RAY O. LIGHT NEWSLETTER
Jan-Feb 2009 Number 52
Publication of the Revolutionary Organization of Labor, USA
The Inauguration of a new President –
The Continuation of U.S. Imperialist Rule
“This is our moment … to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth – that out of many, we are one.”
Barack Obama’s Acceptance Speech, November 4, 2008
On January 20, 2009, in front of the largest inaugural crowd in U.S.
history, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th President of the USA
under the U.S. Constitution. As many as three million people are
expected to make the pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. A large number of
them, especially among the Afro-American people, are motivated by many
of the same religious feelings that possess millions of other
distressed and oppressed human beings who travel to Rome or Mecca or
Jerusalem or the holy sites of India or elsewhere around the world in
the expectation that their lives will be enriched, their distress will
be relieved, their oppression will be lifted.
The millions who travel to Washington, D.C. will be clinging to their
“faith” in “the Obama dream” in the face of a mountain of facts, a
mountain which grows larger every day. We hope this Newsletter is a
source of cold bracing water – not serving as a “wet blanket” spoiling
a big celebration. Rather, we hope it serves as an aid to wake up those
millions in the USA and billions worldwide who have been taking a nap,
induced by the soothing lullaby of the two years-long epic flim-flam of
the U.S. presidential campaign and its ultimate product, “the Obama
dream.” We all need to deal seriously and effectively with U.S.
imperialism, and international capital, especially in the world
capitalist economic crisis that has now erupted.
In the period since his election, Barack Obama has rapidly assembled
his leadership team. Especially in the most crucial departments of the
U.S. imperialist state apparatus, Obama has not only elevated the
Democratic Party hack “usual suspects” but has even retained a number
of key Bush Regime war criminals for his own inner circle. This is
certainly true of his National Security team, tasked with defending the
U.S. Empire at home and abroad, and his Economy Team tasked with
providing a turnaround for the collapsing U.S. and world capitalist
economy and providing relief to the rapidly increasing millions of
dispossessed in the USA itself.
Military Facts and Prospects For Peace:
One of the earliest and most important forces behind the Obama
candidacy were those pacifists and anti-war activists who opposed the
Bush Regime’s war policies to one degree or another. Obama’s opposition
to the U.S. war in Iraq while he was still in the Illinois Senate was
much of the basis for the Obama campaign’s ability to surpass Hillary
Clinton and make him the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. This
anti-war credential remained a key ingredient in his successful run for
the Presidency against Republican John McCain, who was saddled (thanks
to the Iraqi and Afghan people’s resistance movements) with the Bush
Regime’s criminal and failed war policies.
As soon as he became President-elect, however, Obama praised Senator
McCain, a classic war criminal in the Vietnam War.* Obama said of his
Republican “rival,” “He has endured sacrifices for America that most of
us cannot begin to imagine, and we are better off for the service
rendered by this brave and selfless leader.” (Barack Obama’s Acceptance
Speech, 11-4-08)
*As a privileged fighter pilot, this son and grandson of
four-star admirals had enthusiastically bombed the Vietnamese people
until he was shot down, captured and made a prisoner of war by the
heroic Vietnamese national liberation fighters.
Since then, Obama has selected a National Security Team of war mongers,
connected to the military-industrial and finance capitalist complex.
All have already proven themselves in the service of arch war criminal
George W. Bush!
First of all, Obama has chosen to retain Bush’s own Secretary of
Defense, Robert Gates, to lead the entire U.S. military apparatus! And
Gates has already begun to implement Obama’s plans to expand the U.S.
war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama has selected Clinton, with her
track record of six years on the Senate Armed Services Committee and
strong support for Bush’s so-called war on terror, to be his Secretary
of State.
