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PAKISTAN 12 EGYPT 12 VENEZUELA 13 PEOPLE’S KOREA 13

Dec. 27, 2012 Vol. 54, No. 51 $1workers.org

Workers and oppressed peoples of the world unite!

defensores de la vivienda Guerra contra sindicatos 16

WW Photo: MoNiCa MoorEhEad

By Betsey Piette Baltimore

There was excitement in the air as people gathered in Baltimore on Dec.15 for the first National People’s Power Assembly focused on stopping police brutality and fighting for liv-able-wage jobs or income.

Participants came from around the mid-At-lantic region and North Carolina, and as far away as Illinois and California. Others came from Baltimore, where more than 14 people have been murdered by police since January.

The Rev. Cortly “C. D.” Witherspoon, pres-ident of the local Southern Christian Leader-ship Conference and an initiator of the Balti-more PPA, spoke of the community struggles against this scourge of police terror that has devastated neighborhoods. This working-class city, where recreation centers have been shut down, now faces closure of 26 schools.

Two previous People’s Power Assemblies, in June and October, mobilized police bru-tality victims’ family members. These includ-ed relatives of Anthony Anderson Sr., killed by police in September as his three-year-old granddaughter watched. Many speakers at the national gathering put to rest the official lie that cases like Anderson’s were “isolated incidents.”

Baltimore PPA organizer Sharon Black, who co-chaired the session with Wither-spoon, spoke of the group’s origins from a 10,000-person protest over the killing of Afri-can-American youth Trayvon Martin that shut down downtown Baltimore for four hours. “It showed what we could do if people were mobi-lized, including taking over City Hall and run-ning it. We may not be at that point yet, but this movement is long overdue,” said Black.

Opening remarks were given by Nakia Washington, whom Witherspoon introduced as a modern-day “Fannie Lou Hamer.” Wash-

Sandy Hook tragedy

its roots go deeper than guns

Nat’l PeoPle’s assemblydecries police terror, lack of jobs

ington, whose fiancé was shot six times execu-tion-style by police, challenged those gathered to organize and “yell for justice, over and over again.” She asked, “What type of monster is capitalism when prisons are privatized? You better know they are going to try to fill them up with our children.”

Richie Armstrong, an organizer for Com-munity Churches United, spoke of the fight for inclusion of Baltimore’s oppressed workers in major, multibillion-dollar construction proj-ects around the city. He noted that only 2.5 percent of the jobs at three John Hopkins Uni-versity projects went to Baltimore residents. Although 1,500 have been trained to do con-struction work, only three have been hired.

Larry Hales, a People’s Power Assembly or-ganizer from New York, expressed deep sad-ness for the 20 children killed the day before in Connecticut. He also cautioned that while we mourn these children, we have to say that the lives of Palestinian children, or children killed by U.S. drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan, are no less valuable.

Hales stated that while the media might portray the young shooter as “evil,” the Koch brothers and the Waltons, owners of Walmart,

LESSONS Of MICHIGANHow to fight the assault on labor 4-5

VIoleNCe aGaINst oPPResseDThe right to self-defense 7

MINERS, COAL AND CHINAWhat CO2 has to do with it 11

SO. CAROLINA GATHERINGStands with dock workers, nurses 6

Continued on page 3

Longshore leaderken riley, Jaribu Hillat Southern Human rightsconference. .

Continued to page 8

By Larry Hales

Most people find it unconscionable that anyone would deliberately harm a child. In fact, most would have the same reaction to callous disregard that puts a young life in danger’s way.

So when news of the recent shooting at Sandy Hook El-ementary School in Newtown, Conn., began to spread, it is of little doubt that the first reaction, especially of parents, was shock.

Little children between the ages of 6 and 7, just becom-ing cognitive of the world about them, their eyes beaming, seemingly with any and every possibility just beyond their reach, their lights extinguished.

It was cold, almost unimaginable, but it happened — 20 young lives along with six educators and administrators. The mother of the alleged shooter, who was found shot four times in her bed, still in pajamas. And the shooter

Page 2 dec. 27, 2012 workers.org

Workers World 55 West 17 Street New York, N.Y. 10011Phone: 212.627.2994E-mail: [email protected]: www.workers.orgVol. 54, No. 51 • Dec. 27, 2012 Closing date: Dec. 18, 2012Editor: Deirdre GriswoldTechnical Editor: Lal RoohkManaging Editors: John Catalinotto, LeiLani Dowell,Leslie Feinberg, Kris Hamel, Monica Moorehead,Gary WilsonWest Coast Editor: John ParkerContributing Editors: Abayomi Azikiwe,Greg Butterfield, Jaimeson Champion, G. Dunkel,Fred Goldstein, Teresa Gutierrez, Larry Hales,Berta Joubert-Ceci, Cheryl LaBash,Milt Neidenberg, Betsey Piette, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Gloria RubacTechnical Staff: Sue Davis, Shelley Ettinger,Bob McCubbin, Maggie VascassennoMundo Obrero: Carl Glenn, Teresa Gutierrez,Berta Joubert-Ceci, Donna Lazarus, Michael Martínez,Carlos VargasSupporter Program: Sue Davis, coordinatorCopyright © 2012 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of articles is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.Workers World (ISSN-1070-4205) is published week-ly except the first week of January by WW Publishers, 55 W. 17 St., N.Y., N.Y. 10011. Phone: 212.627.2994. Subscriptions: One year: $30; institutions: $35. Letters to the editor may be condensed and edited. Articles can be freely reprinted, with credit to Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., New York, NY 10011. Back issues and individual articles are available on microfilm and/or photocopy from University Microfilms International, 300 Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48106. A searchable archive is available on the Web at www.workers.org.A headline digest is available via e-mail subscription. Subscription information is at workers.org/email.php.Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y.POSTMASTER: Send address changes to

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In the U.S.

Nat’l People’s Assembly decries police terror, lack of jobs . 1

Sandy Hook tragedy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Gala to honor IAC and its founder, Ramsey Clark . . . . . . . . . 2

Right-wing continues attacks on workers, oppressed. . . . . 4

On the picket line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Origins of Michigan’s ‘right-to-work’ union-busting law. . . 5

Southern meet in solidarity with nurses, dock workers . . . 6

U.S. surge in police and neo-fascist lynchings . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Protests follow Cleveland police shooting spree. . . . . . . . . . 8

Another racist vigilante slaying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

NYC struggle over racist subway ads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Still suffering from Sandy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Manning picked as Person of the Year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

A Marxist view of the current crisis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Bring Peltier home in 2012! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Around the world

Venezuela and the struggle for socialism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

‘Youth globally are fighting back’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Coal miners, Hurricane Sandy and China’s GreenGen . . . . 11

Mass movement demands U.S. release Aafia Siddiqui . . . 12

Egyptian protesters stay in the streets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

World’s people show solidarity with Chávez . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Achievements of Korean socialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

WWP congratulates Koreans on satellite launch . . . . . . . . . 13

Editorial

Recognizing a lie in Syria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Noticias En Español

Defensores de la vivienda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Guerra contra sindicatos. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Gala to honor IAC and its founder, Ramsey ClarkBy LeiLani dowell new york

An exciting Jan. 12 gala is being organized by supporters of the International Action Center to honor and celebrate the organization’s 20th anniversary, as well as the 85th birthday of IAC founder Ramsey Clark. The event will be held at the historic Riverside Church in New York City and will raise funds to support the important anti-racist, an-ti-imperialist and anti-capitalist work of the IAC.

The International Action Center originated 20 years ago out of two small rooms in Ramsey Clark’s law office. Since then, its work has been carried out by a dedicated staff of volunteers, working in coalitions and networks with oth-er organizations. The IAC mobilizes for change through rallies, demonstrations, classes, fact sheets, books, videos, the Internet, websites, intern programs, skill training and fact-finding delegations to challenge corporate rule and disinformation. The IAC offices are used for free on a daily basis by many progressive organizations.

Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, chair of the 85/20 Gala Host Committee, says that “for more than 20 years, Ramsey’s work with the IAC has meant that the people of the world know that they can count on a friend and ally in the United States, the belly of the beast. In Cuba’s most difficult hour, Ramsey and the IAC mobilized a massive rally at the Javits Convention Center and sent vital ma-terial aid delegations. At a crucial moment for Mumia Abu-Jamal, it held a historic rally at Madison Square Garden. The IAC has sustained itself through difficult times and has remained consistently anti-imperialist, an-ti-racist and anti-capitalist. This is an accomplishment.”

The IAC is committed to building broad-based grass-roots coalitions to oppose U.S. wars abroad while fighting against racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, growing repression and mass incarceration, and the economic exploitation of workers. With every mobilization or campaign, the IAC strives to connect the struggles and bring together com-munities of color, women, lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer people, youth and students, and immigrant and workers’ organizations to build a progressive movement for social justice and change. The IAC states that “ultimately it is our goal to work towards the liberation and freedom of all peoples living in the U.S. and around the world.”

ramsey Clark – a ‘voice of conscience’

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark remains a unique political figure in the U.S. At great sacrifice, he has consistently opposed U.S. intervention abroad and fought for justice here at home. He has defended count-less targets of racism or repression, many of whom might have otherwise stood alone — from prisoners on Texas death row to the Attica prison rebels in 1971; from Na-tive American leader Leonard Peltier to Jamil Al-Amin, one of the most influential leaders of the Black liberation movement of the 1960s. Clark defended Lori Berenson, a U.S. political activist who was sentenced to life in prison in Peru for supporting the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, as well as prisoners in the Philippines, Tur-key, Pakistan and Egypt. Clark has vociferously opposed nuclear weapons, U.S. bases, drone wars and every U.S. aggression, including the current threat of a new war against Iran.

Brockmann describes his work with Clark: “During my tenure as president of the U.N. General Assembly, Ram-sey was my key senior advisor on international law, pro-viding valuable insights into the Palestinian-Israeli con-flict, the so-called ‘responsibility to protect’ — new jargon to mask the old practice of wars of aggression — and the sorely needed reform of the United Nations. I am proud to have had the honor, during this period, of bestowing on Ramsey in 2008 the U.N. Human Rights Award. His voice, challenging U.S. wars and criminal corporate poli-cies, is a voice of conscience recognized around the world. He has brought ethics back into the equation and dis-cussion of global issues. That a great people’s champion stands tall and keeps fighting is well worth celebrating.”

Clark says: “In 84 years I have never celebrated a birth-day. But I will on my 85th birthday because it celebrates the 20th anniversary of the IAC and helps assure its con-tinued work.”

To purchase tickets for the Jan. 12 gala, place an ad in the gala journal, and/or help build for the event, visit www.RamseyClarkIACgala.com or www.IACenter.org.

Dowell is a coordinator of the Ramsey Clark/IAC Gala.

The International Action Center presents a Birthday/Anniversary

Ga�a

S at u r d ay

January 12, 2013 r i v e r Si d e Ch u rCh • 490 riverSide drive • New york

The International Action Center

originated 20 years ago out of two small rooms in Ramsey Clark’s law office. From then to now, the work of the IAC has been carried out by a dedicated staff of volunteers, working in coalitions and networks with other people’s organizations. The IAC mobilizes for change through rallies, demonstrations, classes, fact sheets, books, videos, internet, web sites, intern programs, skill training, and more to challenge corporate rule and disinformation. Our offices are used for free on a daily basis by many progressive organizations.

The IAC is committed to building broad-based grassroots coalitions to oppose U.S. wars abroad while fighting against racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, growing repression and mass incarceration, and the economic exploitation of workers here at home. With every mobilization or campaign, the IAC strives to draw from the leadership, connect the struggles, and bring together com-munities of color, women, lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer people,

youth and students, immigrant and workers' organizations in order build a progressive movement for social justice and change. Ultimately it is our goal to work towards the liberation and free-dom of all peoples living in the U.S. and around the world.

423

423

Celebrating the 85th birthday of Ramsey Clark & the 20th anniversary of the IAC

K E Y N O T E S P E A K E R

Ramsey ClarkFounder of the International Action Center, Former U.S. Attorney General

Human rights lawyer & international advocate of people’s rights

5 p.m. Hors d’oeuvres6 p.m. Program & dinner buffet

(halal and vegetarian foods included)•

• Tickets must be reserved in advance. To buy your ticket now;• To take out an ad or listing in the Gala Journal;• To make a donation to support the publication of anthology

of Ramsey Clark’s articles;• To donate to continue the work of the International Action Center;

go to RamseyClarkIACgala.com or www.IACenter.orgView latest GALA news at ramseyclarkiacgala.com/Like us at www.facebook.com/RamseyClarkIACGala

Riverside Church • 490 Riverside Drive • New York City

The Workers World print edition takes a one-week break at the end of the year. See you in two weeks with Vol. 55, No. 1! Meantime, check out our website, workers.org, for online postings of any new articles.

workers.org dec. 27, 2012 Page 3

First national People’s Power assembly says

‘ Stop police terror! We want jobs with decent pay!’

are the real examples of evil, getting rich off the backs of their workers and letting workers die in their Bangladesh factories. “They and Bill Gates not only take all the wealth workers create, now they want all the money from public treasuries.”

‘Fiscal cliff’: a cover for austerity

Hales said the ominous “fiscal cliff” is really a cover to implement austerity programs like those spreading across Eu-rope. He pointed out, “They want to strip away all the union rights so they can pay the workers half what they are making now. We can’t wait for the people elected on Nov. 6 to do our bidding. If we want something, we have to fight for it.”

Larry Holmes, a national People’s Pow-er organizer, also addressed the hypocri-sy of the media’s concern for children in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. He noted, “There’s a war on children right here in Baltimore where their lives have been snatched by police, their schools closed, and nutrition and school lunch programs cut. Capital-ism is the biggest killer of children around the world. Poverty kills more children than any bullet does.”

Holmes noted that 2013 will be the fifti-eth anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s historic Poor People’s March. He challenged those gathered to lay claim to the anniversary by demonstrating to de-fend workers’ rights and demanding that youth are entitled to jobs, not jail cells.

“On Jan. 21, let’s see what we can do to inaugurate a year of revolutionary mass struggle to build People’s Power Assembles all around this country,” stat-ed Holmes. “Let’s reignite the campaign King started for jobs and a living wage for everyone by going to D.C. and shutting it down until we win our demands.” The as-sembly passed a resolution support-ing this proposal.

Walmart workers: solidarity is key

The highlight of the day was the arrival of workers from the OUR Walmart campaign and their union supporters from the Food and Com-mercial Workers union. Cindy Mur-ray, a 13-year Walmart employee, described the company’s total lack of respect for its workers. She and co-worker Alan Forest described Walmart’s systematic attempts to in-timidate anyone who is even talking about unions. “We have no benefits, and they pay us so little that the tax-es we pay end up coming back to us as public assistance,” Murray said.

Murray told of the importance of the solidarity shown by 450 people from many unions who came out to support the Maryland Walmart workers’ walkout on Black Friday. She also described meeting two of the Bangladeshi garment factory workers whose co-workers were killed in the fire. “They didn’t have to die. Walmart just decided not to sign the papers to make it a safer in-dustry,” she emphasized.

Attorney J. Wyndal Gordon, who is handling legal action for the An-derson family, introduced several members of the slain grandfather’s family. He noted that two of the

three police officers responsible for An-derson’s death, who remain on the job, had previously been sued, which cost Baltimore more than $400,000. The PPA passed a resolution to support a Dec. 16 protest demanding indictments of the po-lice who killed Anderson.

Other speakers testified with first-hand accounts of police terror. Marcella Hollo-man’s mentally ill son, Maurice Donald Johnson, was killed by Baltimore police at home on May 19, after she called for an ambulance to take him for treatment. Carletta Kiah, who lives near the Ander-son family, told of her brother, Leontey Kiah, being shot multiple times by police in September.

North Carolina activist Lamont Lil-ly relayed the story of U.S. Navy veteran Stephanie Nickerson, who was brutally beaten by Raleigh/Durham police in Oc-tober after asking the police, who tried to search for someone in her home, to first show a warrant.

Dr. Jahi Issa, a University of Delaware faculty member, was arrested in March at a rally while supporting students who were confronting white supremacist

threats on campus. Issa spoke of grow-ing reports from all over the country that say the deaths of Black people authori-ties have labeled “suicide” were, in fact, lynchings.

Teresa Gutierrez, of the May 1 Co-alition in New York City, called on the PPA to link the struggles for immigrant rights with other movements for jobs and against mass incarceration. “Just imag-ine such a united movement. It would be millions of people,” said Gutierrez. She asked the PPA to call for People’s Power Assemblies and marches around May Day 2013 and to commemorate the centenni-al death of freedom fighter, Harriet Tub-man, for upcoming International Work-ing Women’s Day.

