News Flash: National Nurses United Agree to Challenge the Two Parties of Wall Street! Printer-Friendly E-Mail This Dec 15, 2012 By SocialistAlternative.org National Nurses United, the nations largest staff RN union with 185,000 members, held its 2012 Convention in Las Vegas on December 11 to 13. Nurses direct from Michigan's battle lines reported on the mass protests against the newly rammed-through "right to work" (for less) legislation and attack on women's reproductive rights. A "Care Plan for Building a National RN Movement" was proposed to delegates. Massachusetts Nurses Association delegate and Socialist Alternative member Seamus Whelan introduced an amendment to the proposal for the NNU to challenge electorally the two parties of the 1% (Democrats and Republicans) in local, state and national election races. Seamus also proposed linking an electoral strategy to emerging social movements to pose an alternative for the 99% against austerity and attacks on our living standards. The Convention voted in favor of this important proposal. The full text of the passed amendment reads: The NNU will challenge the corporate domination of politics and society by changing the way we do politics. The NNU will consider supporting/endorsing independent candidates to challenge the two parties of Wall Street and the 1%, Democratic and Republican, in local, state or national election races of our choosing as these parties seek to carry out major attacks on public services and programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The NNU will attempt to link an electoral strategy to the political and social movements that will emerge as people fight back against the corporate agenda and thereby allow the ideas and goals of the Main Street Contract for America to reach a broader audience and pose to the 99% a real alternative to austerity and attacks on our living standards. See the video of NNU nurses demonstrating with Las Vegas Culinary and building trade union workers outside a non-union casino Catch a glimpse of Seamus Whelan at 20 sec mark and 1.23 sec.

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A Democracy For the Millionaires — 2012 election spending shatters records Printer-Friendly E-Mail This Dec 16, 2012 By Patrick Ayers This article, initially written in the final days of the election season, appeared in a shortened form in Justice newspaper. This is a longer version with tremendously useful statistics and analysis. It comes as no surprise to many people: spending on the 2012 election broke all records. But, the estimated $6 billion in spending does not simply break the record, it shatters it. “The 2012 election will not only be the most expensive election in U.S. history,” reported the Center for Responsive Politics (CPR), “the cost will tower over the next most expensive election by more than $700 million.” Spending by “super PACs” and outside groups accounts for the largest increase, estimated by CPR to be $970 million in 2012 or more than triple what outside groups spent in 2008. These latest CPR figures are revisions of previous lower estimates. But, the final tally could be even larger. According to the Sunlight Foundationa,/a>, as many as 67 brand new Super PACs sprang up across the country just in the last month of the election with millions to spend. Weekly spending has surged from just over $26 million in early September, to more than $210 million in the last full week of the campaign. Citizens United The trends are very clear. The 1% is going bananas with money and elections. Spending on congressional elections alone increased tenfold between 2008 and 2012, from $46 million to $445 million. Certainly, the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court in January 2010 is one reason for this marked shift. This decision removed one-hundred years of restrictions on campaign spending. While restrictions remain on direct donations to candidates, corporations and the rich are free to unload as much as they want on their own independent election material. Mouthpieces of the 1% argue everyone has this same so-called “right”. But, how many of the 49.1 million Americans living in poverty or the additional 97.3 million Americans with low incomes have $10,000, $100,000, or $1 million laying around for an election? Super PACs In July 2010 another Supreme Court decision gave birth to “super PACs,” essentially massive political funds that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money on their own material in elections. Since then, there has been a rapid growth in PACs driven by corporations and the rich. According to Public Research Interest Group, more than 60% of “super PAC” funding has come from 91 people making donations of $1 million or more, while 97% has come from donations of $10,000 or more from less than 2,000 donors. Just 629 people donated nearly as much money to super PACs as 1.9 million people did to both the Obama and Romney campaigns combined with donations of $200 or less. “Super PACs” have heavily favored Republicans over the Democrats. But, in recent months the Democrats have embraced “super PACs” and have been < a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/21/democratic-super-pacs-2012-election_n_1995174.html">playing catch-up. The third largest PAC is now Priorities USA Action, a pro-Obama fund that has received huge donations of more than $1 million from Hollywood celebrities, corporate executives, and the billionaire hedge fund manager James Simmons – the largest donor to the notorious Republican “super PAC” American Crossroads (Of course, the big donors often like to hedge their bets and donate to both campaigns). There has also been a rapid rise in what's being called “dark money” groups. These are massive campaign funds like “super PACs,” buy they fall under a separate legal category as “social welfare” organizations. One important difference is they do not have to disclose their donors. This is a huge incentive for their millionaire and billionaire backers who prefer to do their dirty work out of the public eye (taxes, business deals, you name it!). The former Bush guru and Republican evil genius Karl Rove runs one of the largest “dark money” groups Crossroads GPS. Of course, corporate money continued to find its way into politics through more traditional channels like bundling and the big money private fundraisers that were important features of both presidential campaigns. By March of the 2012 campaign, Obama had already broken the record for the number of fundraisers attended by a sitting President. When all this gorging on the presidential election is added up, the campaigns are likely to spend more than $1 billion each. Democracy for the millionaires While Citizens United clearly contributed to this marked upturn in spending, it does not fully account for the rising cost of elections, which has rapidly risen over the past forty years. Between 1974 and 2002, the average amount of money raised by candidates for the House rose from $61,084 to $756,993. In the same period, the average raised by candidates for Senate grew from $455,515 to $4,460,206. (Kim Moody, US Labor in Trouble and Transition, New York, Verso, p.152) This points to deeper processes driving the recent developments in the 2012 election. Mark Smith of the University of Washington argues, "If you look over a 30-year period, the biggest thing that I think is driving [the increasing cost of elections] is just inequality. There's more money at the top, and so there's more money that can slosh around." But, the massive growth in inequality itself is being driven by a historic crisis of capitalism. The system cannot deliver both for the 99% and the 1% – particularly since the 1970s – so millionaires have increasingly used their vast financial resources to ram through policies that favor their interests over ours. Build a movement of the millions Many progressives are calling for repealing Citizens United. This should be fought for, but it won't be nearly enough to turn the tide in our favor. For example, both the Democrats and Republicans would still be parties controlled and dominated by millionaires. Writing in the NY Times Sunday Review, Nicholas Carnes pointed out, “If millionaires were a political party, that party would make up roughly 3 percent of American families, but it would have a super-majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, a majority on the Supreme Court and a man in the White House. “Even if we somehow stem the tide of money in Washington” continued Carnes, “even if we guarantee equal participation on Election Day, millionaires will still get to set the tax rate for millionaires.” (10/15/2012) Campaigning to reform elections or the two parties by “getting money out of politics” will not be enough to challenge this “millionaires democracy.” More effective would be breaking with the two corporate-controlled parties, building mass movements independent of them, running hundreds of independent candidates, and building a new party of the millions, not the millionaires. Working people, people of color, women, and everyone in the 99% have never won meaningful change by outspending corporations or by electing millionaire politicians. But, when we organize in our millions and consciously fight for our interests, we are unstoppable.