Finally, he has selected Marine four-star General James Jones to be his
National Security Adviser. At the beginning of 2003 George W. Bush had
made General Jones the head of the U.S. European Central Command and
the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in which capacity he served until
the end of 2006. In 2007, Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a
fellow board member of Chevron Corporation, appointed then retired
General Jones as Special Envoy for Middle East Security where he
represented the Bush Regime and U.S. imperialism in building the
security infrastructure of both the Israeli settler state and the
imperialist puppet Palestinian Authority and conducted U.S. security
negotiations with them. General Jones concurrently served as the
President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s “Institute for 21st Century
Energy” and today remains a member of the board of directors of the
Boeing Company as well as Chevron. As he deals with the Middle East and
other national security matters, General Jones will not forget where
his bread is buttered.
In addition, Obama’s very first appointee, Rahm Emanuel, his Chief of
Staff, is a dual citizen (U.S. and Israel) who is a combat veteran of
the Israeli military as well as a former Wall Street investment banker
and insider at Freddie Mac. And one of Obama’s earliest acts, as
President-Elect, was to intercede with the Senate Democratic leadership
to allow the “Independent Democrat,” Joseph Lieberman, a key link
between the Israeli settler state and the U.S. imperialist state, to
retain his Chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, in
spite of his unqualified support for Obama’s Republican rival, McCain,
for the Presidency!
Obama’s national security team has been praised by John McCain, and his
key Senate allies, Lindsey Graham (Republican-South Carolina) and, of
course, Joseph Lieberman (Independent Democrat-Connecticut) as well as
by George W. Bush’s former political director and chief strategist,
Karl Rove. Rove observed that Obama’s national security team
“represents, to a substantial degree, continuity.”
Rather than peace becoming a reachable goal in Afghanistan and Iraq on
the eve of the Obama inauguration, the settler state of Israel, the
most reliable ally of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East, has launched
a massive air war and ground invasion on the Palestinian people of the
Gaza strip. This Israeli military assault has the full backing of the
disgraced Bush Regime and, more importantly, the clear backing of the
incoming Obama administration. This latter point helps explain why
virtually no government in the world has raised its voice in defense of
the Hamas-led Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip nor condemned the
role of U.S. imperialism in this brutal war crime.*
*An indication of the significance of Obama’s support for
the Israeli aggression in Gaza is that, in the truthful words of
anti-war heroine Cindy Sheehan, “‘the anti-Republican war’ movement
will stand down, as evidenced at the recent United For Peace and
Justice gathering where it was decided to do a mass protest
highlighting the ‘economic crisis’ in NYC instead of an anti-war
protest on the 6th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.” Evidently, the
argument that prevailed at this anti-war (but definitely not
anti-imperialist) group’s convention was to give Obama a “honeymoon”
opportunity to end the war on his own rather than demanding that the
new administration carry out the anti-war agenda they supposedly
elected him to carry out.
From the standpoint of the international working class and the
oppressed peoples, the incoming Obama Regime, somehow freed of all the
Bush baggage, represents a new counter offensive in defense of the U.S.
Empire and a temporary strengthening of U.S. imperialism.
Economic Facts:
Alexander Cockburn astutely observed, with regard to the election of
Barack Obama on November 4th, 2008, “Never was there a luckier
candidate in the timing of economic collapse, the ultimate October
surprise …” (The Nation, 11-24-08)
From the moment the crisis arose just a month or so before the end of
the two years-long 2008 Presidential campaign, Obama as well as his
Republican “rival,” John McCain, fully supported the public bailout of
the private Wall Street banks, insurance companies and other financial
corporations, by the Bush White House and Democratic-controlled
Congress, with no Congressional or public strings attached! That is,
Obama as well as McCain was quite willing to burden “the public,” us
(and our children and grandchildren), with the private debt incurred by
the rich rulers of this country who put us in this situation to begin
with!
During the very month of Obama’s election victory, more than 500,000
people lost their jobs in the USA. By October over $2 trillion dollars
in pension savings had been lost and millions of senior citizens who
were planning to retire will remain in or now return to the work force.
Combined with the massive job loss, the extension of seniors’ work
lives will mean less job opportunities for our youth. And, while “the
American Dream” has always centered on home ownership, despite the
Democratic-Republican gift of the initial Bush bailout of the Wall
Street bankers and financiers to the tune of hundreds of billions of
dollars thus far, the epidemic of home mortgage foreclosures (and the
eviction of renters) has continued with no end in sight.