Continued from page 1

Pam Africa: ‘We have one enemy — Corporate America.’

People’s Attorney

J. Wyndal Gordon with

family members of

Anthony Anderson Sr.,

slain by police.

LGBTQ activist the Rev. Meredith Moise with Black Pride denounced the re-cent Maryland ballot initiative Question 7 that would expand gambling casinos by promising more money for schools. Despite the bill’s passage, 26 Baltimore schools will be closed. Moise said the peo-ple who bankrolled the pro-casino initia-tive were the same who tried but failed to stop passage of Maryland’s marriage equality act.

Zaina Alsous, a Palestinian woman and youth organizer from North Carolina, spoke out against zero-tolerance policies in schools that push students into the school-to-prison pipeline. While African Ameri-cans are only 13 percent of the population, 34 percent of the students suspended un-

der these policies are Black.Pam Africa, a leader of the In-

ternational Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal and the MOVE organization, praised the efforts of PPA organizers in bringing diverse struggles together. She stressed, “We have one ene-my — corporate America. What we are having here today needs to be multiplied.”

Several union activists addressed the assembly. Tom Dodge, Mary-land postal worker, urged people to support a holiday greeting card campaign asking President Barack Obama to veto any bill that would privatize the post office. Postal workers will be gathering for an emergency encampment in Wash-ington, D.C., across from the White House from Dec. 17 to 22 to demand that the Congressional lame duck session halt the closures and cuts to the U.S. Postal Service.

Mishu Blum and Denise Sidbury, hotel workers and UNITE HERE Lo-cal 7 organizers, described their fight against the Hyatt Regency Inner Harbor Hotel that is firing full-time workers and replacing them with temporary housekeepers at $8 per hour — three-fifths of what union hotel workers make.

Everyone left the assembly deter-mined to build people’s power. WW Photo: MoNiCa MoorEhEad

Rev. Cortly ‘C. D.’ Witherspoon speaking, Sharon Black seated.

WW PhotoS: JoE PiEttE


On the Picket Line By Sue Davis

MiCHigan

right-wing continues attacks on workers, oppressed Pickets continue for low-wage food workers

In Manhattan on Dec. 14, labor activists picketed Capital Grille, a chain owned by the Darden Restaurant Group that includes Red Lobster and Olive Garden. They demanded that the corporation sit down with the Restaurant Opportunities Center United to address wage theft, racist discrimination and retaliation, among other charges detailed in lawsuits. Workers at Capital Grilles in Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles and the Washington, D.C., area have also filed suits. They ask supporters to call Regional Director Bill Butler at 407-245-4051 and tell Darden to stop being a Scrooge — it raked in $700 million in profits last year — and negotiate with the low-paid workers. To sign a petition supporting the workers, visit www.dignityatdarden.org.

Two regular pickets at Golden Farm, the Brooklyn, N.Y., supermarket which owes immigrant workers their jobs and more than $500,000 in court-ordered back wages, were arrested on Dec. 9, but later released without charges. Protesters returned in the rain on Dec. 16 to pressure owner Sonny Kim to rehire the low-paid workers, give them the wages they earned, and sign a fair contract with them. Business is down 30 percent, thanks to weekly demonstrations organized by 99 Pickets and the Occupy communities.

conn. nursing home workers back on job Nearly 600 nursing home workers, represented by the New England

Health Care Employees Union, an affiliate of Service Employees 1199, had been on an unfair-labor-practices strike since July 3 at five Health-Bridge centers in Connecticut. The strike got results: they went back to work on Dec. 17. A federal judge ruled Dec. 11 that HealthBridge did not bargain in good faith when it imposed a pension freeze, an increase in health care costs of at least $6,000 a year for family coverage, and elimi-nation of six sick days and a week’s vacation. (New York Times, Dec. 13)

labor laws must cover domestic workers The first comprehensive study of the horrendous working conditions

of nannies, household cleaners, caregivers and other domestic workers confirmed that these workers, predominantly immigrant women of color, are often paid below the minimum wage ($7.25 an hour), with no benefits or sick days, and have no legal job protections or control over working conditions. Though these workers are usually needed to free others to work, the 2,086 women interviewed reported they don’t earn enough to adequately support their own families. The study, conducted by the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois, Chicago, concluded that domestic workers need to be covered by federal and state mini-mum wage laws, which include unemployment insurance, anti-discrim-ination and workers’ compensation provisions, as well as the right to organize and bargain collectively for better wages and working condi-tions. The AFL-CIO formed a partnership with NDWA in 2011. (AFL-CIO Now blog, Nov. 28)

daycon strikers win long fight for justice The janitorial and maintenance workers at Daycon got reinstated

with back pay and benefits after an unfair-labor-practices strike by Teamsters Local 639 in Maryland. It took two-and-a-half years and a court ruling on Nov. 9 after management illegally implemented a cutback contract. Local 639 credited union solidarity organized by the Metro Washington Council AFL-CIO with helping them win their long battle for a better contract. (dclabor.org, Nov. 9)

uSPS sets productivity records in 2012 In sharp contrast to the drive of the 1% to privatize the U.S. Postal

Service, the new annual report shows how well the USPS performs. Worker productivity set a record in 2012, and shipping revenues in-creased 8.7 percent due to a tiny rise in the bad economy. Overall, the USPS brought in $65.7 billion, with operating expenses of $67.9 billion. Only 16 percent of the overall loss is due to mail delivery. Though this year’s deficit is $2.2 billion, down from $4.9 billion last year, the USPS’s total deficit is $15.9 billion. It’s estimated that 80 percent of that stems from having to put aside retirement benefits for workers 75 years in the future. Since Congress passed the prefunding requirement in 2006, the USPS has set aside $47 billion, a killer requirement that no other government agency or private company faces. But the billions set aside could easily erase the deficit. That’s why all four of the postal worker unions, with widespread community support across the U.S., are advo-cating that the law be overturned. (AFL-CIO NOW blog, Nov. 19)

Help needed for construction workers in d.c. There’s a building boom in Washington, D.C., but local residents

are “grossly underrepresented” on construction sites, reported a study published Dec. 5 by the research center Good Jobs First. The study, “Taxation without Employment: The Case for the District’s Strong Local Hiring Rules,” shows that new local hiring rules need to be implemented to help put 30,000 unemployed in D.C. back to work. The report was commissioned by the Laborers’ International Union of North America. (Union City, online newsletter of the Metro Washington Council AFL-CIO, Dec. 5)

By abayomi azikiwe editor, Pan-african news Wire

Since the passage of “right-to-work” legisla-tion in Michigan on Dec. 11, unions and commu-nity organizations have vowed to continue their fight against the inevitable lowering of wages and benefits. The rush to pass what unions are calling “right-to-work-for-less” and other bills is a clear manifestation of an escalating capitalist war being waged on the working class.

The draconian legislation was passed even as 17,000 union members, students and their supporters from throughout the state of Michi-gan were holding militant demonstrations inside and outside the state Capitol building in Lan-sing. Riot police forcefully removed demonstra-tors from the streets and cleared an entrance to the nearby George Romney Building, where Gov. Rick Snyder’s offices are located.

At least eight workers were arrested during the demonstrations and charged with felonies. Oth-ers were brutally handled and pepper-sprayed by state cops.

Snyder, a multi-millionaire Republican, who has supported some of the most extreme right-wing legislation in the state’s history, has be-come the focus of demonstrations throughout Michigan. On Dec. 15, he was met by protesters when he addressed the commencement ceremo-nies for graduates at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

A coalition of labor, faith and progressive or-ganizations lined the roadways to the Breslin Center, where they passed out red carnations to graduates and fliers explaining the impact of right-to-work. “We will salute our graduates and remind Snyder that right-to-work jeopardizes the future of these graduates,” said a statement issued by the We Are Michigan coalition.

The statement continued, “We are standing up to protect students and families in a state where Gov. Snyder and his wealthy cronies are taxing retirees, cutting education and killing good jobs!”

Bill Reed, president of United Auto Workers Local 602 based in Lansing, said “We are here to show our appreciation for the MSU students. The legislation harms these students’ future.”

Many unions have called for an electoral cam-paign to vote out the right-wing Republicans in 2014. However, with the pace of the attacks against organized labor, women, peoples of col-or, youth and workers in general, many cannot afford to wait another two years for the uncertain outcome of midterm elections.

Committee to Beat Back right-to-Work

The Committee to Beat Back Right-to-Work has launched a public campaign within the trade union movement to get the various locals to dis-cuss and pass resolutions calling for a general strike. The provisions for such an action exist within trade union structures, growing out of the sitdown strikes and other mass mobilizations of the 1930s and early 1940s.

Article 50, Sec. 8 of the UAW constitution states, “In case of great emergency, when the existence of the International Union is involved, together with the economic and social standing of our membership, the International President and International Executive Board shall have the authority to declare a general strike within the industry by a 2/3 vote of the International Exec-utive Board, whenever in their good judgment it shall be deemed proper for the purpose of pre-serving and perpetuating the rights and living standards of the general membership … provid-ed, under no circumstances shall it call such a strike until approved by a referendum vote of the membership.”

The Committee to Beat Back Right-to-Work

set up a Facebook page and passed out 2,000 leaflets during the demonstrations in Lansing on Dec. 11, which were well received by the workers.

Further attacks on detroit

On the same day that Snyder and the right wing were passing right-to-work legislation in Lansing, in Detroit a series of repressive mea-sures were forced through under political duress from state officials and banks. A $300,000 legal contract with Miller, Canfield law offices, a mil-lionaire firm, was passed 5-4 by the City Coun-cil. This company has been involved in advising Mayor Dave Bing on the enforcement of the Financial Stability Agreement, a union-busting measure pushed by the banks.

Another measure approved selling 1,500 va-cant plots of land to a businessman who will es-tablish tree farms. These lots on the city’s east side are vacant because of the predatory lending policies of the banks, which have left hundreds of thousands without homes due to foreclosure and eviction.

Hundreds of Detroit residents have attended City Council hearings to express their opposition to these giveaway projects to wealthy corpora-tions. However, a bloc of City Council members has consistently voted in favor of initiatives that further erode the political authority and will of the people of the city.

Bing announced recently that city workers will be hit by another round of furlough days and layoffs. Yet banks that have withheld at least $118 million in unpaid property taxes on vacant homes and buildings are not being pursued for payment.

It was discovered that the firm controlling one of the large downtown sports arenas owes over $2 million in taxes to the city. However, individ-ual households have been receiving notices from the city’s finance division claiming they owe money on back income taxes from 2007 to 2011.

overall assault requires strategic approach

In addition to the right-to-work law, other egregious bills were passed during the lame duck session in Michigan. These changes represent the coming nationwide onslaught against work-ing people.

A new emergency manager law was passed, even though a similar proposed amendment to the state constitution had been rejected by the vot-ers in November. The new legislation, called the Local Financial Stability and Choice Act, will take effect in March, raising the ominous specter of continued austerity and disempowerment of Af-rican-American-majority cities around the state.

A Downtown Development Authority bill passed that will allow the state to continue to capture taxes and give these funds directly to private corporations — a process that already exists but has recently been questioned. The city has not benefited at all from the outright theft of tax dollars; instead, high unemployment and infrastructural damage have worsened.

A personal property tax on businesses was repealed, giving the capitalists hundreds of millions while depriving local municipalities of funds needed to finance public services and projects. A regional transit authority was estab-lished. The federal government had denied fund-ing to metropolitan Detroit unless this measure was enacted.

Women will face greater obstacles to reproduc-tive health care. Bills were also passed that will make it far more difficult to recall public officials.

These new laws require drastic action by workers and the oppressed in Michigan. A shift in strategy toward citywide and statewide work stoppages would raise the level of consciousness and struggle within the region and nationally.

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origins of Michigan’s ‘right-to-work’ union-busting law

United class struggle can overturn itBy Fred goldstein

The passage of the union-busting “right-to-work” law in Michigan is a se-vere legal setback for the labor movement and for the workers, the oppressed and all the progressive masses in the state. If not turned around, it will encourage right-wing, anti-labor forces across the country.

However, it must be emphasized at the outset that so far this is purely a legisla-tive setback. It has not been implement-ed. The working class has not been defeat-ed in the class struggle. Rather, the labor leadership was politically outmaneuvered by a cabal of right-wing billionaires and their political puppets in the legislature and the governor’s mansion. These forces conspired to put this reactionary legisla-tion on the fast track without even giving the legally required time and processes for the masses to mobilize against it.

The worst thing the labor movement can do now is accept this reactionary leg-islation as a fait accompli and look to the electoral arena in 2014 — a distant attempt to regain ground lost in the legislature.

There’s a lesson to be learned from the earlier failure of the Wisconsin so-called recall movement. In this period, as the billionaire Koch brothers and their like pour massive funds into the electoral are-na and into advertising and propaganda, the labor movement is at a distinct dis-advantage fighting on electoral territory alone. To be on much more solid ground, the movement must rely on its real strength — the mobilization of the work-ers, the communities, the students and all the oppressed in the class struggle.

To delay the struggle until the 2014 elections and fail to mobilize the workers for struggle now would allow this legisla-tion to be enforced, so that a legislative sleight of hand is turned into a real and profound setback for the workers. Such a delay would result in a totally demoral-izing, one-sided class struggle, in which right-wing billionaires are allowed to bust unions.

From Wisconsin to Lansing, struggle & fightback

The unions should take their cue from the fact that between 15,000 and 20,000 workers and their allies from around the state and other parts of the country turned out in Lansing on short notice to try to stop the legislation. They were in a militant, fighting mood, even though they were confronted by an emergency situa-tion in which the approval of the legisla-tion was virtually assured.

The unions should also bear in mind the heroic phase of the Wisconsin strug-gle when workers, students and commu-nity activists occupied the Capitol, while tens of thousands of workers and activ-ists from all over the country poured into Madison. For two weeks they tried to stop the attempt to outlaw collective bargain-ing among public sector workers. Support for the Wisconsin struggle came from all over the world, including Europe and as far away as Egypt.

At that time, the question of a general strike was posed for the first time in de-cades by the labor movement — although it was quickly abandoned.

That struggle was never allowed to reach its potential because it was diverted into a “recall” struggle, which was really a gubernatorial election by another name. And the bosses — who had been on the run while the occupation and the mass demonstrations continued to grow — were back in charge in the electoral arena

with their millions in campaign funds to bolster Gov. Scott Walker.

It is still a question whether, if Walk-er had been defeated in the recall by the Democratic Party candidate, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barnett, the law would have been overturned.

The Michigan law, dubbed “right-to-work-for-less” by the unions, is potential-ly an even-more-sweeping challenge to workers’ rights than the Wisconsin law. To bank on an electoral challenge in 2014, or a recall, or winning a legal challenge in the courts is folly and dangerous.

Lansing should be beginning, not endIn both Wisconsin and Michigan, the

workers have shown their willingness to rise to the occasion if given the chance and the resources. It is more fruitful to look upon the Lansing mobilization as a begin-ning of the mass struggle, not the end.

Admittedly, it will be a long and stren-uous road to build the kind of struggle re-quired to overturn the Michigan law. But the basis for such a mobilization exists. The right-to-work law is not the only reac-tionary legislation being rammed through.

The Republican-controlled Michigan legislature passed dozens of bills in its fi-nal sessions, including a bill revising the vicious “emergency manager” bill that had been defeated at the polls in November.

The revised bill, like the previous one, still gives the governor the right to appoint what amounts to a municipal dictator, called a manager, with the power to over-ride city laws and elected officials and tear up union contracts, among other powers.

A law placing restrictions on physicians performing abortions, including requiring special licensing and onerous state inspec-tions, was passed. A voter suppression law aimed at immigrant workers was also passed, requiring that voters affirm their citizenship, their address, their birth date and present a photo identification before receiving a ballot. In addition, the state legislature passed a law eliminating $600 million in property taxes that further un-dermines funds for municipal services.

Thus the legislature has attacked wom-en, undocumented workers and poor cit-ies that are a majority Black, as well as unions. This is the material and political basis for convening a broad coalition of forces to launch a mass fightback against all these reactionary laws — laws that af-fect millions.

need to overcome defeat of Prop 2The workers and the union leaders

in Michigan, especially the United Auto Workers leadership under Bob King, have to overcome the demoralizing effects of a major defeat that set the stage for pas-sage of the right-to-work law — namely, the defeat in the November elections of Proposition 2, which had called for in-serting the right to collective bargaining in the Michigan constitution.

