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VENEZUELA Solidarity with Chávez 10 HAITI 11 PUERTO RICAN hero freed 11

Dec. 20, 2012 Vol. 54, No. 50 $1workers.org

Workers and oppressed peoples of the world unite!

Puerto de oakland oNU y estado Palestino 12

WWP CONFERENCE: Building Baltimore people’s power 6, 7

KATRINA, SANDY and capitalist crimes 9

CECE MCDONALD, youth vs. bullying 5

CENTRAL PARK 5 & SCOTTSBORO CASE 8

WAR ON UNIONS declared in Michigan17,000 battle ‘right to work for less’ law

UNIONS BACK LOW-WAGE WORKERS 3

By abayomi azikiweLansing, Mich.

Dec. 11 — As mounted State Police pepper-sprayed workers protesting outside, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder wasted no time today signing into law two bills that unions call “right to work for less” laws.

In a state that has historically been a bastion of organized labor, the lame-duck legislation was a declaration of war by the multimillionaire gover-nor and a right-wing Republican legislature not only against this state’s unions but against the en-tire U.S. working class.

The bills were passed despite a day-long pro-test of more than 17,000 workers and community constituents. “The workers united will never be defeated” echoed in the Cap-itol Rotunda even as police dispersed protesting laborers, many of them unemployed, and other workers. A ban-ner reading “General Strike to beat back ‘right-to-work’ ’’ attracted much interest, as did thousands of leafl ets headlined: “Beat back ‘right-to-work,’ Yes, WE CAN!” The Rev. Jesse Jackson called for a one-day work stoppage and march on Washington, D.C.

Snyder is hated by many workers and oppressed communities around Michigan. On Dec. 6, when the legislature fi rst voted, hundreds of workers en-tered their chambers chanting “Right-to-work has got to go!” and refused to leave.

State police offi cers closed off the chamber en-trances. When more workers and their supporters attempted to enter, police pepper-sprayed and ar-rested some of them. The police actions fueled an-ger across the state, so that thousands mobilized for the even larger show of force today.

Under the “right-to-work” legislation, employees would no longer be required to join a union where one exists or to automatically pay fees to a collec-tive bargaining unit. The inability of unions to gath-er dues or service fees from all workers paychecks makes it much more diffi cult for them to fi ght for

Continued on page 4

ww Photo: G. Dunkel

ww PhotoS: ABAYoMI AZIkIwe

Dec. 20, 2012 workers.org

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Vol. 54, No. 50 • Dec. 20, 2012Closing date: Dec. 11, 2012Editor: Deirdre GriswoldTechnical Editor: Lal RoohkManaging Editors: John Catalinotto, LeiLani Dowell,Leslie Feinberg, Kris Hamel, Monica Moorehead,Gary WilsonWest Coast Editor: John ParkerContributing Editors: Abayomi Azikiwe,Greg Butterfi eld, Jaimeson Champion, G. Dunkel,Fred Goldstein, Teresa Gutierrez, Larry Hales,Berta Joubert-Ceci, Cheryl LaBash,Milt Neidenberg, Betsey Piette, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Gloria RubacTechnical Staff: Sue Davis, Shelley Ettinger,Bob McCubbin, Maggie VascassennoMundo Obrero: Carl Glenn, Teresa Gutierrez,Berta Joubert-Ceci, Donna Lazarus, Michael Martínez,Carlos VargasSupporter Program: Sue Davis, coordinator

Copyright © 2012 Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of articles is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.

Workers World (ISSN-1070-4205) is published week-ly except the fi rst week of January by WW Publishers, 55 W. 17 St., N.Y., N.Y. 10011. Phone: 212.627.2994. Subscriptions: One year: $30; institutions: $35. Letters to the editor may be condensed and edited. Articles can be freely reprinted, with credit to Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., New York, NY 10011. Back issues and individual articles are available on microfi lm and/or photocopy from University Microfi lms International, 300 Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Mich. 48106. A searchable archive is available on the Web at www.workers.org.

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H In the U.S.

War on unions declared in Michigan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Xmas gifts and the shorter work week . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

United protest wants good jobs at a fair wage . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Schools push students to for-profi t prisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Community protests killer cops. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Proposal for general strike circulates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Atlanta housing activists stop foreclosure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Oppressed youth fi ght neo-fascist & police terror . . . . . . . . 5

Justice for Baltimore community. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

We need a moratorium on foreclosures, evictions . . . . . . . . 6

A real answer to police terror . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Charlotte activists confront right-wing challenge . . . . . . . . 7

A 1931 case of legal lynching revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

The racist hate crime that continues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Sandy and Katrina: What makes them diff erent . . . . . . . . . . 9

Community award to Rosa Maria de la Torre . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Memory of Black Panther Party leaders honored . . . . . . . . . 9

‘We will not be silenced’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

H Around the world

Puerto Rico: A revolutionary comes home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Haitians demand roads, schools, water. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Walmart blamed in Bangladesh fi re . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

H Editorial

Stand with Hugo Chávez & Venezuela. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Syria, Egypt & imperialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

H Noticias En Español

Puerto de Oakland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

ONU y estado Palestino. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Holiday gifts andthe shorter work weekBy Martha Grevatt

We have heard the saying,“Business and politics don’t mix.” In fact the opposite is true.

Many right-wing bills — from Michigan’s “right-to-work” bill to attacks on women, lesbian-gay-bisexu-al-transgender-queer people, and racist “stand your ground” laws — are not even written by legislators. The actual language is provided by groups like the Koch brothers’ reactionary American Legislative Exchange Council or capitalist coalitions like the Chamber of Com-merce and National Association of Manufacturers.

This is not new: The 1947 anti-union Taft Hartley Act, which made right-to-work laws possible, was actually written by NAM. For more than a century, groups like these have used their muscle to block progressive legisla-tion like child labor laws.

1919 anti-worker cabal

A forerunner of today’s pro-1% lobbyists was a secret organization known as the Special Conference Commit-tee. It included representatives of General Electric, Gen-eral Motors, Standard Oil and other huge corporations. The SCC was founded in 1919, a year of a mass labor up-surge in steel, textile, mining and other industries and a fi ve-day general strike in Seattle.

SCC Secretary Edward S. Cowdrick had been an ex-ecutive at John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron during the 1913 Ludlow Massacre of miners and their children. When he became leader of the SCC, he was a personal employee of Rockefeller. The shadowy group held secret meetings in Cowdrick’s offi ce in the Manhat-tan headquarters of Standard Oil of New Jersey.

During this time the steady introduction of new la-bor-saving devices had multiplied the productivity of la-bor. Average hours of work per week had been falling for more than a century, in part because of the hard-fought battle for the eight-hour day. The other reason was that, after Henry Ford introduced the moving assembly line, the same amount of commodities could be produced in much less time. Workers were making more product than the capitalists could possibly sell.

Both Ford and Cowdrick believed an eight-hour day was good; after eight hours productivity declined, and without suffi cient leisure time workers spent less money. But what some unions were raising — a six-hour day with no cut in pay — was out of the question for capitalists. That would be too big a loss of the value workers create.

Their scheme to stave off a crisis of capitalist over-production was to get the working class, accustomed to working only for the necessary means of subsistence, to buy more things. Ford introduced the famous fi ve-dollar-a-day wage, intended to make it possible for autoworkers to buy the vehicles they produced.

It was during the so-called Roaring Twenties that Cowdrick espoused “the economic gospel of consumption.” To counter labor’s demands for a progres-sively shorter work week, the advertis-ing industry was born. At the same time credit became widely available. Manu-facturing and fi nance capital combined

to lure workers into a vicious cycle of working, spending and borrowing.

The 1929 stock market crash, followed by the Great Depression, proved that Cowdrick’s “gospel” offered no salvation from capitalist overproduction. Ford, who in-troduced the assembly line and the fi ve-dollar wage, laid off a majority of his workers.

But Cowdrick and the SCC found plenty to keep them-selves busy, spending the next decade lobbying against pro-worker legislation. The secret group managed to get all its members on a government advisory group, the Business Advisory Council. Cowdrick became secretary of the BAC’s Industrial Relations Council.

Cowdrick used the IRC to get President Franklin D. Roosevelt to withdraw support for the 1933 Thirty Hour Week Act, which was intended to reduce unemployment by spreading work around. The act failed in the House of Representatives by a few votes. The six-hour day is the only demand of the 1937 Flint sit-down strike that has never been realized.

The existence of the Special Conference Committee and its union-busting activities were brought to light during the hearings of Sen. Bob LaFollette’s Committee on Civil Rights (1936-40). These hearings exposed an il-legal spy network built by corporations to undermine col-lective bargaining. Some of the worst offenders, such as GM, were members of Cowdrick’s lobbying consortium.

Revive demand for six-hour day

The SCC fell by the wayside long ago, but workers to-day are still suffering from the failure to win a six-hour day. In fact, hours of labor, which had been falling un-til the 1930s, have been gradually rising since the post-World War II period.

While 30 million or more workers are unemployed or underemployed today, many full-time workers are work-ing overtime to get by. Better-paid union workers have been caught up in the whirlpool of work, spend, borrow, work more. Paid holiday and vacation days are declining. United Auto Workers members have had contracts foist-ed upon them that even undermine the eight-hour day.

Since the eight-hour day became law in 1938, the pro-ductivity of labor has grown exponentially, but instead of giving us leisure, rest and time with our loved ones, the capitalists aggressively promote a dazzling array of trinkets. Every winter we are bombarded by the message that the way to express love and appreciation is to spend all of our hard-earned dollars on expensive gifts — gifts we have less and less free time to enjoy. The workers who produce these gifts are, more often than not, low-paid wage slaves in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Ca-

ribbean. The consumption of fossil fuels in the production of these commodities is a cause of worldwide calamities, from Superstorm Sandy to the melting of the polar ice caps.

The demand for a shorter week needs to be revived as part of a program of transitional demands — one that lays bare the inherently antagonistic rela-tionship between labor and capital and resuscitates the class struggle here in the heart of world fi nance capital.

workers.org Dec. 20, 2012

United protest wants

Good jobs at a fair waGeBy G. Dunkel New York

Carpenters, car wash workers, college professors, jan-itors, fast food workers and many others came together Dec. 6 in Times Square to demand good jobs at fair wag-es. The “Grand Bargain” currently being hashed out in Washington, which will involve cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid under the threat of the so-called fiscal cliff, was also denounced.

As one speaker put it: “They bailed out the banks to the tune of $19 trillion. They’ve got enough for us!”

A speaker for the Carpenters Union, one of the many construction unions present, called for “better wages, better benefits for everybody. I used to make minimum wage and now that I’m making better, I’m standing up for those who are not making it.” Unions for all workers is what would solve the financial crisis in this country, in his opinion.

“You can’t raise a family on minimum wage,” Pamela Flood, a Burger King worker with three children, said on stage at the rally. “With food and diapers, my paycheck is gone after two days. We need a change.”

A member of the Professional Staff Congress, which represents faculty and staff at the City University of New York, felt that his union’s lack of a contract makes it eas-ier to see the need for solidarity with fast-food workers,

who have no contract because they have no union repre-senting them.

“Make the Road,” which describes itself as a mostly Latino/a organization based in Bushwick, Brooklyn, had a strong contingent that demanded an increase in the minimum wage. Their signs said, “$7.25 no es sufici-ente! $7.25 that ain’t right!” They also said that income equality is important regardless of a worker’s sexual orientation.

At the beginning of the rally, the large assemblage blocked 7th Avenue, a major thoroughfare in Manhattan, at the start of rush hour. The cops brought in barricades and tried to push the demonstrators back. The crowd didn’t move until a speaker said that the cops would oth-erwise prevent the program from happening.

The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union took about 150 people from the demonstration down to the Soho Car Wash, which they have organized, to de-mand the owner negotiate. 99 Pickets, a working group of Occupy Wall Street, took a group of people into a near-by McDonald’s to point out that the workers there need a union.

Other groups went to the Long Island Rail Road por-tion of Penn Station with leaflets asking the riders to pressure their congressional representatives to oppose the “Grand Bargain” and authorize support money for Sandy recovery.