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Radio Interview on the Lessons of the Vote Sawant Campaign Printer-Friendly E-Mail This Dec 14, 2012 By SocialistAlternative.org In this interview on Pacifica Radio KPFT 90.1 FM in Houston, Texas, Campaign Organizer Ramy Khalil discusses how it was possible for the Socialist Alternative candidate Kshama Sawant to win 29% of the vote running against the Washington State Speaker of the House as an openly Socialist candidate. This was a truly historic accomplishment for the socialist movement in the U.S. A major reason why this Socialist candidate won such a large percentage of the vote was that she did not have to run against multiple candidates; she was running against only one other candidate - a Democrat. So the typical fear that many liberals have of contributing to the election of a Republican when they consider voting for a third party candidate did not exist. Listen to the 24-minute interview to hear more secrets of the campaign’s success.

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Stop the Assault on Michigan Unions – Occupy the Capitol and Strike! Printer-Friendly E-Mail This Dec 10, 2012 By Patrick Ayers and Ramy Khalil Michigan, a bastion of union power, is now suddenly days away from possibly becoming the 24th “right to work” state in the country. The Republicans who control the state government are attempting to ram a bill through the legislature that is a major attack on workers’ rights. The misnamed "Workplace Fairness and Equity Act" was introduced on Thursday, December 6 and approved by majority votes in both the Michigan House and Senate that same day without a single committee hearing or any floor debate. In scenes reminiscent of the February 2011 working-class uprising in Wisconsin, upwards of 3,000 trade unionists responded by immediately packing the rotunda of the state capitol building in Lansing, the capitol of Michigan, in only half a day’s notice. But the right wing was better prepared this time, having learned some lessons from Wisconsin. The Republican House Speaker ordered the building to be locked down, and the police were ready to evict protesters. The police arrested eight people and pepper sprayed others. Americans for Prosperity, a conservative organization funded by the Koch brother millionaires, erected tents in front of the capitol building to support the bill, and the Michigan Freedom Fund aired radio and television ads in favor of the legislation in the days before. Republicans were completely dishonest about their intentions during the election, and they launched a surprise attack after the election. Earlier this year, Republican Governor Rick Snyder told the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee: "I've made it clear it's not on my agenda. ‘Right-to-work’ is an issue that is a very divisive issue… We have many problems in Michigan that are much more pressing… I don't believe it is appropriate in Michigan during 2012." Now suddenly Snyder, a businessman elected in 2010 with the support of the Tea Party, is promising to sign the bill as soon as Tuesday, December 11. The Republicans are building upon the defeat last month of a ballot initiative which would have made the right to a union a constitutional guarantee in Michigan. This defeat was the result of a $30 million opposition campaign and concerns about changing the constitution in a way that could allow union leaders who are often out of touch with workers to potentially abuse their power, in spite of polls showing that 70% of Michiganders support workers’ collective bargaining rights. The Republicans and their 1% backers now have a month to capitalize on this defeat during the current lame duck session of the out-going legislature. In January, the Republicans will lose five seats and their current super-majority, and then they will no longer have enough votes to ram this bill through. Right to Work… for Less The “right to work” label is intentionally deceptive. The bill certainly won't provide the right to a job for the hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers in Michigan. What it will do is undermine the democratic basis of workers’ right to organize. According to U.S. laws, where a majority of workers support having a union, they have the right to a union. “Right to work” legislation undermines this democratic right by making it illegal for unions to require all workers in a unionized workplace to pay union membership dues, even though all the workers reap the benefits of the union. It's like if the phone company had to provide everyone with phone service, but payments were optional, which, of course, would bankrupt the phone company. This legislation would deal a financial blow to the unions, which are the only organizations workers have to defend themselves at work. There is arguably an upside to these laws, in that they would force union leaders to fight more consistently for workers’ interests in order to convince workers to participate in the union and pay dues for the common good. However, in practice, these laws create an enormous workload for already overworked union stewards and field staff. In “right to work” states (as opposed to states with “closed shops”), workers’ wages are typically $1,500 less per year according to the Economic Policy Institute. Workers are also less likely to have pension or health care benefits, poverty rates are higher, and workplace injuries and deaths are more common. African Americans will be disproportionately affected by this bill. Thirty-two percent of all African American workers in Michigan are in unions compared to 17.5% of all Michigan workers. The Michigan legislature also rammed bills through on the same day that restrict women’s rights and access to abortion services. This is an historic attack in an on-going war against workers. Michigan has been the heartland of union power, and it’s the fifth-most unionized state in the country. If the ruling class can make Michigan the second state in the Midwest to pass “right to work” legislation, then why shouldn't they go for more states? This sudden ambush has been prepared by a whole slew of battles in the past 30 years that the union leaders failed to effectively resist. In 1989, one in five workers was in a union. Today, it's closer to one in ten. And when the economic crisis hit, Michigan was hit harder than most states, losing 750,000 jobs. The union leaders bear a huge responsibility for failing to fight for good jobs. United Auto Workers leaders in particular have spearheaded "labor-management cooperation" schemes that have benefited managers and investors while workers’ wages and benefits have been slashed. In this context, the Republicans are presenting their anti-union legislation as a program for creating jobs. Michigan Republicans point to Indiana where similar “right to work” legislation was implemented last year for the first time in the Midwest. Snyder says Michigan has now lost a competitive edge to their neighboring state, and passing this anti-union legislation is the best way to attract new jobs to Michigan. However, Republicans oppose raising taxes on the 1% by a single dime. They support slashing state budgets and thousands of jobs with them. They are not concerned about jobs or workers. They are concerned about profits for the 1%. A Warning to the Labor Movement If this bill passes, it will have devastating effects on workers' rights in Michigan. The labor movement has literally days to stop this attack. The unions have announced Tuesday, December 11, the day the bill could be signed, as a day for protest and civil disobedience at the capitol. But will this be enough to stop the Republicans? The Republicans appear prepared to disregard widespread protests to push the bills through. They saw that in Wisconsin, in spite of unprecedented massive protests and an occupation of the capitol building that lasted for weeks, the union leaders were unwilling to mobilize the workers to strike and shut the state down. As a result the Republicans were able to weather the storm and come out victorious. The Republicans in Wisconsin did not have the current super-majority that the Republicans in Michigan have for a few more days. Republicans in Michigan also have deliberately attached this legislation to an appropriations bill, which means that it cannot be overturned by a popular referendum. This attack by the right wing comes in the aftermath of Romney and the Republicans’ nationwide defeat in the recent November elections, which, for the most part, saw the defeat of anti-same sex marriage and other right-wing ballot initiatives. This bill in Michigan is an act of desperation by Republicans to shamelessly ram through legislation they want before the will of the voters is implemented and the Republicans lose their super-majority. However, this attack also comes in the aftermath of the Arab revolutions, Wisconsin, Occupy, the Chicago Teachers Union victorious strike, the Walmart workers struggle, the New York fast food workers walk-out, and a strike in L.A. that shut down the biggest port in the country for 8 days. The time is ripe for a counter-offensive. Millions could be mobilized in defense of workers’ rights in Michigan and across the country. It would be particularly shameful if the union leaders did not take the steps that are absolutely necessary right now to mobilize the full power of working people. The Courts and the Democrats Labor activists have filed lawsuits accusing Republicans of violating laws such as the state’s open-meeting laws by locking the state capitol doors. However, one judge has already ruled that the police did not violate state law. Waiting for the courts to further consider arguments that may not end in workers’ favor ultimately works to the advantage of the wealthy elite by channeling workers’ power away from immediate, more effective forms of struggle. The courts have never been the most favorable terrain for unions. Reliance on the courts takes away from our most powerful weapon as the working class - our collective ability to strike and shut down businesses and organize mass protests in the streets. The Democrats in Michigan have called on Obama to withhold federal funds to Michigan to force Republicans to back down. (Obama had previous plans to meet with the governor on Monday, December 10.) Because of the Democrats’ dependence on the unions for getting out the vote, it is not ruled out that Obama and the Democrats might regard the Republican legislation as going too far, and they might pressure Governor Snyder to agree to some kind of compromise. But we cannot rely on Obama who did nothing to help workers in Wisconsin or teachers in Chicago who were viciously attacked this summer by Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Obama abandoned the Employee Free Choice Act, and he didn’t even mention unions in his acceptance speech at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, which was held in the “right to work” state of North Carolina. Obama's bailout of the auto industry also demanded that the United Auto Workers agree to slash wages for new hires and dismantle benefits. In Wisconsin, the Democratic politicians as well as most union leaders actively channeled the historic mass uprising of workers away from occupying the state capitol and into a recall election campaign instead of organizing a one-day public sector general strike, which would have been far more effective as Socialist Alternative argued at the time. The immediate effect was to allow the legislation in Wisconsin to pass, inflicting immediate damage on the unions. Ultimately, the recall failed because the Democratic gubernatorial candidate agreed to parts of Governor Walker's hated anti-union legislation, he tried to evade this central issue during his campaign, and he used similar legislation himself to attack unions when he was the mayor of Milwaukee! This is typical of the Democratic Party – they use unions to get out their vote, but they balance their budgets on the backs of workers, too, just not as fast as the Republicans. That's why we need a workers’ party to defend the interests of workers against the attacks of both corporate parties. Mobilize the Independent Power of Workers Working people and the unions have enormous power in numbers. That is the key to the entire situation right now. Failing to use this power decisively would be a recipe for disaster. That's why it's a mistake that Michigan union leaders did not call for further mass actions until Tuesday. They do not seem prepared to match the determination of the 1% with determined action by the 99%. Instead, Michigan AFL-CIO President Karla Swift and other labor leaders are focusing on mobilizing workers to merely call and lobby politicians in Michigan. But the best way to make these rabidly pro-corporate politicians listen to us is to show them we have the power to shut down business as usual! What's needed is an immediate escalation of mass actions, mobilizing thousands of workers, Occupy activists, and supporters to occupy the capitol – turning Lansing into Zuccotti Park! But, as with Wisconsin, the Republicans are likely prepared to ride out mass demonstrations. So while occupying the capitol is important, it probably won't be enough. To really demonstrate the power of working people, immediate mass strike action should be called to shut down the capitol, including schools and workplaces. After all, we need every single person to go to the capitol anyway, not work or school. But also by striking, it will show the power workers have, which, when mobilized, can move heaven and earth. Strike action, particularly if it's well organized, will raise the stakes. Rather than the Republicans having to only face a mass protest, they will have to face the complete shutting down of the state. To really drive the point home, workers should cut off the heat and electricity to the capitol building itself. If the politicians want to strip working people of their rights, they can do it in the cold and dark! If the union leaders at the top are not prepared to act decisively, working-class activists should take a page from Wisconsin and organize actions from below themselves. Rank-and-file committees in workplaces should be immediately organized to lead unofficial actions, perhaps in the form of mass “sick-outs” like the teachers organized in Wisconsin, to be able to travel to the capitol building in Lansing. A few strikes in a few workplaces could inspire workers elsewhere to take matters into their own hands and also go on strike, which would pressure the union leaders to call for mass, coordinated action. Students in Michigan will face an even likelier future of dead-end McJobs if the bill passes, so students, too, should organize walk-outs across Lansing, Detroit, Dearborn, and other cities. We should not let existing anti-union laws limiting workers’ ability to strike stand in our way. Past struggles show that anti-strike and anti-union laws can be overcome by mass action. Besides, it's better for the unions to break the bosses’ laws than to let the bosses’ laws break the unions! If “right to work” legislation passes in Michigan – the fifth most-unionized state in the country – it will embolden the 1% across the country to go on the offensive. As American labor law expert Gordon Lafer explained, “Right-to-work bills were introduced in about 20 states in 2011 and 2012. This is part of a campaign to get rid of unions for both economic and political reasons” by well-funded conservative groups who laid the groundwork for a right-to-work vote in Michigan for some time. The entire labor movement across the U.S. should organize protests, mobilizing people to Lansing where possible, and organizing solidarity actions across the country. The union movement has only days before the hard-won gains of past generations of workers are set back. Decisive action, mobilizing the full force of the labor movement, is the only thing that will stop the henchmen of the 1%.