This proposition lost by 14 points, 57 percent to 43 percent, even though Presi-dent Barack Obama swept the state. This came as a shock to the labor movement. The defeat of Prop 2 during Republican Gov. Rick Snyder’s term in office was

a signal to the right wing to move the union-busting legislation. It was passed five weeks later.

It was not just the defeat, but the large margin of the setback that took the breath out of the labor movement. It emboldened the right to go further and move union-busting legislation in a state known as a center of union strength, the stronghold of the UAW. The moment the results were announced, the leaders knew that the unions were in great danger. They were reduced to hoping that Snyder would veto it. They went into meetings with him, having been taken in by his ear-lier statements that right-to-work was not on “his agenda.”

Snyder is a multimillionaire corporate executive, a venture capitalist, There is no reason in the world for working-class representatives to trust him as far as they can throw him. It was the height of fol-ly to give credence to his early denials. To claim now that he stabbed the labor movement in the back is like denouncing the fox for eating the chickens.

The unions got into this position by severely underestimating the political influence and strength of the right wing and heavily overestimating their own so-cial strength. Furthermore, they adopted the wrong strategy and tactic in dealing with an impending move to put over the right-to-work law, which had begun in early 2011.

The Michigan Freedom to Work coa-lition was formed after the Republican electoral sweep in 2010. In March 2011 Snyder sent up “emergency manager” leg-islation that authorized tearing up union contracts. Around the same time he put forward laws to prevent the collection of teachers’ union dues.

As word spread that a right-to-work movement was afoot, the unions realized they were facing a potential battle that could end up in a crisis. A broad coalition of unions, headed by the UAW, launched a campaign to preempt the right wing with the “Protect Our Jobs” amendment — Proposition 2.

Right-wing billionaires pounced. Rich-ard DeVos of the Amway fortune, the 67th richest man in the U.S. with $5.1 billion, formed Protecting Michigan Taxpayers, which poured $22.7 million into defeat-ing Proposition 2. (Reuters, Dec. 13) The Americans for Prosperity funded by the Koch brothers and the American Legisla-tive Exchange Council, a front for right-wing corporate forces, joined the strug-gle. This should have come as a surprise to nobody, given the right-wing political climate. The defeat at the polls in Wiscon-sin should have rung alarm bells against relying on electoral methods to fight back.

Also shocking was that the defeat of Prop 2 revealed the weakness of the labor movement’s political appeal in the state. That should serve as a wakeup call to the

labor movement that it has to repair its relationships, not only with the workers but also with the broad masses.

Build labor-community relations through popular assemblies

It is clear that many people were sus-ceptible to the massive anti-union propa-ganda spewed by the right wing. The labor movement must take this deadly seriously. After decades of retreat before the bosses, including the UAW’s collaboration in the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs and in agreeing to a concession-rid-dled contract during the auto bailout, cyn-icism and apathy about unions seem rife among sectors of the workers, as well as the unorganized masses.

The widespread abandonment of the Black masses of Michigan, especially by the UAW, in matters of jobs, foreclosures, destruction of public education, etc., has resulted in a growing isolation of the la-bor movement from the community. The same holds true among women, the LGBTQ communities and immigrants, who have all been regarded as peripher-al by sectors of the labor movement and who at best have received lip service from the bureaucracy.

In addition, the retreat of the labor movement, combined with the eco-nomic crisis, has devastated the unions numerically.

It was thoughtless and irresponsible for union leaders not to have taken all these factors into consideration before launching the constitutional amendment project. For them not to have considered what would happen if they lost, thereby revealing their weaknesses and vulnera-bility to the class enemy, was to recklessly court danger.

Wisconsin showed that, when faced with the potential of a legislative initia-tive attacking the unions, the correct course was to begin the long and difficult process of mobilizing the union rank and file and then forging alliances with the oppressed communities.

At the time of the legislative crisis, when the workers massed in Lansing on Dec. 11 to protest the law, the Committee to Beat Back RTW promoted a call for the move-ment to consider a general strike and to form popular assemblies of women, the LGBTQ communities, the immigrant community, students and youth, and all the popular organizations to unite to carry out a mass strike.

Many of the workers at the Lansing demonstration responded with enthusi-asm to this appeal. A strategy along these lines is the only road back from this de-feat. The longest journey begins with a single step. The Lansing demonstration should be regarded as that single step, to be followed by many more on the road to defeat union busting, exploitation and op-pression of all types.


Southern conference in solidarity with nurses, dock workers

WW PhotoS: MoNiCa MoorEhEad

Support for MUSC nurses, Dec. 8.

SHROC delegation, Dec. 9.

By Monica Moorehead Charleston, S.C.

People from the West Coast and across the country traveled to Charleston, S.C., to attend the ninth biannual Southern Human Rights Organizers Conference (SHROC) on Dec. 7-9. The conference was held in a hall belonging to Local 1422 of the International Longshoremen’s As-sociation, which represents thousands of dock workers on the East Coast.

It is also home to most of the Charles-ton Five longshore workers — members of ILA Local 1422, four African-Ameri-can and one white — who were arrested in January 2000 on trumped-up charges stemming from a protest over union bust-ing. Due to tremendous mass solidarity with these workers in the U.S. and world-wide, the charges were finally dropped in November 2001.

SHROC, first inaugurated in 1996, has been held in various Southern cities such as Oxford and Jackson, Miss.; Miami; At-lanta; Memphis; Houston; Durham, N.C.; Birmingham, Ala.; and Charleston. An es-timated 300 conference participants trav-eled from these cities as well as from Chi-cago; Greenville, Miss.; New Orleans; San Antonio, Texas; Boston; New York; Jersey City, N.J.; Oakland, Calif.; and Columbia and Greenville, S.C.

While a great number of the partici-pants were of African descent, there were also whites, Latinos/as, Indigenous and Palestinian activists. Two of the activists represented the inspiring Bolivarian Rev-olution in Venezuela.

With the theme “Forging the Path to Vic-tory — Solidarity Across the Global South,” the main goals of the conference included bringing together activists to discuss social issues and develop strategies for building a movement for human rights in the Deep South; strengthening labor, youth, civ-il rights and anti-war organizations; and deepening global outreach and unity with the exploited and downtrodden.

Whether it’s catfish workers in Missis-sippi, immigrant domestic workers in Mi-ami, environmental justice activists fight-ing pollution in North Carolina, low-wage workers fighting for dignity, or youth fighting police terror, SHROC helped to give voice to these important struggles and many more locally, statewide and around the world.

The conference was dedicated to the memory of Trayvon Martin, the Black youth murdered Feb. 26 by a racist vig-

ilante in Florida; Samuel Hammond Jr., Henry Ezekial Smith and Delane Herman Middleton, Black students killed by rac-ist police in 1968 during a desegregation struggle at South Carolina State Universi-ty in Orangeburg, S.C.; and the late Septi-ma Clark, a long-time civil rights activist born in Charleston.

‘Changing what’s possible at MUSC’

A major issue dominating the three-day conference was the struggle of pre-dominantly African-American nurses at the Medical University of South Caroli-na. Some 54 nurses have been illegally dismissed for filing justified grievances against this private medical college’s in-tolerable working conditions, low pay and racist attitudes on the part of management.

A number of these nurses attended the conference to share their stories. SHROC organizers called a direct action in front of MUSC on Dec. 8. A picket line of about 200 activists chanted for a couple of hours, while some of the impacted nurses stood across the street cheering them on.

The main theme of the protest was “Changing what’s possible at MUSC.” Along with “No justice, no peace” and “Ain’t no power like the power of the peo-ple cause the power of the people don’t stop” was “Ain’t no stoppin’ us now, work-ers are on the move.”

This struggle was likened to the histor-ic 1969 hospital workers’ strike against MUSC led by the 1199 union in Charleston. The strike, which lasted 113 days, was initi-ated by hospital aides, who won an increase in pay and better grievance procedures. The gains were short-lived, however, due to South Carolina being, then and now, a state that adheres to right-to-work-for-less laws that undermine union organizing, in-cluding the right to collective bargaining, which also affects the MUSC 54.

Leaders of ILA 1422 are participating in current mediation talks with the MUSC administration on behalf of the nurses.

The opening of the conference includ-ed round-table strategic discussions on the criminalization of youth of color by the police and society in general; winning rights for excluded workers; and the con-tinued building of the Southern Workers Assembly, which held its first meeting in early September in Charlotte, N.C., fol-lowing the March on Wall Street South.

Plenary sessions, which were all con-nected to building a strong, united South-ern human rights movement, focused on views about the 2012 presidential elec-

tions; present struggles being waged in South Car-olina and other parts of the region; U.S. slavery built on theft of Native lands in the U.S. and the relation-ship to the worldwide cap-italist market today; the global supply chain as key to human rights empow-erment; and the lessons and victories for local and regional mass campaigns.

Topics during concur-rent breakout sessions centered on combatting discrimination; seizing the airways and building community FM radio sta-tions; waging war on pris-ons for profits; exposing U.S. policies on immigration and building solidarity; women’s rights are human rights; tactics for achieving racial justice; moving for-ward with a Southern Regional People’s Assembly; and organizing a U.S. Labor Party.

Solidarity messages were presented throughout the conference by Clarence Thomas, International Longshore Work-ers Union Local 10; William Camacaro, Venezuelan Circle in New York; Gener-al Consul Jorge Veloz, Venezuela; Sarah White, Mississippi Workers Center for Human Rights; and Monica Moorehead, Workers World Party.

SHroC solidarity with longshore workers

Another major highlight of the con-ference was the keynote address given by Kenneth Riley, president of ILA Local 1422. Riley, also the first African-American president of the South Carolina AFL-CIO, was introduced by his brother, Leonard Riley, also a leader of this struggle-orient-ed local, which is well-known and respect-ed in the Charleston community.

Ken Riley spoke of the need for unity and solidarity among all workers, orga-nized and unorganized, throughout the South and the world. The ILA is current-ly in contract negotiations with shipping bosses over the epidemic of outsourcing dock worker jobs. If a decent contract is not reached by the extended deadline of Dec. 30, there is a real possibility of an East Coast longshore strike that will im-

pact shipping from Maine to Texas.A resolution in solidarity with long-

shore workers was adopted at SHROC that reads in part: “The negotiations be-tween the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) representing longshore workers on East and Gulf Coasts and U.S. Maritime Alliance representing the em-ployers of the shipping industry which is due to expire on Dec. 30, 2012, have reached a critical juncture.

“As the economic crisis has left millions of U.S. workers unemployed, employers are proposing technological changes at a pace that will increase the unemployment and deepen economic and social crisis for working people.”

“THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the Southern Human Rights Organizers Conference stands in solidarity with the ILA in its negotiations for a fair contract for its more than 14,000 members rep-resenting thousands more families and communities who will be affected by the contract.

“That SHROC will build solidarity committees and actions especially in the East and Gulf Coast cities where the 14 main ports are located;

“That SHROC calls on unions, worker and community and faith-based organiza-tions to pass resolutions in support of the ILA in its efforts to gain a fair contract;

“That SHROC calls on all unions, work-er and community and faith-based orga-nizations and supporters to send emails to U.S. Maritime Alliance Chairman and CEO James A. Capo, [email protected], calling on them to negotiate in good faith and to protect jobs for working people. Send copies of emails to James A. Capo to SHROC at [email protected].”

SHROC founder Jaribu Hill told Work-ers World, when asked about the signifi-cance of this conference: “In 2008, during the SHROC IX, we celebrated the election of the first African-American president. At SHROC X, we came together to strat-egize to make uncompromising demands on behalf of the 99%. We will tell Presi-dent Obama that we will not remain silent to allow his or any other administration to ignore our just cries for real equality and inclusion. We can and we must stand in solidarity with dock workers, hospital workers, catfish workers, formerly incar-cerated workers and Walmart workers from here to Bangladesh. The struggle will and must continue.”

For more information, go to southernhumanrights.org.


Part 3

Boston LGBTQ Pride march, June 9, 2012. WW Photo: StEvaN KirSChbauM

By Leslie Feinberg

An “unwritten law” in the U.S. “dictates that nothing unusual is happening when 13 cops shoot 137 bullets at an apparently un-armed Black couple in Cleveland, a Black-run city,” writes Glen Ford, the executive editor of Black Agenda Radio. (Dec. 5)

“Community members charged the vic-tims were lynched,” Ford reported.

Ford’s online commentary is headlined “Massacre in Cleveland: Lynch Law Was Never Repealed.”

“Less than two weeks before, in Jack-sonville, Fla.,” Ford recalled, “a white man who didn’t like Black teenagers play-ing loud music at a gas station fired eight or nine shots at 17-year-old, unarmed, Jordan Davis, killing him.”

Armed killers of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin both claimed the “right” to gun down these unarmed Black youths was “self-defense” under Florida’s “stand your ground” law — which has embold-ened vigilante, death squad terror.

“Young Trayvon drew his last breath in time to be listed among the 120 Black people known to have been extrajudicial-ly executed in the first six months of this year — one killing every 36 hours.”

The damning evidence of these exe-cutions was compiled by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in its report on the “Extrajudicial Killings of Black People by Police, Security Guards or Self-Appointed Law Enforcers,” posted online on July 9, 2012. The full report can be downloaded at mxgm.org.

This compelling study was the second produced for the “‘No More Trayvon Mar-tins Campaign,’ demanding a National Plan of Action for Racial Justice.” It found that “sixty-nine percent of the lives lost be-longed to people from the ages of 13 to 31.”

The online report states: “The corpo-rate media have given very little attention to these extrajudicial killings. We call them ‘extrajudicial’ because they happen without trial or any due process, against all international law and human rights conventions.”

‘institutionalized violence of white supremacy is intensifying’

The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement emphasizes that “this 6th month update proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the institutionalized violence of white su-premacy is not only alive and well, but is, in fact, intensifying.

“To complete the picture, we must take into account the extrajudicial killings and other repressive policies directed at other targeted peoples and communities such as Indigenous peoples, Latinos, Arabs, Muslims, and immigrants.”

“Those few mainstream media outlets that mention the epidemic of killings have been … unwilling to acknowledge that the killings are systemic — meaning they are embedded in institutional racism and na-tional oppression,” the report explains.

BAR Editor Glen Ford noted: “The re-port, compiled by a handful of people for the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, had to be pieced together from news clip-pings and other sources. That’s because there is no database on the extrajudicial killing of African Americans, a practice that is not considered a crime, based on America’s ‘unwritten law.’

“In fact, it’s treated even more casually than a sport — at least in sports they keep statistics.”

Ford concluded that Black anti-lynch-ing organizer and journalist “Ida B. Wells kept statistics. She and a few col-leagues tallied 3,436 lynchings of Blacks in the 33 years between 1889 and 1922. Eighty-three of the victims were women. Lynching reached its high-water mark in 1892, when 160 African Americans were slaughtered because of their race.

“That number will be far exceeded this year, at the rate the blood is flowing.”

CeCe Mcdonald punished for surviving racist lynch mob

CeCe McDonald — a 22-year-old Black (trans)woman — and her friends survived a white-supremacist attack by a racist mob on the streets of South Minneapolis. McDonald has been punished by sher-iffs, jailers, prosecutor, judge and prison guards ever since.

McDonald’s web support site states: “Around 12:30 a.m. on June 5, 2011, CeCe was walking to the grocery store with some friends, all of them young, African American, and LGBTIQ or allied. As they passed a local bar, the Schooner Tavern, a group of older, white people who were standing outside the bar’s side door be-gan hurling racist and transphobic slurs at them, without provocation.”

In the trial transcript CeCe McDonald testified that at least four or more white adults took part.

The website states: “When CeCe ap-proached the group and told them that her crew would not tolerate hate speech, one of the women … smashed her glass into CeCe’s face. She punctured CeCe’s cheek all the way through, lacerating her salivary gland.” (supportcece.wordpress.com)

One of the neofascists, Dean Schmitz — a white man whose body was emblazoned with a swastika tattoo — was stabbed and died.

McDonald was the only person arrest-ed that night.

repressive show of state force against CeCe Mcdonald

After being arrested, her website states that McDonald “was briefly taken to the hospital where she received 11 stitches in her cheek. While McDonald was still suf-fering both physically and mentally from this traumatic incident, she was left alone in a room for three hours. She was then in-terrogated and placed in solitary confine-ment at the Hennepin County men’s jail.

“She spent the next several months in jail and had to wait almost two months between her initial doctors’ visit and a much-needed follow-up appointment.

“After her arrest, CeCe was quickly charged with second-degree murder. In short, she was prosecuted for surviving a violent, racist, transphobic attack.”

A Crime Library online article, posted Oct. 2, 2012, reports: “Prosecutors of-fered McDonald a deal: Rather than face trial for second-degree murder, she could plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter and serve just seven years in prison. She refused the plea bargain.”

