usually involve taking water and chewing coca leaves, which help ward off hunger pangs. Mr Morales rose to prominence as leader of a coca-growers' union.

The election Bill has been held up by demands for an updated voter registry, by arguments over whether Bolivians living outside the country should be able to vote and over a dispute about the number of seats in Congress that should be assigned to indigenous groups.

Under the new constitution that took effect in January and aims to further empower Bolivia's long-suppressed indigenous majority, Congress was supposed to have enacted the elections law by Thursday.

Bolivians are to vote for president and a new Congress.

Mr Morales, Bolivia's first indigenous president, is the favourite to win re-election over a fractured opposition.

Poll: Many Americans prefer socialism over capitalism

2009-04-14T01:47:00.000-07:00

From: PWW

Author: Teresa Albano
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/09/09 14:54

This poll made our day.

According to a recent Rasmussen Report, only 53 percent of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.

Not a very good spread for the profits-before-people, greed-is-good crowd. Ayn Rand must be rolling in her grave.

These numbers of course reflect the deep, transformative moment we are living in. An economic depression is a powerful force for people to experience, leading them to question the system that got us here.

Then there is the 20 percent that say socialism is better than capitalism, according to Rasmussen. Another wow! Twenty-seven percent are not sure which is better.
As the population gets further away from the Cold War years, the more they are open to socialism. The under 30 population is essentially divided: 37 percent prefer capitalism, 33 percent socialism and 30 percent are undecided.

Thirty-somethings are a bit more supportive of the current system with 49 percent for capitalism and 26 percent for socialism.

But the ones over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13 percent of those believe socialism is better. What happened to the radical baby boomers?!

As you may imagine, those who have money to invest chose capitalism by a 5-to-1 margin. But for the rest of us who have no money to invest – a quarter of us say socialism would be o.k. Only 40 percent of non-investors think capitalism is better.

These are amazing statistics considering Rasmussen did not define either capitalism or socialism in their questions.

In an earlier survey by the polling firm they found, 70 percent of Americans prefer a free-market economy. When using the term “free market economy,” Rasmussen asserts, it attracts more support than using the term “capitalism.”

“Other survey data supports that notion. Rather than seeing large corporations as committed to free markets, two-out-of-three Americans believe that big government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors,” the poll summary stated.

Imagine how Americans would react if truly a national conversation was had on the benefits of socialism. Right now most Americans see it as a “government-managed” economy and they aren’t convinced the government could do any better than the corporate royalty, according to further poll findings.

Not included in the current popular view of socialism is democratization of the economy – where representatives of all communities, unions, schools, etc., would actually be involved in steering economic policy and decision making on all levels – micro and macro.

Recently, a colleague of mine, Sam Webb, the chair of the Communist Party said of the current economic and political situation:

“Is there any reason to think that millions in motion can't transform this country and world into the just, green, sustainable and peaceful "Promised Land" that Martin Luther King dreamed of?

“It would be a profound mistake to underestimate the progressive and socialist potential of this era. The American people have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity within their reach.”

While polls are just a snapshot of a very fluid and dynamic process of what people think, the more long term forces of the economy are already having this profound effect.

Union leaders announce new progress in push to unite labor movement

2009-04-11T14:46:00.001-07:00

From: PWW

Author: John Wojcik
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 04/08/09 13:29

The AFL-CIO, Change to Win and the National Education Association announced April 7 the creation of the National Labor Coordinating Committee to hammer out a final agreement among their affiliated unions to unite the entire American labor movement.

The committee has already settled major rifts that resulted in seven unions quitting the then 63-member AFL-CIO in 2005 and is drafting the final terms of a deal to form a reunited labor federation.

David Bonior, the former House Democratic whip, has been selected as chairman of the committee.

Bonior said major progress in negotiations was made this week in how the new united federation will deal with organizing, political action and legislative campaigns. He said the remaining issues are how the reunited federation will be governed and how it will be financed.

The main disagreement when the split occurred in 2005 was over the issue of whether union organizing or political action was more important. Since that time events have driven unions on the two sides to work together both in the area of political action and organizing. Labor’s push to elect Barack Obama was widely considered as the most united and successful labor mobilization in U.S. history.
.
“Recognizing the historic moment we face, the American labor movement must unify to restore the American dream for working families,” Bonior said.

Although he would not give a set timetable for when he expected the federations to achieve formal reunification, indications are that it should happen before the scheduled mid-September convention of the AFL-CIO in Pittsburgh and in time to boost labor’s effort to reform labor law by passing the Employee Free Choice Act.

“I am very pleased with our progress. The committee has pledged to complete its consultations and other work on unification plans over the coming months. A unified labor movement is the way to ensure that the vast majority of Americans who want a union are able to join one,” Bonior said.

He also indicated that, in addition to hammering out the final terms of a unity agreement, the Committee will act nationally on a range of critical issues facing workers, including not just labor law reform but also additional steps needed to stimulate the economy and national health care reform.

The affiliated unions of the AFL-CIO, Change to Win and the NEA represent more than 16 million workers in more than 60 unions.

In addition to the presidents of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win, the membership of the National Labor Coordinating Committee consists of the presidents of the National Education Association, the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, the American Federation of Teachers, the Communication Workers of America, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Laborers International Union of North America, the Service Employees International Union, Unite Here, the United Auto Workers, the United Food and Commercial Workers and the United Steelworkers.

YCL Weekly Update

2009-04-08T23:10:00.000-07:00

I. In the News: In America, Labor has an Unusually Long Fuse

II. Tell Rite Aid: Stop the union busting and sign a first contract

III. NC Registration Deadline: Friday April 10th

I. In the News: In American, Labor has an Unusually Long Fuse

by Steven Greenhouse

"When General Moters recently announced huge job cuts worldwide, 15,000 workers demonstrated at the company's German headquarters.