Socialist Alternative, P.O. Box 45343, Seattle WA 98145 Phone: (206)526-7185 Comments? Suggestions for improving our web page? Please email info@SocialistAlternative.org

Accused of Lifting Veil on U.S. War Machine-Bradley Manning Pretrial Hearing: Drop All Charges!

Workers Vanguard No. 1014	7 December 2012

Accused of Lifting Veil on U.S. War Machine-Bradley Manning Pretrial Hearing: Drop All Charges!

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

DECEMBER 4—Army private Bradley Manning spoke publicly last week for the first time since he was detained in May 2010 for allegedly handing over a trove of classified documents to WikiLeaks that exposed U.S. imperialism’s schemes and wartime atrocities. Charging Manning with 22 offenses including espionage and “aiding the enemy,” military prosecutors are threatening him with life imprisonment, having decided not to pursue the death penalty. Taking the stand at a hearing on a defense motion to dismiss all charges on the grounds of unlawful pretrial punishment, Manning recounted the torturous conditions of his confinement, which one prison psychologist described as worse than at Guantánamo or on death row. The hearing is continuing as we go to press.

The suffering and deprivation inflicted on Manning is meant as a message: the U.S. imperialists will not tolerate any light shed on their workings. This vendetta was also designed to break him so that he would implicate WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, who remains holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition to the U.S., via Sweden (see “Hands Off Julian Assange!” WV No. 1010, 12 October). In the past week, protests demanding Manning’s freedom have taken place from the court site, Fort Meade near Baltimore, to Berlin and other cities.

Last month, Manning offered to accept responsibility for providing, as an act of conscience, at least some of the 250,000 diplomatic cables, 500,000 Army reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and video from Baghdad that WikiLeaks made public. Shortly before Manning testified last week, the presiding military judge accepted the framework that would allow him to plead guilty to some lesser charges, which carry a maximum sentence of 16 years. Manning has not yet filed a formal plea. Even if the plea were to be accepted, Manning still faces trial on the maximum charges unless the case is dismissed and could receive a life sentence if found guilty of only one of them. The court martial is now slated to begin in March.

If Manning did make available the material attributed to him in the tentative plea, he provided a major service to working people and the oppressed the world over. In seeking to galvanize proletarian opposition to the capitalist order, we welcome even a slight lifting of the veil on the imperialists’ war machine. The video Manning is accused of leaking shows an Apache helicopter gunning down and killing at least 12 people in Baghdad in 2007, including a Reuters journalist and his driver, while the pilots laugh and gloat. The war logs document 120,000 civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and a formal military policy of covering up torture, rape and murder. The cables address all manner of lethal operations within U.S. client states, from the “drug war” in Mexico to drone strikes in Yemen.