The article added that on Oct. 6, 2011, “Prosecutors added a second charge of second-degree murder, this one ‘sec-ond-degree intentional murder.’

“Each of these two charges could damn her to as much as 40 years in prison if she were found guilty in court.”

The Crime Library article stated that McDonald’s lawyer and the Legal Rights Center charged that “prosecutors were re-taliating for McDonald’s refusal to take a plea.” (trutv.com)

McDonald’s web support site points out that Hennepin County Attorney Mi-chael Freeman — a white prosecutor “who describes himself as ‘the Michael Jordan of prosecutors’ — held the power to drop the charges against her.

“But in the face of powerful communi-ty demands to ‘Free CeCe,’ Freeman did not drop the charges: instead, he dug in his heels and escalated the attack against CeCe by adding an additional charge of second-degree murder.”

Crime Library notes: “Freeman con-tinued to maintain that it wasn’t self defense. Schmitz wasn’t the one who’d hit McDonald with the glass, he point-ed out. And nothing stopped McDonald from running away from the scene at any time.” (trutv.com)

Katie Burgess, executive director of the Minneapolis-based Trans Youth Support Network, said in April, “People were very enraged about what had happened to her and the refusal of Hennepin County to recognize her right to self-defense.”

Burgess continued: “And word has spread across the nation and across the world. We have seen local support from LGBT organizations and politicians and also national support from organizations such as the National Center for Transgen-der Equality and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. We have a petition that’s circu-lating with over 15,000 signatures asking Hennepin County to drop these charges.” (April 27)

She said that 44 percent of hate mur-ders in the U.S. are committed against young trans women of color.

“And we would like to also point out the ways that this violence plays out in the courtrooms.” (democracynow.org)

Journalist Marc Lamont Hill wrote in an Ebony article: “The injustices of Mc-Donald’s case continued inside the court-room. Throughout the trial, the judge and prosecution consistently and intention-ally misgendered McDonald, referring to her by masculine pronouns, further demonstrating a refusal to acknowledge her as a woman.

“Despite considerable evidence — in-cluding medical evidence, toxicology re-ports, eyewitness accounts, and unrefut-ed testimony that Schmitz initiated the altercation — McDonald’s self-defense claim was dismissed by prosecutors.

“Even worse, the judge ignored the fact that McDonald was the target of a hate crime, despite the racist and homophobic language used by Schmitz seconds before the fight began.

“The court even refused to admit Schmitz’s criminal record into evidence,

not to mention the swastika tattooed on his chest, as evidence of his history of vio-lence and bigotry,” Hill reports.

A May 22 article in Mother Jones points out, “The judge also ruled that the defense could not call an expert witness who would testify to transgender people’s experiences of violence in their everyday lives.”

Crime Library concluded: “Meanwhile, McDonald’s family and friends reported that they were being harassed by peo-ple connected with Dean Schmitz. They recounted threatening phone calls, and said that people they recognized from the Schooner Tavern had thrown bottles at them from a car” and yelled racist epi-thets. (trutv.com, Oct. 2)

‘By any means necessary’

It is always “legal” for ruling classes and their hired guns to attack and wage war against those they exploit and oppress. This same legal fiction deems it “illegal” for those who are oppressed and exploit-ed to fight back.

The Emancipation Proclamation — signed Jan. 1, 1863 — was necessary, for exam-ple, because the inhuman violence of the system of chattel slavery had been “legal.”

The Proclamation spelled out the right of Black people to self-defense. Yet Mc-Donald was arrested for defending her life against white-supremacist attack, and later sentenced during the month of June-teenth, a celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation — the formal abolition of “legal” enslavement of peoples of African descent.

McDonald was sent to prison in June — the month when the Stonewall Rebellion ignited in the streets of Greenwich Village in 1969. From the Compton’s Uprising to the Stonewall Rebellion, defense against oppressions is a law of survival.

During the month of March, McDonald and her book club supporters read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” as told to Alex Haley. (supportcece.wordpress.com)

Black revolutionary Malcolm X spoke out repeatedly about the right to self-de-fense: “I’m nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me.

“I don’t call it violence when it’s self-de-fense, I call it intelligence.”

In a speech Malcolm X gave only weeks before being assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965, he told an interviewer, “We declare our right on this earth to be a human be-ing, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.” (Quoted in “By Any Means Necessary.”)

CeCe Mcdonald & friends fought, survived lynch mob

U.s. surge in police and neo-fascist lynchingsoppressed have right to fight ‘by any means necessary’


himself, only 20, an evident suicide. All gone, killed.

It shouldn’t happen, but it did and it does. The shooting at Sandy Hook on Dec. 14 is being called the second-larg-est such massacre at a school, behind the shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007. It was not an isolated event in this country. Not even for this year.

Though it seems long ago because the media have ceased talking about it, the massacre at the Century 16 theater at the Aurora Mall near Denver was only in July. In total there have been more than a dozen registered mass shootings in the U.S. in 2012.

In a few, such as in Oak Creek, Wis., where a white supremacist entered a Sikh temple and killed seven people, the mo-tives are clear. In others, like Aurora and the latest in Sandy Hook, there doesn’t seem any one reason that drove the al-leged shooter to kill.

As in Aurora with James Holmes, the media have portrayed Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old white male alleged to have committed the killings in Sandy Hook, as a very intelligent yet disturbed lone gun-man. He is said to have had few friends, few relationships at all, somewhat es-tranged from his older brother, whose identification he carried. Friends of Nancy Lanza, Adam’s mother, say she rarely went

into detail about her troubles with him.Adam has also been characterized as be-

ing unemotional, of not having the ability to feel physical pain, according to a former advisor, Richard Novia, who also was the school district security head until 2008. Adam’s older brother, Ryan, says Adam suffered from a personality disorder, pos-sibly Asperger’s syndrome. But experts say this would in no way predispose him to premeditated violence.

Adam was removed from school for a short time and home schooled. According to school officials, he was assigned a psy-chologist. His aunt, Marsha Lanza, recalls Adam’s mother struggling with the school to make sure her son received the services he needed.

Nancy Lanza, his mother, was also the one who taught Adam how to shoot. She had a dozen guns in total and has been described as a survivalist with an outgo-ing personality. After failing to purchase a rifle two days before the school shooting, Adam ultimately used several of the guns his mother kept in the home.

the underlying causes

Is this what it all boils down to? Gun control? Is the heart of the issue that the young man had access to numerous fire-arms? Or is it something deeper? What would drive someone so young to commit such a heinous act?

CLeveLand

Protests follow police shooting spreeBy Sharon danann Cleveland

Police shootings of unarmed Black “suspects” are sadly all too common na-tionwide. But firing 137 bullets to stop a car with two occupants may have set a record.

On the night of Nov. 29, 13 officers chased a car driven by Timothy Ray Russell, 43, from downtown Cleveland through the city of Bratenahl to East Cleveland, a 26-minute chase. Malissa Williams, 30, was a passenger in the car. Both Williams and Russell were killed in what Cleveland’s daily newspaper, the Plain Dealer, called “a fusillade of bullets” on a cul-de-sac behind Heritage Middle School. Police cars were also shot up by “friendly fire,” a clear indication of the po-lice chaos.

The police claimed initially that they were fired upon. But investigators from the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s office stated that no guns or bullet cas-ings were found in the car. A security film showing the beginning of the chase re-

veals no flash or sound of gunfire. Results of gunpowder residue tests, which should be available, have not been released.

The community has responded with marches, rallies, press conferences, open forums and graveside support. At packed community meetings on Dec. 6 and Dec. 14, sponsored by the Cleveland NAACP, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson and other high-ranking city officials, people chanted “No justice, no peace!” The victims’ family members stated that police had murdered their loved ones “in cold blood.”

During a march at the site of the shoot-ing, signs condemned what happened as “lynching.” Walter Jackson, Williams’ uncle, called it “another Rodney King situation.”

An East Cleveland resident at the Dec. 14 protest labeled the police action as “Ku Klux Klan mentality.” Connecting the po-lice murders with the tragic massacre of school children in Connecticut, she stat-ed, “This country loves its guns.”

Black on Black Crime founder Art McKoy pointed to the Cleveland Police Department’s history of deadly force,

compounded by bias favoring officers in the investigations of these incidents. All 4,427 use-of-force investigations by po-lice supervisors for the period January 2003 to September 2006 cleared the of-ficers involved of wrongdoing. (Cleveland Plain Dealer, Jan. 14, 2007)

The Task Force for Community Mobi-lization, Self-Determination, Transfor-mation and Community Empowerment, a coalition of more than 35 community groups, sent a letter to U.S. Attorney Gen-eral Eric Holder asking for a swift investi-gation of the November shootings by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. The letter concluded, “We can no longer rely on the police to police themselves.”

Groups that make up the Task Force in-clude the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Friends Service Committee, the Carl Stokes Brigade, the Immigrant Support Network, Peace in the Hood, the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Shurah Council of Greater Cleveland (10 mosques), Black on Black Crime, the Oppressed Peoples Nation, Survivor and Victims of Tragedy, the Hip Hop Work-shop and the Council on American-Islam-ic Relations.

The Task Force, along with the ACLU of Ohio, has requested that Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine appoint a special prosecutor to head up the investigation, replacing the East Cleveland Police De-partment and the Cuyahoga County Sher-iff’s Office. In its letter to DeWine, the Task Force pointed out: “There were 137 shots including shotgun blasts that were fired into the vehicle after a reckless high-speed pursuit. At what point does a per-son stop being a danger? One officer fired 30-40 shots alone. He would have had to reload at least twice. That was nothing

more than target practice on corpses. Sev-eral years ago community leaders, citizens and public officials concluded that the Cleveland Police Department had a pat-tern and practice of excessive force, civil rights violations and bias involving people of color.”

The Cleveland NAACP has called the shootings “unacceptable and avoidable.” Congress member Marcia Fudge, whose district includes East Cleveland, sent a letter to the Special Litigation Unit of the Justice Department, asking for a thorough and independent review.

At a community forum in East Cleve-land’s Shaw High School on Dec. 14, Ab-dul Qahhar, minister of justice of the Task Force, called for the Plain Dealer to pub-lish the photos of the 13 officers who fired weapons in the shooting incident as “crim-inal cops who committed murder,” since the paper publishes pictures of fathers behind in their child support payments. Qahhar’s suggestion received enthusiastic support.

Ernest Smith, founder of the Oppressed People Nation, was loudly applauded as he called for the community to take to the streets.

One older African-American man said this is happening in every city in the U.S. He eloquently pointed out that the African people in the U.S. are a captive and bru-talized nation and the fightback must take place outside of the rigged “criminal” jus-tice system.

When the meeting ended, people marching to the exits started counting to 137 — the number of bullets fired. Re-garding the groundswell of community or-ganizing, Qahhar later declared, “We are kicking ass.”

Martha Grevatt and Susan Schnur contributed to this article.

Another racist vigilante slaying

By kathy durkin

Jordan Russell Davis was with friends in an SUV listening to music in a gas station in Jacksonville, Fla., over the “Thanksgiving” weekend. Their fun and camaraderie came to an abrupt halt as this 17-year-old African American was fa-tally gunned down.

The shooter was Michael David Dunn, a 45-year-old software engineer, who claimed he felt “threatened” by the four unarmed youths, who were simply sit-ting in their vehicle enjoying themselves. Dunn shot at them eight or nine times, striking Davis with three bullets and kill-ing him. A grand jury indicted him for first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder in the Nov. 23 shoot-ings. It is expected that Dunn will claim his murderous acts constituted “justifi-able homicide” under Florida’s “stand your ground” law.

Ronald Davis and Lucia McBath, the parents of Jordan Davis, appeared on MSNBC on Dec. 12 to discuss their son’s horrific slaying and publicize the need to overturn the “stand your ground” laws. Davis avowed that in Florida, “the best that we can do as Jordan’s parents is to get the ‘stand your ground’ law repealed because this is just a shield for people to go ahead and use their firearms without any type of thought about human life. So

that’s why we’re going to repeal that.”The Color of Change blog maintains

that the “stand your ground” law “legaliz-es vigilante homicide, has demonstrated racial bias in its application, and has led to an increase in gun-related deaths in the more than two dozen states where it has been passed into law. These laws give individual gun owners a greater right to shoot and kill than the rules of engage-ment for our military during times of war grant to soldiers in war zones. It must be repealed now to protect families and com-munities and prevent senseless deaths.”

There is tremendous outrage not only in Florida but around the country at this racist murder. It took place less than a year after vigilante George Zimmerman fatally shot African-American youth Tray-von Martin in Sanford, Fla. Zimmerman is hiding behind the “stand your ground” law — which is promoted in every state by the ultraright National Rifle Associa-tion — to try to justify his heinous act and avoid being held accountable and impris-oned. His senseless act sparked demon-strations from coast to coast in solidarity with the Martin family and their quest for justice for their son.

The horrendous crime which took Jor-dan Davis’ life requires that all progressive forces express solidarity with the Davis family and fight to overturn these reac-tionary laws wherever they are enacted.

Jordan russell davis


Sandy Hook tragedy

Its roots go deeper than guns


The underlying causes of such an act spring from the fundamental contradic-tions of modern society at this juncture in history and the political economy of the U.S. in particular. The politics and su-perstructure are formed by the economic base. Also, we must point out the sheer hy-pocrisy in the narrative of the mainstream media and of the politicians who turn out to express grief with the suffering families.

Life is precious and the life of a young person even more so. Most people think of a young life as brimming over with po-tential. Of course, some, because of their material wealth, status, nationality and gender expression, have more possibilities open to them. But things change. Where there is life there is the possibility for change. The young people who lost their lives could have been actors in making the world a better place.

When President Obama expressed his condolences and spoke of being responsi-ble for one another’s children and of giv-ing children the chance to live out their lives in happiness, he may not have con-sidered the children in Pakistan who have lost their lives in U.S. drone attacks.

The president may not have considered the children in Gaza, who died from Israe-li-delivered but U.S.-financed bombs, nor the children in Iraq or children anywhere who suffer because of U.S. policies of war and economic strangulation.

He may not have thought of the millions who die from hunger every year because of neoliberalist destabilization of the econo-mies of underdeveloped countries.

He probably didn’t think of the chil-dren of deported parents. Or of Trayvon Martin or Jordan Davis or the children and grandchildren of Anthony Anderson, who was killed by Baltimore police. He probably doesn’t know the name Ramar-ley Graham or of the many whose lives were lost from police brutality. Or those who die from lack of health care or who fall through the cracks because of a disap-pearing social safety net.

The media do not mention any of the above. Certainly, though, the life of a Palestinian child is not less than that of one of the young children killed in Sandy Hook Elementary.

Yet, the fact that there appears to be a higher value placed on one life than an-other, and that the media and politicians can speak in generalizations about how precious a young life is, even while pursu-ing and enacting policies that lead to the suffering of hundreds of millions, only be-gins to get at the heart of the matter.

Adam Lanza was not reared behind an impenetrable shell, whether or not he suffered from some personality disorder. His actions and the final act he is alleged to have committed happened within a so-cial context.

Centuries of gun culture

There is indeed a gun culture. The peo-ple arguing for gun control, however, are seeking changes in the legal superstruc-ture — laws that would make it harder to purchase or stockpile weapons.

The National Rifle Association spends millions every year on lobbying, along with Gun Owners of America and other such organizations. Gun manufacturers have been making record profits.

Sturm Ruger and Smith & Wesson,

which account for 30 percent of the hand-gun market in the U.S., have seen their sales soar in the last few years. Guns are a $4.1 billion industry here.

These figures reflect only the person-al firearms industry, not major weapons manufacturers such as General Electric, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin or the other corpora-tions that receive tens of billions of dollars per year from the federal government.

The gun culture is more than that, though. The U.S. was built from seized land, land that was taken from the orig-inal inhabitants, who were then massa-cred — children, women and men. Whole nations were disappeared, killed by guns, knives and an early form of biological warfare, where diseased materials were used to introduce foreign illnesses to In-digenous peoples.

Slavery was maintained by the gun and brutal violence that saw the rise of the first standardized police force, the slave catch-ers. To this day, it has been violence that has maintained U.S. political and eco-nomic hegemony over most of the world.

U.S. predominance is at the service of a small class that owes its beginnings to the founding of the U.S. and capitalism. The U.S. and Western Europe owe their wealth, not to the ingenuity and suprem-acy of the peoples of the respective coun-tries, but to naked aggression, theft, slav-ery, rape and genocide. As Walter Rodney wrote in “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” “[T]he development of Europe [is] part of the same dialectical process in which Africa was underdeveloped.” The same can be said for the U.S. with regard to the rest of the planet.

