Workers World weekly newspaper

La tragedia de Sandy Hook

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Workers and oppressed peoples of the world unite!

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Jan. 10, 2012

Vol. 55, No. 1

$1

Fiscal axe aimed at Social Security

Struggle can still stop austerity cuts

By Chris Fry As we write, the new year has begun. Congress has not yet voted on a new budget, but the “fiscal cliff” negotiations have reportedly led to agreement on raising income taxes of those making $400,000 and over by a few percent and raising the tax on their capital gains from a paltry 15 percent to 20 percent.

Even capitalist liberals, however, are admitting that the Obama administration did not get much from the Republican right wing and the billionaires behind them. Tax rates on the wealthy will still be much, much lower in the U.S. than in the other developed capitalist countries.

Raising taxes on the rich by a few percentage points is supposed to be the “sweetener” for what is to come next: the slashing of social programs relied on by the working class, including even funds like Social Security and Medicare that people pay into all their working lives. So far the politicians have agreed to delay imposing these cuts for a couple of months, but there can be no doubt of their intent.

While the final outcome of the much-proclaimed negotiations between the administration and Congress is yet to come, one thing should be crystal clear. The budget deficit blamed for the “cliff” is 100 percent a sham.

Last summer a study by the Tax Justice Network of the U.S. revealed that the billionaires of the world have stashed between $21 trillion and $32 trillion (when calculated in U.S. dollars) in hideaway bank accounts around the world, from Switzerland to Bermuda to the Cayman Islands.

That averages out to $7,000 to $8,600 for every person living on the planet, more than most people around the world earn in a year.

This ocean of cash, produced by the global working class, is more than enough to remove the so-called deficit of every nation on the planet and to fund every social program desperately needed by the workers in this deepening capitalist economic crisis.

Mumia on ‘What fiscal cliff?’ 10

Of course, the U.S. government has borrowed and spent trillions of dollars on the bloody wars and occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. At the same time, tax rates for the rich were slashed, while taxes for the workers have remained virtually the same.

When corporate and banking speculation triggered a financial collapse five years ago, the peoples’ treasuries of many countries, from Iceland to Greece to Portugal to the U.S. and more, were drained to fill the banks’ coffers.

Now these same banks and their political minions, rather than spend some of the money they have appropriated from hundreds of millions of workers around the world, are brazenly terrorizing workers to squeeze even more wealth by slashing our much-needed social programs like retirement, health and unemployment benefits, college aid programs and much more. Around the globe this is known as the infamous “austerity” program.

Why are they doing this? For the last 20 years advances in technology and vast new armies of Continued on page 10

Response to India rape

At Charleston, S.C. port, Dec. 20, 2012.

Will workers shut U.S. ports?

3

7

Hunger strike in Washington to save postal jobs and services.

Fight over postal jobs

4

‘No’ to police brutality

5

Defending peoples’ power

6

First Nations’ struggle

7

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Cuban Revolution 8-9

Kolkata, West Bengal, India.

Photo by Samarendra Pratihar

U.S. troops to Africa

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Page 2

Jan. 10, 2013

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WORKERS WORLD

Workers World Party conference

Chicago teachers’ union points the way Excerpts from a talk by Eric Struch, a Workers World Party organizer in Chicago, at the Nov. 17-18, 2012, WWP conference in New York. See video at youtube/wwpvideo.

The teachers’ strike last September was a high-water mark in the class struggle in Chicago, and it shows in which direction things must move. The strike was a link in the chain of class struggle that includes other battles like the factory floor occupation at Republic Windows and Doors and the occupation of the state Capitol in Madison, Wis., in defiance of Gov. Walker’s attack on public sector workers. This new wave of struggle is especially important because, in the case of the teachers’ strike and the Republic occupation, oppressed workers took the lead.

In his new book, “Capitalism at a Dead End,” comrade Fred Goldstein points out, “In 2006 immigrant workers staged what amounted to a general strike involving millions to protest proposed repressive federal anti-immigrant legislation. That legislation was dropped. In 2008 workers occupied the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago. This was the first plant occupation since the 1930s. Wisconsin workers in alliance with students seized the state Capitol and held it for two weeks in the winter of 2011 to try to stop a union-busting bill. There was even talk of a general strike. These are rumblings of resistance from below that are sure to grow in frequency and intensity as the crisis deepens and workers, communities, students, and youth come under even greater pressure and suffer ever greater hardships. No one can know when and how the struggle will grow and spread.

The only certainty is that it will.”

The teachers’ strike was mainly about stemming the flood of school privatizations and closures that have plagued communities of color in Chicago for nearly a decade. Privatization means the theft by corporations of wealth and resources that belong to the working class.

The super rich, who have stolen workers’ homes through the foreclosure crisis, who have vacuumed cash out of our pockets through the vast expansion of consumer credit during the 1990s, and who now have their eyes on our Social Security, have also turned Chicago into a laboratory for the privatization of public education.

Eight years ago, Mayor-for-life Richard M. Daley and Chicago Public Schools head Arne Duncan cooked up a plan to steal the public school system and turn it into anti-union, for-profit charter schools. Duncan dubbed this plan “Renaissance 2010.” He prefers calling it “market-based choice” over “privatization” so people are less likely to notice that the privately owned and operated charters are still funded through the workers’ tax dollars.