With over 20 supporters attending the court hearing, Manning detailed the depravity of his enraged military jailers. His first two months in custody were spent in what Manning described as an “animal cage” in Kuwait, where he was kept isolated and disoriented. “I just thought I was going to die in that cage,” he told the court. Returned to the U.S., he was thrown into what he called “a shark-attack environment” at the Quantico Marine brig in Virginia, where he was kept for nine months. He spent at least 23 hours a day alone in a six-by-eight-foot cell with no window or natural light, forbidden to exercise, lie down or even lean against a wall if not sleeping. Even when he was allowed to sleep, he was periodically awakened by guards who also subjected him to daily strip searches and forced nudity.

Quantico commanders justified their handling of Manning by classifying him first as a “suicide risk” and then putting him on “prevention of injury” status. While Manning had been driven to despair by the unrelenting abuse he suffered in Kuwait, at least 16 official reports from brig psychiatrists at Quantico concluded that Manning was not a threat to himself or others. Nevertheless, his status did not change until he was transferred to Fort Leavenworth in April 2011 amid international condemnation of his treatment. By the admission of the colonel in charge of Quantico at the time, a blind eye was turned to these reports because a staff dentist made assessments more to the liking of the brass!

Court documents show that one base commander instructed staff to “do whatever we want” to Manning. The parameters of the torture regime were run up the chain of command to the Pentagon. Meanwhile, the handprint of the White House is all over the case. With a push from the Obama administration, Manning was charged under the 1917 Espionage Act, with the Commander-in-Chief himself declaring last year that Manning “broke the law.”

The government is intent on painting a portrait of Manning as a traitor who aided and abetted Al Qaeda, with the judge even giving the go-ahead to prosecutors to introduce the contents of Osama bin Laden’s hard drives. The prosecution does not feel compelled to present evidence that any tangible aid was provided to an “enemy.” Rather, it argues that it is sufficient to establish that Manning knew that U.S. adversaries could access the information that was now in the public domain. Thus Washington equates disclosure of classified information by “whistleblowers,” journalists or anyone else with treason. And by the lights of the “war on terror,” an “enemy” could mean virtually any opponent of the U.S. government.

It is the norm for the imperialists to accompany their depredations around the world with official silence and secret dealings. In 2011 alone, U.S. officials classified more than 92 million documents. Revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky observed in November 1917: “Imperialism, with its dark plans of conquest and its robber alliances and deals, developed the system of secret diplomacy to the highest level.” Opponents of imperialist occupations and war must be won to the understanding that it will require a series of socialist revolutions around the world to put an end to the capitalist order, which maintains itself through systematic violence and lies. 

Veronica Jones Memoir-Witness Helped Expose Mumia Abu-Jamal Frame-Up

Workers Vanguard No. 1014	7 December 2012

Veronica Jones Memoir-Witness Helped Expose Mumia Abu-Jamal Frame-Up

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

“As I lay in a coma for two months in early 2007, I could hear the voices around me.... All I knew was that I wanted to live. I did not want to die, not like this. There’s a lot I want to do and say and have wanted to say for years.”

Veronica Jones did live for another three years, and before she died in 2009 at the age of 48, finally got her say in an autobiography as told to her sister Valerie, which was posthumously published earlier this year. Veronica and the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal is the riveting story of a 20-year-old mother of three and part-time prostitute who was an eyewitness at the scene of the 9 December 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. This was the killing for which Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther Party spokesman, a MOVE supporter and acclaimed journalist, was falsely accused and sentenced to death.

Jones’ personal story cuts a large chunk out of the heart of the racist frame-up and decades-long conspiracy to legally lynch Mumia, an innocent man, or to keep this fighter for the oppressed locked in prison hell for the rest of his life. Several days after Faulkner’s killing, Jones told police she saw two black men run from the scene. Neither of these could have been Mumia, who was found slumped on the sidewalk profusely bleeding from a shot from a policeman’s gun. Jones’ report of two men running away would have been devastating to the prosecution scenario, which is that Mumia “must have” been the one who shot Faulkner because no one else but Mumia and his brother William Cook were on the street corner with Faulkner. But under intense intimidation from the Philly cops, at Mumia’s 1982 trial Jones recanted her account, dealing a blow to his defense. Although several witnesses saw one or more black men flee the scene, almost all of these witnesses’ accounts were kept from Mumia’s jury.

However, 14 years later, Jones came forward at a post-conviction hearing and stood up to the prosecutors, cops and “hanging judge” Albert Sabo to explain how the cops had pressured her to lie at the 1982 trial. In retaliation, Sabo and the prosecutors had her arrested on the witness stand and dragged off to jail on the basis of a New Jersey bench warrant (for supposedly trying to pass a bad check!) that had been issued more than two years earlier. Jones defiantly told Sabo’s court: “You think that’s going to make me change my story. It’s not!” Returning to the hearing after being released from jail, Jones demonstratively sat with Mumia’s supporters.

In her 1996 post-conviction testimony, Jones revealed how only days before Mumia’s trial, two detectives visited her in jail where she was held facing robbery charges. In her book, she describes how the sadistic cops laughed at her pleas to go to the bathroom, forcing her to urinate on herself. The cops threatened Jones with a long prison sentence on gun possession charges if she didn’t play ball, adding that her three daughters would be taken and placed in foster care. She recalled that one “detective stepped over to me only inches from my face, the whole while staring me directly in the eyes, never taking his eyes away from mine and with a straight face said, ‘We want you to tell the court that Mumia Abu-Jamal is the person that shot Officer Faulkner and we will make those five to fifteen years disappear’.”

At trial Jones refused to finger Mumia but denied her initial report that she had seen two men flee the shooting. What she did say, though, was that the cops had offered her the same deal they gave prostitute Cynthia White—to work the streets without cop harassment in exchange for saying that Mumia shot Faulkner. This had the potential to blow the frame-up apart, and for that reason was suppressed by Judge Sabo as “not relevant.”

The pressure put on Jones to echo White’s false account underscores the fragility of the prosecution’s case. Cops and prosecutors disappeared evidence exonerating Mumia and manufactured such fake “evidence” as a confession purportedly uttered by Mumia as he lay near death shortly after the shooting—a tale that was concocted by prosecutors and cops two months after Faulkner’s killing. White, the prosecution’s star witness, was the only one to testify seeing Mumia with gun in hand. No other witness even recalled seeing her in the area at the time. In the months leading up to Mumia’s trial, White repeatedly changed her account of what she saw. One reason the cops put intense pressure on Jones was that they feared that White couldn’t keep her fabricated story straight at trial. (For a fuller account and documentation of Mumia’s frame-up, see the 2006 Partisan Defense Committee pamphlet, The Fight to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal—Mumia Is Innocent!)

The most dramatic new revelation in Jones’ book is that she was having sex with Faulkner over a period of time before the shooting. In previous testimony, Jones had made clear that she knew Faulkner and that he had helped her. Jones’ book recounts how Faulkner assisted her one night after two other Philly cops viciously raped and robbed her, recalling, “He didn’t seem surprised by my story of what happened that night.” According to her memoirs, they had sex the night of Faulkner’s shooting, when he was in a strange mood as if “something really confidential” was “going to go down out there.”