Community protests killer copsPhiladelphia community activists or-

ganized by Free the Streets marched on Dec. 7 from 61st and Market streets, near where Derrick “Browny” Flynn was killed by Philadelphia police, to the 19th Police District, where friends and fami-ly demanded to know why he was killed last Nov. 11. Several speakers, including Browny’s cousin, Shanise Jackson, and Building People’s Power community resident, Patrice Parmstead, spoke in outrage that nine “police clergy” [local ordained ministers who work with the police] chose to line up in front of the precinct’s doors, defending the terror of the police instead of the human rights of the community’s residents.

Report and photo by Joe Piette

Schools push students to for-profit prisonsBy Betsey Piette

While U.S. corporations seem unwill-ing to cut into their profits to provide liv-ing-wage jobs for millions of unemployed youth, for-profit prisons are finding new ways to jail them.

Concern has been growing over the widespread pattern of funneling students out of schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice system. The practice usu-ally targets impoverished or otherwise disadvantaged youth, especially students of color. So-called educators employ “ze-ro-tolerance” policies that criminalize mi-nor infractions of school rules.

Across the U.S., reports are surfacing that this trend is accelerating.

The U.S. Department of Justice is in-vestigating schools in Meridian, Miss., for their policies of calling police when-ever administrators want to discipline students. Police have arrested children as young as 10 years old.

The resulting DOJ lawsuit against the district found that the arrests happen automatically. It doesn’t matter what the children do or whether their actions even warrant arrest. The police simply arrest all children referred to them through the schools.

Once within the juvenile court system, these youth may be incarcerated for days without a hearing and denied basic con-stitutional rights. The DOJ found that Meridian’s long-time systemic abuse punishes students “so arbitrarily and se-verely as to shock the conscience.” (Col-orlines.com, Nov. 26)

Attorneys with the Southern Poverty Law Center started to investigate Meridi-an in 2008 when reports surfaced of “hor-rific abuse” of youth in detention centers. They found that 67 percent of the youth warehoused there came from the Meridi-an school system.

The young people had been denied ac-cess to lawyers. Many did not know what they were arrested for. All the students who were jailed or expelled for minor in-fractions were youth of color. Meridian’s population is 61 percent African American.

even arrests — have doubled. Current education policies give school adminis-trators carte blanche to decide which stu-dents they will educate and which ones they will remove. More often than not the students who are not chosen end up in the juvenile prison system.

Students of color are most often the target of these arbitrary disciplinary dis-parities. African-American students are nearly three times and Latino/a students nearly one-and-a-half times as likely to be suspended as white students. (naacpldf.org/case/school-prison-pipeline)

Students of color tend to receive harsh-er punishments than white students for engaging in the same conduct. Segre-gated schools where students of color predominate are the most likely to use push-out policies and employ the harsh-est disciplinary policies.

Schools should be places where chil-dren go to be educated, not to be fast-tracked into an increasingly for-profit prison system. Our youth need education not incarceration, and we all need a sys-tem that puts people’s needs before prof-its.

What infractions warranted calling the police? In eighth grade Cedrico Green was put on probation for getting into a fight. After that any minor infraction — if he were a few minutes late or broke the school dress code — landed him back in the juvenile detention center. Green esti-mates “maybe 30” times.

The DOJ lawsuit found that students were incarcerated for “dress code infrac-tions such as wearing the wrong color socks or undershirt, or for having shirts untucked; tardiness; flatulence in class; using vulgar language; yelling at teachers; and going to the bathroom or leaving the classroom without permission.” (huffing-tonpost.com, Oct. 25)

Policy benefits for-profit prisons

On Oct. 31, Corrections Corporation of America, the largest for-profit prison/im-migrant detention center operator in the U.S., was invited to participate in a lock-down and drug sweep of Vista Grande High School in the town of Casa Grande, Ariz.

Students were lined up against walls and locked in the school, while teams of

police using drug-sniffing dogs searched classrooms and student lockers. While unwarranted search for drugs has become routine in many U.S. schools, this was the first raid in which for-profit prison agents participated. Two CCA canine units were involved.

Vista Grande High School Principal Tim Hamilton admitted he was unaware of any particular drug use at the school. His desire was to send a “message to kids.” The raid resulted in the arrest of three students for alleged possession of minor amounts of marijuana. (PRWatch.org, Nov. 27)

In 2011, CCA grossed $1.7 billion from its operations that include more than 92,000 prison and immigrant detention “beds” in 20 states. Most of the revenue for warehousing prisoners and immigrant detainees came from per-diem, per-pris-oner rate contracts with local, state and federal governments.

School-to-prison pipeline targets students of color

Since the 1970s, rates of school dis-cipline — suspensions, expulsions and

ww PhotoS G. Dunkel


MichiGaN

Proposal for general strike circulates

Continued from page 1

By David Sole Detroit

Only hours after the Michigan Legis-lature voted in favor of a union busting “right to work” law on Dec. 6, a “Commit-tee to Beat Back ‘Right to Work’” started circulating an appeal to the major labor organizations in the state to consider a general strike.

Citing the need for “decisive action,” the leaflet quotes the United Auto Work-ers Constitution, Article 50, Section 8, which authorizes the International Ex-ecutive Board to call a general strike “in case of great emergency, when the exis-tence of the International Union is in-

volved, together with the economic and social standing of our membership … for the purpose of preserving and perpetuat-ing the rights and living standards of the general membership.” Article 50 requires a referendum vote of the union member-ship before such an action is taken.

The committee also calls upon the Michigan state AFL-CIO to “urge ev-ery affiliate to initiate discussions and hold referendums to authorize a gener-al strike.” Realizing that education and careful preparation must precede this unprecedented action, the leaflet calls for discussion “with every worker at every work place.”

The leaflet points out that “we can be

sure that the entire crowd of Wall Street bankers and corporate bosses, including GM, Ford, Chrysler and the billionaire Koch brothers, are behind the push to break us … after years of concessions.” They need to see that labor “can bring ev-erything to a standstill.”

The committee also reminds union workers that the only road to success in-cludes bringing in all workers and com-munity organizations. This means “un-organized, retired, young, immigrant … church leaders, people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, the education community, foreclosure victims, the un-employed, Occupy Wall Street movement … and all others who are under attack.…

Demands must be shaped to make the largest majority of the people of the state understand that we are fighting for every-one.”

The appeal ends with the suggestion that labor and community groups con-vene a huge assembly of the people that can “represent the 99%” and have the clear authority to organize a general strike to roll back the right-wing attacks.

In a state where local and state politi-cians only represent the 1%, an assembly of the 99% will have commanding authority!

For more information, go to Facebook group — Committee to Beat Back “Right to Work,” email [email protected] or call 313-680-5508.

Atlanta housing activists stop foreclosureBy Dianne Mathiowetz atlanta

Dec. 10 — Housing justice activists ratcheted up the struggle against fore-closures, evictions and homelessness by reclaiming a boarded-up, bank-owned property in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Atlanta on Dec. 6. Similar actions were held in cities across the U.S. on the same day.

In front of TV cameras, dozens of peo-ple moved Reneka Wheeler and Miche-lene Meusa and their two children, Dil-lon and Jahla, into the bright pink house. Since the middle of the summer, the two women, both of whom had been laid-off from their jobs and were forced to move out of their rental townhouse, had been shuttling from shelter to shelter. Not rec-ognized as a family, they had been split apart.

With the aid of Occupy Our Homes At-lanta, they decided to take action. They focused on the catastrophe created by

banking and housing policies that have wreaked havoc on millions of people in the United States. They explained that by taking back homes illegally grabbed from families and restoring them to their rightful purpose — sheltering people — the two hoped they could force a discus-sion of homelessness.

Occupy Our Homes Atlanta has de-clared that there are seven vacant houses for every homeless person in this country.

The Pittsburgh community lies in the southwest side of Atlanta, off Inter-state 75. Once a thriving African-Ameri-can neighborhood of working people, its streets are lined with boarded-up houses, decrepit or burned-out hulls of buildings and overgrown vacant lots. This devas-tation is the result of decades of growing unemployment, urban development, so-cial service cutbacks, deceptive mortgage practices, absentee landlords and specu-lative builders. Home values have fallen 84 percent in the last few years, and some 50 percent of the housing stock is empty.

house brought back to life

One of those houses is 1043 Wind-sor St., a foreclosed house held by M&T Bank. Before Dec. 6, its overgrown yard and boarded-up windows contributed to the decaying appearance of the neighbor-hood. Now the grass is mowed and flow-ers planted, the lights are on, and a family of four is warm and together. Neighbor-ing churches and people from across the city are furnishing the house, bringing food and 24-hour support.

Atlanta police are keeping a constant presence. The bank has not yet, as of this writing, made a complaint. Thus the cops have not yet attempted to evict Wheeler and Meusa.

An online petition demands M&T Bank turn the property over to the community, specifically to Higher Ground Empower-ment Center. Occupy Our Homes Atlanta saved this century-old Black church in an-other economically depressed neighbor-hood from foreclosure last January. Its pastor has become a leading voice in the

fight against foreclosures and evictions.Occupy Our Homes Atlanta celebrated

another victory after a year-long struggle to save the Pittman family home from foreclosure. The family matriarch, Eloise Pittman, was the victim of an unscru-pulous subprime mortgage from Chase Bank, which foreclosed on her as she was dying from cancer in November 2011. Her 21-year-old granddaughter, Carmen, led her family through a year of full-scale occupation, with tents in the front- and backyards, numerous demonstrations and marches, national call-in days to Chase, and Carmen’s own arrest at a bank takeover.

Chase has now relinquished the prop-erty, and it is again safely in the hands of the Pittmans. On Saturday, Dec. 8, a vic-tory celebration was held where the hated eviction notice was burned.

For more information on other an-ti-foreclosure fights being waged in Atlan-ta and to sign the petition to M&T Bank, see Occupy Our Homes Atlanta.

rights, benefits and social projects that all workers in the shop — paying or not — will have.

One of the largest unions in the auto-motive industry, United Auto Workers Local 600 in Dearborn, Mich., conduct-ed civil disobedience training on Dec. 8. These sessions were also attended by the Michigan Nurses Association and drew support from the Service Employees union; the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; and other worker organizations.

Dawn Kettinger, of the Michigan Nurs-es Association, said, “We’ll be out there [Dec. 11] for all workers and all people who care about Michigan.” Some work-ers will place duct tape over their mouths as a symbol of the legislation’s impact. “That’s what the right-to-work bills will do if passed — they will silence workers,” Kettinger said. (Detroit News, Dec. 9)

Leading up to the Dec. 11 protest at the Capitol, other demonstrations were held in various parts of the state. On Dec. 9, SEIU led actions outside Oakland Mall, an upscale shopping area just north of Detroit in Troy, Mich.

Ilana Alazzeh, a member of a statewide coalition called We Are Michigan, said, “Our politicians are being influenced by

corporate lobbyists and are weakening our families and suppressing our voic-es by pitting us against each other.” The group sang parodies of holiday songs. (Detroit News, Dec. 10)

The real impact of ‘right-to-work’

With Gov. Snyder signing the bills, Michigan became the 24th state in the U.S. to be governed by right-to-work laws. Although Snyder has repeatedly told the corporate media that the legislation will create jobs in one of the states most im-pacted by the economic crisis, the facts say otherwise.

In general workers in right-to-work states have lower salaries and far fewer benefits. Poverty rates are higher in these states, while unemployment and under-employment remain significant. (Eco-nomic Policy Institute, February 2011)

In a Feb. 6 American Prospect article, Abby Rapoport cites a study by Gordon Lafer and Sylvia Allegretto of the Econom-ic Policy Institute. “There’s no evidence that right-to-work laws have any positive impact on employment or bringing back manufacturing jobs,” writes Rapoport. “While 23 states have right-to-work legis-lation, Lafer says that to adequately judge the law’s impact in today’s economy, you have to look at states that passed the law

after the United States embraced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and free trade in general.” Only two states, Oklahoma and Indiana, have passed right-to-work legislation since 2001.