In this setting, President-elect Obama’s economic “brain trust,”
including his Secretary of the Treasury designate, Timothy Geithner,
are all Wall Street financiers, multi-millionaires and includes
multi-billionaire Warren Buffett – the very people most responsible for
the economic crisis. Working in close cooperation with Bush’s Treasury
Secretary, Henry Paulson of Goldman-Sachs, Geithner was described by
The Washington Post as “a primary architect of the Bush
Administration’s response to the financial crisis.” (Our emphasis, ROL)
As we have pointed out elsewhere, the Wall Street fat cats should not
be bailed out; instead they should be jailed with no bail! The
deepening economic crisis has no end in sight; and Obama’s prescription
for getting out of this crisis involves increasing the wealth of Wall
Street at the expense of Main Street, making his loudly trumpeted
“dream” of “unity of all the people of the USA, rich and poor, etc.” an
ever more elusive and illusive one. “Out of many, we are one” is a
cruel joke, being played on us!
The Obama-Biden Administration is inheriting the deepest economic
crisis in the USA since the Great Depression of seventy-five years ago,
and its fundamental cause is the same as the earlier one, capitalist
overproduction. That is, we the working people are unable to buy back
the product of our labor because the capitalists have reaped such
profits from the exploitation of our labor that there is now a drastic
chasm between what the haves have and what we, the have-nots, have not.
There can be no unity of the people of the USA with our Wall Street
rulers. Even capitalist economists have recently begun to speculate
that the tremendous disparity between the rich and the rest of us in
the USA may lead to civil war.
The prospect of such a development is, no doubt, fueling the drive
begun under George W. Bush (which was previously illegal under the
Posse Comitatus law) to introduce U.S. combat troops into the streets
of the USA itself! This is giving the “war abroad and the war at home”
a deeper meaning than heretofore.
There are several interdependent questions that will largely determine
how this war between the rich and the rest of us plays out: How
long a honeymoon period will the workers and oppressed nationalities
within the U.S. multinational state, especially the Afro-American
people, give the Obama-Biden Administration? How much fighting
capacity do the oppressed and exploited of this U.S. imperialist
society have today after fifty years of U.S. hegemony in the world
capitalist camp, fifty years of being part of the chief oppressor
nation in the world? How much relief and how many concessions can the
exploited and oppressed of this society wrest from the new
administration? How serious, militant and principled are the scientific
socialists and other revolutionaries in the USA and internationally in
their willingness to deal with the main enemy of humanity, imperialism,
headed by U.S. imperialism?
Recent Attacks on U.S. Working People and Some Successful Fightback
The Obama-Biden Administration is clearly an integral part of the
Republican-Democratic political duopoly controlling the state apparatus
as faithful representatives of U.S. monopoly capitalism and imperialism
as indicated above. Nevertheless, the Obama and Democratic Party
election victories involved the mobilization of much of organized labor
as well as the Afro-American and Latino communities and other sectors
of workers and oppressed within the U.S. multinational state. This
mobilization has increased our political strength, at least in the
short run.
Obama and the Afro-American People
Nevertheless, in this historical moment, when the USA is about to
inaugurate the first Black American President of the USA, it is the
Afro-American people who are in the most vulnerable position. After
all, the Afro-American people faced a dilemma in the campaign to elect
Obama as the first Black President. As we pointed out last year,
“seizing this opportunity involves accepting Obama’s political
assessment … according to this logic, Afro-American people should not
struggle and strive for Afro-American unity, for to do so is to
practice the politics of ‘divisiveness!’” (The Obama and McKinney
Campaigns for President – Which Path toward Afro-American Freedom? Ray
O. Light Newsletter #48, May-June 2008)
Since the Obama election victory, there has been a sharp increase in
hate crimes targeting Afro-American and Latino people as well as
targeting Obama himself. While the U.S. ruling class is using Obama’s
elevation to the Presidency as a weapon to disintegrate and destroy
Afro-American unity and organization, white supremacist organizations
are growing rapidly on the same basis, an especially dangerous
combination!