Duncan did such a good job destroying public educa-

 National uprising against racist terror after the murder of Trayvon Martin  Successful Chicago teachers’ strike  Unprecedented coast-to-coast organizing among low-wage workers  The beginnings of a People’s Power Assembly movement

join us

Fiscal axe aimed at Social Security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Chicago teachers’ union points the way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Longshore workers reject cutbacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Postal hunger strike targets Congress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

WW photo: Brenda Ryan

On the picket line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Rally protests murders of Black & Brown youth . . . . . . . . . . . 5

tion in Chicago that the Obama administration put him in charge of implementing a nearly identical plan nationally, called Race to the Top. Renaissance 2010 was the official opening of what many have called the era of educational apartheid in Chicago, but the CPS privatization plan predated the Duncan regime. Daley touted charter schools as if they were some sort of solution to the perennial funding crisis faced by the public schools in Chicago. But this lack of funds for schools is the real problem that no one in the capitalist media seems to be allowed to talk about.

Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, points out that “in the last 20 years, CPS has closed over 200 schools and placed 300 on probation.”

In the historic Black community of Bronzeville on the city’s South Side, which was the home of Chicago’s version of the Harlem Renaissance, families have been hit particularly hard by the closings. With the destruction of public housing by the Chicago Housing Authority as the backdrop, 15 Bronzeville schools have been closed over the last 12 years. Students have been transferred to different schools, some of them two or even three times.

These school closures do nothing but further destabilize already marginalized communities. This is the educational component of the war on Black communities.

The Chicago Teachers Union has been the best defender of the interests of the students, parents and community when it opposes the privatizations and closures imposed by the Mayor Rahm Emmanuel administration and the School Board. City Hall claims that the anti-union charters are out-performing public schools, but as the Reader’s Ben Joravsky points out, “There are 541 elementary schools in Chicago. Based on the composite ISAT scores for 2011 — the last full set available — none of the top ten are charters. None of the top 20, 30 or 40 either. In fact, you’ve got to go to 41 to find a charter.”

Nathan Johnson, a teacher at Lakeview High School on the city’s North side, summed things up this way: “I truly believe that this strike has implications that go far beyond Chicago, and I feel that it is absolutely imperative that we take a stand and say enough is enough!” The Chicago Teachers Union is pointing the way forward for our class!

We’re looking forward to reporting on more in 2013. But we can’t do it alone.

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

Please help keep us going.

Contribute to Workers World because you care about the struggle to end capitalism. Give because you want to build a workers’ world.

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Workers World Party (WWP) fights for socialism and engages in struggles on all the issues that face the working class & oppressed peoples — Black & white, Latino/a, Asian, Arab and Native peoples, women & men, young & old, lesbian, gay, bi, straight, trans, disabled, working, unemployed, undocumented & students.

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East Coast ports strike looms — Feb. 6 deadline . . . . . . . . . . 3 Eric Struch

Begin the new year well! Build Workers World!

You’ve read about many important events in these pages in 2012:

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Hurricane Sandy still impacts workers & poor . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 In defense of peoples’ power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 2013: a year to free the Cuban 5 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Mumia: What fiscal cliff? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Emancipation Proclamation and Night Watch . . . . . . . . . . . 10  Around the world Horrific rape sparks mass protests in India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Idle No More movement sweeps across Canada . . . . . . . . . . 7 Socialism key to Cuba’s love for human life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Anti-war group on Syria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 U.S. agent’s family calls for negotiations with Cuba . . . . . . . 9 Portugal’s railroad workers strike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 U.S. to deploy troops to 35 African countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11  Editorial Emancipation and incarceration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10  Noticias En Español La tragedia de Sandy Hook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Workers World 55 West 17 Street New York, N.Y. 10011 Phone: 212.627.2994 E-mail: ww@workers.org Web: www.workers.org Vol. 55, No. 1 • Jan. 10, 2013 Closing date: Jan. 1, 2013 Editor: Deirdre Griswold Technical Editor: Lal Roohk Managing Editors: John Catalinotto, LeiLani Dowell, Leslie Feinberg, Kris Hamel, Monica Moorehead, Gary Wilson West Coast Editor: John Parker Contributing Editors: Abayomi Azikiwe, Greg Butterfield, Jaimeson Champion, G. Dunkel, Fred Goldstein, Teresa Gutierrez, Larry Hales, Berta Joubert-Ceci, Cheryl LaBash, Milt Neidenberg, Betsey Piette, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Gloria Rubac Technical Staff: Sue Davis, Shelley Ettinger, Bob McCubbin, Maggie Vascassenno Mundo Obrero: Carl Glenn, Teresa Gutierrez, Berta Joubert-Ceci, Donna Lazarus, Michael Martínez, Carlos Vargas Supporter 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.

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Page 3

East Coast ports strike looms — Feb. 6 deadline

By Ben Carroll Just days before a potential strike by more than 14,500 workers at 14 ports along the Eastern U.S. and the Gulf coasts, the International Longshoremen’s union and the U.S. Maritime Alliance (USMX) — the port bosses — announced another temporary extension of their collective bargaining agreement until Feb. 6 as negotiations continue. The previous extension would have expired at midnight on Dec. 29.