Jones’ account of Faulkner’s frame of mind accords with the situation detailed in the subsequent confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner. Beverly’s 1999 sworn affidavit (one of the documents in the PDC pamphlet) tells how he and another man were hired for the job because Faulkner “was a problem for the mob and corrupt policemen because he interfered with the graft and payoffs made to allow illegal activity” such as prostitution, gambling and drugs.

Veronica Jones remained a visible supporter of the fight to free Mumia until her death, and for that she paid a great price. “She was determined to tell the whole story,” Valerie Jones writes in the book’s introduction, “for herself, for her family and above all, for an innocent man on death row. She believed, as I do, that Mumia Abu-Jamal is guilty of nothing except surviving that night and her own experience points to a deliberate police frame-up.” The book concludes, “The state’s determination to execute Mumia impacted the entirety of Veronica’s adult life.” The book includes a foreword by Mumia and a legal afterword by Rachel Wolkenstein, formerly a PDC counsel who was part of Mumia’s legal team in the late 1990s and continues to provide him legal assistance.

In 2011, ten years after a ruling by a federal judge overturning Mumia’s death sentence, the Philly district attorney’s office announced that it would not seek to reinstate the death penalty. Mumia, who never should have spent one day in jail, now faces the living death of life in prison without parole. There is no justice in the capitalist courts! Since first taking up Mumia’s defense in 1987, the Spartacist League and the PDC have favored every possible legal action against the frame-up while at the same time stressing that fighters for Mumia’s freedom must place their reliance on the power of mass, labor-centered protest. It will take a workers revolution to smash the greater prison house that is racist American capitalism, opening the road to an egalitarian socialist society. The future American workers state will honor the memory of Veronica Jones for her brave defiance of the executioners in black robes.

Extradited to Spain for Defending Basque Rights-Free Aurore Martin!

Workers Vanguard No. 1014	7 December 2012

Extradited to Spain for Defending Basque Rights-Free Aurore Martin!

(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)

We reprint below a November 2 leaflet by the Comité de Défense Sociale (CDDS)—a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League. It was distributed in French and Spanish at a 15,000-strong demonstration on November 10 in Bayonne, in the French Basque country, protesting the extradition of Aurore Martin to Spain. Martin was arrested on the grounds that she had attended several meetings of the pro-Basque independence organization Batasuna, even though this organization is not illegal in France. Her arrest was made possible by a European Union (EU) agreement that introduced the so-called European Arrest Warrant. Under this agreement, any EU member state must arrest and extradite to the requesting EU state anybody deemed by the latter to be a criminal suspect.

The CDDS condemns the extradition by the French state of Aurore Martin to Spain, where she faces up to 12 years in prison. Just days before Martin’s detention yesterday, two other Basque activists, Izaskun Lesaka and Joseba Iturbe, were arrested near Lyon in a joint operation by the RAID [elite French cop unit] and the Spanish Guardia Civil. Both Lesaka and Iturbe are suspected of belonging to the ETA pro-Basque independence group, and Lesaka is purported to be one of three activists who in October 2011 read out the ETA statement that it was definitively renouncing armed struggle.

The French and Spanish capitalist states have no intention of dropping their bloody vendetta against the Basque nationalists, despite ETA’s renouncing armed struggle. The Basques, as well as other national minorities such as the Catalans and the Corsicans, along with the Muslim population, are used by the French and Spanish bourgeoisies as all-purpose scapegoats. As the worst economic crisis in decades rages, this serves to divide and weaken the working class in order to push through the bosses’ renewed austerity attacks as well as to justify the raft of new laws increasing state repression, which are also ultimately aimed at workers struggling against capitalist oppression. This is not to mention the opaque maneuvers and rivalries at play around the European Union, in which the lives of militants are cynically traded as bargaining chips for imperialist interests. The Aurore Martin case and the European Arrest Warrant vividly show how the EU, insofar as it is “united” at all, is united over the oppression of minorities and the workers movement. Down with the EU!

Already this year, the total number of arrests of alleged ETA members stands at 24. Sixteen of those took place in France, three in Spain and five in other countries. We demand that all charges be dropped immediately against Aurore Martin, Izaskun Lesaka and Joseba Iturbe and that they be immediately released from the clutches of the French and Spanish states. We also demand that the hundreds of other Basque nationalist activists jailed in French and Spanish prisons be freed!

Aurore Martin Extradition: Valls Finishes Job Begun by Sarkozy and Guéant

Back in October 2010, a European Arrest Warrant was issued by the Spanish government against the French Basque activist Aurore Martin, demanding her extradition on the basis of alleged “participation in a terrorist organization.” The “evidence” cited is that she attended six public meetings of Batasuna in 2006 and 2007—four in Spain and two in France. The Batasuna party, outlawed in Spain, is a perfectly legal party in France. Aurore Martin is also accused of writing an article for the (legal) Basque newspaper Gara and of having dealings with the Basque Lands Communist Party (EHAK), which was outlawed in Spain in 2008. There is not even the slightest attempt by the French or Spanish government to produce evidence linking Aurore Martin to any armed activity; this French citizen was extradited by France’s top cop, Manuel Valls, and is today imprisoned in a Spanish jail solely because of her opinions and political solidarity with the cause of Basque independence. Her extradition, based on no tangible evidence, provoked outrage against Valls from practically all National Assembly members from the Basque country, even the most “republican” among them.

When an arrest warrant was issued against Aurore Martin in 2010, she went into hiding. But six months later, in early June 2011, she decided to “lead a normal public life again” and attended a public meeting in Biarritz on the subject of the European Arrest Warrant. Days later, on June 21, [then-president Nicolas] Sarkozy’s minister of the police, Claude Guéant, sent in his cops to arrest her in Bayonne. But they were literally pushed back by the activists and local people, and Aurore Martin eluded arrest. At the time, Guéant stated that France would do its “duty” and that her extradition would be carried out. However, after a 3,000-strong march in Bayonne demanding that her arrest warrant be lifted, there was no further attempt by the French government to arrest her. That is, until Valls and the popular-front government under [Socialist president François] Hollande stepped in to finish the job. In a recent interview in El País, Valls praised the “exemplary” cooperation between the French and Spanish governments and declared that the French government would “help Spain 100 percent” in pursuing the fight against ETA “with full firmness.”

The arrest and extradition of Aurore Martin are very much in line with the sinister crusade against the Basque nationalists carried out by the Socialist predecessors of Valls and Hollande. As we wrote in a short statement denouncing the European Arrest Warrant against Aurore Martin back in March 2011: “We denounce the police cooperation between France and Spain, which, starting with the GAL [“Anti-Terrorist Liberation Groups”] state terrorists under [French president François] Mitterrand and the Spanish Socialist Workers Party government of Felipe González in the 1980s and continuing up to today, has cost the lives of dozens of people and led to the arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of activists.” The workers movement must protest the extradition of Aurore Martin! For the right of self-determination of the Basque people, south and north of the Pyrenees! Down with the European Arrest Warrant! Down with the capitalist European Union! 