Rapoport continues, “Rather than in-creasing job opportunities, the state saw companies relocate out of Oklahoma. In high-tech industries and those service in-dustries ‘dependent on consumer spend-ing in the local economy’ the laws appear to have actually damaged growth. At the end of the decade, 50,000 fewer Oklahoma res-idents had jobs in manufacturing. Perhaps most damning, Lafer and Allegretto could find no evidence that the legislation had a positive impact on employment rates.”

Part of larger economic package

The attempt to impose right-to-work legislation in Michigan is part and par-cel of a broader strategy aimed at busting unions and reducing salaries and employ-ee benefits. On a national level, negoti-ations surrounding the so-called “fiscal cliff” are actually designed to slash social programs and to further reduce federal funding for public sector projects.

During the lame-duck session in Mich-igan, other bills on the table included women’s health care restrictions, efforts and to further break up public school dis-

tricts around the state and increase the number of charter schools through an Ed-ucational Achievement Authority.

Under the guise that it will boost invest-ment and create jobs, another bill under consideration would eliminate property taxes that businesses pay. These revenues are needed by local communities to main-tain basic public services including trans-portation, lighting and education.

An emergency manager law is set for an overhaul after Public Act 4, popularly known as the “dictator law,” was voted down in the Nov. 6 elections. This law would strip all authority from local gov-ernments and school districts in order to accelerate the payment of debt service to financial institutions. The law, now being carried out under the resurrected Public Act 72, is largely implemented in majority African-American municipalities.

These attacks on the working class and the nationally oppressed are taking place throughout the country and indeed around the globe. The world capitalist cri-sis is driving the ruling classes to make even greater cuts in the real wages and social benefits of the workers in their fu-tile attempts to maintain a dying system of exploitation and repression.

Cheryl LaBash contributed to this article.

War on unions declared in Michigan17,000 battle ‘right to work for less’ law


cece McDonald & anoka students tear white hood off ‘bullying’

oppressed youth fight neo-fascist & police terrorcorporate media are complicit in war on youthsBy Leslie Feinberg

Big-business media have reported that an alarming number of white LGBTQ/+ children and teenagers in the U.S. are ending their own lives because they can’t endure another day of harassment and threats due to the rise in violent bullying in schools and on the streets.

The coverage sometimes includes heartfelt appeals from older generations to younger ones to “hang on” because “it gets better.”

History has proved again and again, however, that the mere passage of time — in and of itself — does not usher in progress.

The dominant media obscure where the bullying is coming from, and why the rate of child/youth suicides is so startling. The news propaganda poses the question of “bullying” as an abstract, relative and unknowable truth.

The truth is, bullies are those who target the oppressed and exploited. And it’s not just youths who are being bullied. All gen-erations of those oppressed and exploited are up against reactionary bullying.

anoka: LGBTQ/+ high school youths under attack

Nine youth — students in the Ano-ka-Hennepin School District in Anoka, Minn. — have ended their own lives in less than two years, Rolling Stone report-ed in an online article dated Feb. 2. (roll-ingstone.com)

Dan Reidenberg, a child psychiatrist and the executive director of the Minne-sota-based Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, declared the Anoka-Hennepin School District the site of a “suicide clus-ter.” He suggested that suicidal thoughts might be contagious, like a virus.

But Rolling Stone journalist Sabri-na Rubin Erdely pointed to the political climate and economic conditions in the town.

The old logging company town is “in an area where just 20 percent of adults have college educations, the recession hit hard and foreclosures and unemployment have become the norm.”

The town is in reactionary Rep. Michele Bachmann’s [R-Minn.] home district. Er-dely wrote that town evangelicals have created an extremely hostile environment for LGBTQ/+ youths — and those per-ceived to be.

Of the students who ended their lives: “Four of the nine dead were either gay or perceived as such by other kids, and were reportedly bullied.” This means that youths, whose tormentors claimed they would burn for eternity, chose to die rather than live through another day of torture.

Erdely stated, “In 1993, Bachmann, a proponent of school prayer and creation-ism, co-founded the New Heights char-ter school in the town of Stillwater, only to flee the board amid an outcry that the school was promoting a religious curric-ulum. Bachmann also is affiliated with the ultra-right Minnesota Family Coun-cil, headlining a fundraiser for them last spring alongside Newt Gingrich.”

“[T]he Anoka-Hennepin school district finds itself in the spotlight,” Erdely con-tinued, “not only for the sheer number of suicides but because it is accused of hav-ing contributed to the death toll by culti-vating an extreme anti-gay climate.”

Part 2“LGBTQ students don’t feel safe at

school,” Anoka Middle School for the Arts teacher Jefferson Fietek reported. “They’re made to feel ashamed of who they are. They’re bullied. And there’s no one to stand up for them, because teach-ers are afraid of being fired.”

LGBTQ/+ youths organize, struggle, win support

LGBTQ/+ students in the Anoka-Hen-nepin School District are organizing in re-sistance, with support from other students and other generations, including parents, teachers and activists.

Rolling Stone concluded that LGBTQ/+ youths “are fighting back.”

For example, five students have filed a lawsuit against the Anoka-Hennepin School District “alleging the school dis-trict’s policies on gays are not only dis-criminatory, but also foster an environ-ment of unchecked anti-gay bullying.”

Rolling Stone reports that the South-ern Poverty Law Center and the Nation-al Center for Lesbian Rights have filed the lawsuit on the youths’ behalf. “The Department of Justice has begun a civil rights investigation as well.”

Anoka officials bill the town as the “Hal-loween capital of the world.” At this year’s Halloween Parade, some 30 youths were denied their right to march. They had planned to march together as a contingent for Justin’s Gift — “an Anoka-based non-profit that seeks to provide safe activities” for LGBTQ/+ youths. (justinsgift.org)

Officials claimed that “there were al-ready too many walking entrants in the parade,” reports minnpost.com.

Erdely interviewed 19 youths who met for the first Gay Straight Alliance meeting of the school year at Anoka Middle School for the Arts.

The youths described what the GSA has meant in their lives. One explained: “It’s a place of freedom, where I can just be myself.”

A child with an asymmetrical hair-cut spoke in a soft voice before breaking down in tears: “What this GSA means to me, is: In sixth grade my, my only friend here, committed suicide. She was the one who reached out to me. I joined the GSA ‘cause I wanted to be just like her. I want-ed to be nice and — loved.”

cece McDonald: still under siege, still resisting

CeCe McDonald, a young Black (trans)woman and community youth organizer, is resisting ongoing hate crimes — first by neo-fascists on the streets of South Minne-apolis and then by those who carry badges.

McDonald and her friends were violently assaulted in the street in South Minneapo-lis on June 5, 2011, by a group of neo-fas-cists who defined themselves by shouting white-supremacist Klan language, an-ti-LGBTQ/+ and anti-woman slurs.

One of the attackers smashed a glass mug into McDonald’s face, cutting her deeply. Another of the neo-fascists — who bore a swastika tattoo — died of a stab wound from the struggle that ensued.

Supportcece.wordpress.com reports that “the only person arrested that night was CeCe.”

McDonald has been punished by po-lice, jailers, prosecutor, judge and pris-on guards ever since. She is currently in a prison cell in St. Cloud, Minn., where sadistic, white-supremacist, neo-fascist

bullies are uniformed, armed and carry the key to her cell.

The St. Cloud prison warden reported-ly locked down all prisoners on Sept. 14, and posted armed SWAT teams at every entrance, to block a group of supporters who had traveled in a motorcycle caravan to visit McDonald.

McDonald wrote an organizing mes-sage from her prison cell on Nov. 20 hon-oring the lives lost to anti-trans murders. “We need to not only celebrate for Trans Day of Remembrance, but also become self-aware and ready to put an end to our community being the focus of violence.

“We need for our mission to promote racial, social, and economic justice for trans youth, with freedom to self-define gender identity and expression. It won’t be long before I’m out and I want to be involved with all those who are willing to step up and get ready for a revolution, and it will not be televised!”

Deputizing armed neo-fascists, corporate cops

Bullies — alone or in groups — are cow-ards. They attack when they think the re-lationship of forces is in their favor.

When they instigate violence against an oppressed person, the bullies are con-fident that bigger bullies — the forces of violence that help keep the 1% in class rule, including police, courts and media — are behind them.

It’s not which class or group the bullies come from that defines them as fascists. It’s which class their ideology and actions serve.

Klan and Nazis, neo-fascists and their militia, corporate police and mercenaries — all these bullies are being emboldened and bankrolled by billionaires as the eco-nomic crisis deepens for oppressed peo-ple/s and the working class.

Fascist ideology attempts to whip up divisive blame toward people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ/+ people, youth, women, the disabled and ill, workers and unemployed — in order to divert atten-tion from the economic and social crimes of capitalism.

The director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association, Bryan Fischer, has repeatedly issued a public call for a terrorist network to abduct chil-dren from their same-sex parents.

Adding deep racist insult to injury, Fischer calls this organized kidnapping an “Underground Railroad” — the means by which African peoples self-emancipat-ed from white-supremacist enslavement.

Unarmed youth of color are being lynched in cities across the U.S. — Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Ramarley Graham — by armed vigilantes and police, who hide behind the claim of “self-defense.”

Oppressed youths in the U.S. are con-fronted by apartheid passbook laws and violent attack by Immigration and Cus-toms Enforcement (ICE) agents, and are stopped, frisked and brutalized by police.

Police, armed white supremacist vigi-lante groups and other neo-fascist bullies enforce unofficial curfews for oppressed youths — as well as official ones.

Vigilantes and mercenaries are being increasingly hired, armed and “deputized” by the banks and corporations directly, for private armies and prisons for profit.

Corporate cops took part in a police raid on students at Vista Grande High

School in Casa Grande, Ariz., on Oct. 31. The “deputized” mercenaries were hired by the “Corrections” Corporation of America — the largest syndicate in the profit-driven prison system.

CCA receives taxpayer dollars for each prisoner. “That means, for each prisoner, CCA makes a profit,” Mint Press News re-ported. (mintpress.net, Nov. 29)

“In 2011, CCA made $1.76 billion. When locking people up is a main source of revenue, the motives behind arrests, charges and incarcerations are ques-tioned. With many prisons across the nation becoming privatized, their actions are being watched with a close eye, espe-cially when they involve students in pub-lic schools.”

Youth of color and working-class youth are caught between re-enslavement in racist mass incarceration in the pris-on-industrial complex, or the economic draft into the military-industrial com-plex — where they are ordered to kill or be killed. Students face indentured servi-tude to crushing debt.

Frederick Douglass: ‘Without struggle, there is no progress!’

Youths are at the front-line barricades, leading struggles today that are shaping tomorrow — from Cairo, Egypt, to Port-au-Prince, Haiti; from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Montreal; from Oakland, Calif., to Baltimore.

A clear view of these struggles would inspire hope for many oppressed youths that the fight for change is already being waged, with youths in the leadership.

Youths need jobs; live-able wages; affordable education, health care and housing; recreation and transportation. Oppressed youths have a right to walk to-gether in the streets without curfew; the right to meet, to make music and other art in public; to organize in collective defense.

Anti-slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass summed up this historic truth: “Without struggle, there is no progress.”

Douglass, enslaved as a laborer in Maryland, had attempted to escape re-peatedly. As punishment for teaching other enslaved African laborers to read, Douglass was sent to be whipped by a paid “slave-breaker.”

Douglass fought back and beat the “slave-breaker” to the ground. He suc-cessfully emancipated himself from slav-ery in 1838, with collective help from the Abolitionist Underground Railroad.

He was 20 years old.When he was almost 40 years old,

Douglass elaborated on the lessons of his own life and centuries of struggles for so-cial/economic justice with these powerful words:

“Let me give you a word of the philos-ophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. …

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation … want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”

Douglass concluded, “This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a phys-ical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.

“Power concedes nothing without a de-mand. It never did and it never will.”