The threat of a strike by the ILA, which would be the first on the East Coast since 1977, sent shockwaves through big business. A group of more than 100 business owners, along with Florida Gov. Rick Scott, sent a letter in early December to President Obama, calling on him to invoke powers granted to the president in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act that would allow him to stop the strike.

President George W. Bush invoked these powers in 2002 to force locked-out International Longshore and Warehouse Union to work West Coast holiday cargo.

The workers on the docks who move containers off ships from across the world work at a critical juncture in the global capitalist economy and play a crucial role in the international movement of commodities and goods. Many of these containers hold goods destined for the shelves of corporations like Walmart, Kmart, and Home Depot, while others contain raw materials like lumber, rubber and other commodities.

Last year alone, these 14 East and Gulf coast ports — from Boston to Baltimore; Wilmington, N.C., to Savannah, Ga.; and Miami to Houston — handled 110 million tons of cargo. In 2011, more than $208 billion worth of commodities went through the Port of New York and New Jersey, making it the biggest port on the East Coast and the third largest in the country.

At the core of the ongoing impasse in contract negotiations is the USMX’s demands for big concessions from the ILA on the key issues of what’s known as the container royalty fee and the Master Contract Wage Scale, including a guaranteed eight-hour workday. USMX wants to cap

and eventually eliminate the royalty fees.

In a release issued on Dec. 27 announcing the latest temporary extension of the collective bargaining agreement, the ILA announced some progress in negotiations around the central issue of the container royalty fee.

Containerization and automation Throughout the course of the negotiations, the USMX has waged a vicious propaganda campaign against the dockworkers over the issue of wages and capping the container royalties, attempting to portray the workers as being “overpaid.”

This flimsy line is taken right out of every boss’s playbook during a union struggle, and is merely cover for the USMX’s efforts to squeeze even more profits off the backs of the workers.

In the 1960s, there were nearly 35,000 dockworkers at the Port of New York and New Jersey. Today, there are just 3,500.

The same is true at ports up and down the coast.

This dramatic drop is due to the introduction of standardized, 20- to 40-foot steel containers that brought along with it many other forms of automation. This led to mass reductions in the number of workers on the ports, along with cuts in working hours for those that remained.

The ILA won the container royalty fee in the 1960s. The fee is a small amount that is collected based on the amount of tons of cargo that ILA members handle, that is then distributed back out to the workers.

The royalty fee allows workers to keep a small share of the enormous profits that the bosses are reaping. Due to the dramatic increase in the amount of cargo that can be moved at one time, containerization and automation have wiped out thousands of jobs on the ports. Because of the technological developments associated with containerization, tons of goods that used to require many workers to handle are now moved by relatively few. Capping or eliminating the royalty fee would significantly reduce workers’ wages.

Dockworkers’ specific experience with containerization is but another example of the general developments workers have faced across industries and sectors over the past several decades. The bosses have

WW photo: Monica Moorehead

A resolution adopted at Southern Human Rights Organizers Conference held in Charleston, S.C., at a ILA Local 1422 Hall Dec. 9, read in part: SHROC stands in solidarity with the ‘ILA in its negotiations for a fair contract for its more than 14,000 members representing thousands more families and communities who will be affected by the contract.’

introduced greater and greater technological changes, increasing labor productivity. Rather than these developments improving workers’ conditions, across the board they have driven down wages in the bosses’ continual quest for higher profits.

In 2011, a record $51.4 billion in cargo passed through Baltimore’s public and private marine terminals, 24 percent more than in 2010. In just the first six months of 2012, Baltimore’s public terminals handled 4.8 million tons of cargo, a 10 percent increase over the same period in 2011 and a record for the port.

Also in 2011, a record 461 ships moved a total of 4.4 million tons of goods through the Port of Wilmington, N.C. Despite the USMX bosses and corporations’ huge cuts in the workforce, the workers are moving more goods than ever before.

The ILA reported that 15 workers were killed on the job this year alone after being crushed by containers, run over by forklifts, or from other injuries they sustained from this dangerous work. Speedups associated with automation and containerization undoubtedly exacerbate the dangers.

The Panama Canal’s expansion is expected to bring even more ships to the East Coast ports. With the still deepening capitalist economic crisis and the national offensive by bosses against workers throughout the country, the USMX is expected to try and take back what the union had won regarding the container royalty fee and wages.

But the ILA has so far shown its determination to fight on these central issues.

Where does the struggle go from here?

A potential coastalwide strike by the ILA

would have huge implications for the U.S. labor movement, especially in this period.

This struggle deserves continued attention as the new deadline of Feb. 6 approaches.

Saladin Muhammad on the talks “The current negotiations between the ILA and the Maritime Alliance are critical for the future of the U.S. labor movement in terms of resisting imposition in the collective bargaining process,” said Saladin Muhammad, coordinator of the Southern Workers Assembly. “In addition to the corporate strategy to get states across the country to enact right-to-work laws, the call by the Florida governor for President Obama to impose Taft-Hartley, placing restrictions on the ILA’s right to strike, is part of the corporate strategy to weaken the power of the labor movement and to keep it in a position of concessionary and austerity bargaining.

“As U.S. and global corporations seek to maximize profits and maintain the dominance of the capitalist system, they must have a global supply chain to import, export, transport and warehouse raw materials, food products and finished goods to domestic and global markets,” Muhammad continued. “The longshore workers represent a key part of the global capitalist supply chain, and a decisive organized sector of the working class in the struggle against the abuses of the capitalist system against the workers.”