Furthermore, Black politicians have come under renewed attack, such as
in the targeting of progressive Boston city Councilman Chuck Turner and
the besmirching of the reputation of Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr.
Congressman Jackson seems to have been effectively blocked from
becoming the new junior Senator from Illinois by the Blagojevich
scandal. With the departure of Obama from the Senate, the upper chamber
is once again a lily-white club. We have witnessed the stunning and
nasty spectacle of Blagojevich’s nominee, former Illinois Attorney
General Ronald Burris, an Afro-American man, being blocked, at least
initially, from taking his seat in the U.S. Senate, even though he has
been accused of no wrongdoing and Governor Blagojevich is still legally
authorized to make the Senate appointment!
The very first activity in the inauguration itself will be the
invocation scheduled to be given by Evangelical Pastor Rick Warren. By
the time of the 2008 election, the only mass base of support still
remaining for George W. Bush and transferable to Senator John McCain
was the white evangelical Christian right. By selecting Pastor Warren
to give the invocation, Obama is keeping the faith with McCain and
George W. Bush!*
*In this connection, it is worth noting that Warren’s
selection also represents a slight to Obama’s gay-lesbian community
base.
Obama’s choice of Warren for the invocation is a repudiation of the
Afro-American church and its historical role, including its invaluable
role in the struggle for Afro-American liberation that made Obama’s
election possible. Just as Obama’s former minister and mentor, Reverend
Jeremiah Wright, has observed, the attack on him (Wright) during the
election campaign was, in reality, an attack on the Black Church,
historically the most important self-defense institution in
Afro-American society. Thus, Obama’s repudiation of Reverend Wright led
inexorably to the selection of Pastor Warren to give the invocation at
the inauguration.
The marvelous anti-war leader, Cindy Sheehan, has shared the fact that
people involved in counter-recruitment work have reported to her that
military “recruiters are targeting young people of color even more
intensely now telling them that they will be ‘Fighting for Obama’…”
(Cindy Sheehan blog, 12-21-08) Between this propaganda effort and the
current economic crisis, no wonder the Army, Navy and Air Force have
all met their recruitment quotas for the first time in a few years.
Last month we posed the question: “how big a price will the
Afro-American people be willing to pay to prop up the Obama
Presidency?” For the sake of the international working class and the
oppressed peoples, and especially for the Afro-American people’s own
sake, we hope that the “honeymoon” period is brief. For the
Afro-American people as well as the rest of the working people of the
USA and the world should not surrender our initiatives, our priorities,
our own agendas for justice, freedom and peace.
Attack on the Auto Workers and Prospects for the Employee Free Choice Act
Now, in order to attempt to keep U.S. working people politically tied
to the capitalist system, especially when unemployment and hard times
are rampant and the system is collapsing, Obama and the
Democratic-controlled Congress have to appear to attempt to provide,
and to some extent, as working people intensify our struggle, may
actually provide, some support for the hard-pressed labor movement and
relief for the working class.
Thus, in sharp contrast to Bush’s Secretary of Labor, the openly
anti-labor Elaine Chao, President-elect Obama has selected as his
Secretary of Labor, California Congresswoman Hilda Solis, a Latina with
pro-union working class roots. Congresswoman Solis has been a
co-sponsor of Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) legislation and openly
talks about strengthening our unions. At the press conference
announcing his choice, both Obama and Ms. Solis spoke about working
people and unions in an extremely respectful way, unheard of from such
high government officials in decades. Such positive gestures by Obama,
Solis and others can be a source of encouragement and confidence for
the oppressed and exploited to demand our rights and a decent standard
of living, and wage the class struggle against U.S. and international
capital, if today’s communists and other anti-imperialists handle the
contradictions properly.*
*Such was the case, for example, in the Depression years of
the 1930’s, when the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) and the
dedicated union organizers in the Congress of Industrial Organization
(CIO) effectively used the respectful way that President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and his legislative agenda dealt with the labor
movement and the working class to promote the idea that “FDR wants you
to join the union.” This tactical approach helped them to organize
millions of unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled workers into the CIO
and led others into the more conservative American Federation of Labor
(AFL) at the time.