This is how the gun culture, a culture of violence, came into being. It is a mere re-flection of the current world social order.

violence, privilege and alienation

This is the context in which Adam Lan-

za grew up — one of violence, privilege and also a deep disconnectedness. While Lanza may have been surrounded by ma-terial trappings, things that the vast ma-jority of people on the planet will never see, there is a profound emptiness in just having things.

Capitalist society touts individualism, the competition for survival. In modern U.S. society people are alienated from the fruit of their work and from one another. The consumerist culture that so many lib-eral magazines decry is a manifestation of the alienation in modern capitalist soci-ety, which is part of the decadent culture that grows more ripe, generation after generation.

The blame is being put on guns. There are calls for more stringent gun control laws, something that would cede the monopoly of violence to the police, who maintain the current social relations. But the real reason for the rise of these types of actions and the troubled state of young people is the social order.

Perhaps the families of the children who died at Sandy Hook can never truly heal. How can they, when birthdays will pass and the voices of young precious people will go unheard and all their po-tential will never be realized?

Science at times can seem unfeeling, but at the heart of a revolutionary is the desire to change the world, to see the old order be torn away for something better, more human, based on making sure ev-eryone in society is provided for.

The only way to begin to address a trag-edy like the massacre at Sandy Hook is to address the fundamental problems that exist. In the final analysis, it is the capi-talist system that is to blame. As long as it exists, the lives of children are at risk, whether it be from violence, starvation, neglect or disasters caused by global warming. It is all rooted in a system that has outlived its usefulness.

Sandy Hook tragedy

Its roots go deeper than guns

Subway struggle over racist adsBy tony Murphy new york

When the far-right blogger Pamela Geller collaborated with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in September to run a series of racist, anti-Islam ads in the New York subways, the reaction on the part of New York’s progressive communi-ty was instant.

Virtually all of the ads Geller paid the MTA to run were defaced within days. Add that to the protesters who invaded the MTA board meeting that month to confront Geller and take a stand against racism, and it’s clear that her ad campaign got the treatment it deserved.

Now, Geller is back with a new round of ads. Different words — same disgusting, pro-war, anti-Islam message.

This time, the MTA has helped her by placing more of the ads higher up, along-side clocks that hang from the ceilings in the underground subway system. Geller claims they will be too high to be defaced.

We’ll see. What is also a question is whether activists will be able to expose the MTA’s role in all of this. The board mem-bers played martyr in September, claim-ing that a court order forced them to run the ads. “Our hands are tied,” they said.

Nonsense. With SWAT teams that pa-trol the subway with submachine guns, attack dogs, and racist-profiling backpack checks, the MTA long ago became a will-ing accomplice in the bogus war on terror.

It was no accident that Geller’s ads ran in September, when the United Nations was in session, at the height of the media’s hysterical anti-Ahmadinejad campaign.

The MTA’s sorry attempt to cast its war propaganda as a free speech issue is trans-parently hypocritical: it still hasn’t run ads paid for in September by the International Action Center. These ads say, “Resist An-other War: No to Racism & Anti-Muslim

Bigotry, Tool of 1% Rule. We — the 99% — Need Unity & Solidarity!”

Exposing the MTA’s role is more than just anti-war sentiment. It opens up the potential for more allies in the struggle for contract justice for the transit system workers and the fight against the yearly transit hikes.

It also avoids simply giving Pamela Geller the kind of media soapbox she rel-ishes. When people come out to protest, she uses it as a chance to get more air time

for her bigoted pro-war line.That’s harder to do if the movement’s

target is the MTA.The 99% use and run the subway sys-

tem. It belongs to the people. Yet riders are forced to accept higher and higher fares, and now have to be accosted by rac-ism when they take the subway. And the transit workers — who heroically revived the subway system after Hurricane Sandy — are being asked by the MTA to accept no raises for three years.

The MTA has gotten the media to report that riders are resigned to being treated like ATM machines, with fares automat-ically going up every several months, as though that’s the fault of the workers. But the outrage against the racism being pro-moted in the subways shows how thor-oughly what should be a public service has been taken over by the 1%.

The basis for classwide unity to take back public transportation is growing. It’s time for the movement to take advantage of it.

Thousands of people living in New York City’s Far Rock-away and Staten Island areas are still without heat, hot water and electricity. They have to line up for hot meals and food. Toxic mold and residue from Sandy’s surge fill their apartments. On Dec. 15, Occupy Sandy in conjunction with a number of community members called protests, involving marches and housing rehabilitation, in these two communities. This was followed by a gathering in front of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s posh Manhattan house in the evening.

report and photo by g. dunkel

Still suffering from Sandy


Workers World Party conference .

venezuela and the struggle for socialism

‘The agenda is to deepen the revolution’

Hit by the capitalist crisis

‘Youth globally are fighting back’

This is a talk by Berta Joubert-Ceci of the Philadelphia branch of Workers World Party to the November WWP National Conference.

I want to share some thoughts about Venezuela.Since Hugo Chávez took office as pres-

ident in 1999, Venezuela has been a ray of hope for millions of people around the world, but more so for the people in Latin America. The Bolivarian Revolu-tion sparked a new wave of revolutionary struggles all around the region. Each pro-cess is different in every country, but they are tied to each other not only by their geographical situation, but by their aims to lift the masses of people out of poverty, rely less on the U.S., and very important, to integrate the region. And now, to follow a socialist path.

When Chávez declared that the revolu-tion would be built on the basis of social-ism, every revolutionary was ecstatic. He particularly mentioned that it would be the socialism of the 21st century. What is that? The point of reference is the USSR. First, that it would prevail. And second, that it would correct the mistakes that in their view served almost as sources of self-destruction, particularly in the orga-nization of the masses. This, however, is not a critique of the USSR, considering the long history of U.S. imperialist aggression.

Can a socialist state be built through elections? Without dismantling and re-pressing the old violent capitalist state and replacing it with a new armed power

that can jump-start the socialist develop-ment and protect it?

We remember the tragic experience in Chile. But the Venezuelans do too, and I bet that they have learned from it. Chávez has always said that the Bolivarian Rev-olution is a peaceful revolution, but not unarmed.

A socialist state cannot be constructed by just wanting socialism, or by changing some things in the superstructure (educa-tion, politics, etc.). The means of produc-tion must be in the workers’ hands. The relations of production must change.

So, since the capitalist state is still in place, enormous difficulties and contra-dictions have plagued the revolution,

which it is important to stress is not socialist yet. But on the other hand, as a progressive, anti-impe-rialist revolution which has social-ism as its goal, it has lasted for 14 years. So, let us take a brief look at what has helped to maintain it.

The first thing that Chávez did was to re-establish the constitu-tional framework and engage the people in the drafting of a new progressive constitution. This helped to start some changes that eventually chipped away some of the political power from the cap-italists. The main source of in-come, the oil, was rescued and its enormous profits went to estab-lish social programs for the bene-fit of the masses. Then there was

the nationalization of banks and of some industries.

There was also the establishment of workers’ control in some companies.

The revolution is now at the stage of how to transform the relations of produc-tion and have the means of production in the hands of the working class.

The organization of the working class to take power is crucial.

Chávez has been presented in the capi-talist media as a “dictator.” Right now he is the only political figure able to galva-nize the masses and push forward the rev-olution, but he knows that has to change. And since the very beginning of the revo-lution he has encouraged the organization of the masses. Remember the Bolivarian

Circles? A constant in the revolution has been organization at the base. And a great deal of discussion and debates.

Now, after the last election, the agen-da is to deepen the revolution, towards socialism. For that there is the second national plan for socialism. They are pro-gramming assemblies all over the nation to engage the people in a great discussion about how to go forward. This is crucial. They are establishing “comunas” (com-munes). In neighborhoods, in workplac-es, everywhere.

There are dangers, within and without. We should be on the alert to the dangers posed by the Venezuelan opposition and U.S. imperialism, which has been work-ing incessantly to overturn the Bolivarian Revolution. It aligns with the pro-imperi-alist oligarchy and aids the counterrevo-lutionaries through nongovernmental or-ganizations, etc. There is a high presence of U.S. and Israeli intelligence at all levels ready to whip up dissent and malicious criticism of Chávez and the process.

For us in the center of imperialism, it is crucial to defend this tremendous devel-opment, which has ignited a new wave of resistance to imperialism, and above all, sparked the flame, the passion, for a just society where the wealth belongs to the people. Defending this development is to defend the struggle for socialism.

¡Viva la Revolución Bolivariana!¡Viva el socialismo! Long live socialism!Long live the international peoples’

struggle for socialism!

Following is a talk by Ben Carroll of the Durham, N.C., branch of Workers World Party to WWP’s National Confer-ence in November.

It’s incredibly exciting to be here, given all the tremendous developments in

the struggle, the fightback that is building across the globe and the role that young workers are playing in this. Before I get into talking more about some of these, I want to first discuss some of the ways that this crisis is impacting young people.

One of the most profound symptoms of this capitalist crisis is the staggering lev-els of youth unemployment around the world and the desperate situation that this has thrown an entire generation into. At the end of 2010, there were around 80 million young people across the globe who were unemployed, according to the U.N. Youth unemployment is around 40 percent throughout much of Europe, 50 percent in Egypt and Tunisia, and hovers in the 40 percent to 50 percent range for many countries. Here in the U.S., the most recent unemployment statistics show that youth employment is around 20 percent overall, and stands at an almost unfath-omable 50 percent for Black youth.

And these are all the official statistics, which we know are deliberately manip-ulated lower and don’t account for those who are underemployed, working part time when they need a full-time job, who have given up looking for a job altogether, or prison labor.

To a greater and greater extent, young people are faced largely with three op-tions: work a low-wage job with no ben-efits, join the ranks of the unemployed or get locked up in prison. A whole gen-eration is being shut out of the workforce altogether, and this shows the severity of the present crisis of the capitalist system.

The austerity measures and budget cuts being adopted by state and local governments around the country have put every social service on the chopping block, all of which were won through struggle. Education is being hit partic-ularly hard, as schools are closed or pri-vatized or charterized, teachers and edu-cation workers are laid off, the growth of the school-to-prison pipeline, tuition at community colleges and universities is soaring through the roof. And the banks cannibalize the public treasury and force students to mortgage away our futures with student loans if we want to get an ed-ucation. This is because education for the masses of young people, and particularly African-American and Latino and Latina youth, is regarded as unnecessary by the ruling class.

Whatever last thin veils remained that hid or obscured the barbarity, the injustice and the inhumanity of the capitalist sys-tem have been lifted, revealing all the con-tradictions, racism, sexism and bigotry of this system more and more with each day.

This is what has led billionaire Mayor Bloomberg, the International Monetary Fund, and many other capitalist pun-

dits and media to issue warnings about what Bloomberg Businessweek magazine termed “the youth unemployment bomb.” And around the world there are signs that this bomb is beginning to explode.

An international fightback is beginning to bubble up that in many cases is be-ing led or initiated by young people, and while each has a different political charac-ter, all are set against the backdrop of the global capitalist crisis.

In many ways, it began in Tunisia and Egypt with uprisings that toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorships in those coun-tries and took aim at mass unemploy-ment there.

WW PhotoS: brENda rYaN

In Spain, demonstrations were held on May 15 across the country against aus-terity and mass unemployment, which stands at 20 percent generally and 45 percent for young people. They escalat-ed into occupations of squares in cities across the country that lasted for nearly a month. At one point, there were demon-strations in over 150 cities. Young people there began referring to themselves as “los indignados,” the generation without a future, which really speaks to the con-dition of young people across the globe. They have continued to hold assemblies in many of the major cities in Spain that have been defending people’s homes when there are attempted evictions or moving people back into their homes af-ter they have been foreclosed.

In Greece, where the attacks on the workers and the austerity are perhaps the most severe and the fightback the most developed at this stage, young peo-ple have played a pivotal role in mobi-lizing and supporting the general strikes which have been called in response to the attacks, the most recent of which was last week. The student section of the All Workers Militant Front, the union asso-ciated with the Greek Communist Party, has led walkouts of high schools and uni-versities to support the strikes. And more than 50,000 young people also organized an occupation outside of Parliament in Athens at the time of the square occupa-

Continued on page 14

Berta Joubert-Ceci

Ben Carroll


Coal miners, Hurricane Sandy and China’s GreenGenBy deirdre griswold

This year, possibly for the first time ever, the United Mine Workers did not endorse a presidential candidate. In 2008, the union was an early endorser of Obama, and has usually supported Dem-ocratic candidates. The union’s decision to sit it out this year was an indication of the crisis that has befallen coal miners, who don’t know where to turn for help.

In 1923, there were 700,000 coal min-ers in the United States. Today, there are fewer than 88,000. In this same period, the total amount of coal produced here annually has doubled, while productivity per worker has increased about 14 times.

Mining coal is a hard, dirty and danger-ous job. Most of the mines are in areas, like Appalachia, where poverty is high and other types of work are hard to get. His-torically, coal miners have been among the most class-conscious and militant workers. Their harsh conditions and the high-handed, brutal tactics of the mine owners resulted in class struggles that have at times amounted to open warfare.

Both capitalist parties want the votes of miners and their communities but have no answers to their rising problems. The Republicans tried to make hay this year by blaming growing unemployment in mining areas on government regula-tion of coal mining and coal-fired pow-er plants, which are major producers of greenhouse gas (GG) pollution. Romney even found some coal miners willing to stand on the platform at one of his cam-paign rallies. The Republicans failed to capture the union’s endorsement, but the workers were disappointed enough with the Obama administration to withhold their support.

no mention of climate change in debates

Capitalist politics is based upon decep-tion of the masses of people. This election was no exception. While the presidential debates were about the budget deficit and taxes, the all-important issues of jobs, pov-erty and climate change got little attention from the candidates. Climate change in particular was never even mentioned.

It should have been a perfect opportu-nity to bring to hundreds of millions of viewers a clear, scientific explanation of what is happening to the world’s environ-ment because of rampant, profit-driven industrial expansion, and then present a program of what to do about it.

Here, in the richest of all capitalist countries, the technology and the human power exist to remake the entire infra-structure and begin to turn around the intensifying cycle of unnatural disasters now unfolding.

The energy of every person who needs and wants a job and training could be em-ployed in such an endeavor.

Of course, nothing of the kind hap-pened. The absolute lack of any plan, even to deal with the after-effects of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts and floods, let alone with their causes, was made painfully clear during and immediately after the election. Millions had their lives turned upside down by climate-change-induced catastro-phes all over the country, from wildfires in the West and drought in the Midwest grain belt to the swath of submerged and ham-mered communities hit by Hurricane San-dy, which rampaged from the New York-New Jersey coast all the way to the Great Lakes and into Canada.

Yet the recent annual U.N. talks on cli-

mate change, which took place this year in Doha, the capital of oil-rich Qatar, got nowhere as usual.

The governments of the rich and pow-erful capitalist countries that have pro-duced the vast majority of carbon dioxide gas that today blankets the earth, trap-ping its heat, have blocked any efforts to set quotas for reducing the emission of greenhouse gases. Nor could the small island countries that face extinction as sea levels rise get any meaningful help for their people.

However, the lack of an international agreement hasn’t stopped every country from moving ahead with tackling this ur-gent problem. Most notable is the People’s Republic of China. It is worth citing a few facts about what China is doing, especially since most of the U.S. media present Chi-na as a major problem in climate change.

China pioneers ‘clean’ coal

China relies on coal for 70 percent of its energy. It has the largest coal deposits in the world, and is presently the largest consumer of coal. This is a huge problem for China, and has contributed to serious air pollution in most of its cities.

But in 2010 China became the world’s largest investor in clean energy. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, the U.S. spent trillions on bailing out the banks and other financial institutions. China, seeing its ex-port market drying up as the Western cap-italist economies plunged, did something different. It invested nearly a trillion dol-lars in its infrastructure, much of it deal-ing with the problem of energy conserva-tion as well as clean energy generation.

It established the Thermal Power Re-search Institute, the Clean Energy Re-search Institute and many other gov-ernment bodies to integrate scientific breakthroughs with industrial develop-ment. This led to vastly expanding its in-vestment in renewables like solar panels and wind farms.

In October the China Institute of Atom-ic Energy announced it had complet-ed the construction of an experimental fourth-generation fast neutron reactor that is now contributing 20 megawatts to the power grid. The plant utilizes 60 percent of the energy in its uranium fuel, compared to just 1 percent for older pres-surized water reactors. The next step in China’s nuclear program is a fast reactor that uses recycled fuel — thus beginning to draw down the huge piles of radioactive waste accumulating around the world.