WORKERS WORLD PARTY CONFERENCE BUILDING PEOPLE’S POWER: FIGHTBACK & SOLIDARITY

Justice for Baltimore community

ww Photo: BRenDA RYAnC.D. Witherspoon

We need a moratoriumon foreclosures, evictions

Excerpts from a talk given by Mike Shane, from the Detroit branch of Work-ers World Party, at the WWP Nov. 17-18 conference in New York. See video at youtube.com/wwpvideo

Millions of families have lost their homes over the past six years. This fore-closure crisis is spurring the growth of a militant movement across the U.S. and the globe. This week in Spain, a morato-rium on evictions was won in the midst of a general strike sweeping across Europe.

And here in the U.S., the growing movement against foreclosures and evic-tions is coordinating nationally, raising political demands and winning victories. It is uniting around the idea that housing is a human right.

A year ago, the Occupy Wall Street movement launched a national day of ac-tion in almost a dozen cities, including De-troit, joining with families and groups in the fi ght to save homes. The Occupy move-ment has truly energized and spurred the emergence of a national movement that is increasingly anti-capitalist, direct-action oriented and against the banks.

Detroit is 143 square miles in area, a little smaller than the Gaza strip, with an estimated 40 square miles of open area today. In the recent crisis, Detroit was hit with somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 foreclosures, due, in large part to the banks’ racist subprime lending prac-tices. The banks targeted African-Amer-ican and Latino/a communities with the most expensive, lowest quality, but high-ly profi table subprime loans, which are almost impossible to pay off. In the last census, Detroit lost a quarter million resi-

dents, largely due to foreclosures.In March, the Moratorium NOW! Coali-

tion, in which the party plays a major role, organized a national conference to fi ght for a moratorium. Over 130 activists from a dozen cities attended. Action proposals included organizing for the march on the Democratic National Convention to de-mand that President Obama use his exec-utive authority to impose a national mora-torium on foreclosures and evictions.

In early August, housing rights groups, including Moratorium NOW!, held a na-tional meeting in Minneapolis, organized by Occupy Homes. A major concern at the meeting was the increasing role of the government sponsored enterprises, Fan-nie Mae and Freddie Mac, in foreclosures and evictions. Fannie and Freddie were taken over by the federal government in 2008, in order to prevent the complete collapse of the U.S. banking industry. Since then, almost $200 billion of taxpay-ers’ money has been given to these enti-ties, in order to reimburse the banksters for any and all losses.

The Minneapolis meeting called for regional and national actions against Freddie and Fannie in September. These demonstrations represented the move-ment’s qualitative leap forward. In addi-tion to demands to stop all foreclosures and evictions and for a principal reduc-tion, the movement is now demanding “a people’s takeover of the people’s bank,” a reference to the government control of Fannie and Freddie. The demonstrations also demanded that the empty, foreclosed homes be returned to the evicted families or to their communities. We need to pay

attention to this development.In Detroit, since the rise of Occupy, we

are in a much broader coalition, known as Occupy Detroit Eviction Defense, that also includes union activists and neigh-borhood groups. In the past year, we have stopped around a dozen evictions through grassroots mobilizations that included packing the courtroom, demonstrations at banks and homes, and daily vigils to guard homes under threat of eviction.

More and more families are coming to Eviction Defense meetings to fi ght for their homes. We are almost beyond our capaci-ty to do home defenses one at a time. This problem is not unique to Detroit. This is happening in other cities, as well.

This calls for a national mass struggle for an immediate moratorium on foreclosures and evictions, in combination with a gen-eral reduction in mortgage principals to current market values. We need to do what the workers in Spain just accomplished this week. And we need to make this a part

of the People’s Power Assemblies.Detroit is also facing severe austerity

measures, caused by the foreclosure crisis, due in part to an unprecedented decline in property tax receipts. Just last year alone, Detroit lost $118 million in property taxes on bank-owned properties that the banks refused to pay. So what we have done is tie the municipal debt to the foreclosure crisis.

Last spring, we held a demonstration against Bank of America, calling for a moratorium on foreclosures and munic-ipal debt payments. It was probably the fi rst of its kind in this country during this crisis. Over 80 persons participated, and to our pleasant surprise, the chants turned from a demand for a moratorium on debt payments to a demand to cancel the debt! This is a sign of things to come.

Fight for a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions, and public debt payments!

Make the banks pay!Build the People’s Power Assemblies!

Excerpts from a talk given by the Rev. C.D. Witherspoon, from Balti-more, at the Workers World Party Nov. 17-18 conference in New York. See video at youtube.com/wwpvideo

As president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Baltimore Chap-ter founded by Dr. Martin Luther King, I am so excited to be here today and stand in arms with you. I believe this is the vi-sion Dr. King had for the entire world.

Police brutality is a vicious and brutal attack on Black, Brown and poor peo-ple alike. It is an attack at the hands of a very vicious, capitalistic, materialistic system that is not only innately void and ill-equipped with the human integrity and pride to be able to stand up for issues con-cerning humanity, but it is also an indict-ment upon our system as a whole.

It is an indictment upon its inability to provide for health care; it is an indictment on its inability to provide adequate and suffi cient housing; and it is an indictment upon each of us if we fail to take a stand to do what every single people have done around the world. And that is to stand up to own its citizenship rights and to take our communities back.

It is critical for us to understand we have a task at hand. Brothers and sisters from North Carolina walked 41 miles with us the beginning of this year to Washing-ton, D.C., despite being threatened with not being served because of our alliance with brothers and sisters in the Occupy

movement. We locked arms because this fi ght is going to be won with our ability to come together.

What we have attempted to do in Balti-more is to build a People’s Assembly — an alternative to the power structure that has proven time and time again not to give a damn about working-class and hardwork-ing people. What we have attempted to do is to get down into the communities. That required us to roll up our sleeves, to get past our perceptions, our misgivings, to check our egos at the door, and to begin to start addressing the needs of the people.

We became exposed to different issues.The beating to death of Brother Anthony Anderson — a gentleman who was just walking in his neighborhood in East Bal-

timore without knowing what was about to happen on his way to his grand-daughter’s birthday par-ty. He was hoisted up into the air by “knockers” — a specialized police unit that

is grafting terror across this entire country — we all have

these type of units in our communities. This police unit launched him up into the air, slammed him down on his head and killed him almost instantly, in the pres-ence of his mother, in the presence of his 2-year-old grandchild.

We have a situation in a relationship with David Kim over in West Baltimore. A disabled man, partially paralyzed, who was shot by the police. The police offi cer sat in his cruiser and shot four times out into the general public endangering the entire city at that particular time with no regard to the community.

Then we had demonstrators from East Baltimore that were fi ghting for jobs. This proves to you that the victims of po-lice brutality are also the people who are

having their utilities shut off, having their recreation centers closed down. This is all about capitalism. These people took to the street to challenge. They challenge the promise of the provision of jobs that was made to them.

And when they challenged it, the sys-tem responded, it attacked, it brutalized and arrested those demonstrators. One was beaten severely, kicked, stomped and maced. And as a result of what they did was they bogged him down with a whole bunch of charges to deter him from mov-ing forward with addressing the issues.

What we did was to apply months and months and months worth of pressure to the system and those charges were dropped. We sent a message that when you brutalize people, we shall not be moved as a community.

I want to encourage you to maintain the fi ght because, when Anthony Anderson was killed in the presence of his mother, his grandchild and his entire communi-ty, the police lied about what happened. They said he swallowed drugs. But the au-topsy report that we demanded — “in 48 hours” but they delivered it in 28 because we knew our rights and we were going to demand and fi le a Freedom of Informa-tion Act request — and it said there was a homicide. We need to start doing that, knowing our rights, following through with that and demanding justice for our community.

Mike Shane ww Photo: BRenDA RYAn

Then we had demonstrators from East Baltimore that were fi ghting for jobs. ... The victims of police brutality are also the people who are having their utilities shut off , having their recreation centers closed down.

Detroit lost $118 million in property taxes on bank-owned properties that the banks re-fused to pay. So what we have done is tie the municipal debt to the foreclosure crisis.


WORKERS WORLD PARTY CONFERENCE BUILDING PEOPLE’S POWER: FIGHTBACK & SOLIDARITY

Yen Alcala Yen Alcala

ww Photo: BRenDA RYAn

A real answer to police terror

ww Photo: BRenDA RYAnSharon Black

Excerpts from a talk given by Sharon Black, a national Workers World Party organizer and representative of the Bal-timore People’s Assembly, at the WWP Nov. 17-18 conference in New York. See video at youtube.com/wwpvideo.

Baltimore, like Gaza, is an occupied city. I’m not asserting that the people of Baltimore are suffering the same kind of brutal terror that the Palestinians are re-sisting at this very moment.

The comparison between the two is the systematic use of racism, violence and humiliation used to control and subdue an oppressed people. In Baltimore this includes the dehumanizing use of illegal strip searches of women in the street, the handcuffi ng of children, the kidnapping of Black youth and of course the brutal kill-ings by police that Rev. C. D. Witherspoon described so well.

The fact is that police terror is capi-talism’s answer to their economic crisis. Rather than provide jobs, education or health care, the system has resorted to mass incarceration, terror and jails. Its fi rst target is oppressed youth — but po-lice repression has spilled over to the Oc-cupy movement and to the workers and poor as a whole.

This is why the Baltimore People’s As-sembly has called for getting the police out of our communities, for jailing killer police, for community control and much more.

I want to end with three points:

Baltimore needs your help. We do not want to fi ght our battles alone and isolated. Police terror, mass incarceration, racism and all of the other ism’s of capital-ism are national problems from Oakland to Baltimore.

In this light, we want to invite you to participate in the Dec. 15 National Peo-ple’s Power Assembly in Baltimore. Come to this assembly not only so that we can fi ght as one but also to strategize the next steps in the People’s Power movement.

Second, I wanted to raise what my col-league, brother and comrade, Reverend Witherspoon, could speak more knowl-edgeably on is that this coming year marks a major milestone in civil rights history. It is the 50th anniversary of the Poor Peo-ple’s Campaign and the August Jobs and Freedom march and many other signifi -cant events for the civil rights movement.

Let’s claim this year, the 50th anni-versary, as part of our struggle: unite the most oppressed with those who are fi ght-

ing for jobs, workers’ rights, immigrant rights, student rights and push the strug-gle forward to it’s logical conclusion. Let’s link the struggle against racism with the fi ght against capitalism.

The Baltimore People’s Assembly is planning to commemorate the Poor Peo-ple’s Campaign by marching from Balti-more to Washington, D.C., later in May.

The last point has directly to do with the People’s Power Assemblies. We do not know what crisis will occur or exactly how resistance will develop. Will it be re-sistance to austerity or police repression? Will the point of resistance be on the job or will it be in the streets with the unem-

ployed?We have no perfect way

of predicting this. What we do know is that the workers have the power to shut the system down and that the People’s Power Assemblies can play a very important role in encouraging that de-velopment.

Like the European Oc-cupy movement and other Occupies, the Occupy Wall Street Movement has proven helpful in giving a boost to the trade union and work-ers’ movement; albeit, it has been from the outside of it.

We are not narrow or sec-tarian, nor are we seeking to

control every PPA. That would be detri-mental to the movement.

But we need to be deadly serious in contributing to pushing, nurturing and birthing the People’s Power Assemblies.

We need to ultimately look forward to the formation of an international revo-lutionary council that could grow out of such a movement, whose goal will be to plan coordinate and execute a global in-surrection that will sweep away capital-ism and save the planet.

Power to the People!Power to the Workers!Power to the Oppressed!

Activists in N.C. confrontright-wing challenge

Excerpts from a talk given by Yen Alcala, Occupy Charlotte activist, at the Workers World Party Nov. 17-18 conference in New York. See video at youtube.com/wwpvideo.

I speak to you today about some of the momentous actions, coalition building and manifestations of people’s power that have come to fruition in Charlotte over the past year. We the people have made tremen-dous strides in mounting strong defenses and raising potent opposition to some of the gravest, most oppressive and despica-bly destructive forces we the people face.