The Southern Workers Assembly has also recently released a petition calling on President Obama not to invoke Taft-Hartley in the event of a strike by the ILA. You can sign that petition at this ­address: ­southernworker.org/ ilarighttostrikepetition/

Pacific Northwest

Longshore workers reject cutbacks the CHS/Cargill joint venture TEMCO, split from the Grain Handlers Association to continInternational Longshore and ue negotiations with ILWU and Warehouse Union locals in the Paextend the terms of the old concific Northwest continue to work at tract, which expired on Sept. 30. terminals owned by the Grain HanFt.com reported the U.S. farmdlers Association after three out of ing cooperative CHS’ net proffour terminal owners imposed the its exceeded that of its TEMCO agri-bosses highly concessionary partner, Cargill, as well as that “last, best and final” offer on Dec. of terminal owners Louis Drey27. By nearly 94 percent, ILWU fus and Bunge. members rejected that package, International agribusiness giwhich the ILWU reports demandant Bunge is the major partner ed “more than 750 changes to a in the highly automated Export contract that’s made the industry An informational picket at a Charleston, S.C. port where a ship — loaded with goods from a Bangladesh clothing factory Grain Terminal in Longview, successful for the past 80 years.” where workers had recently been killed in a fire. ILA union Wash. Bunge’s profits doubled Clearly this is a temporary situamembers honored the picket and refused to unload the cargo. in the quarter ending Sept. 30. tion. Nearly 3,000 ILWU members The EGT contract accepted by ates that profit from and control the food work at grain terminals in Seattle, the ILWU International last year — while Tacoma and Vancouver, Wash., and Port- supply trade of the world.

One of the richest terminal owners, spurning a massive Occupy and labor soliland, Ore., owned by the huge conglomerBy Cheryl LaBash

darity mobilization poised to join the fight — set the concession pattern the ILWU is now fighting.

Grain Handler Association members have hired the Gettier scab-herding corporate security firm in an attempt to strong-arm longshore workers in case of a lockout or strike. But a militant mood is building among workers in the global supply chain.

Long-suffering ILWU clerks struck last month, closing the Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif., docks for eight days.

Warehouse workers and Walmart workers walked off their jobs to demand better conditions. And international solidarity pickets in Newark, N.J., and Charleston, S.C., challenged goods shipped from the clothing factory in Bangladesh where mostly women workers died in a fire on Nov. 24.

Page 4

Jan. 10, 2013

workers.org

Postal hunger strike targets Congress

By Joe Piette Washington, D.C. Postal workers carried out a six-day encampment and hunger strike once again in Washington, D.C. This time they stalked the congressional lame-duck sessions that threaten to tear down the U.S. Postal Service.

The labor activists contend that Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and outgoing Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are engaged in closed door postal reform negotiations that would scale back delivery days and kill 25,000 letter carrier positions, up to 80,000 postal jobs overall.

Rather than reversing the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), however, reactionary anti-union legislators want to further cut postal services, for example, by eliminating the sixth delivery day.

No closures, no cuts Five hunger strikers occupied the office of Rep. Issa on Dec 20. “Issa needs to back off his campaign to wreck the Postal Service. We demand that he immediately declare his commitment to preserve six-day mail delivery,” said Dave Welsh, hunger striker and retired letter carrier from San Francisco.

“Not the Internet, not private competition, not labor costs, not the recession — Congress is responsible for the postal mess,” said hunger striker Jamie Partridge. “Corporate interests, working through their friends in Congress and the presidency, want to undermine the USPS, bust the unions and then privatize it.”

Four of the strikers were ejected

by Capitol police while one, John Dennie, a retired mail handler from New York, was arrested. He was released three hours later, charged with “blocking an entrance.”

Dennie’s earlier attempt on June 28 to make a citizen’s arrest of Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe in front of USPS Headquarters also led to his detention by police, who later released him without charges.

That action was part of a weeklong hunger strike by ten Community and Postal Workers United

activists to point out that Congress was starving the Postal Service.

It was the 2006 lame-duck Congress that passed the PAEA on a voice vote. This act forces the USPS to pre-fund retiree health benefits 75 years in advance. By building in these high costs at the front end, it will bankrupt the Postal Service if it remains in force.

The Postal Regulatory Commission released a report in November 2012 stating that not only would the Postal Service have been profitable without the mandate, the service has also overpaid tens of billions of dollars into two pension funds. (www.prc.gov) Arrest Postmaster General Donahoe Thirteen thousand jobs have ­already been eliminated and delivery standards relaxed. “Extensive disruption has resulted from these plant closures,” said Dennie in a letter delivered to the Postal Board of Governors on Dec. 21. Criticizing Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe’s announced plans last May that he would close half the mail sorting plants in the country and cut hours from 25 to 75 percent in half of the nation’s post offices, the document accuses Donahoe of “criminal delay and obstruction of the mail and calls for his termination.”

“Take away a parent’s job, take away a child’s future,” said Victoria Panell, youth leader of the National Action Network, last June.

Twenty-one percent of postal jobs are held by African Americans. The Postal Service is the largest employer of Black workers making over $55,000 annually. Many of those jobs are threatened by ongoing and planned postal cutbacks in jobs and services. (multiculturallife.org) Rural communities and oppressed neighborhoods will be especially hard hit by the USPS drawdown through the loss of postal services as well as the decrease in well-paying career jobs with health care and pension benefits.