Parti Québécois Government: No Victory for Workers, Youth-State Vendetta Against Quebec Student Activists

Workers Vanguard No. 1014	7 December 2012

Parti Québécois Government: No Victory for Workers, Youth-State Vendetta Against Quebec Student Activists

We reprint the following article from Spartacist Canada No. 175 (Winter 2012/2013), newspaper of the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste, Canadian section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

In the aftermath of the student strike that rocked Quebec this past spring and summer, the capitalists’ cops and courts are pursuing a vindictive campaign against strike activists. A particular target is one of the student movement’s most prominent spokesmen, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois of the Coalition Large de l’Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Etudiante (CLASSE). On November 1, Quebec Superior Court justice Denis Jacques found Nadeau-Dubois guilty of “contempt” for encouraging student protesters to ignore court injunctions. The CLASSE leader now faces up to a year in prison and $50,000 in fines.

The judge railed that Nadeau-Dubois had advocated “anarchy” and that his comments could pave a “road to tyranny.” Underlining the political nature of this frame-up, his ruling cited the precedent of the May 1972 convictions of the leaders of Quebec’s three trade-union centrals [federations] for contempt of court. The jailing of these union leaders for refusing to order workers to obey strikebreaking injunctions sparked a spontaneous eleven-day general strike, the most deepgoing working-class struggle in Quebec history.

Other student militants face even more serious charges. Over 3,300 protesters were arrested during the strike, a number far exceeding even the mass roundups of leftists, nationalists and union leaders under the War Measures Act in the “October Crisis” of 1970. Among them is Yalda Machouf-Khadir, the daughter of Québec Solidaire MNA [National Assembly member] Amir Khadir. She faces charges of “conspiracy,” assault and breaking and entering following her alleged participation in the trashing of a former Quebec education minister’s office. Other activists face the Orwellian charge of “inciting fear of terrorism,” which carries a potential five-year jail sentence.

In order to hunt down and frame up political activists, the notoriously vicious Montreal police set up a special unit last year called GAMMA—Guet des Activités des Mouvements Marginaux et Anarchistes (Surveillance of the Activities of Marginal Movements and Anarchists). The ongoing witchhunt of left-wing activists highlights a basic truth: the capitalist state, including the cops and courts, is not neutral, but is the repressive fist of the ruling class, to be mobilized against striking workers, student radicals and anyone else who dares challenge the oppressive status quo. We say: Drop all charges now!

The sustained, militant struggle by tens of thousands of students won wide support among working people in Quebec. In the end, the students were able to win their bottom-line demands for withdrawal of a massive tuition hike and repeal of the draconian Bill 78, the “law of the nightsticks” enacted by Jean Charest’s Liberal government in an attempt to break the strike. But nothing fundamental has been resolved, and many student militants recognize that the newly-elected Parti Québécois regime will soon launch a new round of attacks on workers and student youth, as PQ governments have always done in the past.

PQ premier Pauline Marois cancelled the Liberals’ tuition hike to put a lid on social struggle. But the PQ is already vowing to increase tuition in line with inflation, and its promised “summit on higher education funding” explicitly excludes the student unions’ just demand for free education. Amid the sordid corruption scandals exposing (some of) the dirty deeds of Quebec mayors and other politicians, the PQ’s overriding priority has been to assure the “business community” that it can “balance the budget” and effectively manage the capitalist order. This will mean yet more austerity measures against workers and the poor.

The election of the bourgeois-nationalist PQ is not a victory of any kind for workers and student youth. History has shown repeatedly that the PQ in power is an enemy of the working class. In 1982-83, the government of party founder René Lévesque launched sweeping attacks on public-sector unions. In 1999, Marois, then minister of health in Lucien Bouchard’s PQ regime, introduced a bill ordering nearly 50,000 striking nurses to return to work. These and other attacks by the last PQ government paved the way for the even more savage assaults of the Charest Liberals.

Student struggle can provide a spark for the broader social struggle necessary to beat back capitalist attacks. However, as we emphasized throughout the student strike, it is the organized working class—in the factories, mines and transportation systems—that uniquely has the social power and material interest to bring the bourgeois profit system to its knees. Despite its history of militant struggle, the Quebec working class is tied to the capitalist order by union misleaders who have long supported the PQ in the name of “national solidarity.” The student strikers received both “advice” and financial support from the union tops, who used their authority and influence to limit the struggle and secure “social peace.” To unleash the social power of Quebec labour, a new leadership must be forged that can mobilize the workers independently of the PQ and all other capitalist parties.

Social Struggle and the National Question

Marois’ victory in the polls unleashed the usual wave of chauvinist hand-wringing in the English Canadian bourgeois press, though the fact that the PQ was only able to garner a minority government led to sighs of relief that no new sovereignty referendum would soon be on the agenda. However, the question of Quebec independence still looms large as a central feature of Canadian politics, one that will, sooner or later, erupt anew.

The national question in this country—the forcible incorporation of the francophone Québécois nation in an Anglo-dominated Canada—has long served to divide the working class. In English Canada, anti-Quebec chauvinism is fostered by the “Canadian unity” demagogy of the NDP [New Democratic Party] social democrats and their allies in the top trade-union bureaucracy. Within Quebec, national oppression is manipulated by the bourgeois nationalists and their labour lieutenants to bind the working class to its own francophone oppressors. As revolutionary internationalists who oppose all forms of chauvinism and discrimination and work to unite the workers in anti-capitalist struggle, we advocate Quebec independence. This is the best means to get the national question off the agenda, so that the workers of both nations can see clearly that their enemies are their own respective capitalist exploiters.

As the student struggle came to a head, the strike leaders increasingly dissipated the energies of the student movement into the parliamentary shell-game: “Anybody but the Liberals.” Léo Bureau-Blouin, former head of the Fédération Etudiante Collégiale du Québec (FECQ), ran for the PQ and was elected to the National Assembly. While declining to endorse any political party, the more radical CLASSE federation began organizing its protests around slogans like “Neoliberals out!” A CLASSE position paper issued just before the election opined that “The only way to force the government to truly respond to the popular will is to put in place a sufficient balance of power and to not give it any respite.”

Unable to conceive of any other strategy than putting pressure on the capitalists’ government, the CLASSE leadership promotes illusions that the “popular will” can be forced upon the ruling class. Such illusions are spread in a more crude form by various reformist left groups. For example, an article on the International Socialists’ (I.S.) website (10 September) was headlined “Quebec Election 2012: A Major Victory for Students and the Left.”

The I.S. and other reformists have worked overtime to spread illusions in the PQ’s “left” appendage, Québec Solidaire (QS). As we have noted, the purpose of QS, a petty-bourgeois populist party, is to channel the anger of youth and workers back into the safe channels of bourgeois parliamentarism and Québécois nationalism. At the height of the struggle and the police repression, QS joined in the violence-baiting of student activists, attacking “vandalism” by “rioters.” When his own daughter was arrested, Amir Khadir told a press conference, “If reprehensible acts were committed by my daughter or whoever else, one must take responsibility for one’s actions” (La Presse, 7 June). QS leader Françoise David made clear in the build-up to the election that QS would be prepared to support a PQ minority government.

Tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets rained down on student protesters during the strike, providing a crucial lesson about the brutality of the capitalist state to a generation of youth engaging in political struggle for the first time. Conclusions must be drawn from these and other experiences to provide a road forward against the unceasing attacks of the ruling exploiters. As we wrote in one of our French-language supplements distributed at the mass student protests:

“Only the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of workers rule can put an end to poverty and all-sided oppression and open up new vistas for humanity. This is not just a task for Quebec, but for all of Canada, the U.S. and the entire world. The way forward for Quebec student radicals is to commit their energy to forging a binational, multiethnic Marxist vanguard party, part of a reforged Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.”