China’s investment in cleaner energy has also led to the development of new ways to use coal without adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

This year, a coal-fired plant called GreenGen went online in Tianjin that is generating 400 megawatts of electricity with near-zero emissions of carbon and sulfur. The carbon is sequestered and pumped back deep underground. Green-Gen is a pilot plant; if it performs as ex-pected, China will build more and phase out the older polluting plants.

Coal is not the answer for all time, ob-viously. Coal, like oil and gas, is a fossil fuel. It was created by geological process-es over millions of years, and it is being depleted at an alarming rate by human extraction. It is not renewable.

Over the short term, however, the new coal-fired energy technology can help China reduce its GG emissions — which it committed itself to do at the U.N. con-ference in Copenhagen three years ago.

It voluntarily set itself a target of a 45 percent reduction in GG emissions per unit of economic development by 2020. (Bloomberg News, April 3)

China is still a developing country, one that has to feed and house 1.3 billion peo-ple — four times the population of the U.S. How can it afford to be on the cut-ting edge of dealing with global warming, when only two generations ago most of its people lived in dire poverty?

The answer is that, despite the growth of the capitalist market in China, its cen-tral financial and industrial institutions are still publicly owned and operated ac-cording to a planned economy made pos-sible by its socialist revolution of 1949. Even Western capitalists, who would love to break up state control over the Chinese economy as they did in the former USSR, recognize this.

‘earth, the operator’s Manual’

The U.S. Public Broadcasting System aired a documentary last April entitled “Earth, the Operator’s Manual.” It can be viewed online. Among the people inter-viewed on this program, which deals with the question of climate change, is Jon Hofmeister, the head of Shell USA.

Hofmeister says about China: “There is literally a plan in their energy policies. It’s good to have a plan — having that long arc of commitment. … We’re not making the decisions at the national level that need to be made in terms of the next decade and the next several decades after that. … Places like China have a clear plan, and they are driving forward and they are building an energy infrastructure for the 21st century which will perhaps supply energy to the world’s largest economy — China, not the U.S.”

How ironic that a major capitalist — from the oil industry, no less — should speak admiringly of China’s economic plan. Of course, Hofmeister would be hor-rified if we were to suggest that Shell, Mo-bil, General Electric, Ford, Citibank and all the huge corporations and banks that have a lock on the U.S. economy should be taken over through a workers’ revolu-tion so that the riches of this society, built by the workers, could be organized in a rational plan and used to meet people’s needs, not the profit greed of a small class of parasitic owners.

No, Hofmeister wants to have his cake and eat it, too. He wants the capitalist government to invest the workers’ money into just enough planning of infrastruc-ture so that his company won’t fall behind China and can still produce enormous profits for his class.

One of the U.S. companies that has started doing business in China is Pea-body Coal. It actually divested its mines

in Appalachia by selling them to a com-pany created for this purpose, which then conveniently went bankrupt. This pushed the responsibility for the miners’ pensions and health coverage onto the government — a common trick nowadays.

Peabody is involved in the GreenGem plant, and would probably like to take the technological knowhow that China has developed in the field of near-zero-emis-sion, coal-fired energy generation and make profits from it here in the U.S. But Peabody wouldn’t sink much of its own money into such a plan. It would agree with Hofmeister that the government should pay the lion’s share. The primary concern of Peabody, as a capitalist corpo-ration, is not clean energy. It is profit.

The U.S. capitalist government, how-ever, is already so overburdened with paying the banks their interest on the national “debt,” spending trillions on protecting the worldwide imperialist in-terests of big capital, and also repressing the working class at home — where we have the largest prison population in the world — that it is trying to figure out what to cut, not what to add.

Mattoon power plant, dead before it was born

Actually, there was a plan to build such a low-emissions coal-fired power plant in the U.S., beginning back in 2004 with the founding of the FutureGen Alliance. Mil-lions of dollars were sunk into it before the Bush administration withdrew funding. After the bubble burst, the new Obama administration said in 2009 that some of the stimulus money should go into build-ing the FutureGen plant in Mattoon, Ill. But it seems that the plug has been pulled on that plant, and it is now going nowhere.

The capitalist system has no answers to the problem of global warming or to the despair of the coal miners, who are being replaced not by environmental regula-tions but by new technology like moun-taintop removal.

Meanwhile, many communities ravaged by Hurricane Sandy are still suffering. And the Midwest drought has lowered the Mis-souri and Mississippi rivers by as much as 20 feet, threatening to halt shipping there. (Thanks to WW subscriber Joe Johnson of Wisconsin for this information.)

The profit motive, which is so total-ly entrenched in this capitalist society, stands in the way of a rational reorgani-zation of the economy that would provide jobs for all while re-greening the planet. Only the working class and the oppressed, fighting in their own interests, have the power to bring this ruling class down and put production on a sustainable basis. En-vironmentalists have a duty to do all they can to help make this happen.

China in 2010 became the world’s largest investor in clean energy. It is the largest producer of solar panels and of wind energy. Here, an engineer points to a diagram of the GreenGen coal-fired, low-emission power plant that went online this year.


in PakiStan

Mass movement demands U.S. release Aafia Siddiqui

In support of continuing efforts to pressure the U.S. government to repa-triate Dr. Aafia Siddiqui to Pakistan, former U.S. Congressperson Cynthia McKinney and International Action Cen-ter Co-Director Sara Flounders traveled to Pakistan Dec. 2-9. Workers World managing editor John Catalinotto conducted the following interview with Flounders on her return to the U.S.

WorkerS World: What was the aim of your trip to Pakistan?

Sara FlounderS: The trip focused on exposing U.S. crimes, meaning the gov-ernment’s violations of due process and justice in the case of Aafia Siddiqui and also U.S. practices of secret renditions, illegal confinement and torture — practic-es highlighted by Siddiqui’s case. It also confirmed that there is deep opposition across the whole political spectrum in Pa-kistan to the U.S. use of drones to carry out assassinations in the region.

Cynthia McKinney was the other per-son from the U.S. on the trip, participat-ing in every meeting. She has been an op-ponent of U.S. wars at every step.

The Pakistani forces — and they are nu-merous — who support Aafia Siddiqui also want to bring pressure upon the Pakistani government so that it too demands of the U.S. that she be returned to Pakistan. That is what millions of Pakistanis want.

Political parties were signing a pledge in the Parliament that they would take a stand opposing the release to the U.S. of anyone in Pakistan’s custody until Aa-fia Siddiqui is returned to Pakistan. The U.S. Congress is so arrogant that they de-manded that Pakistan release Dr. Shakeel Afridi, the jailed CIA informant, to the U.S., while of course they are silent on the U.S. holding a kidnapped Pakistani wom-an, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui.

WW: Two weeks ago we covered your stop in Karachi. How much support does

Aafia Siddiqui have in the rest of the country that you visited?

SF: Our trip to Peshawar — which is drone territory — and Lahore confirmed what we saw in Karachi, each time more strongly, that the kidnapping of Siddiqui, her 10 years in prison, her secret deten-tion and trial are a deeply felt emotional issue in Pakistan.

We drove from the capital, Islamabad, south to Hyderabad. When we were on the road, young people came out in thou-sands. Our car was surrounded by youths on motorcycles carrying flags with Aafia’s picture on them.

All political currents — and there are hundreds of parties — say they support her return. This includes even those who worked with the U.S., and of course those who opposed U.S. imperialism, and it in-cluded the masses in the street, who are for her release in a powerful way. We saw signs on the walls all over, “Free Aafia,” “Free sister Aafia,” “86 years, bullshit.”

People in the U.S. may have gotten used to seeing Congress speak so arrogantly to the rest of the world. Or the U.S. courts treating oppressed people like they have no rights. But the Pakistanis can’t believe what happened to Siddiqui. They asked in every meeting: How it was possible that someone who injured no one could be sen-tenced to jail for 86 years? Why was a Paki-stani citizen brought to the U.S.? How can this be? They asked: How could the U.S. government or some secret agency hold her young children in prison for years? When the children were finally returned to the Siddiqui family, they spoke only En-glish. Average Pakistanis are outraged.

WW: What role did women play in the protests?

SF: We were extremely impressed by the role of women in the movement to free Siddiqui and also at their anger against the drones that are killing their families.

We stopped in a small town just outside

Peshawar. The men were on one side of the room, the women on the other. But far from being submissive, the women were passionately involved in the issue, the most militant. They had been to rallies for Aafia Siddiqui and spoke about her as if she were their sister.

In her youth Aafia Siddiqui was the num-ber one high-school student in Pakistan. Her specialty at MIT and her doctorate were on the learning process of children.

Aafia’s sister, Dr. Fauzia Siddiqui, who is also U.S.-educated and was director of the epilepsy program at John Hopkins University, was the main coordinator of the Free Aafia movement and of our trip. I found her to be a skilled political organiz-er who has built this movement into such a force that every political party in Paki-stan has to at least say they support it. It is telling that she has now received death threats. It shows that powerful forces fear the success of this movement.

We were impressed by the Free Aafia media work, which was coordinated by Altaf Shakour. We were overwhelmed by the friendly media coverage. Every news-paper printed front-page color pictures.

And there is a broad range of media, much more variety than in the U.S. There were 100 journalists from all types of me-dia at the events. There were big rallies with thousands of people, after which our motorcades drove past thousands more on the way to the press club. It was a live issue.

We also visited Aafia’s home in Kara-chi, met with her mother, Fauzia’s two children and the two children of Aafia.

WW: Was there any sign of the war in Afghanistan?

SF: People in Pakistan continually say that Karachi is key to the war in Afghan-istan and are for the withdrawal from Af-ghanistan. People often made the point that Pakistan taught the U.S. a lesson when just months ago the people and the govern-ment shut the roads. Today there are lines

of trucks going along the roads bringing U.S. equipment back from Afghanistan.

Peshawar, near the border with Af-ghanistan, is under control of the Paki-stani military. We had a huge, huge out-pouring of the Pashtun people who are an oppressed nationality within Pakistan. It’s an area of constant war. There, trucks with big sound systems played songs about Aafia Siddiqui in large rallies. There were hundreds of signs.

People referred constantly, with great resentment, to the many U.S. operatives, private contractors and military working within Pakistan today.

The big issues were the drones, the U.S. policy of secret renditions. McKinney spoke a lot also about the U.S. unjust and racist prison system itself, as well as Aafia Siddiqui. People consider the extrajudicial killings with the drones the extension of the kidnapping and imprisonment of Siddiqui.

Nothing shows more the utter failure of U.S. drones than seeing how these totally criminal, extrajudicial tactics have turned a whole population so decisively against Washington. Drones are not such an ef-fective weapon if 95 percent of Pakistan’s population now hates the U.S.

WW: Did you meet with any left forces?SF: In Lahore, a political center, there

was an Institute for Policy Studies, a room with 100 people that was live-streamed to another 25,000. Everyone, even in this Westernized atmosphere, was against drones and for the return of Aafia Siddiqui. Because we were from the U.S. and it was about Aafia, it was intensely watched.

Both religious and left forces support the movement. We had a meeting, for ex-ample, with the Awami Workers Party, a new party recently formed by the merg-er of three workers’ parties. They want to make Aafia’s freedom a workers’ issue. When we left, a Grand Youth Alliance in Pakistan for Aafia with a base on every campus was in formation.

as voting for draft constitution begins

Egyptian protesters stay in the streetsBy abayomi azikiwe editor, Pan-african news Wire

Egyptians in 10 of the country’s 27 provinces, including the two major cities of Cairo and Alexandria, voted on Dec. 15 in the first phase of a referendum for a draft constitution. The follow-up vote is scheduled to be held Dec. 22 in small-er cities and rural areas throughout this North African state.

Only one-third of the 26 million people eligible in the 10 provinces actually voted. Preliminary results showed that the “yes” vote for the constitution received about 56 percent and the “no” vote 44 percent. The new constitution and other issues have drawn widespread protest through-out the country over the last month.

On Nov. 22, President Mohamed Mor-si of the Muslim Brotherhood-allied Freedom and Justice Party had issued a decree concentrating greater powers in his office. Under pressure from mass demonstrations, Morsi rescinded this de-cree a few weeks later.

These two developments, the decree

and the national referendum, led to the formation of a large opposition coalition calling itself the National Salvation Front. It consists of left, liberal and nationalist parties and organizations in opposition to the character of the constitution and the political process which the FJP gov-ernment has utilized in the recent period. While there are some prominent pro-cap-italist leaders like Mohamed ElBaradei in the NSF, there are also new organizations of youth who were the backbone of the revolutionary movement two years ago.

Official preliminary results show the “no”

vote won in both Cairo and Alexandria, meaning that the two main political cen-ters rejected the FJP leadership. Neverthe-less, the FJP, along with the Al Nour Party, a Salafist-oriented organization, have declared victory for the draft constitution.

The National Salvation Front has re-jected the official results and is calling for canceling the second phase of the contro-versial process on Dec. 22. The NSF cites lack of judicial supervision and vote rig-ging, and demands that the government abandon the process and re-open negoti-ations on a new constitution.

opposition calls mass demonstrationsThe NSF called upon its supporters to

go into the streets on Dec. 18 to express their opposition to the character of the elections. Some of the violations cited by the coalition were unstamped voting bal-lots (making them invalid), the names of dead people on voter rolls, the absence of judicial oversight, and the presence of what they claim were 120 “fake” judges involved in the monitoring process.

These elections take place in a period of economic decline. Unemployment remains

high, and the domestic sectors of tourism and natural gas have been depressed.

The FJP government of President Mor-si has taken no measures that would dis-tance it from the international capitalist financial institutions. Nor has it reorient-ed Egyptian foreign policy away from the U.S., taken a position against the state of Israel, or shown more solidarity toward the Palestinians in Gaza than did the pro-U.S. Hosni Mubarak regime.

Qatar, a Gulf emirate allied with the U.S., has recently pledged $20 billion in investments to the Morsi government.

The Egyptian masses overthrew Mubarak because they wanted fundamen-tal change in how Egypt was run, includ-ing overturning the political, economic and foreign policy of the pro-imperialist government, along with more of their own participation in that rule. They are unhap-py with the successors to Mubarak and are again opening the door to change. This will require a break with imperialism and rebuilding the country based upon its own national interests and those of the majori-ty of the population.

Egyptians demonstrate against President Morsi demanding that he withdraw decrees that usurp powers from the judiciary.


as voting for draft constitution begins

Egyptian protesters stay in the streets

World’s people show solidarity with ChávezBy Berta Joubert-Ceci

Since Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced the recurrence of the cancer that he has been battling since 2011 and the need for additional surgery, he has been the object of world solidarity. He told the Venezuelan people on Dec. 8 that his last medical examination showed that ma-lignant cells recurred at the site in his ab-domen where he had been treated earlier. As a result, he needed a fourth operation.

This time, however, the outcome could be disability or even death. As the Consti-tution mandates, he designated current Vice President Nicolás Maduro to stand in during the treatment and as his successor should he be unable to return to office by the Jan. 10 Inauguration Day. He asked Venezuelans to elect Maduro president if new elections are needed.

Chávez then flew to Havana, Cuba, in preparation for surgery on Dec. 11. A skilled Cuban medical team had the dif-ficult task of treating and trying to save the life not only of an individual, but the hope of millions of people throughout the region and the world.

Why is Chávez important?One leader is not the revolution. It is

the masses and the process of revolution that create leaders, and not the other way around. Leaders, however, can steer the revolution, coordinate resources and speed it up. Leaders are also an import-ant part of revolutions when they are the product of the masses’ aspiration.

Chávez is such a leader. He has been able to gather and concentrate the desire of the Venezuelan people for social jus-tice and equality and turn it into action. Under his presidency, the government has lifted the lives of all Venezuelans, dedicating an impressive 43.2 percent of the budget to social programs. Illiteracy is now nonexistent in Venezuela and pov-erty has been reduced.

Venezuela is a dynamic country where people participate actively in forming their future.

Along with improving the quality of life of millions of people, Chávez’s government has shown that Simón Bolívar’s dream of regional integration could be a reality. To-gether with revolutionary Cuba, Venezuela impelled the formation of anti-imperialist regional associations like the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA). These associations have been crucial for the im-provement and cohesion of the region, in-cluding other Caribbean nations.

Chávez and Venezuela inspire the world by standing up against the U.S. im-perialist monster. They show that nations can win and maintain national dignity, in-dependence and sovereignty in the face of criminal imperialist interventions.

Broad solidarityThat is why the news of his illness has

moved people to almost personal suffer-ing — what one feels for a family member — from Venezuela and Latin America and the Caribbean to Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe.