The hunger strikers have called on postal management to suspend cuts and closures and allow Congress to fix the finances by repealing the pre-funding mandate and refunding the pension surplus.

On the Picket Line

By Sue Davis

The postal hunger strikers rode a banner-draped horse and carriage from the Postal Museum to the White House to celebrate the 237year history of the Postal Service and 150 years of Saturday delivery (city free delivery was established in 1863).

They attempted to deliver a giant postcard calling on President Obama, who has twice allowed for cutting six-day delivery in budget proposals, to instead use his veto power to save six-day mail delivery, if necessary. “We helped elect Obama and he owes us,” said Ken Lerch, Letter Carriers union (NALC) Branch 3825 president.

Outside the headquarters of the NALC, President Fred Rolando joined the contingent for a short period.

Completing the sixth day of their hunger strike to save six-day delivery, five postal workers broke their fast and declared a people’s victory.

“Along with thousands of postal workers and our community allies, who have been battling to save America’s Postal Service, we were able to raise awareness and increase pressure on the decision-makers as they attempted to wrangle backroom deals,” said Partridge, a retired letter carrier from Portland, Ore. If no postal bill is agreed to by the lame-duck Congress by Jan. 3, it will be up to the new incoming Congress to craft a bill to either save the Postal Service, or to push it further on the path to the destruction of hundreds of thousands of jobs and the elimination of lowcost postal services.

Can community organizations, postal workers and their labor organizations unite into a strong enough movement to force the 113th Congress to do the right thing? Can the challenge to save the post office unite with the upcoming struggle against austerity and force back the right-wing attacks on the working class? A mass rally of thousands of workers, postal as well as other workers, is called for. Will the future deliver?

Joe Piette retired from the USPS in 2011.

All quotations taken from CPWU press releases.

Chicago Teachers Union charges racial discrimination

In a federal lawsuit filed Dec. 26, the Chicago Teachers Union and three teachers charged the Chicago Public Schools with discrimination against tenured African-American teachers and staff. More than half of the 347 tenured teachers in schools on Chicago’s West and South sides selected for what’s called “turnaround results” are Black.

(Turnaround schools are closed and all faculty replaced regardless of qualifications or experience.) However, Black tenured teachers only made up 29.6 percent of CPS’ tenured teaching staff in 2010, down from 40.6 percent in 2000. The suit alleges that the schools selected for turnaround have a higher percentage of Black teachers than schools that performed similarly but were not selected. The suit also noted that the CPS has never published its criteria for choosing schools for turnaround. (ctunet.com, Dec. 27)

Minimum wage to increase in 10 states

One million low-wage workers are getting a raise in Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington state. That makes Washington the state with the highest minimum wage: $9.19 an hour. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that another 140,000 people will benefit indirectly from the wage hikes. The federal minimum has been $7.25 an hour in 31 states since 2009, with no cost-of-living adjustment. Let’s make changing the federal minimum wage into a living wage one of labor’s top priorities in 2013!

(AFL-CIO NOW blog, Dec. 27)

Warehouse workers on strike in Seattle area

After a three-day unfair-labor-practices strike in Auburn, Wash., in early December, warehouse workers at United Natural Foods Inc., represented by Teamsters Local 117, agreed to go back to work. But after UNFI announced Dec. 13 that it was permanently replacing 72 of the 168 workers, in violation of labor law, the workers returned to the picket line at 9 p.m. that night. The union called UNFI’s actions “retaliatory, unlawful and frankly despicable” and promptly filed new charges over the permanent replacement issue. UNFI is currently being investigated for 45 violations. (The Stand, Dec. 13) In the meantime, solidarity is growing for the strikers, who held a picket line, with labor, faith-based and community support, outside a Whole Foods in Seattle on Dec. 19. Since then, PCC Natural Markets has issued a statement supporting the workers, and the Olympic Food Co-op and Central Co-op have refused to do business with UNFI. (unfidrivenbygreed.com, Dec. 28) For more information, visit the strike website.

NYU grad student workers resume union struggle

More than 1,100 graduate student employees at New York University and NYU-Poly signed a letter to the administration and delivered it in December urging the school to respect their choice to join a union. These workers received a boost in pay, benefits and workers’ rights when they were represented by the Graduate Students Organizing Committee/United Auto Workers Local 2110 from 2001 to 2005. When the contract expired in 2005, NYU refused to renew it based on a 2004 ruling by the Bush-controlled National Labor Relations Board that graduate teaching employees and research assistants at private universities were not protected by federal labor law. They are protected at public universities, notably in California, Massachusetts and Michigan. If the NLRB rules in the workers’ favor, the GSOC says that NYU will appeal the decision. (AFL-CIO NOW blog, Dec. 17)

Report proves ‘right-to-work’ laws no help to workers

Three hunger strikers take postal struggle to Congress.

WW photo: Joe Piette

A report by the Minnesota 2020 think tank entitled “A Losing Bet,” about the impact of a “right-to-work” law in Minnesota, was released Nov. 20. It proves what unions have been saying about right-to-work-for-less laws like the one recently imposed in Michigan. Not only are they bad for workers’ wages, benefits and working conditions, but they’re bad for the entire economy. (mnaflcio.org, Dec. 17)

workers.org

Jan. 10, 2013

Page 5

Oakland, Calif.