Whether it has been neo-Nazi/KKK groups descending on our city promoting discrimination and hate, the corporate criminals known as Bank of America hold-ing their annual shareholder meetings, the pro 1% anti-democratic mechanism for corporate control over legislation known as the American Legislative Exchange Council or ALEC holding their spring summit, dirty Duke Energy price-gouging people already teetering on the edge of their own fi scal cliff with further proposed rate hikes to fund further dirty energy ex-ploitation, homophobic and hateful state legislation with Amendment 1, battling oppressive abusive infringements on civil liberties by the City Council with target-ed anti-Occupy ordinances, standing with city workers in their fi ght for dignity and for a basic bill of workers’ rights, stand-ing for and with our undocumented and immigrant brothers and sisters for dignity against depraved inhumane discrimina-tion, or when one of the corporate political duopolies descending on our city for their

national convention with the DNC in September… We have been there!

In the face of these powerful forc-es, we have stood strong with solidar-ity and we have won great victories.

The lesson

Not North American capitalism, not European capitalism, but the en-tire capitalist system is faltering and collapsing upon itself. This is not just an economic bubble bursting or the anni-hilation of a market. This is a full blown capitalist crisis — the inevitable annihila-tion of a self-destructing system — the im-plications and the unavoidable outcomes and consequences of which are the lesson we need to heed as we move forward.

Not only in Charlotte, North Carolina, or here in New York City, but across this nation and planet — the signs are every-where — the continued deep recession; sustained sky-high permanent un- and underemployment; ever rising poverty; crumbling infrastructure and social ser-vices; permanent wars; bankrupt cities, counties, states and governments; our impending fi scal cliff; the possibility of sequestrations; the continuation of QE3 or quantitative easing — should make us all uneasy as austerity and further peril is coming our way. Just as it has in Europe.

It is coming here. It’s coming to our backyard very soon. We need only to look to Greece, Spain, Portugal, France and on and on. Just this week millions have taken to the streets in protest, strikes and general strikes unifi ed and unprecedent-ed in number and scope across the entire-ty of the European Union.

That is what we need to be preparing for. That is what we need to be learning from. That is what we need to be gear-ing up for. This is the greatest lesson. We need to be getting prepared.

The same dangerous policies and prac-tices that haven’t worked over there are on their way here. It’s the same broken, igno-rant logic that says that in order to fi x this global and national capitalist crisis, creat-ed by them, they must take more from the people who have already been left on the brink of disastrous catastrophe.

It is their insatiable self-indulgence, and the toxic greed that is embedded within their free market system, that has them bound, not to fi x but to further per-petuate the downward spiral of the capi-talist crisis.

This means we have a great respon-sibility and opportunity before us in the near future. No one knows how rapidly this will occur, but it is coming. The ques-tion is: when will millions upon millions out of desperation and sheer frustration be ready to take to the street? When will masses of the people, who may have never been engaged or involved before, be ready to take action?

What infrastructure will be available for them? What options will be available for them?

Look to the last comparable capitalist crisis — the Great Depression. When fac-ing the possibility of great austerity, the people came together and fought in soli-darity. The people mounted the greatest surge in union membership and workers’ rights protections in our history, where masses of people were able to put real pressure on [President Franklin Delano Roosevelt], forcing him to create social protections and security with the passing of the Social Security Act, unemployment insurance and public works that put over 12.5 million people to work. All by making the 1% pay their fair share.

I will close by saying that the lesson for Charlotte, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, D.C., NYC, the message to us all should be that we need a robust reinvigoration of People’s Power Movements everywhere in preparation for the things to come, which is why we have been working hard to establish a People’s Power Assembly in Charlotte. [We] plan on continuing that work in our city and hope to see a network of people power in action.

‘ The Baltimore People’s Assembly is planning to commemorate the Poor People’sCampaign by marching from Baltimoreto Washington, D.C., later in May.’

Yen Alcala

The entire capitalistsystem is collapsing upon itself. The lesson forCharlotte, Chicago, D.C.,Detroit, Oakland, NYC, should be that we need a robust reinvigoration of People’s Power Movements in preparation for thingsto come.


‘Scottsboro Boys’

A 1931 case of legal lynching revisitedBy Dolores cox New York

The documentary film, “The Central Park 5,” is showing in theatres here even as a federal civil rights lawsuit regarding the case proceeds against the city of New York and its police department. One is reminded of the case of “the Scottsboro Boys.” In both instances, innocent Black teenagers were falsely accused, convicted and imprisoned for raping a white wom-an, without any physical evidence prov-ing their guilt.

The Central Park 5 served between 7 to 13 years in prison for the 1989 crime. In 2002, they were exonerated after the ac-tual serial rapist confessed and his DNA matched that of the attacker. However, the Five, now in their thirties, are still awaiting justice and reparations.

Nothing apparently has been learned from the past. The case of “the Scottsboro Boys” was recognized as a horrific trav-esty of justice; one that many assumed could never happen again. But U.S. his-tory continues to be replete with similar cases. Both the Scottsboro and Central Park 5 stories are powerful reminders of what can happen when the justice system is manipulated, the truth is ignored and racism dominates.

Scottsboro case

In the Deep South of the 1930s, Blacks were declared guilty until proven inno-cent. Black lives didn’t count for much. Self-serving groundless accusations were allowed to change forever the lives of both the Scottsboro and the Central Park teens, who merely found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The Scottsboro youth were tried, con-victed and imprisoned on death row, de-spite an abundance of evidence proving their innocence. No other case ever re-sulted in as many trials, convictions, re-versals of decisions and retrials.

For nearly two decades, the youth struggled for justice. Their civil rights case was a story of racism, injustice and bigotry played out in the rigidly segregat-

ed South. They became victims of a racist legal system, spending the balance of their teen years into adulthood in jail paying for a crime they never committed,which is also the case of the Central Park 5.

On March 25, 1931, the nine Afri-can-American teenage males, ages 12 to 18, were falsely accused of gang raping at gunpoint two young white women aboard a Southern Railroad “hobo” freight train. Haywood Patterson, Roy Wright, Andy Wright, Charlie Weems, Clarence Nor-ris, Ozzie Powell, Willie Roberson, Olen Montgomery and Eugene Williams were among many men, Black and white, who were riding the train in search of jobs. The two female accusers, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, were mill workers from Huntsville, Ala.

A racial fight had broken out on the train, causing the motorman to wire ahead to the next station, where an armed mob of white men was waiting. The teens were arrested and taken to a jail in Scotts-boro, Ala., a small, rural town. That night a lynch mob of several hundred surround-ed the jail. The teens became known as “the Scottsboro Boys.”

All but three of the youth denied raping or having even seen the two young wom-en on the train. The three who confessed did so after repeated beatings and threats. Similarly, the Central Park teens suffered up to 30 straight hours of questioning and coerced confessions.

Trials of the Scottsboro youth began just 12 days after their arrest. But local newspapers had already tried and con-victed them, with calls for the death pen-alty, just as in the Central Park 5 case.

The young women’s stories were im-plausible and contradictory, with no ev-

idence supporting their accusations of being gang raped. Incompetent attorneys were assigned to represent the youth and offered no closing arguments. The young men were found guilty of rape and re-ceived the death penalty.

Because rape of white women, partic-ularly in the South, was a volatile issue and remains so throughout the country, the NAACP did not readily come forth. But the Communist Party did, and zeal-ously took on the case. The Party’s Inter-national Labor Defense (ILD) attorneys described the case against the “Boys” as “a murderous frame-up.”

Samuel Leibowitz, a famous New York criminal attorney, and Joseph Brodsky of the ILD took the case. Leibowitz made a motion to crush the indictments and de-clare a mistrial on the grounds that Blacks were systematically excluded from jury rolls and that verdicts were based on ra-cial prejudice. In 1933, a judge set aside the verdicts and ordered a new trial. The new jury also quickly returned a guilty verdict and sentenced them to death.

Between their first and second trials, the teens spent two years on death row in a deplorable Alabama prison. They saw inmates being carried off to a death chamber near their cell and could hear the sound of the electrocutions. One of Haywood Patterson’s jobs was to carry out the bodies of electrocuted inmates.

The U.S. Federal Supreme Court ruled on appeal that the right of the defendants under the 14th Amendment’s due process clause to competent legal counsel had been denied, and the convictions were over-turned. Again, new trials were ordered.

One of the accusers, Ruby Bates, later recanted her story, admitting that both

women had lied. She became a leading Communist Party ILD spokesperson at Scottsboro rallies, where she begged for-giveness and pleaded for justice for the “Boys.”

Leibowitz appealed the death penalty to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1935 reversed the convictions of Clarence Nor-ris and Haywood Patterson. New trials were again ordered.

The convictions of Eugene Williams and Ozzie Powell were overturned in a landmark decision stating they should not have been tried as adults.

In 1937, the fourth and last trial of Haywood Patterson again resulted in a conviction for rape, but this time he was sentenced to 75 years. It was the first time in Alabama’s history that a Black man convicted of raping a white woman had not been sentenced to death.

Eventually, all death sentences were set aside and lengthy prison terms imposed, varying up to 99 years. Four of “the Scotts-boro Boys” were exonerated, two because they were only 12 and 13 years old at the time of their conviction and had already served sufficient time.

Haywood Patterson managed to escape from prison in 1948. While a fugitive, he co-wrote his autobiography, “Scottsboro Boy: The Story That America Wanted to Forget.”

In 1979, Clarence Norris’ co-written au-tobiography, “The Last of the Scottsboro Boys,” was published. All have since died. None ever received an apology or finan-cial restitution from the state of Alabama — much like the situation of the Central Park 5 to date.

Read the entire article on workers.org.

‘The central Park Five’

The racist hate crime that continuesBy Sue Davis

A racist hate crime of sensational pro-portions has been allowed to fester since 1989. It must be addressed and the vic-tims properly compensated. However, justice is still being denied 23 years later.

In 1989, then Mayor Ed Koch referred to the near-death beating and rape of a young white woman jogger in Central Park as “the crime of the century.” The police depart-ment, the district attorney’s office and the media all fell into racist lockstep, demon-izing a so-called “wolf pack” of five Black and Latino teens on a “wilding” spree as the ones responsible.

While that attack was horrific — it’s a miracle the woman survived and was able to move on with her life — the crime that continues to this day is the one perpetrat-ed on the five innocent young men of col-or who had the misfortune to be in Cen-tral Park on the evening of April 19, 1989.

A new, critically acclaimed documen-tary, “The Central Park Five,” created by

award-winner Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, chronicles how this crime was systematically contrived and ex-ecuted in a virulently racist, legal lynching by the capitalist state and the corporate media. Not only were there 28 other rapes in New York City during the same week, al-most all of them of Black and Latina wom-

en, but only one, that of a Black woman in Brooklyn, received even a mention in the press.

The movie shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, how the youth were tortured — during many hours of interrogation while being deprived of food and sleep — into confessing to a crime they did not com-mit, based on promises that if they impli-cated the others they could go home.

In the film, New York Times columnist Jim Dwyer admits that journalists did not do their job. Why didn’t they question the fact that none of the so-called confessions locates the scene or time of the attack? Why weren’t the stories of the attack con-sistent? Why didn’t DNA evidence cor-roborate their guilt? The only coincidence

was that all the confessions implicated the other four by name. You can hear the cops constantly repeating the names during the interrogations.

Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana Jr. and Korey Wise were railroaded to prison for seven to 13 years in a racist frenzy, their young lives, and those of their families, irrevocably shattered.

In 2002, Matias Reyes, a rapist and murderer sentenced to life in prison, fi-nally confessed and his DNA was identi-fied on the woman’s clothes.

Even though the youths’ convictions were vacated on Dec. 19, 2002, no one in city government has apologized for this injustice. However, District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s comments in his Dec. 5, 2002, motion to vacate point out “troubling discrepancies” in the youths’ coerced confessions.

Seeking justice and reparations, Rich-ardson, Santana and McCray filed a civil suit against the city in 2003 for “malicious prosecution, racial discrimination and

emotional distress.” However, the state, ever since using devious manipulations to delay the case, subpoenaed in September the outtakes from and original interviews and research for the documentary. The filmmakers have refused to comply, de-termined not to be bullied by the state.

Dolores Cox, a civil rights activist who has been following the suit, told Workers World after viewing the film, “As a Black person living my entire life in the U.S., a country built on Black and Native holo-causts fueled by capitalism, I’ve witnessed and personally experienced the continuing violence and terrorism directed toward people of color here. I live in a country that loves to hate. Pathological racism has been built into not just its criminal justice system, but into every other system and institution to ensure its permanence.”