Chávez is close to the hearts of millions. One can see their feelings in the faces of women and men of all ages in the photos of gatherings in Venezuela and hear it in their testimony.

Chávez, who of all the Latin American presidents has used social networks ex-tensively, has been inundated with mes-sages of well-wishers in his “chavezcan-danga” Twitter account.

Beyond Venezuela, Ecuadorean Presi-dent Rafael Correa canceled his appoint-ments and flew to Havana to be with Chávez before his surgery. All the presi-dents of the ALBA countries have been in constant communication with Chávez’s representatives. They and many other heads of state and multiple organizations have organized solidarity events with Chávez and the Venezuelan people.

Most of these events have been religious, of every kind. In the context of sadness and individual impotence in the face of an unknown outcome, it reflects the im-portance of religion for millions of people in Latin America. At a service in a Ven-ezuelan mosque, Vice President Maduro said that 58 mosques in Muslim countries were holding services for Chávez’s health that day.

These services are acts of solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution and its aim of liberation from imperialism. Uruguayan President José Mujica, who is not religious himself, sent Chávez a letter, saying: “As you know, I am not a believer, but I have asked some friends to organize a mass so that those who wish to express themselves religiously for your health have a place

here in our country. I will go with them.”In Cuba, it has been reported that both

Raúl and Fidel Castro visit him daily and talk with the Chávez family, who are by his side.

elections in venezuela without ChávezThe regional elections held Dec. 16,

without Chávez’s physical presence, select-ed 23 governors and 237 representatives to the Legislative Council, including eight representatives of Indigenous regions.

The candidates from Chávez’s PSUV party won in 20 of Venezuela’s 23 states, gaining the governor’s house in five states formerly in the opposition’s hands. This is a significant popular victory and a step forward on the road toward socialism.

This will be no easy task. Even a fully recovered Chávez would face a complex process with enemies inside and outside Venezuela, particularly U.S. imperialism and its local stooges. We must not forget that Venezuela is still a capitalist country, and socialism is still an ideal, although there are definite plans for its construc-tion. All the socialist forces everywhere should be paying close attention to this process and help sustain it and defend it from the imperialist forces.

This is the time that people around the world, and particularly all the progres-sive forces inside the United States, need to show a strong commitment to and sol-idarity with the Venezuelan Bolivarian Revolution and its leader, Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías. ¡Chávez, amigo, estamos contigo! Chávez, we are all with you!

WWP Congratulates Koreans on Satellite Launch

Scientists and technicians of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea successfully launched a satellite into orbit on Dec. 12, making the DPRK

the tenth country in the world to achieve a presence in space. This feat is all the more remarkable given the intense military and economic pressures exerted on the socialist state by the U.S. ever since the imperialists failed to crush the Korean Revolution in the bloody 1950-53 war they waged there. Workers World Party sent the following message of solidarity to the Cen-tral Committee of the Workers Party of Korea on hearing the news.

Workers World Party sends its congratulations to His Excellency Com-rade Kim Jong Un and the Workers Party of Korea on the DPRK’s magnifi-cent scientific achievement of successfully launching into orbit the satellite Kwangmyongsong-3.

This is further proof that all attempts by the U.S. imperialists to strangle the DPRK through economic sanctions and military encirclement cannot overcome the ingenuity and creative joint efforts of the Korean people to move forward in all areas of development. This success was made possible by the DPRK’s great socialist revolution and the decades of hard-fought struggles to defend your independence and sovereignty.

Deirdre GriswoldFor the National Committee of Workers World Party

Achievements of Korean socialismBy Caleb t. Maupin

The recent launch of a satellite into or-bit is only the latest of many achievements of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The northern half of the Korean peninsula is led by the Korean Workers Party, a revolutionary communist orga-nization. The banks, factories and other commanding heights have been held in common and guided by a planned econo-my since 1948.

The DPRK’s socialist revolution has re-sulted in many achievements for the Ko-rean people.

Building up industryBefore driving out the Japanese colo-

nialists, north Korea had very little in-dustrial production. After the revolution, Kim Il Sung led the country in developing its infrastructure. But from 1950 to 1953, the U.S. invaded the DPRK and tried to eradicate all that had been built with a massive bombing campaign. The Kore-ans resisted and finally an armistice was signed. Over the next three years, in the Three-Year Plan of 1954-1956, the indus-trial growth rate was at least 30 percent, even according to hostile U.S. sources. (“A Country Study: North Korea,” U.S. Li-brary of Congress)

Between 1953 and 1956, the DPRK tripled its gross domestic product. Huge steel plants were erected. Electric power plants were also constructed. The coun-try became industrialized at a pace that astounded economists all over the world. (“Korea: Division, Reunification, and U.S. Foreign Policy” by Martin Hart-Lands-berg, Monthly Review Press, 1998)

The DPRK has continued to develop, but always under the burden of U.S. sanctions

and threats of another military attack.

Universal housingEven during the extreme flooding and

droughts of the “arduous march” period of the early 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR, no person in the DPRK has ever been deprived of their basic human right to housing. Dr. Bruce Cummings of the University of Chicago pointed out in his book “North Korea, Another Country” that the DPRK makes universal housing a priority. (New Press, 2003)

Currently, the country is working to construct 100,000 new “dwelling hous-es” in Pyongyang. (Korean Central News Agency, Jan. 22, 2010)

Universal employmentArticle 70 of the DPRK’s constitution

says: “Citizens have the right to work. All able-bodied citizens choose occupations in accordance with their wishes and skills and are provided with stable jobs and working conditions. Citizens work ac-cording to their abilities and are paid in accordance with the quantity and quality of their work.” There is no unemployment in the DPRK.

educationDuring the period of Japanese occupa-

tion, many working people in Korea were illiterate. The socialist revolution in the northern half of the country established a system of compulsory universal educa-tion. According to the CIA World Fact-book, literacy in the DPRK is 99 percent.

Kim Il Sung, the founder of the DPRK, emphasized how important education was for constructing socialism. His book “The-ses on Socialist Education” is considered one of his most important writings.

Koreans dance near banner reading ‘We celebrate the launch of the satellite.’

Pyongyang, dec. 14.


editorials

Recognizing a lie in Syria

Begin the new year right!

Build Workers World!you’ve read about many important events in these pages in 2012:

The national uprising against racist vigilante terror that followed the murder of Trayvon Martin

The successful Chicago teachers’ strike

Unprecedented coast-to-coast organizing among low-wage workers

The beginnings of a People’s Power Assembly movement

We’re looking forward to reporting on much more in 2013.

But we can’t do it alone.

We’re now faced with having to move our office because the landlord would double the rent when our lease ends. Moving imposes a heavy burden on our organizational and financial resources.

At the same time, we’ve upgraded our website, workers.org, so that we can bring you more current reporting on the most pressing issues affecting the global working class and the oppressed, as well as the Marx-ist-Leninist analysis you’ve come to rely on.

We keep costs down by depending on a volunteer staff of editors, writers, photographers, copyeditors, proofreaders and mailers. But the cost of each issue keeps going up, especially when we opt for four-color printing.

Many other left organizations have given up producing a printed newspaper. But we get a lot of feedback from workers and oppressed people who say that hav-ing an actual paper that reports on their struggles is indispensable — and they are getting it out in the union halls and the communities and to their friends. Others who rely on receiving our printed paper are the many thinking, class-conscious people locked behind the bars of this oppressive system who otherwise would be cut off from any source of the truth.

Please help keep us going. Contribute to Workers World because you care about the struggle to end capitalism, with all its injustice and inequality. Give because you care about WW’s future and because you want to build a workers’ world.

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Manning picked as Person of the Year

On Dec. 11, the U.S. took what the Obama administration calls a “big step.” It formally recog-

nized the Syrian Opposition Council as the sole “legitimate representative” of the Syrian people. Most observers were not surprised: Washington and its allies have been laboring mightily for months to create the very organization they now “recognize.”

Just before the announcement, a firestorm of media frenzy accused Syria of possessing weapons of mass destruc-tion. NATO then deployed six batteries of Patriot missile systems along Turkey’s border with Syria. Yet, unable to sustain this accusation, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, on the same day that the U.S. formally recognized the opposition, downplayed the so-called danger from Syrian chemical weapons. “At this point the intelligence has really kind of leveled off,” Panetta told reporters. (AP, Dec. 11)

A key point in the U.S. recognition was to ensure that the “official” opposition will be a pliant tool of U.S. and West-ern interests. President Obama made it clear in an interview with ABC News on Dec. 12 that there were definite strings attached: “So we will provide them recog-nition and obviously with that recogni-tion comes responsibilities on the part of that coalition,” he said. “It is a big step.”

It is obvious that U.S. imperialism has set up this “official” opposition as a means to make military aid and even outright military intervention in Syria more palatable to the world’s peoples. The administration has been very clear

about its hopes for the region.“I would remind you of how this went

in the Libya context where we were able to take progressive steps … and to advance the way we dealt with them po-litically,” State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland said. (AP, Dec. 11)

Nuland was referring to the so-called Libyan National Transitional Council, which used the same designation of “legitimate representative” to open an office in Washington and access billions of dollars in assets frozen in U.S. banks that had belonged to the government of Moammar Gadhafi. U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens then went to Benghazi, Libya, as an envoy — accompanied by numerous CIA operatives — to help direct the Libyan rebels.

But the new Libyan regime proved unable to extend its control as planned. In October, some of Washington’s former allies attacked and burned the U.S. Con-sulate in Benghazi and killed Stevens and three CIA operatives doing security there.

Washington is now willing to risk using the most fanatic groups of killers to destroy Syria’s government, economy and society, even as it attempts to keep them under control and prevent another “blowback.”

The Syrian government and people, however, are still fighting the imperial-ist puppets. It is the Syrians who must determine who their legitimate repre-sentatives are, not the corporate-minded strategists in the U.S. and Europe. It’s up to the anti-war movement here to help keep the imperialists out of Syria.

By Chris Fry

By an overwhelming vote of its on-line readers, the British newspaper The Guardian has been forced to name U.S. political prisoner Pvt. B. Manning its “Person of the Year.”

Daniel Ellsberg, the releaser of the Pentagon Papers, which exposed U.S. lies about the contrived Tonkin Gulf inci-dent used in 1964 to justify U.S. attacks on Vietnam and the massive U.S. occupa-tion, last year said this about Time maga-zine’s selection of its “Person of the Year”:

“The Time Magazine cover gives a pro-tester, an anonymous protester, as ‘Person of the Year,’ but it is possible to put a face and a name to that picture of ‘Person of the Year.’ And the [U.S.] American face that I would put on that is Private Bradley Manning.”

Why has Pvt. Manning inspired such support?

In April 2010, the whistle-blower web-site WikiLeaks released a U.S. military video taken from an “Apache” helicopter in Iraq as it gunned down a dozen civil-ians, including a Reuters videographer and his driver. A month later, the U.S. Army arrested and jailed Pvt. B. Manning.

For more than two and a half years, Manning has been locked up, charged with the capital crimes of espionage and “aiding the enemy.” The “enemy” here consists of the world’s people. The “crime” is the release of thousands of military and State Department documents that made the public aware of human rights abuses, U.S. support of ruthless dictators, govern-ment and corporate corruption, and U.S. war crimes.

Manning endured months of torture in Kuwait and the brig in Quantico, Va. He was placed in solitary, in a tiny cage, and was often forced to strip naked.

Many “establishment” newspapers in the U.S. and Europe, including the New York Times and the Guardian, published excerpts from what was released by WikiLeaks. Nevertheless, none of these bastions of the so-called free press lifted a finger to defend the person accused of providing this information to them.

Early in December, the Guardian con-ducted a survey to choose its “Person of the Year.” The paper’s management made their choice clear — Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani 14-year-old who was shot in October because she was waging a cam-paign for the education of Pakistani girls. The corporate media are trying to use her legitimate campaign in order to justify imperialist intervention in Pakistan and Afghanistan. (See article by Deirdre Gris-wold, Oct. 17, at workers.org)

However, some 70 percent of respond-ers selected Pvt. Manning. Obviously Manning’s stirring courage in the face of overwhelming vilification and harsh treatment has attracted profound support among progressives and people in general here and abroad.

Manning exposed U.S. war crimes, which is supposed to be how an honorable soldier should behave, according to the U.S. Army Field Manual and the Nurem-berg Principles determining war crimes. To jail and torture Manning obstructs the peo-ple’s justice. It is, in fact, itself a war crime.

Free Manning now!

tions in Spain last June.In August, 2011, the U.K. was rocked by

an uprising against state repression, rac-ism, high unemployment and austerity that was led by young people, particularly Black and immigrant youth.

In Chile, students have been on strike for several months, shutting down the university system there to demand free education, and have united with copper workers who have been on strike, as well as other unions and sectors.

Now this fightback has spread to the U.S. From Wisconsin earlier this year, where young people played a pivotal role in building and maintaining the occupa-tion of the state Capitol against the at-tacks on collective bargaining and other cuts, to all the young people throughout the country who took to the streets to stop the murder of Troy Davis, and now Occu-py Wall Street.

Occupy Wall Street erupted, sweeping the country like wildfire and giving popu-lar expression to the outrage that so many feel. It has channeled the hopelessness and desperation from all the attacks and mass unemployment into political action that is developing an anti-capitalist char-acter. While contradictory, it is radicaliz-ing and bringing in a whole new layer of

people, in particular young people, who are in motion, want to fight back and are, by and large, uncommitted ideologically.

It is opening space to revolutionary ideas and to break through the isola-tion and alienation of our generation. The struggle is a great teacher, and we must be there to summarize the lessons and advance an anti-capitalist program and help to develop revolutionary class consciousness and solidarity. The last I looked, there were solidarity actions be-ing organized in nearly 150 cities, and this past Wednesday nearly 100 colleges held walkouts in solidarity with the big labor march here in the city. In North Carolina alone, last weekend eight different occu-pation events were organized across the state, and more cities have held assem-blies and other formations since then.

This is a tremendously important and exciting development that, while still in its early stages, is building rapidly, develop-ing anti-capitalist and class consciousness among a broad section of society, and put-ting thousands upon thousands of people across the country in motion against the banks and the big capitalists. Who knows where exactly this will go, but this devel-opment, along with events internationally, is an encouraging sign of the prospects for the fightback against the capitalist crisis.


Hit by the capitalist crisis

‘ youth globally are fighting back’


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M U n d o o B r e r o

declarada la guerra contra sindicatos en Michiganmirar a los estados que aprobaron la ley después de que los EE.UU. adoptara el Trato de Libre Comercio de América de Norte (TLCAN) y el libre comercio en general. “Solo dos estados, Oklahoma e Indiana, han pasado legislaciones del derecho al trabajo desde 2001”.

Rapoport continúa: “En lugar de au-mentar las oportunidades de empleo, el estado vio el traslado de empresas fuera de Oklahoma. En industrias de alta tec-nología y en aquellos sectores de servicios que “dependen del gasto del consumidor en la economía local” parece que las leyes de hecho han dañado el crecimiento. Al fin de la década, 50.000 residentes menos de Oklahoma tenían empleos en la manu-factura. Y aún peor, Lafer y Allegretto no

pudieron encontrar ninguna evidencia de que la legislación tuviera algún impacto positivo sobre las tasas de empleo”.

Parte de un programa económico más amplio

El intento de imponer la legislación del derecho al trabajo en Michigan es parte de una estrategia más amplia cuya meta es destruir los sindicatos y reducir los salari-os y beneficios de los/as trabajadores/as. A nivel nacional, las negociaciones en torno al llamado “abismo fiscal” están realmente diseñadas para recortar los programas so-ciales y reducir aún más los fondos federa-les para proyectos del sector público.

Durante la sesión del Congreso en Mich-igan, otras legislaciones pendientes in-cluían restricciones en el cuidado de salud

de las mujeres, esfuerzos para fragmentar los distritos de las escuelas públicas por todo el estado y aumentar el número de escuelas “charter” a través de una Autori-dad de Logro Educacional. [N.T.: Escuelas charter son escuelas subcontratadas por el Departamento de Educación Pública]

Bajo el pretexto de que impulsará la in-versión y creará puestos de trabajo, otro proyecto de ley eliminaría los impuestos sobre la propiedad que pagan las empre-sas. Estos ingresos son necesarios para que las comunidades locales puedan man-tener los servicios públicos básicos como el transporte, la luz y la educación.

Una ley de manejo de emergencias está pautada para reorganizarse después de que la Ley Pública 4, conocida popularmente como “la ley del dictador”, fuera rechaza-

da en las elecciones del 6 de noviembre. Esta ley quitaría toda la autoridad de los gobiernos y distritos locales para acelerar el pago del servicio de deudas a las insti-tuciones financieras. La ley, implementa-da ahora por la renovada Ley Pública 72, es mayormente usada en las municipali-dades mayormente afro-americanas.