Rally protests murders of Black & Brown youth

By Judy Greenspan Oakland, Calif.

Alan Blueford would have turned 19 on Dec. 20, but instead he was killed by Oakland police last May 6. To commemorate his birthday and to say no to all acts of police violence and murder of Black and Brown young men, more than 450 people from the Bay Area packed the Laney College auditorium in downtown Oakland on Dec. 18.

The evening, an outpouring of support and love for the Blueford family, also became a loud, angry cry of protest against all forms of police torture and murder.

Speaking at the beginning of the program, Jeralyn Blueford said, “What they did to my baby was wrong, and we’re here to do something to stop it. We have to organize. We have to march. We have to stop the murder.”

Joining the Bluefords on the stage throughout the night were family members of other young Black and Brown men who have been shot and killed by police, from Oakland to New York City. Slides and videos were shown throughout the evening to commemorate the deaths of many youth of color.

Despite the sadness and mourning that rippled throughout the evening, the intense, fiery messages of warriors, old and new, in the struggle against racism and oppression were heard loud and clear.

Clarence Thomas, a longtime activist from International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 and a leader of the

Million Worker March Movement, set the tone early in the evening, saying, “The nation mourns and expresses outrage over the murder of 20 children and six adults in Connecticut at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, and that outrage is legitimate. But where is the outrage to the mass escalating murder and brutality against our youth? Where is the outrage to the racist police shootings of our young people, Alan Blueford, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin and many others?”

Thomas added, “Labor has a responsibility because labor is the most organized sector of the working class.” The union leader recounted the long history of the ILWU, from a 1934 four-day port shutdown to protest the police murder of two San Francisco dockworkers to the 2010 shutdown of the West Coast ports in solidarity with Justice for Oscar Grant. Grant was a young Black man who was shot and killed by Bay Area Rapid Transit cop Johannes Mehserle on Jan. 1, 2009, while handcuffed and restrained by other police.

Spearheading national campaign Blueford’s killing has propelled his family into spearheading a national campaign against similar police shootings and murders. The Justice for Alan Blueford Coalition has actively sought out families around the country who have been targeted by the police.

The Blueford anti-police brutality campaign has been joined by family members, supporters and friends of Oscar Grant.

One such member, Tim Killings, presi-

dent of the Laney College Black Student Union, dePhoto: Daniel Arauz livered a moving solidarity Angela Davis (left) at Justice for Alan Blueford rally. statement in which he explained: “We are more than just a student Witherspoon said that only after the comorganization. We are deeply concerned munity launched their own investigation members of the Oakland community did the truth come out about Anthony Anwhere Black, Latino and poor youth are derson Sr., who was tackled by police and under attack. We advocate doing what- killed in front of his two-year-old grandever is necessary to get justice for Alan daughter. The SCLC leader stated, “Not only is this brutality, it is terrorism.”

Blueford.”

Constance Malcolm and Franclot GraOther speakers at the rally included Angela Davis, a former political prisoner ham, the parents of Ramarley Graham, and longtime activist against racism and an 18-year-old Black man, described how mass incarceration, who is now a profes- their son was shot to death in his Bronx sor at the University of California, Santa home on Feb. 2 by New York Police OfCruz. Davis, who also identified herself ficer Richard Haste. The two travelled as a longtime resident of Oakland, said, across the country to express their soli“When I think about Alan Blueford, I think darity with the Blueford family and other about Li’l Bobby Hutton, who was killed victims of police terror and challenged the by the Oakland police a few days before he crowd to: “Stand up with all of the famiwould have celebrated his 18th birthday. lies and fight.”

Also speaking was Fred Hampton Jr., The eyes of the world are on Oakland.”

A panel of social justice organizers and the son of the Chicago Black Panther Parfamily members of young people killed ty leader who was murdered in his bed by by the police was featured in the second Chicago police in 1969.

This event was much more than a compart of the program. the Rev. Cortly “C.D.” Witherspoon, who traveled from Balti- memoration. It was a call to organize more, summed up the feeling of the group communities around the country against when he said, “There is nowhere else I police violence and brutality. As Wanwould rather be than with the Bluefords da Johnson, the mother of Oscar Grant, stated, “We have to come together to fight fighting for justice.”

Witherspoon, head of the Baltimore for justice. We will not take what they are Southern Christian Leadership Confer- doing to our Black and Brown children ence and a leader of the People’s Power anymore.”

For more information, contact the Assembly, gave testimony about 15 racist killings by the Baltimore police of Black ­Justice for Alan Blueford Coalition, youth since the beginning of the year. justice4alanblueford.org.

Hurricane Sandy still impacts workers & poor

By G. Dunkel New York The governors of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut came up with a $60 billion figure for the damage Hurricane Sandy did to their states and what it would cost to limit damage done by future storms. They asked Congress for the money and the Senate passed the bill Dec. 28. But it is not clear that the House will take it up, given the struggle over the “fiscal cliff.”

Very little of the damage done by Sandy to working and poor people will be compensated by this money, whenever it comes. This damage has been ignored, miscalculated or deemed irrelevant by government entities and the corporate-owned media. Immigrants, even those with legal permission to be in the United States, are disqualified from receiving any aid from the government.