By throwing a spotlight on the hate crime that continues, the film is a cry for justice that must be heard.

Davis and other WWP women activ-ists participated in the Committee to Defend the Central Park 5 in 1989-90.

Movie . review .


Continued on page 1o

Sandy and Katrina:

What makes them diff erentBy Johnnie StevensNew York city

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recent-ly said, “Superstorm Hurricane Sandy caused more property damage and affect-ed a greater number of people than Ka-trina.” The Nov. 26 New York Daily News took his remarks even further in an arti-cle entitled “In push for $42B in federal aid, New York pols say Hurricane Sandy worse than Katrina.”

Cuomo’s remarks about hurricanes San-dy and Katrina constitute a new level of racism in the “Empire State” by completely leaving out the human cost of each crisis.

More than 1,800 people died in Hurri-cane Katrina and the resulting fl oods. One million people were displaced — indeed, forcibly removed — from the Gulf Coast in 2005. Some 93 percent of those who had to go to shelters were African American. National Guard, police and Blackwater agents put many people on buses at gun-point. Families were separated, placed on buses with different destinations, spread over 46 states. (See Loyola University Professor Bill Quigley’s slide presentation on “Katrina, Racism and Catholic Social Teaching” at tinyurl.com/dywonfh.)

An estimated 100,000 people have not been able to make their way back to the Gulf area. Those who did return have lost homes and property due to bank and landlord takeovers.

Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers, which put billions of tax dollars in corporate pockets, were full of cancer-causing formaldehyde. Millions of dollars of food was locked in Red Cross warehouses and never distributed to Ka-trina survivors.

What Cuomo left out in comparing San-dy to Katrina was condemnation of the capitalist system, which puts profi ts before people. This is why crews were ordered to light up Wall Street within two days of the fl ooding, while residents in lower Manhat-tan, Brooklyn and Staten Island were left without electricity or services for weeks.

Although there have been abundant warnings about the dangers from aging infrastructure, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers neglected to repair the Gulf levees and New York State neglected to prepare for serious fl ooding, strengthen

natural barriers or even clear out drains.

Warning to public housing residents

Residents of public housing should be warned about what happened after Ka-trina: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Housing Authority of New Orleans destroyed fi ve housing projects once the residents were evacuated, displacing more people from structures that were sound. Is this in store for tenants in Red Hook, Far Rockaway, Staten Island and Chelsea?

According to Rosa Maria de la Torre of the Chelsea Coalition on Housing, “This is a very dangerous time. HUD Secretary Donovan invited two groups to discuss plans for moving displaced people to va-cant apartments: the misnamed Rent Sta-bilization Association — a landlord lobby — and the New York Real Estate Board. These talks completely exclude tenants’ rights groups and Legal Aid lawyers, who are worried that the nature of the leases could result in rent deregulation and the long-term loss of affordable housing.”

Cuomo issued an executive order to dismiss the contractual standards for school bus drivers and vehicles in the post-Sandy period (governor.ny.gov/ex-ecutiveorder/65). Similarly, after Hurri-cane Katrina the New Orleans teachers’ union was decertifi ed, and 69 percent of public schools were taken over by charter corporations, all with government help.

In both disasters, the most reliable source of support for survivors has been the solidarity shown by tens of thousands of regular people, often members of com-munity, church, union, Occupy, or other mass organizations. Whether opening up their homes, donating clothing and cash, providing health screenings, or going door to door to give out water, they ap-plied people power when the government failed to protect us.

Of course, there should be full govern-ment funding for the reconstruction of New York State and New Jersey. What’s needed now is a guarantee of people pow-er: Namely, that the same community or-ganizations, labor unions, tenant groups and others which have shown genuine leadership be included in planning how to solve the problems and rebuild to prevent future problems.

Photo MIChelle Del GueRCIo

Those most affected by Hurricane San-dy have the strongest will to ensure that workers who perform cleanup tasks have protective gear and real training that can lead them to permanent jobs with union benefi ts, as opposed to getting a few months’ pay but becoming ill for the rest of their lives.

Johnnie Stevens is a co-founder of the New York Solidarity Coalition with Katrina/Rita Survivors. He has compiled 100 hours of video interviews, much of them from September 2005, with Ka-trina survivors in Louisiana, Texas and New York State.

Rosa Maria de la Torre, program co-ordinator of the Chelsea Housing Group at Hudson Guild in New York City since 1998, received the Dororthy Epstein Com-munity Service Award at a Hudson Guild dinner on Dec. 6. In addition to working on many local tenant initiatives, this com-munity activist is a founding organizer of

Community-Labor United for Postal Jobs and Services — along with Johnnie Ste-vens pictured wearing glasses — which mobilized to stop the threatened closure of a Chelsea post offi ce. De la Torre (hold-ing plaque) with her son, Pablo (second row right), and activist friends.

— Sue Davis

Community Award to

For Ramarley Graham

‘We will not be silenced’By Sue DavisNew York city

“We will not be silent and we will not be silenced!” was the theme of the Dec. 8 din-ner in honor of Ramarley Graham, held in the packed to overfl owing Service Em-ployees 1199 auditorium in New York City. The 18-year-old African American was ruthlessly gunned down in the bathroom of his Bronx home by a NYC cop on Feb. 2.

Ever since, Graham’s parents, Con-stance Malcolm, a member of SEIU 1199, and Franclot Graham, and their friends and neighbors in their outraged com-munity have fought tirelessly for justice for their son. Only after seven months of marches to and rallies at the local pre-cinct was Offi cer Richard Haste indicted on fi rst- and second-degree manslaughter on Sept. 13. A member of a street narcot-ics team that illegally entered the Graham home, Haste claimed he shot the youth

because he thought Graham had a gun — though none was found.

Since then, four other innocent people of color have been gunned down by the New York Police Department: Shantel Davis while driving on June 15; Reynaldo Cuevas fl eeing a robbery at the bodega where he worked on Sept. 7; Mohamed Bah for “act-ing strangely” in his home on Sept. 25; and Noel Polanco after being pulled over on a Queens highway on Oct. 4.

Aware that their son’s murder was part of a pattern of police terror throughout the U.S., Malcolm and Graham devoted the dinner to a call for “justice for Ra-marley Graham and all victims of police abuse” and invited 11 families in the New York area to talk about their loved ones and their struggle to win justice.

“We must make Mayor Bloomberg, Police Chief Kelly and the entire NYPD accountable for all the deaths that are un-

Memory of Black Panther Party leaders honored

By Patricia Linarezchicago

On the 43rd anniversary of the cop massacre of Black Panther Party leaders Chairman Fred Hampton Sr. and Defense Captain Mark Clark, more than 100 peo-ple gathered at 2337 West Chairman Fred Hampton Way in Monroe, where a cop death squad carried out the targeted as-sassination on Dec. 4, 1969.

Hampton was born on Aug. 30, 1948, in Chicago and grew up in Maywood, Ill. As a teenager he organized demonstrations and later became one of the leaders of the Black Panther Party.

In his short life he helped oppressed people when he set up the Free Breakfast Program for children. He also tried to keep the peace between some Chicago street gangs and built alliances with revolution-ary organizations and other nationalities.

International Revolutionary Day was observed by revolutionary people led by Chairman Fred Hampton Jr., of the Pris-

oners of Conscience Committee/Black Panther Party Cubs, and Comrade Moth-er Akua Njerim, who relived the tragedy of losing one great revolutionary who not only died fi ghting for the people’s rights but lived for the revolution. He left us with the courage to follow our beliefs.

The Freedom Home Academy joined the tribute. Many of the youths between 8 and 13 years expressed solidarity with people’s struggle.

Chairman Fred Hampton Jr. gave a message to the new generation. On his facebook page, he pointed out that the cops had picked that very day, Dec. 4, to honor the son of one of the cops who slaughtered Chairman Fred Hampton Sr. He noted that while some “have forgotten [the date], it is continuously made clear that the system has not.”

Workers World Party gave a solidar-ity message to the gathering. Let us not forget this BPP leader’s contributions to revolutionary history and let us not forget how he died.

ww Photo: eRIC StRuChCommunity gathers to remember Chairman Fred Hampton Sr.

ROSA MARIA DE LA TORRE


editorials

just,” said Malcolm.“We are fi ghting not just for Ramar-

ley, but for all kids who were killed. We have to stand together.” Graham added, “Ramarley’s call is against violence. We’re here with all the families to continue the fi ght for justice for all.”

Among the speakers, each describing the heartbreaking loss they have suffered

forever. Enough is enough. We need real change. We need to stand together and get this done.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton, Dr. Cornel West, City Councilmember Jumaane Williams, Assemblymember Carl Heastie and Min-ister Hafeez Muhammad of Mosque No. 7 also lent their voices to the call for justice.

Attorney Royce Russell asked the au-dience to pack the Bronx Criminal Court-house on Dec. 11 during a hearing for Haste and then gather afterwards at the family home for a protest. For more infor-mation, visit Ramarleyscall.org.

Continued from page 9

Stand with Hugo Chávez & Venezuela

Syria, Egypt & imperialism

If you’re reading this editorial, you probably don’t believe that when cops invade poor Black or Latino/a

neighborhoods, they do it to protect the innocent and the elderly. You proba-bly don’t believe that the governor of Michigan is attacking unions in order to protect workers from paying dues.

And you’re absolutely right. These ele-ments are working on behalf of a handful of big bankers and corporate owners who are out to hamstring the working class and all poor and oppressed people.

Extend that to foreign policy. No one should believe that the U.S. and its NATO allies bomb a country to protect democ-racy or extend human rights. Or that CIA-operated drones are protecting us from terrorists.

NATO governments use a powerful propaganda machine to falsely present themselves as the guardians of civiliza-tion. They are really the sheriffs and cops protecting private property of that same small group of billionaires on a worldwide scale, while they impose “austerity” on workers at home. On the international arena, these are the old colonial overlords grouped behind dominant U.S. imperial-ism. They hold the lion’s share of military and fi nancial power and a near monopoly on media. They use it to exploit labor and extract wealth around the world.

Two years ago a popular revolt erupted against repressive regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and spread elsewhere in North Africa and Southwest Asia. Washington and its European allies moved quickly to stop any truly popular governments from replacing their old puppets. Then they moved to exploit any instability to remove existing governments that had some independence and sovereignty.

Using their massive propaganda machines overtime, they lie incessantly. They change their story from day to day. They depend on their media monopoly to sell their aggression as “humanitarian” or “defensive.”

To cut through these lies, it is best to start from the knowledge that the Euro-pean and North American ruling classes only intervene for strategic goals or to seize resources. Whatever the character of a particular country or leader, NATO intervention will only make life worse for the vast majority of the people involved. The same class also makes life worse for the workers at home.

In Libya, for example, NATO bombed and destroyed a stable sovereign govern-ment. They murdered Moammar Gadhafi and left chaos, except in areas of the country where they can extract oil. And they spread the turmoil to Mali.

U.S., no friend to Egypt, ready to intervene in Syria

In Egypt, the U.S. is acting as if it is a defender of democracy. The truth is that

the U.S. supported the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship for 30 years, built its ties with the Egyptian army — that is, with its top offi cers — and the Pentagon still has the tightest connections with that military. The Barack Obama adminis-tration has also worked with current Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who is with the Muslim Brotherhood, to bring about a ceasefi re in Gaza after the Israeli military slaughter of civilians and fi ghters had stiffened the resolve of the Palestin-ian people to resist. U.S. agencies are all over Egypt, keeping ties to the pro-capi-talist elements in opposition to Morsi and the generals.

Egypt’s workers and poor need food, shelter and security. They need a govern-ment that works for their interests. The vast majority of Egypt’s 83 million people feel strong solidarity with Palestine.

Washington’s goal is to assure that Egypt has a pro-capitalist regime that maintains its treaties with Israel, so that Israel can turn all its guns on the Pales-tinians, the Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, and threaten Syria and Iran. Keeping the Egyptian masses hemmed in by a Penta-gon-dependent military is central to U.S. imperialist policy in the region.