Esos ataques contra la clase trabajado-ra y los/as oprimidos/as nacionalmente, están siendo implementados por todo el país y de hecho por todo el mundo. La cri-sis capitalista mundial está llevando a las clases dominantes a hacer recortes aún más grandes en los salarios reales y los beneficios sociales de los/as trabajadores en sus vanos intentos por mantener un sistema moribundo de explotación y represión.

By Manuel raposo

“Capitalism at a Dead End” is the expressive title of a book published this year in the United States that analyzes the current crisis of world capitalism from a Marxist point of view. Fo-cused mainly on the U.S. sit-uation, the book shows the significance of job destruc-tion and overproduction in an era of high technology and high labor productivi-ty. It’s a work that, starting from current conditions, covers not only the econom-ic crisis but also the social and political movements that it is generating.

The author, a North American named Fred Goldstein, writes for Workers World newspaper and in 2008 published another work, “Low-Wage Capitalism,” in which he describes the effects of the new globalized imperi-alism and high technology on the class struggle in the USA.

The explanation made in “Capitalism at a Dead End,” to which this review is dedicated, focuses on three or four facts critical to understanding the current cri-sis, but discussed hardly at all within the prevailing currents of opinion. They are, in our view, the following:• This is a long-term crisis, we are still in

its early stages and its character is not at all comparable to the normal highs and lows of economic activity.

• At its root is a fall in the rate of capital accumulation, which makes the finan-cial aspects a consequence and not a cause of the present problems.

• The crisis broke out after decades of great technological progress, of increas-ed labor productivity and competition, which belies the idea of widespread lack of productivity and competitiveness, and shows on the contrary that the system is bursting at the seams as a result of its own ability to produce on a massive scale.

• Where one can speak of any economic recovery after the collapse of 2008 (as in the U.S.), this recovery has taken place without a recuperation of jobs, which had been eliminated in unprece-dented numbers.Hence, the entire capitalist system

is at a dead end. Or, as the author says,

‘Capitalism at a dead end’

A Marxist view of the current crisis“Capitalism reached a point where, on its own, nothing of an economic character could by itself get the system moving forward and upward any longer.”

Starting from these findings, and mak-ing comparisons with major world crises of 1873-96 and 1929-39 — from which capital-ism emerged under the impetus of war (Span-ish-American War of 1898, World Wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45), embarking upon impe-rialist expansion — the author writes that global capitalism’s response to

its crisis today also points to the “massive destruction of means of production and infrastructure.”

With the cataclysms that occurred since 2008, the panorama of class struggle has also changed. The tendency to profit at ever lower rates, the inability to bring up employment levels, even partially, trans-late to a general decline in wages (a “low-wage capitalism”). And so, in the words of Fred Goldstein, “The era of concessions has been replaced by the era of givebacks” — as is evident, we note, on this side of the Atlantic, not only in the reduction of wag-es but also in cuts in social benefits and greater job insecurity, and in the attack on labor and union rights. Everything, in short, that in postwar Europe and in Por-tugal after April 25 [the 1974 anti-fascist revolution] was presented as a supposed-ly irreversible “advance for civilization.”

This crisis shows that it is different, Goldstein emphasizes, for another rea-son. “All the traditional methods by which the system has been revived [in previous situations] are being used but no lon-ger work.” The proof is in the trillions of dollars (and Euros) injected mainly into the financial system with the sole effect of avoiding a worsening of the crisis, but without signs of an economic recovery.

More: the fact that U.S. business is grow ing at a snail’s pace and that Europe and Japan are on the verge of decline is in-creasing fears, even within the corridors of power, of a new global economic downturn.

But if this is a crisis of global exten-sion that is not just a cyclical downturn of business and there is no real recovery in

sight, then we believe it takes on the char-acter of the end of an epoch.

As the author asserts, “The profit sys-tem is entering a stage at which it can only drag humanity backwards.” So, “The masses of people will come to a point where they cannot go on in the old way because capitalism is blocking all roads for survival.” And having reached this point, “humanity can only move forward by clearing the road to survival, which means nothing less than the destruction of capitalism itself.”

The theses of the book by Fred Gold-stein, lead us, in effect, to an issue to which the Marxists and the Communist movement will have to pay close atten-tion: with this crisis the era of capitalist expansion that began after the Second World War has ended and consequently it is creating the conditions for a new cycle of worldwide social revolutions.

In our opinion, the words of Karl Marx as he was evaluating the economic crisis of 1847 must therefore be considered ex-

tremely topical. Reflecting on the recov-ery of capitalism in the years 1848 and 1849, once the revolutions that occurred in Europe in 1848 were defeated, he said:

“In the face of this general prosperity, in which the productive forces are devel-oping as exuberantly as is possible within the framework of bourgeois relations, it is not possible to talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is possible only in peri-ods in which these two factors — namely, modern productive forces and bourgeois forms of production — come into contra-diction with each other.”

And Marx concluded: “A new revolu-tion is possible only as the result of a new crisis. It is inevitable as is the latter.”

The crisis we are living through now, is it not, after all, evidence of conflict be-tween the modern forces of production and the bourgeois relations of production?

Raposo is a contributor to the Portu-guese website, Mudar de Vida (www.jornalmudardevida.net). John Catali-notto translated from the original.

Book revieW ‘ Capitalism at a Dead’ is now available in English & Spanish. For more information go to www.lowwagecapitalism.org

Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger hosted a full house at the “Bring Leonard Peltier Home in 2012″ concert Dec. 14 at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. Supporters heard Jack-son Browne, Bruce Cockburn, Common with Mos Def, and several Indigenous performers, including Bill Miller and Jenni-fer Kreisberg. Speakers includ-ed Danny Glover, Rubin “Hur-ricane” Carter, Oglala Sioux Tribe VP Tom Poor Bear and Michael Moore, who connected Leonard’s case to the Central Park Five.

Peter Coyote emceed and Pete Seeger led the crowd singing songs, including a new rendition of his anti-Vietnam War song titled “Bring Him Home” with Bela-fonte. Seeger called on everyone to make comments to President Obama in support of executive clemency now for the Anish-

nabe/Lakota political prisoner and elder Leonard Peltier, whose health is in great jeopardy. Supporters should call 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1112, or comment online at whitehouse.gov/contact to call on the president to bring Peltier home by Christmas.

— Stephanie J. adohi

Bring Peltier home in 2012!

Correspondencia sobre artículos en Workers World/Mundo Obrero pueden ser enviadas a: [email protected]

¡Proletarios y oprimidos de todos los paises unios!

Continua a página 15

Activistas de Atlanta detienen ejecución hipotecaria

Declarada la guerra contra sindicatos en Michigan

Por dianne Mathiowetz

Atlanta, 10 de diciembre - Activistas defensores de la vivienda han incremen-tado la lucha contra los embargos, los de-sahucios y la falta de viviendas al tomar una vivienda propiedad de un banco que había sido cerrada en el barrio de Pitts-burgh en Atlanta el 6 de diciembre. Ac-ciones similares se llevaron a cabo el mis-mo día en varias ciudades de los EE.UU.

Frente a las cámaras de televisión, de-cenas de personas mudaron a Reneka Wheeler y Meusa Michelene y sus dos hijos, Dillon y Jahla, a la casa de color rosa brillante, 1043 de la calle Windsor. Desde mediados del verano, las dos mu-jeres, quienes habían perdido sus puestos de trabajo y se vieron obligadas a salir de su casa de alquiler, han ido de refugio en refugio. Al no ser aceptadas como una fa-milia, las separaron.

Con la ayuda de Ocupar Nuestras Vivi-endas de Atlanta, ellas decidieron tomar acción. Se centraron en la catástrofe crea-da por las políticas bancarias y de vivienda

que han causado estragos en millones de personas en los Estados Unidos. Explic-aron que mediante la recuperación de vivi-endas ilegalmente tomadas de las familias y restaurarlas a su legítimo propósito – dar refugio a la gente - las dos esperaban forzar un debate sobre la falta de vivienda.

Ocupar Nuestras Viviendas de Atlanta ha declarado que hay siete casas vacías por cada persona desamparada en este país.

La comunidad de Pittsburgh se encuen-tra al lado suroeste de Atlanta, cerca de la carretera Interestatal 75. Era un próspero barrio afroamericano de gente trabajado-ra, pero ahora sus calles están bordeadas por casas tapiadas, cascos de edificios de-crépitos o quemados y terrenos baldíos llenos de maleza. Esta devastación es el resultado de décadas de creciente de-sempleo, desarrollo urbano, recortes de servicios sociales, prácticas engañosas de hipotecas, propietarios ausentes y con-structores especulativos. El valor de la vivienda ha caído un 84 por ciento en los últimos años, y alrededor del 50 por cien-to de las viviendas están vacías.

Una de esas casas es la 1043 de la calle Windsor, una casa tomada por el banco M&T. Antes del 6 de diciembre, sus venta-nas condenadas y su patio lleno de maleza contribuían a la apariencia de decadencia del vecindario. Ahora, la grama está re-cortada y se han sembrado flores, las luces están encendidas, y una familia de cuatro miembros está junta y sin frío. Las igle-sias vecinas y gente de todas partes de la ciudad están equipando la casa, llevando comida y brindando apoyo las 24 horas.

La policía de Atlanta mantiene una presencia constante. El banco hasta ahora no se ha quejado. Por eso la policía aún no ha intentado desalojar a Wheeler y Meusa.

Una petición en la red de internet exige que el Banco M&T entregue la propiedad a la comunidad, específicamente al Cen-tro Higher Ground Empowerment. Ocu-par Nuestras Viviendas de Atlanta salvó de la ejecución hipotecaria a una vieja iglesia de la comunidad afroamericana en otro barrio económicamente deprimido en enero pasado. Su pastor se ha converti-do en un vocero de la lucha contra las eje-

cuciones hipotecarias y los desalojos.Ocupar Nuestras Viviendas de Atlanta

celebró otra victoria después de un año de lucha para salvar la casa de la familia Pittman de una ejecución hipotecaria. La matriarca de la familia, Eloise Pittman, fue víctima de una hipoteca sin escrúpulos del Banco Chase, que ejecutó la toma hipo-tecaria mientras ella moría de cáncer en noviembre del 2011. Carmen, su nieta de 21-años de edad, condujo a su familia en un año de acciones de ocupación a gran es-cala, poniendo tiendas de campaña en los patios, organizando numerosas manifesta-ciones y marchas, llamadas telefónicas na-cionales al Chase e incluso arriesgándose al arresto durante una ocupación del banco.

Chase ha entregado la propiedad y está de nuevo en manos de los Pittmans. El sábado 8 de diciembre, una celebración por la victoria tuvo lugar donde quemaron el aviso de desalojo.

Para obtener más información sobre otros embargos contra la lucha que se libra en Atlanta y para firmar la petición a M&T Bank, ver Occupy Our Homes Atlanta.

Por abayomi azikiwe

Lansing, Michigan, 11 de dic-iembre –Mientras la Policía Es-tatal rociaba con gas-pimienta a los/as trabajadores/as que protestaban, el gobernador Rick Snyder de Michigan no perdió ti-empo hoy en convertir en ley dos proyectos de ley que los sindica-tos llaman “leyes de derecho a trabajar por menos”.

En un estado que histórica-mente ha sido un bastión del movimiento obrero organizado, la leg-islación saliente fue una declaración de guerra por el multimillonario gobernador y por una legislatura republicana de dere-cha no sólo en contra de los sindicatos de este Estado, sino contra toda la clase tra-bajadora estadounidense.

Los proyectos de ley se aprobaron a pesar de la protesta por más de 17.000 tra-bajadores/as y personas de la comunidad. La consigna “Trabajadores unidos jamás serán vencidos”, se hizo eco en la Rotonda del Capitolio aún cuando la policía disper-saba a los/as trabajadores/as que protes-taban, muchos/as de ellos/as desemplea-dos/as. Una pancarta que decía “Huelga General para hacer retroceder el right-to-work’” atrajo mucho interés, al igual que miles de volantes titulados:

“Derroquemos el “right-to-work’: Sí, po-demos”. El Rev. Jesse Jackson convocó a un paro de un día y una marcha en Wash-ington, DC. [N.T.: ‘right-to-work’, en es-pañol ‘derecho al trabajo’ son legislaciones que están diseñadas para destruir los sindicatos al prohibir las cuotas a éstos.]

Snyder es odiado por muchos/as tra-

bajadores/as y comunidades oprimidas alrededor de Michigan. El 6 de diciembre, cuando la legislatura votó por primera vez, cientos de trabajadores/as irrump-ieron en las salas de audiencias gritando “Right-to-work has got to go!” (El dere-cho al trabajo se tiene que terminar) y se negaron a salir.

Agentes de la policía cerraron las entra-das a la sala. Cuando más trabajadores/as y sus partidarios/as intentaron entrar, la policía los/as roció con gas-pimienta y ar-restó a algunos/as. La acción de la policía alimentó la ira en todo el estado, por lo que miles se movilizaron para una mani-festación de fuerza aún mayor.

En el marco de la legislación “dere-cho al trabajo”, los/as empleados/as ya no estarían obligados/as a afiliarse a un sindicato cuando uno exista, ni a pagar las cuotas automáticamente a una unidad de negociación colectiva. La incapacidad de los sindicatos de reunir las cuotas por servicio de todos los salarios de los/as trabajadores/as hace que sea mucho más difícil luchar por los derechos, beneficios

y proyectos sociales que todos/as los/as trabajadores/as del lugar del trabajo tendrían, ya paguen o no.

Uno de los sindicatos más grandes de la industria automo-triz, Sección 600 del Sindicato de Trabajadores Automovilísticos Unidos en Dearborn, Michigan, llevó a cabo una capacitación de desobediencia civil el 8 de dic-iembre. La Asociación de Enfer-meras/os de Michigan también asistió a estas sesiones, y obtuvo

el apoyo de la Unión de Empleados/as de Servicios, la Federación Americana de Empleados/as Estatales, del Condado y Municipales (AFSCME), y otras organi-zaciones de trabajadores/as.

Dawn Kettinger de la Asociación de En-fermeras/os de Michigan dijo: “Vamos a estar allí [el 11 de diciembre] por todos/as los/as trabajadores/as y todas las per-sonas que se preocupan por Michigan”. Algunos/as trabajadores/as se colocarán cinta adhesiva sobre la boca como sím-bolo del impacto de la legislación. “Eso es lo que la ley del derecho al trabajo hará si pasa — va a silenciar a los/as tra-bajadores/as”, dijo Kettinger. (Detroit News, 9 de diciembre)

En los días previos a la manifestación del 11 de diciembre en el Capitolio, otras manifestaciones tuvieron lugar en varias partes del estado. El 9 de diciembre el sindicato SEIU dirigió acciones fuera de Oakland Mall, un centro comercial de lujo justo al norte de Detroit en Troy, Michigan.

Ilana Alazzeh, miembro de una coali-ción estatal llamada Somos Michigan, dijo: “Nuestros políticos están siendo

influenciados por los grupos de presión corporativos y están debilitando nuestras familias y están suprimiendo nuestras vo-ces al dividirnos”. El grupo cantó parodi-as de canciones navideñas. (Detroit News, 10 de diciembre)

el verdadero impacto del “derecho al trabajo”

Al firmar la legislación, el gobernador Snyder hizo que Michigan se hiciera el 24to estado en los EE.UU. en tener leyes de “derecho al trabajo”. Aunque Snyder le ha dicho varias veces a los medios corpo-rativos que la legislación creará puestos de trabajo en uno de los estados más afec-tados por la crisis económica, los hechos dicen lo contrario.

En general los/as trabajadores/as en los estados de derecho al trabajo tienen salarios más bajos y muchos menos ben-eficios. Las tasas de pobreza son más altas en estos estados, mientras que el desempleo y el subempleo siguen siendo significativos. (Economic Policy Institute, febrero de 2011)

En un artículo el 6 de febrero en Amer-ican Prospect, Abby Rapoport cita una investigación de Gordon Lafer y Sylvia Allegretto del Economic Policy Institute (Instituto de Políticas Económicas). “No hay evidencia de que las leyes de derecho al trabajo tengan algún impacto positi-vo sobre el empleo o la recuperación de empleos industriales”, escribe Rapoport. “Mientras que 23 estados tienen leyes de derecho al trabajo, Lafer dice que para juzgar de manera adecuada el impacto de la ley en la economía actual, hay que

Mo foto: abaYoMi aZiKiWE

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