— “Students: Ally with the Working Class!” SC No. 174, Fall 2012 [reprinted in WV No. 107, 31 August]

*   *   *

To aid the legal defense fund for students and other protesters arrested during the strike, send contributions to: Association pour une Solidarité Syndicale Etudiante, 2065 rue Parthenais, Local 383, Montreal QC H2K 3T1. You can also contribute directly to the defense fund for Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois: Comité de Soutien à Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, 2065 rue Parthenais, Bureau 08, Montreal QC H2K 3T1. 

Bourgeois Philanthropy and Working-Class Misery

Workers Vanguard No. 1014	7 December 2012

TROTSKY

LENIN

Bourgeois Philanthropy and Working-Class Misery

(Quote of the Week)

As the capitalist ruling class and its media mouthpieces once again trumpet the virtues of helping the needy in the holiday season, we offer Friedrich Engels’ scathing depiction of the 19th-century English bourgeoisie’s self-serving “charity” toward its victims.

The relation of the manufacturer to his operatives has nothing human in it; it is purely economic. The manufacturer is Capital, the operative Labour. And if the operative will not be forced into this abstraction, if he insists that he is not Labour, but a man, who possesses, among other things, the attribute of labour-force, if he takes it into his head that he need not allow himself to be sold and bought in the market, as the commodity “Labour,” the bourgeois reason comes to a standstill. He cannot comprehend that he holds any other relation to the operatives than that of purchase and sale; he sees in them not human beings, but hands, as he constantly calls them to their faces; he insists, as Carlyle says, that “Cash Payment is the only nexus between man and man.”…

Let no one believe, however, that the “cultivated” Englishman openly brags with his egotism. On the contrary, he conceals it under the vilest hypocrisy. What? The wealthy English fail to remember the poor? They who have founded philanthropic institutions, such as no other country can boast of! Philanthropic institutions forsooth! As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practising your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow.

—Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England (1845)

Billionaire Bloomberg Squeezes NYC Workers-Hungry and Homeless in the Shadow of Wall Street

Workers Vanguard No. 1014	7 December 2012

Billionaire Bloomberg Squeezes NYC Workers-Hungry and Homeless in the Shadow of Wall Street

DECEMBER 4—Five weeks ago, a weakening Hurricane Sandy, which had devastated parts of the Caribbean and the U.S. East Coast, combined with a Nor’easter to steamroll much of the coastal areas of New York City. From the east and south shores of Staten Island across the Lower New York Bay into Brooklyn’s Coney Island and Red Hook and the Rockaways in Queens, the densely populated banking center and port metropolis was slammed with killer winds, a record storm surge and massive flooding. Since then, what stands in stark contrast is the extent of recovery for the city’s rich and poor, for the capitalist owners and for the workers who make the city run.

Wall Street was back online within two days of the storm’s landfall. In little more than a week, a grueling, 24-7 deployment of transit, sanitation and utility workers had restored life in most of Manhattan to conditions little changed from the holiday shopping season one year prior. But for the largely black and Latino residents of public housing projects and the homeless, the picture was very different. Many were served their Thanksgiving dinners from volunteer food lines in outdoor parking lots or inside parish halls. More than a month after the storm, thousands of people still lack heat, water, power or working elevators, at best getting intermittent service. The high-traffic emergency room of Bellevue, the 276-year-old free public hospital evacuated in the storm, is still closed and will not resume operation as a Level One trauma center before February.

After Sandy flooded the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn, it took the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) two weeks to dispatch workers to knock on tenants’ doors to see if they were alive. When agency workers finally did arrive, they found 127 residents requiring medical care, six of whom needed ambulances. When the NYCHA showed up in the Rockaways, one member of a family of 12 living in a single apartment told the New York Daily News (13 November), “We’re living like animals and all they were worried about was the $1,000-a-month rent.”

Even in fair weather, it is a struggle for the impoverished families who live in the projects to get apartments painted, elevators maintained or broken boilers fixed. But after the storm, even as the NYCHA announced that it would be weeks or months before heat was restored, it initially threatened to evict anyone who didn’t pay rent. No surprise, then, that Red Hook residents lining up for Red Cross blankets were furious when NYCHA chairman John Rhea showed up on November 12 to magnanimously announce that they would get a partial rent credit, calling this “a nice little Christmas present.” Evidently NYCHA bureaucrats view the public housing residents in about the same light as the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) bosses and city administrators view their workforces, which is to say, as master to subject.

The disaster brought on by the storm threw into sharp relief the everyday cruelties of life in the financial center of U.S. capitalist society, which is run for the profit of the tiny group of families who own industry and the banks. The number of New Yorkers who are dependent on food pantries or soup kitchens—a number that includes many working poor as well as unemployed—has swelled far beyond the 1.4 million (17 percent of the population) who survived in this way before Sandy hit. Already before the storm, there were 47,000 homeless in shelters across the city, many of them victims of bank foreclosures, others too poor to afford the cost of rent. Sandy increased the number of homeless by tens of thousands, with most of those driven from public housing in low-lying areas. The new homeless have been shuffled chaotically from evacuation centers in public schools to armory floors to hotel rooms without cooking facilities. One Far Rockaway evacuee, roused from his bed for a transfer, declared: “It’s like you were being processed to go to jail.”

The scourge of homelessness, though compounded by natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy, is firmly rooted in the normal functioning of the capitalist system. A study early this year by the advocacy group Picture the Homeless estimated that the thousands of properties in New York City that are kept vacant, largely for the purpose of real estate speculation, could house some 200,000 people. The same is true nationally as banks have driven millions from their homes, leaving the properties vacant until real estate prices rebound. According to the 2010 census, almost 19 million homes in this country sit vacant while some 3.5 million people remain homeless.

By the lights of the capitalist profit system, it is entirely just that the bourgeoisie and its high-priced executives possess mansions and vacation homes around the world, with more rooms than they can count, while the poor are consigned to crumbling, rat- and roach-infested projects. Meanwhile, working people who buy homes are prey to the banking and insurance vultures. As long ago as 1872, Friedrich Engels, who co-founded with Karl Marx the modern communist movement, addressed the problem in his work The Housing Question:

“One thing is certain: there is already a sufficient quantity of houses in the big cities to remedy immediately all real ‘housing shortage,’ provided they are used judiciously. This can naturally only occur through the expropriation of the present owners by quartering in their houses homeless workers or workers overcrowded in their present homes. As soon as the proletariat has won political power, such a measure prompted by concern for the common good will be just as easy to carry out as are other expropriations and billetings by the present-day state.”

Engels concluded:

“As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist it is folly to hope for an isolated settlement of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the lot of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of subsistence and instruments of labour by the working class itself.”

Picking the Pockets of Heroes

The heroes of the Hurricane Sandy disaster are those unionized workers who were key to saving lives and getting the city back up and running, even as many of their own homes were destroyed. Transit workers have been lauded for rapidly restoring subway and bus service. Sanitation workers, who worked 12-hour shifts for weeks, have been hailed by those in hard-hit neighborhoods for removing mountains of storm debris at great personal risk. But even as NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg and his cronies pat workers on the back with one hand, they’re picking their pockets with the other.