Obama’s key campaign promise to the labor bureaucrats was that he would
support and sign EFCA legislation, providing “card check” for union
recognition and stiffer penalties against companies that violate labor
law. This would help “level the playing field” with capital after
decades of decline for U.S. organized labor. In this setting, Corporate
America, through the Chamber of Commerce and other pro-business
organizations, has launched multi-million dollar campaigns against the
EFCA, with the incoming Obama administration already backpedaling on
this key promise to organized labor.*
*Alexander Cockburn remarked with regard to the fact that
the Democrats have fallen one vote short of a filibuster-proof majority
in the U.S. Senate: “I’m sure that many in the Democratic high command
will heave deep sighs of relief at still having Republican
obstructionism to blame when labor’s objectives, such as the Employee
Free Choice Act, get put on the back burner.” (The Nation, 11-24-08)
Furthermore, through the Congressional negotiations with the “Big
Three” U.S. automakers (G.M., Ford and Chrysler) regarding potential
bailout loans to these economically distressed companies totaling as
much as $34 billion dollars, the U.S. ruling class attempted to force
the United Auto Workers (UAW) leadership to agree to the decimation of
generations of hard fought gains of the auto workers. Counting on its
role as corporate lackey for the Big Three, the reactionary ruling
class forces believed, that, in its haste to help its Big Three
“masters” survive, the UAW leadership could be brought to its knees, so
as to push organized labor back at this critical moment. For, an
intimidated and defensive labor movement would not be in a position to
take advantage of the window of opportunity to organize the millions of
unorganized workers in the USA today that an EFCA would provide.*
*It is worth noting the double standard: Congress wrote a
blank check for the criminals and parasites of Wall Street to the tune
of $700 billion with no strings attached and no accountability. Bush’s
Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, who comes directly from Wall Street
giant Goldman Sachs, refused to tell Congress where all the money has
gone and Congress accepted this! Yet when it came to a “bridge
loan” to sustain the “Big Three” with their hundreds of thousands of
unionized workers and two million additional jobs connected to their
auto production, Congress refused to loan them a dime without major
concessions from the auto workers union! This exposes the fact that the
crushing of the UAW and the U.S. labor movement was their aim.
Furthermore, when the Bush Administration ultimately provided the
bridge loan, without additional Congressional action, out of the
already existing Wall Street bailout money, it came with serious
strings attached – auto workers’ wages and benefits had to be lowered
to that of their non union counterparts!
Fortunately, not all workers and oppressed nationality forces in the
USA are waiting for the Obama-Biden Administration to come to their
aid.
Victories of Smithfield Workers and Republic Windows Workers
In a very significant development, no doubt partly fueled by the Obama
election victory as well as an increasingly angry mood of the working
class in response to the economic crisis and the bailouts for the Wall
Street rich, five thousand meatpackers at the massive Smithfield Foods
plant in Tarheel, North Carolina (N.C.) won their union election, in a
close vote, and affiliated with the United Food and Commercial Workers
Union (UFCW). This victory culminated a sixteen year struggle against
one of the most intense anti-union company offensives in recent U.S.
history — including firings and physical assaults on union activists,
use of local police agencies and immigration raids aimed at
intimidating and splitting the workforce, and anti-trust law-suits
against the union. The unity of the Afro-American and Latino
workers in winning small concessions on the basis of militant work
floor actions over a long period was key to the accomplishment of what
has been an all too rare victory of this magnitude for U.S. organized
labor in many years. The fact that the factory is located in the “Black
Belt South,” in the old slave plantation region, in one of the least
unionized states (3% of the workers in N.C. are unionized) adds to the
significance of what is arguably the most important union organizing
victory in the U.S. in recent years.