The most likely place for a new, open military intervention, however, is against Syria. The Qatari Emirate and the King-dom of Saudi Arabia have been fi nancing and arming the reactionary Syrian oppo-sition. NATO-member Turkey gives them a safe haven on the Syrian border and protects the route to bring them arms. British Special Forces train them. A Ger-man spy ship supplies intelligence. Many of their troops come from al-Qaida-like forces in other countries.

It’s hard to present these mon-arch-backed killers as “democrats,” so U.S. strategists are trotting out the same “weapons of mass destruction” argument to defame Syria that they used falsely against Iraq.

Even U.S. Army Col. Lawrence Wilker-son, former chief of staff to Colin Powell and no friend of Damascus, felt com-pelled to expose this pretext. He told how the “intelligence community” lied to him and Powell about Iraqi weapons and said, in an interview Dec. 8 with the Russian Times, “I would be highly skeptical of any of the intelligence rendered by the $140-billion-plus U.S. intelligence com-munity as to weapons of mass destruc-tion in the possession of another country. Period.”

That a military person like Wilker-son would speak so frankly shows how blatant U.S. government lies are. No one should believe Washington’s lies, just as we wouldn’t believe the cops are our friends or Michigan’s governor wants to help that state’s workers. Period.

U.S. out of Egypt. Hands off Syria.

Hugo Chávez’s extraordinary career as military rebel, people’s hero and agent of deep social change in Venezuela, as well as a leader of the anti-imperialist struggle in Latin America, has inspired the world while putting fear in the hearts of the imperialists.

His announcement that his cancer has returned despite many efforts by Cuba’s stellar medical teams to cure him has shocked and saddened progressives everywhere, especially the masses in Latin America who have looked to the Bolivarian Revolution as a path to both independence from imperialism and to regional integration of their efforts for development with social justice.

It is the masses of people who in the long run make history. Comrade Chávez knows this so well. For 14 years he has been the people’s tribune, their cou-rageous leader, who stood with them against the oligarchy and was in turn rescued by them from the hands of the U.S.-backed coup plotters. He has

initiated an extensive dialogue with the people on how to bring about socialism in the 21st century. Now he has bravely told the people that they need to prepare for a possible transition of leadership if he becomes incapacitated by his illness. His designated successor is Vice Pres-ident Nicolás Maduro, a former labor unionist and minister of foreign affairs.

This distressing situation is a devel-opment that Washington will try to take advantage of and escalate its ongoing plan to destabilize the revolutionary process in Venezuela. The day before Chávez fl ew to Cuba for more treatment, tens of thousands of Venezuelans assem-bled in downtown Caracas on Dec. 9 to wish him well and display their solidar-ity in the face of uncertainty and grief. It is urgent that revolutionaries and all progressives fi rmly come together in support of the Bolivarian Revolution as the Venezuelan people work their way through these diffi cult days.

For Ramarley Graham

‘We will not be silenced’

BEGIN THE NEW YEAR RIGHT!

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

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

The successful Chicago teachers’ strike

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

The beginnings of a People’s Power Assembly movement

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

But we can’t do it alone.

Perhaps the speaker who moved the crowd the most was Nicole Bell, whose husband-to-be Sean Bell was murdered only hours before the wedding on Nov. 25, 2006. Also a member of 1199, Bell re-counted how Malcolm called to ask how she was doing. “You deserve an award for all you do for all of us,” said Bell, which brought the crowd to its feet for a stand-ing ovation.

“Our struggle has to go beyond rallies and programs like this,” said Bell. “We have to hold everyone accountable. Let’s take this and build something that lasts

and their determination to keep strug-gling, were Kenneth Chamberlain Jr., who recounted his continuing fi ght to have the cops indicted who shot his ailing father on Nov. 19, 2011; and Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five, who continues to fi ght for reparations after a wrongful con-viction in 1990 and exoneration in 2002. Each speaker received a plaque from Mal-colm and a standing ovation.

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

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

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

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

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

I enclose: $75 supporter $100 sponsor $300 sustainerI enclose every month: $6 supporter $10 sponsor $25 sustainer

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Continua de página 12obligados/as a realizar el trabajo, incluso detrás de un piquete. Cada piquete debe ser respetado como si fuera nuestro”.

Thomas siguió diciendo que: “Lo que falta hoy es ese tipo de solidaridad sindical. Los intereses que representa el puerto son los de las compañías navieras, sus clientes, las empresas de estibadores y el capital, no a los/as trabajadores/as en mi opinión. De lo que no se habla es del impacto de la huelga de la SEIU Seccional 1021 en las empresas navieras, en Walmart y en otros minoristas globales, en contraste con el en-foque de que los camioneros independien-tes pierdan un día de salario”.

Luego citó a Frederick Douglass: “No

hay progreso sin lucha”.Thomas resumió: “El ILWU tiene una

historia viva. Estamos enseñando a nues-tros/as miembros más jóvenes cómo con-tribuir a ese rico legado histórico, apren-diendo las lecciones de unidad de la clase obrera”.

Pendiente bloqueo o huelga de granos

Un contrato de granos importante con los/as trabajadores/as del ILWU en el noroeste del Pacífico se termina el 28 de noviembre después de meses de negoci-aciones. Los empleadores están exigien-do un acuerdo con muchas concesiones, como el que forzaron a los/as traba-jadores/as del ILWU en Longview, Wash-

MUNDo oBReRo

trabajadores/as cierran Puerto de oakland

PUeRTo Rico

A revolutionary comes homeBy Berta Joubert-ceci

Avelino González Claudio came home. His relatives and supporters, includ-ing other ex-political prisoners, warmly greeted his arrival at San Juan airport by singing the Puerto Rican Revolutionary anthem.

González Claudio finally arrived Dec. 6, freed from one of the U.S. federal cor-rectional facilities where he had spent the last four years. He is to live in a halfway house for three months and then com-plete the rest of his seven-year sentence on parole.

Despite some physical frailty from the Parkinson’s disease that afflicts him, González Claudio looked happy and

pleased to be reunited with his loved ones. A condition for his exiting prison is that he make no public political state-ments, but his broad smile and raised fist were expressive enough.

González Claudio was apprehended in Puerto Rico in 2008 after living clandes-tinely for 23 years. In 1985, when sever-al Macheteros were arrested, González Claudio was charged in absentia with the planning and robbery of $7 million from a Wells Fargo armored truck. This involved a famous heist by the politi-cal-military group Ejército Popular Bo-ricua-Macheteros (Popular Boricua Ar-my-Machete Wiel ders) in West Hartford, Conn., in 1983.

While in jail, González Claudio was

subjected to the rude and inhuman treat-ment that the capitalist state reserves for all revolutionaries who dare to confront this criminal system. He faced solitary confinement, restricted family visits and denial of health care. Because the pris-on refused to provide adequate care and medication for what was eventually diag-nosed as Parkinson’s disease, he under-went severe physical deterioration. Even talking is a difficult task for him.

To obtain release, he admitted guilt to the charges of conspiracy in the Wells Fargo robbery. In exchange, the U.S. gov-ernment accepted the fact that the money from the robbery was destined to aid the struggle for Puerto Rican independence and not for individual gain of those Ma-cheteros involved.

Los Macheteros is a Marxist-Leninist organization started in the late 1970s to fight for independence of the island, but independence with social and political justice for the masses. Though a relative-ly small organization, it was able to deal several blows to the U.S. military and cor-

porations — as the Wells Fargo robbery shows.

The organization is on the FBI and U.S. State Department’s lists of “terrorist” or-ganizations, and its members have been persecuted, jailed and even assassinated. Its Secretary General, Commander Fili-berto Ojeda Ríos, was cruelly murdered in 2005 by FBI agents sent to the island solely for this targeted assassination.

U.S. imperialism might be making war on several fronts at the same time, but this does not prevent it from repressing its oldest colony, Puerto Rico, and pre-venting its people from living in a sover-eign nation. Washington still keeps the Puerto Rican independence movement under close watch and continually harass-es pro-independence activists.

There are still two independence fight-ers in U.S. jails — Avelino’s brother, Nor-berto González Claudio, who was impris-oned in 2010, and Oscar López Rivera, who has already spent more than 31 years in U.S. dungeons for struggling for the in-dependence of his homeland.

Haitians demand roads, schools, water

ington, en enero pasado. “Las empresas que operan los terminales de grano del noroeste del Pacífico”, dijo Thomas, “han presentado su ‘última, mejor y final ofer-ta’”. Es una que los/as trabajadores del ILWU están reacios a aceptar.

Los/as miembros del ILWU Seccional 8 en Portland ya están organizándose para estar en los piquetes. Los/as activistas de Ocupar Portland y Seattle se están prepa-rando para apoyar a los/as trabajadores/as si ILWU sale en huelga o les cierran. Cómo esta lucha se desarrollará será sig-nificativo para los estibadores y otros/as trabajadores/as, dada la historia militante del ILWU y de las concesiones extremas que exigen las compañías de granos.

People protesting the horrific factory fire that last month killed at least 112 gar-ment workers in Bangladesh held a rally Dec. 6 in the center of a South Asian com-

By G. Dunkel

Mass protests, with barricades of burn-ing tires, kept Construtora OAS, a Brazil-ian construction company, from moving its equipment out of Jérémie, Haiti, for four days at the end of November. This small city in the southwestern part of the country is still so riled up that schools were closed until the second week of De-cember.

Jérémie, renowned for its poetry, art and architecture, doesn’t have a good road connecting to the rest of Haïti. OAS was tasked with building 42 miles of road connecting it to the southern city of Aux Cayes, but the company claimed it hadn’t been paid and so was pulling out. The In-ter-American Development Bank and the Canadian government financed the $95 million project.

The people of Jérémie blamed the Hai-tian government, so they came out into the streets en masse to block OAS from moving its equipment until construction was restarted. The protests intensified af-ter Haïti’s national SWAT team, the Corps for Intervention and Maintenance of Or-der, arrived on Nov. 29.

The press says one of the protesters, a young boy named Hilder Victor, was killed by gunfire. However, activists say more deaths occurred, and that about a

dozen people had gunshot injuries.“President Martelly lied to the popu-

lation of the Grand Anse,” one protester told Haïti-Liberté. “He promised to build an airport, a power plant, schools, supply the city of Jérémie with drinking water, among other things. We have not received anything after more than a year and a half. Today, we have rebelled against the lies, the disrespect for the people of the city of poets, the lung of the country. And they sent Minustah troops and a CIMO force to shoot at us and bombard us with tear gas. Even children were not spared. We’re not afraid of these forces. We are organizing to give them a response with our own means.” (Dec. 9)

Jérémie, and the department surround-ing it called Grand Anse, are isolated and were spared from the direct devastation of the 2010 earthquake and recent hur-ricanes. This relatively prosperous area had given Martelly a lot of support. It even elected senators who were in his party.

However, the complete unwillingness and incapacity of Martelly’s government to do anything at all for the people led to this uprising. It has become clearer that the only reason why Martelly’s gov-ernment survives is the presence of Mi-nustah, the United Nations military force in Haïti. Minustah is the U.N.’s cover for U.S. and French imperialist control.

Walmart blamed in Bangladesh fire

munity in the Jackson Heights neighbor-hood of Queens, N.Y. Speakers focused on the responsibility of giant retailers like U.S. megacorporation Walmart and Eu-ropean firms like Carrefour for squeez-ing workers’ wages in Bangladesh and promoting unsafe conditions in factories there. Some reported that Walmart man-agement had specifically decided not to promote safety measures because they would increase costs and thus trim the firm’s enormous profits, which came to $15.7 billion in 2011.

The group Desis Rising Up and Moving called the rally. DRUM was founded in 2000 to build the power of South Asian low-wage immigrant workers, youth and families in New York City to win eco-nomic and educational justice, and civil and immigrant rights. Vamos Unidos, a group of Latino/a street vendors, as well as the May 1 Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights and other progressive groups supported the action, as did lo-cal City Council member Daniel Drom. Workers World Party members distribut-ed WW newspaper. — Report & photo

by John catalinotto

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

¡Proletarios y oprimidos de todos los paises unios!