The MTA docked the pay of thousands of transit workers who could not get to work in the first days of the disaster because mass transit was shut down and bridges and tunnels were knocked out of commission. For workers who needed emergency leave because their lives had been upended, the MTA bosses came up with a cynical scheme to allow them time off from work—by having other transit workers “donate” their own vacation days or sick leave! Yet even that plan cannot trump the artifice of Mayor Bloomberg. A capitalist in his own right with a net worth of $25 billion, Bloomberg e-mailed city workers to press them to contribute, through an automatic payroll deduction, to a “Mayor’s Fund” that supports volunteer relief efforts.

This is just a sick twist to the lie of “shared sacrifice” that government agencies and corporations, echoed by the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, have foisted on workers for years. Throughout the five-year-long economic crisis, both Democratic and Republican state and local governments have cut into wages, pensions and other benefits as part of their war against public employees unions, which are portrayed as public enemies. Even before that, bourgeois politicians invoked budget crises to slash the workforce rolls.

During a blizzard that hit NYC two years ago, the same sanitation workers lauded in the press today were targets of a tabloid hate campaign for a supposed work “slowdown.” In fact, the workers had to deal with the emergency after 400 jobs had been cut in Bloomberg’s austerity budget and in the face of utter negligence by the city administration, which was completely unprepared for that storm. Today, the unions in every single municipal bargaining unit in the city, plus the subway and bus workers in the Transport Workers Union, are working without a contract or with their old contract extended, and some have been doing so for many years. In fact, all the unionized workers who are laboring mightily to provide necessary services in the New York-New Jersey region have been under attack. Last summer Con Edison, backed by Democratic NY governor Andrew Cuomo and rolling in profits, strong-armed the Utility Workers union into making major concessions to end a lockout. This gave the lie to the union tops’ tired refrain that Con Edison bosses and workers are a “family.”

The labor officialdom has played dead in the face of the anti-union assault, bowing to New York State’s Taylor Law, which bans public employee strikes, and the whole gamut of laws and regulations aimed at hog-tying union struggle. To fight for what’s needed, the labor movement must be broken from the program of class collaboration, which has its political expression in the union misleaders’ support to the Democratic Party.

The labor movement should be fighting for a massive program of public works to restore the damage done by Sandy and rebuild the decaying infrastructure that the capitalist rulers have allowed to rot. This would necessarily be combined with a fight to organize the unorganized and for jobs for all through a shorter workweek at full union wages. Struggles for these necessities point to the need to fight for a workers government that would seize the productive wealth that has been squandered by the capitalist rulers and put it toward rebuilding this society. This calls for the forging of a new, class-struggle leadership of the union movement as part of the struggle to build a revolutionary workers party.

Bourgeoisie Appeals to Volunteerism

If one feature has clearly stood out in the aftermath of Sandy, it is the massive volunteer effort that continues into the second month of the disaster. Out of basic human decency, thousands of people have manned food lines and free clinics and assisted with debris removal, or have simply passed out bottles of water. But their efforts can fill no more than a tiny part of the void created by the capitalist rulers’ refusal to mobilize the resources—like massive amounts of money and hired labor—required to address the crisis.

The volunteer effort has been promoted by bourgeois politicians from Barack Obama to Bloomberg and New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who are seizing on it to alibi their neglect of the needs of the population. Thus it does not come as a surprise that Bloomberg and the publishers of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have hailed the aid provided by Occupy Sandy, a grouping that harks back to last year’s Occupy Wall Street movement. Chiming in from the left side of the choir, the reformist International Socialist Organization gushed that Occupy Sandy signaled that “a push for a people’s recovery is beginning to emerge” (Socialist Worker, 28 November).

In a brief appearance in the Rockaways on November 29, Bloomberg told Occupy Sandy volunteers, “You really are making a difference.” He then hopped into his SUV to flee the wrath of residents still without heat. Earlier, a reporter for the left-liberal Nation (5 November) observed Occupy Sandy volunteers joining with FEMA personnel and city cops who brutally drove Occupy protesters from Zuccotti Park in Manhattan last year, in chanting, “We are unstoppable, another world is possible.” The reporter thought this was “a truly bizarre moment.” But in fact the populist Occupy movement from the beginning saw the cops—the racist, strikebreaking enforcers of capitalist rule—as part of the “99 percent,” promoting the lie that the police and those they are paid to suppress have common interests.

As seen today in New York, this country’s ruling class possesses boundless contempt for workers, the poor and everyone they have relegated to the bottom of society. At the same time, they moved with alacrity to get the stock market and other major businesses back in gear after the storm hit.

On a much more massive and deadly scale, the same “priorities” were at play when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and especially New Orleans seven years ago. For the capitalist class, what mattered in New Orleans was the port and the tourist trade. Poor and black residents of the city were left to die or suffer horribly in the sweltering heat. With the National Guard patrolling the streets, black people were criminalized as “looters,” shot at by cops and vigilantes and locked up in “Camp Greyhound.” Those whose homes were flooded were shipped out of state, with the intent that they never return.

In the months and years that followed, the bourgeoisie used every opportunity to reshape the previously majority-black city—it was even blithely argued that a city at or below sea level (a requirement for a port) is by nature uninhabitable. The public school system was largely privatized and the teachers fired, decimating the union and making the city the epicenter for the charter school movement. Intact and scrubbed of damage, Charity Hospital, a public institution, was nonetheless closed down. Large- and small-scale construction speculation abounds to this day. The port has grown, but the International Longshoremen’s Association has lost more ground to scab outfits. Although consisting of solid low-rises that survived the storm well, most public housing was simply razed.

While the devastation wrought by Katrina was on a scale far greater than that of Hurricane Sandy, both crises, in their own way, laid bare the social reality of capitalist America. Why were the 40 nursing homes in flood-prone areas of New York City not evacuated? A report in the New York Times (3 December) showed that it was all about saving money. According to the Times, the evacuation of patients last year in the face of Tropical Storm Irene “led to millions of dollars in health care, transportation, housing and other costs.” Thus “when Hurricane Sandy loomed, the officials were acutely aware that they could come under criticism if they ordered another evacuation that proved unnecessary.” Nor were the highly vulnerable Bellevue and New York University hospitals evacuated until after the storm knocked out power, forcing workers to carry patients down flight after flight of darkened stairways. Bloomberg’s focus was on the NYC marathon money machine—for which dozens of generators had been reserved—until a public outcry forced the cancellation of the race.

There is a fundamental divide in society between the capitalist class and the working class, whose labor is the source of the capitalists’ immense profits. The working class is not just one more victim of austerity within the “99 percent.” It is the only force with the potential social power and historic interest to sweep away the barbarous capitalist system. As we wrote in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (“New Orleans: Racist Atrocity,” WV No. 854, 16 September 2005):

“Despite differences over particular policies, the Republicans and Democrats are united in defending capitalism—an anarchic, irrational profit-driven system that cannot even provide for the safety and welfare of the population. The situation cries out for a socialist planned economy, in which natural resources and the technological and productive forces of society would be marshaled on behalf of human needs, not profit. What is urgently required is to build a workers party that can lead a workers revolution to rip power from the hands of the capitalist class and its political agents, right-wing Republican and liberal Democrat alike.”