(Daily News, Dec. 18) According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, job losses in New York state due to Sandy are 30,000 for November. (New York Times, Dec. 20) This is a large number of jobs, but the BLS report notes that anybody who worked for even a single hour in November was not counted. So the real number of Sandy job losses is between 30,000 and 158,204, the number of individuals who filed initial claims for unemployment in November, nearly the number of claims made in January 2009 at the height of the recession.

The BLS figure for Sandy job losses in New Jersey is 8,100, but 138,661 — a re-

Food lines still needed weeks after hurricane struck.

cord number of first-time claims for unemployment insurance — were filed.

The BLS will release a report at the end of January with better estimates. It is likely that some people who lost their job in November were rehired in December as some businesses reopened.

Millions of people in New Jersey and New York lost electricity, which meant they lost heat, hot water and refrigeration. Depending on whether they used gas or electricity, they couldn’t cook. Those in large apartment buildings, especially in New York City, lost water, which severely affected their sanitation.

Long Island Power Authority, generally regarded as a badly run utility, was unable to provide service to 90 percent of its customers. Most of its customers on Long Island got power back in a few weeks, but 11,000 LIPA customers in southeast Queens, in the Rockaways area of New York City, still didn’t have heat, hot water or power as of the third week of De-

WW photo: G. Dunkel

cember, when the Queens Congregations United for Action did a survey.

QCUA also charged that as of Dec. 5 only 174 homes out of 38,000 homes and businesses on the Rockaway Peninsula had received help through Rapid Repairs, a city program to enable homeowners and renters to return to their homes.

While LIPA, a state controlled public authority, claimed it had nearly completely restored service, many residents of Far Rockaway at the end of December were still relying on community centers for food and hot meals.

Instead of help, eviction notices Both Rapid Repair and the Federal Emergency Management Agency grants, by a decision of New York’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, did not cover mold removal.

Dr. Natasha Anandaraja, a pediatrician at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, told the Daily News, “We’re concerned about

children developing respiratory illnesses due to the cold, wet and moldy surroundings.” Many of the homes and apartments, especially in the Rockaways, without heat and electricity, are filled with mold, plaster dust and asbestos. (Dec. 19) The Star Ledger, which generally focuses on New Jersey news, also made similar warnings about dwellings there.

The New York City Housing Authority shamefully distinguished itself by sending process servers door-to-door with eviction notices while its buildings were without power, water, heat, elevators or gas.

At the same time, it claimed it could not verify the status of the elderly, disabled and sick people living in its buildings who hadn’t been able to evacuate in the one day they were given by the city.

“It’s really ridiculous,” Edward Josephson, director of litigation for NYC Legal Services, stated. “At the very time they were unable to send people out there to see if people were dying or not, they were able to send people to serve notice of evictions.” (Daily News, Dec. 23) Nearly 80,000 NYCHA tenants in Red Hook, Coney Island and the Rockaways lost basic services for weeks and their landlord didn’t deign to tell them when their buildings would be returned to normal. While tenants in some large, privately owned projects like Stuyvesant Town have already gotten rent abatements, there has been nary a word from NYCHA. The effects of Hurricane Sandy make it clear that working and poor people need organizations that will fight for their interests on a broad front.

Page 6

Jan. 10, 2013

workers.org

In defense of peoples’ power

Part 4

Capitalism profits from guns, war & reaction

migrant bashing, to male supremacy and anti-LGBTQ+ oppressions.

By Leslie Feinberg Violence and defense against violence are life-and-death social questions for those who are oppressed and exploited.

The roots of violence in society can’t be separated from the capitalist drive for profits.

There is only one economic class in society that profits from weaponry and war — the capitalist 1%. Bankers and industrialists — actually numerically closer to .001 percent — have their own class interests in relation to violence and guns.

For some 5,000 years, ruling classes — slavocracy, feudal and capitalist — have lived an opulent and idle existence by exploiting labor and the land.

These exploiting classes couldn’t have ruled — domestically or internationally — over a downtrodden and disenfranchised, oppressed and exploited world multitude without a monopoly on violence and hightech weaponry.

The economic empires and fortunes of the 1% are bloody from the violent class warfare it has waged to profit from stolen labor and land, and the socially built apparatus of production.

The rich don’t run capitalism; the drive for profit runs the capitalists.

Capital is more than money. Capital is magnetically drawn to profits like a compass needle points to the melting polar ice cap.

Capital is the violent economic and social relationship of exploiter to exploited, oppressor to oppressed.

In his monumental three-volume work “Capital,” Karl Marx quoted economist T.J. Dunning: “Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 percent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 percent certain will produce eagerness; 50 percent, positive audacity; 100 percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged.”

Dunning concluded: “If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated.”

More police, more wars and weapons for profit?

The 1% media are moderating the public discussion in the U.S. about guns and violence as if this were a capitalist presidential debate, outside of social, economic and historic context.

Malcolm X wisely warned about big-business media: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

Six capitalist corporations control most of the media in the U.S. (commoncause. org) “The military-industrial media complex,” states Wikipedia, “is an offshoot of the military-industrial complex.”

Ultimately, such a numerically small class as the .001% can only rule over the vast majority of the exploited and oppressed peoples of the world through an overwhelming force of violence and weapons of mass destruction.