Provided there is militant and visionary leadership, this victory has
the potential to be a springboard that can lead to the unionization of
the intensely exploited and oppressed poultry and meat packing workers
throughout N.C. and the South and help provide some necessary organized
“fightback” in these new depression conditions.
Another indication that the mood of U.S. workers, especially immigrant
national minority and Afro-American workers, is changing rapidly and
dramatically for the better was revealed by the successful factory
occupation by 240 Republic Windows unionized employees in Chicago after
they received three days notice of lay-off in violation of the law that
required a 60 day notice of plant closing. With their Union, United
Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), the now small
remnant of one of the largest and most successful CIO unions born in
the 1930’s, solidly behind them, the workers occupied the factory for
six days demanding their earned severance pay, continuation of health
benefits and pay for accrued vacation.
Workers were especially angered by the fact that Bank of America, a
recipient of $34 billion as part of the massive Wall Street bail-out,
withheld credit from the company in part causing the plant shutdown.
The bank also allegedly advised Republic Windows to refuse to pay the
workers their earned benefits. Workers rightfully raised the slogan:
“They got bailed out, we got sold out.” With justified anger over the
Wall Street bail-out (so much, in fact, that it was voted down the
first time by the U.S. House of Representatives, even with Bush and
Pelosi, McCain and Obama, all supporting it!) and the devastating
impact of the economic meltdown, the demands and actions of the
Republic Window workers received the sympathy and captured the
imagination of working people all over the country. Organized by “Jobs
With Justice,” demonstrations against Bank of America took place in
many cities around the United States. Recognizing the people’s anger,
President-elect Obama said that the workers were right and the company
should pay them what the law provided.
After a six day occupation of the factory the workers won all their
demands, including a severance package worth $1.75 million, though they
and the UE did not carry on the fight against Bank of America to try to
keep the plant open.
The past few decades have witnessed the almost total disappearance of
the strike weapon from the arsenal of U.S. organized labor. In this
setting, the Republic Windows workers and the UE’s adoption of the far
more advanced tactic of factory occupation in defense of their rights
and standard of living and the widespread sympathetic response they
received, are very good signs.*
*Such actions, though on a much more massive scale, took
more than five years of Depression and active class struggle to emerge
in the 1930’s with the Rubber Workers Sit-Down strike in Akron, Ohio,
followed by the even more massive Auto Workers Sit-Down in Flint,
Michigan a few years later.
The fact that 80% of these workers were Latinos, many of whom had been
participants in the mass struggles in defense of immigrant rights on
May Day 2006 and other occasions over the past few years and the fact
that the workers had already been told that they were losing their
jobs, rendering that threat unavailable to the company, also help
explain why these workers took such a militant action, a sharp and
needed departure from the passive responses of so many workers and
unions in the face of decades of corporate assaults on their rights,
standard of living and working conditions.
The Struggle for Militant and Democratic Unionism in the SEIU
Currently, the largest union in the USA is the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) led by its autocratic President Andy Stern.
Stern is also, for all intents and purposes, the leader of the Change
to Win Coalition, representing several other large U.S. unions,
including the Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers Union and
the Laborers’ International Union, making up approximately forty
percent of all of organized labor in the USA today.*
*John Sweeney, the President of the AFL-CIO, which contains
almost all the remaining 60% of U.S. organized labor, was a previous
president of the SEIU, as well, indicating some of the importance of
this particular union in the U.S. economy dominated by the service
industry.
Over the past several years, Stern and the SEIU have gained a global
labor influence. For example, in China, the government has brought
Stern in to try to help develop unions (similar to many SEIU locals)
that will function as loyal detachments of both the companies for which
their members work and the government as well. Such unions will help
the rulers at the company and country level to keep control over the
working class.
Likewise, in Puerto Rico, the colonial government has brought Stern and
his SEIU gang of international “scabs” into the labor movement there in
an attempt to replace the militant and patriotic Puerto Rican teachers
union. This has sparked a popular resistance on the part of Puerto
Rican teachers and their many allies.