H

Continua a página 11

organismo mundial reconoce al estado PalestinoPor David Sole

El 29 de noviembre, la Asamblea Gen-eral de las Naciones Unidas votó a favor del reconocimiento de Palestina como un “Estado observador no miembro” con 138 votos a favor, nueve en contra y 41 ab-stenciones. Esta votación ha cambiado el anterior estado político de Palestina como “entidad” y sucedió en el 65 aniversario de la Resolución 181 de la ONU de 1947, que dividió a Palestina en un estado judío y uno árabe.

Este apoyo abrumador a nivel mundi-al se ha desarrollado en reconocimiento a la indomable determinación del pueblo palestino de oponer resistencia a su de-strucción por un Israel sionista durante décadas. Los/as palestinos/as, que suman 4,3 millones en la Ribera Occidental y Gaza, tuvieron grandes celebraciones en las calles luego del voto.

Estados Unidos—el respaldo financiero y militar de Israel—reprochó este aconte-cimiento. La portavoz del Departamento de Estado, Victoria Nuland, amenazó con cortar la ayuda económica de EE.UU. que ahora da a Palestina. La embajadora de EE.UU. ante la ONU, Susan Rice, afirmó que “sólo... las negociaciones directas en-tre los interesados” eran útiles, ignorando el fracaso de décadas de conversaciones entre los/as palestinos/as e Israel. (Usun.state.gov, Nov. 29)

Los votos en contra de Palestina fueron: EE.UU., Israel, Canadá, la República Che-ca (la única nación europea que votó en contra), Panamá, las Islas Marshall, los Estados Federados de Micronesia, Nauru y Palaos. Los últimos cuatro son ex co-lonias en el Océano Pacífico y sus pobla-ciones varían entre 108.000 (Micronesia) a 9.378 (Palaos). El aislamiento de Israel se definió fuertemente por esta votación.

El periódico The Guardian informó el 30 de noviembre que “los funcionarios is-raelíes quedaron impactados por la mag-nitud del apoyo europeo” para Palestina. La continua expansión de asentamientos por Israel en los territorios ocupados en clara violación del derecho internacional, le ha costado el apoyo público.

Antes de la votación, el canciller israelí Avigdon Lieberman rabiosamente arre-metió en contra del sufragio, amenazando con derrocar al presidente de la Autoridad Palestina Mahmoud Abbas. Este ataque pudo haber contribuido a los votos a favor de Palestina.

El primer ministro israelí Benjamin Net-anyahu ordenó la construcción de miles de nuevas viviendas para colonos sionistas en la Ribera Occidental y Jerusalén del Este, en represalia por la votación de la ONU. Is-rael también amenazó con cortar la trans-ferencia de los impuestos que recauda para la Autoridad Palestina. Estas acciones sólo fomentarán más la ira del mundo y soca-varán el apoyo al estado colonial de Israel.

La acción de la ONU sucedió luego de terminar ocho días de bombardeos contra Gaza por el ejército israelí que mató a 176 palestinos/as e hirió a más de 1.000, en su mayoría civiles. El gobierno electo de Gaza, Hamas, quien tiene fuertes diferencias con la menos militante dirigencia palestina de la Ribera Occidental encabezada por el presidente Abbas, elogió la votación de la ONU y añadió que la diplomacia sólo fun-ciona en conjunción con la lucha armada.

continúan los ataques contra Gaza

Los ataques contra Gaza han continua-do aún después del cese al fuego acordado el 21 de noviembre. El Centro Palestino para los Derechos Humanos documentó ataques israelíes contra barcos pesqueros palestinos frente a la costa de Gaza. Entre

el 21 y el 28 de noviembre, Israel disparó contra seis embarcaciones, destruyéndo-las o dañándolas, confiscándolas todas y arrestando a 15 palestinos.

El día antes de la votación, los colonos judíos cerca de Belén inundaron las huer-tas de tres aldeas palestinas con las aguas residuales liberadas desde terrenos con-tiguos situados a más altura. Los cultivos de aceitunas, uvas y almendras quedaron dañados severamente. (Palestine News Network, 29 de noviembre)

El imperialismo estadounidense orque-stó la creación del estado israelita entre los años 1947 y 1948 en respuesta al creciente nacionalismo entre los pueblos árabes del Medio Oriente colonizado. El objetivo de Washington era crear un régimen clien-telista flexible, armado, financiado y de-pendiente de los EE.UU. en una zona de enorme riqueza petrolera.

Hoy en día, las Naciones Unidas tienen 193 estados miembros, pero el voto en 1947 sobre la Resolución 181 fue sólo de 33 a 13. La mayoría de las naciones de África y del Medio Oriente, así como en otras áreas, aún no habían alcanzado su independen-cia de los amos coloniales. Aun así, para obtener la mayoría de dos terceras partes necesaria en 1947, EE.UU. tuvo que apli-car una gran presión, amenazas e incluso sobornos, como se documenta en muchas fuentes. (Véase por ejemplo, el libro de Al-fred M. Lilienthal, “La Conexión Sionista”.)

Los objetivos imperialistas de Wash-ington no han cambiado en los 65 años transcurridos desde 1947. Las ganancias petroleras de la región todavía llenan las arcas de los bancos de Wall Street. Esta-dos Unidos ha maniobrado después de la independencia de las naciones árabes con la misma combinación de presiones, amenazas y sobornos. Agreguemos a esto las operaciones encubiertas de la CIA, los

golpes de estado, las intervenciones mili-tares directas y la guerra, todo para asegu-rar el flujo constante de ganancias.

Sin embargo, las décadas de pene-tración imperialista no han creado seguri-dad para los capitalistas estadounidenses. El levantamiento que comenzó en Túnez en diciembre del 2010 se ha extendido por toda la región, derrocando a vari-os regímenes opresores y amenazando a muchos más títeres de Estados Unidos, mientras que los imperialistas han in-tensificado su intervención para tratar de sacar provecho de la inestabilidad.

En Libia, los imperialistas derrocaron al gobierno de Moamar Gadafi, produc-iendo caos y destrucción. La guerra de Estados Unidos contra Siria y los ataques contra Irán también amenazan con gener-ar una guerra más amplia. Las invasiones militares anteriores en Irak y Afganistán no han conseguido estabilidad.

Esto explica el continuo apoyo y directi-va de EE.UU. a las facciones más reaccio-narias y militaristas del gobierno sionista de Israel. Sólo Israel ha demostrado ser un puesto militar confiable para el imperi-alismo estadounidense, un “portaaviones insumergible”, como Alexander Haig, sec-retario del estado del presidente Ronald Reagan, una vez lo describió.

Es seguro que el pueblo palestino se-guirá luchando por su derecho a la libre determinación en la Palestina ocupada y que los pueblos en todo el Oriente Me-dio seguirán luchando por liberarse de la opresión económica y política estadoun-idense. El látigo de la reacción siempre genera resistencia. Los pueblos de la región pueden ser ayudados por el pueblo estadounidense al construir un movimien-to en contra del apoyo de EE.UU. a las políticas israelitas de racismo, represión y apartheid contra los/as palestinos/as.

Trabajadores/as cierran Puerto de OaklandPor Terry Kay

‘Estamos decididos/as a obtener un contrato justo’

Oakland, California —¡“Piquete es para no cruzar”! gritaban los/as trabajadores/as en huelga del sindicato de Empleados de Servicio (SEIU) Seccional 1021 y sus partidarios de la comunidad, mientras mantenían un piquete en las siete termina-les del Puerto de Oakland el 20 de noviem-bre. Los/as trabajadores/as habían dejado las labores por un conflicto con el puerto sobre políticas laborales injustas.

Después de 16 meses de negociaciones, más de 220 electricistas, trabajadores/as de oficina, personal de seguridad y con-serjes del sindicato SEIU decidieron que ya habían aguantado bastante y exigieron que los comisionados del puerto negocia-ran con ellos/as de buena fe. El puerto es-taba presionando para lograr un contrato con concesiones.

Millie Cleveland, organizadora de SEIU 1021 en el puerto, dice “[los/as] traba-jadores/as de SEIU se niegan a retroceder, a devolver lo que ya hemos ganado. Los/as trabajadores/as quieren mantenerse a flote y recibir lo ajustado a la inflación. Una vez más los/as trabajadores/as tuvieron que negar su labor para hacer que los em-pleadores entiendan que estamos determi-

nados a conseguir un contrato justo”.Ella habló sobre cómo “la huelga fue sig-

nificativa porque con el apoyo de la Unión Internacional de Estibadores y Traba-jadores de Almacenes (International Long-shore and Warehouse Union), ellos/as pu-dieron cerrar todos los siete terminales”.

Los piquetes estuvieron reforzados por partidarios de la comunidad, incluyendo un número considerable de Ocupar Oak-land. Otros/as partidarios/as de la comu-nidad eran la Coalición por Justicia por Alan Blueford, Ocupar San Francisco y el Comité de Solidaridad con los /as Traba-jadores/as de Transporte. Estos números adicionales fueron significativos. Los pi-quetes tenían que ser considerables para que los árbitros declararan un riesgo para la salud y la seguridad, lo que a su vez per-mitió a los/as trabajadores/as del ILWU recibir su pago a pesar de no haber cruza-do el piquete y no haber entrado a trabajar.

Es importante señalar que SEIU 1021 acabó de aprobar una resolución de la Coalición por Justicia por Alan Blueford exigiendo que el policía Miguel Masso sea despedido y enjuiciado por el asesinato de Blueford, un joven negro asesinado en mayo pasado. La Coalición Blueford, in-cluyendo a Adam Blueford, el padre del asesinado joven de 18 años de edad, esta-ba en el piquete en solidaridad y recipro-

cidad. Eso es lo que es la solidaridad.La huelga también se extendió al aero-

puerto de Oakland pero los piquetes no trataron de impedir que los/as pasajeros/as viajaran.

El paro fue planeado para que durara 24 horas, cerrando también el turno de la tarde. Sin embargo, cuando los comi-sionados del puerto vieron la solidaridad entre la SEIU, ILWU y la comunidad, pi-dieron al alcalde de Oakland, Jean Quan, que interviniera para reanudar las nego-ciaciones. Después de regresar a las ne-gociaciones el 23 de noviembre, la miem-bro de SEIU, Cleveland, dijo que están “tratando de negociar y abordar algunos conceptos pero están todavía muy dis-tantes, y regresarán a las negociaciones el lunes”. Señaló que el comité de huelga continúa sus reuniones.

¿Por qué deben ser respetados los piquetes?

Workers World /Mundo Obrero pre-guntó a Clarence Thomas, ILWU Seccio-nal 10, el por qué los estibadores arries-garon un día de salario por no cruzar los piquetes de SEIU. Él le dijo a este report-ero que todas las Secciones 10, 34 y 91, que representan a los estibadores, a los/as empleados/as de oficina y a los jefes respectivamente, se negaron a cruzar las

líneas. Thomas explicó la firme historia del ILWU de no cruzar los piquetes. En los años recientes eso ha incluido un pi-quete de la comunidad para protestar la matanza de la gente que traía suministros humanitarios a Gaza y los dos cierres del puerto en 2011 por Ocupar Oakland.

Thomas explicó que el ILWU “es una de las organizaciones más democráticas y militantes, la cual entiende la impor-tancia de la unidad de clase. . . Estuvimos muy conscientes de la situación de SEIU y que están sin un contrato. La huelga fue decisión suya. No permitimos que la san-tidad de un contrato sea utilizada como un subterfugio para socavar la unidad de los/as trabajadores/as”.

Thomas citó los diez Principios Recto-res del ILWU. Dijo que el cuarto punto, “para ayudar a cualquier trabajador/a en peligro”, debe ser “una guía diaria en la vida de todos los sindicatos y sus miem-bros individuales. La solidaridad sindical significa exactamente eso. Los sindicatos tienen que aceptar el hecho de que la sol-idaridad sindical está por encima de todo lo demás, y aún de la llamada santidad del contrato. No podemos adoptar por nosotros mismos las políticas de los diri-gentes sindicales que insisten en que por tener un contrato, sus miembros están

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