But in the United States, where G.M. plans its biggest layoffs, union members have seemed passive in comparison. They may yell at the television news, but that's about all. Unlike their European counterparts, American workers have largely stayed off the streets, even as unemployment soars and companies cut wages and benefits."

For the whole article, go to the NY Times Website.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. What do you think of the different reasons the article uses to explain why the working class in the U.S. seems to have a "long fuse"?

2. Why do you think that trade unionists and workers in the U.S. have not taken to the streets in the same way that trade unionists in Europe have?

3. Do you think the tactics used by workers in France and elsewhere are appropriate for the political situation here? Do you think the French and German demonstrations have stopped companies from firing workers?

4. What do you think of the quote from Professor Kennedy at the end of the article saying, "This generation, he said, has "found more effective ways to change the world. It's signed up for political campaigns, and it's not waiting for things to get so desperate that they feel forced to take the streets"?

II. Tell Rite Aid: Stop union busting and sign a first contract

Companies aren't supposed to attack workers who want a union, but Rite Aid and other employers are doing it every day. When 650 workers at Rite Aid's distribution center in Lancaster, CA wanted to join a union to address problems like sweltering heat in the warehouse, the company threatened and fired them.

Sign the petition from Jobs with Justice (JwJ) and tell Rite Aid stop the union busting now!

III. National Council Registration Ends on April 10th!

Make sure that you sign up for the YCL's NC meeting by extended deadline April 10th! At the meeting April 25th and 26th in Chicago we will be assessing our role in the fight back over the economic crisis, building the YCL and making plans for our Convention in 2010. Sign the online registration form and make sure you are part of this important event!

Spartan Worker

What happened to my country?

Safeway janitors stop work, tired of intimidation

Safeway janitors stop work, tired of intimidation

The U.S. and the world

What do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

Scary Movie - The Horror of the Employee Free Choice Act

Committing heresy: Nazis and the Berlin Wall

America needs warriors for justice

New website

09.24.2009 Young Communist League Weekly Update

Este es un mensaje bilingue. This is a bilingual message.

Why is Pat Buchanan Defending Hitler?

Plot to kill Post Office cloaked by right wing ‘recess rally’ chaos

Limbaugh’s Nazi slurs draw condemnation

SickForProfit: Video Series Highlights Insurance Company Greed

Labor issues call for a new New Deal

White House school reform plan draws mixed reaction

Raul points the way for Cuba on July 26

Young Republicans elect a new leader who's under fire for racist remarks

House bill: Taxes the wealthy to keep America healthy

Obama reported firm in his support for EFCA

From: PWW

The Faces of the Communist Party

Happy Independence Day!

Call-in day presses Congress to pass public option

Communist Party Statement on Honduras Crisis

EMERGENCY RALLY IN SUPPORT OF HONDURAS

YCL weekly update

In Poll, Wide Support for Government-Run Health

Elena Mora on CNN discussing Cuba

New religion commission begins work

Israelis and Obama

Tiananmen Square Is None of Your Business, Congress

Union flag flies from Mt. Everest

The fall of GM — new thinking needed

Biden refuses to cross fire fighters picket line

Specter tells labor: You're gonna like my EFCA vote

Employee Free Choice will pass without gutting main thrust

GM bankruptcy spurs demand to ‘reinvest in America’

Impressively massive and vibrant pre-election rally of KKE in Athens A strong message for a powerful KKE

Assassin part of shadow anti-choice terror network

‘Card check’ remains on table, Senate leader of free choice battle says

New Study Confirms Intense Employer Opposition to Workers' Unions

Employers Continue to Punish Workers for Supporting a Union

Many Employers Resist Collective Bargaining Long After Their Workers Form Unions

Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act Would Restore Workers’ Rights

Chavez: My Next Gift For Obama Will Be Lenin Book

Anti-union bill defeated in Missouri

Steelworkers walk out in France

Socialist International calls for closer ties on global issues with China

Quote of the Week

Kucinich on The Ed Show

Workers Face Increasing Abuse in Attempts to Form Unions

Obama budget: A 180 degree turn on how workers will be protected

Vietnam celebrates Dien Bien Phu anniversary

New report shows millions lost health coverage during the recession

Video Review: Capitalism Hits the Fan

US Soldiers in Afghanistan Told to "hunt people for Jesus... so we get them into the kingdom"

May Day in Baghdad

Obama, reform and the role of the left

VP Biden affirms Obama admin.'s support for EFCA

HAPPY MAY DAY!

Home child care providers are paid so little, they’re losing homes, cars

You and What Movement? A Response to Naomi Klein

Nationalize General Motors? UAW and U.S. government could own 89 percent of company under GM's plan

by The Associated Press Tuesday April 28, 2009, 8:12 AM

Equal Pay Day: April 28

The book Chavez gave Obama

THINK BEFORE YOU DRINK: WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT BACARDI

New moves by administration seen as step toward bank nationalization

The Problem of Transition: Development, Socialism and Lenin's NEP

1,500 Indian farmers commit mass suicide: Why we are complicit in these deaths

YCL Weekly Update

Wowza, New CEO Pay Numbers‏

Michigan ACLU Update

Thousands rally for public takeover of big banks

National unions form coordinating committee; AFL-CIO president announces retirement plans

A first for N. America: A union contract at Wal-Mart

Morales on hunger strike over election delays

by The Associated Press
Tuesday April 28, 2009, 8:12 AM