Finally, within the USA itself, Stern has overseen the rapid growth of
SEIU, in marked contrast with most U.S. (shrinking) unions. But he has
accomplished this on the unprincipled, anti-union basis of “sweetheart
agreements” with hospital and health care and nursing home corporations
over the heads of and at the expense of the members he is signing up.
Stern’s corrupt methods have rubbed off on many of his key lieutenants
who have recently been indicted on various corruption charges. Even
blatantly corrupt Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, in one of his
scenarios for selling Obama’s vacated Senate seat, was allegedly
seeking a top Change to Win Coalition-SEIU job for himself from Stern!
Stern is currently in the process of trying to crush a democratically
run, San Francisco-based 150,000 member United Health Care local of
SEIU led by its progressive President, Sal Roselli. But the membership
and leadership of SEIU local #250 has mobilized and is defending its
rank and file-led union and its decent contracts. When Stern recently
forced a phony vote between two alternatives for local mergers, either
of which would have severely weakened SEIU #250, a total of only 25,000
voted for both alternatives out of over 300,000 eligible members; even
more impressive were the 40,000 membership postcards to Stern and
80,000 signatures on petitions protesting Stern’s draconian tactics.
The protracted and mass struggle for union democracy being carried out
by SEIU local #250, occurring in this period of economic crisis and
nascent working class ferment, holds significance far beyond local #250
and California and the SEIU. It has the potential for helping to pave
the way for class struggle-oriented, democratically-run, rank and
file-led unions, capable of leading a crusade of working class
organization and struggle against capital such as were born and thrived
in the last Great Depression with the rise of the CIO.*
*And this movement against the Stern-SEIU Gang and
opportunist treachery in the labor and working class movement also has
the potential of reaching across the borders of the USA to Puerto Rico
and even to China!
Conclusion
Finally, a few thoughts:
1. Had the world communist movement been armed with a proletarian
internationalist world outlook over the past two years, “the Obama
phenomenon,” providing a new and exciting façade for bourgeois
democratic illusions about the U.S. imperialist state, and thus
representing a new U.S. imperialist ideological and political
counter-offensive, would have been thoroughly exposed. With a clear
internationalist view that the liberation movements of the Afghani and
Iraqi peoples are on the frontlines of our struggle, President-elect
Obama’s decision to retain George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense,
Robert Gates, would have been the “last straw” rather than the first
hint about Obama’s key role in defense of the U.S. Empire.
2. Those proletarian revolutionaries, Marxist-Leninists, scientific
socialists, who understand clearly that Obama has become the leader of
the U.S. imperialist state, the chief bulwark of world capitalism, have
a responsibility to help unite those working people who have illusions
about Obama with those who do not, in practical activities –
tactically projecting petition campaigns, marches, strikes and
solidarity strikes, sit-ins and sit-downs – making demands on Obama,
channeling the mass mobilization into a fight for our own working class
and mass interests in opposition to the interests of U.S. imperialism.
3. The working class and oppressed masses of the USA cannot afford to
watch and wait in the face of the deepening economic crisis, wars at
home and abroad and the continuation of U.S. imperialist rule, now
coming under the baton of the new Obama administration. The encouraging
examples of struggle of the Smithfield, Republic Windows and SEIU 250
workers help chart the path for militant “Fight Back” actions against
the Wall Street rich and their obscene trillion dollar government
bail-outs as well as the oil wars in defense of U.S. Empire in Iraq,
Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Struggles for more union jobs and decent wages and a massive public
works program, to keep homeowners and renters in their homes, to win
guaranteed pensions, to fight for health care for all (the new
coalition “Labor for Health Care” is a positive example), to gain “the
right of return” for the Afro-American masses and other displaced
people to and the reconstruction of the Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast
and for nationalizing the banks and placing them in the service of the
people are all on the order of the day!
Let us heed the words of Georgi Dimitroff, the outstanding leader of
the Communist International and hero of the fight against Hitler and
world fascism leading up to and during World War II: “… in history
great revolutions have grown out of small movements for the defense of
the elementary rights of the working class.”
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