The 1% claims that all of society is safer, as long as its hired guns maintain a monopoly on violence and weapons.

The wealth is there; the crisis is ownership

Photo: Alex Vallis

Detroit

Using the double-speak of “peace,” the ruling class claims that more police, courts, prison and military, with more advanced weapons will bring about an end to violence in capitalist society.

If more police and military might, more guns and high-tech weaponry, could win the peace in the class war under capitalism between exploiters and the exploited, oppressors and the oppressed, the U.S. would be a utopian paradise.

No emperor or king in history has ever commanded such high-tech weaponry, police force or military force as do the barons of Wall Street and the military-industrial complex.

In reality, the police, courts, prisons, immigrant detention centers and military are an admission by the 1% that it is unable and unwilling to peacefully end its violent social and economic rule as an exploiting and oppressing class.

In fact, the social and economic antagonisms under capitalism are sharpening.

— “one person lynched every 36 hours” — by police “and a much smaller number of security guards and self-appointed vigilantes.” (mxgm.org) During the last year, Black residents were gunned down in Tulsa, Okla., the second such massacre in the community’s history. Sikhs were massacred outside Milwaukee, Wis. When unarmed youths led the first Occupy in the heart of Wall Street, they tried to create a forum for cooperative dialogue and debate in the Capitol of capital.

In response, the billionaire mayor unleashed violent assaults by a militarized police force.

In October, after Hurricane Sandy, it was the Occupy activists and organizations of the oppressed that organized to feed the hungry — including hungry Federal Emergency Management Agency officials — not the capitalist government.

The billionaire in Gracie Mansion [the official residence of New York City’s mayor] sent armed police to shut down the volunteer network to meet peoples’ needs.

WW analysis

Rise in racist lynchings, massacres Capitalist “democracy” is the violent class dictatorship of the 1% over the 99% — particularly the oppressed and laboring class.

Wall Street poses behind a façade of “democracy.” But democracy for whom? Greece was a democracy for the slave-owning class. It was a slave state for those who were shackled. Roman emperors ordered the avenue to their capital city lined with crucified enslaved laborers as a threat against rebellion against the slavocracy.

Today, the U.S. has become the capital of the death penalty as a weapon of state terror against the oppressed and impoverished — those who line death rows.

This is what capitalist “democracy” looks like: racist police profiling and “stop and frisk,” apartheid passbook laws and police brutality, gestapo raids by immigration police, tagging workers by skin color, separating families, indefinite detention, round-up and mass deportations of Muslims, rendition — the outsourcing of torture, racist mass incarceration, endless wars for profit.

More capitalist police and private security guards with more powerful weapons do not usher in social peace. Police brutality and police-state occupations of oppressed communities are the predominant force of “legal” terror in the U.S. Trayvon Martin was one of 120 Black people known to have been extrajudicially executed in the first six months of 2012

The right to organize to build peoples’ power The 1% claims to lead in the interests of “the nation.” But the U.S. is not one nation — it is a prison-house for oppressed nationalities.

Capitalist society is also made up of more than one economic class.

The economic and social interests of the world working class and oppressed peoples are diametrically opposed to the imperialist ruling class. It is the laboring classes — disproportionately the oppressed — who have done almost all the dying in wars for profit.

Therefore, oppressed peoples and the working class need their own assemblies to share information about social problems and to organize peoples’ power to solve them.

The working class and oppressed peoples around the world have a right to get together — indoors and outdoors — to discuss social crises of great importance from their own material standpoints in society, including defense and liberation, to organize and to take action together in their own class interests.

The needs of oppressed and working people set the peoples’ agenda: good-paying union wages for short work weeks, free homes and mass transportation, free health care and education, recreation and vacations; an end to white supremacy and jingoism, to imperialist wars and im-

Capitalism can’t solve the life-and-death needs that the profit system has created. It is the oppressed and workers who must organize social solutions.

For example, as adult generations can’t find jobs in a jobless recovery, are homeless or fear losing their home, and can’t afford health care, the suffering of their children is soaring, too.

Newspapers in Syracuse report preteenage children are robbing at gunpoint.

More than 40 percent of children are starving and desperate, living below the poverty level, in Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester, Utica and Schenectady, according to data from the U.S. Census.

The poverty level is officially defined as an income of $22,300 or less for a family of four.

The wealth is there. It’s just being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.

“The rich got richer and the poor got poorer in New York City last year as the poverty rate reached its highest point in more than a decade,” the New York Times admitted in September, “and the income gap in Manhattan, already wider than almost anywhere else in the country, rivaled disparities in sub-Saharan Africa.” (Sept.

20, 2012) Children are desperately hungry because there’s too much food to be sold at a profit. Capitalist production, hardwired for profit, leads to capitalist overproduction — a crisis of abundance. Millions of workers desperately need goods and services, yet can’t afford to buy them back because they are unemployed or are working for poverty-level wages.

This economic and social rule by the 1% is an ongoing violent armed crime against humanity — which cannot move forward within the confines of the existing capitalist economic and social relations of production and distribution for profit.

In an article headlined, “New movement for people’s power,” Workers World reporter Steven Ceci wrote that thousands of people have taken to the streets in Baltimore this year to protest racist police brutality, and lack of jobs and recreation for youth. These actions were organized by the Justice 4 Trayvon Martin/Maryland Local Organizing Committee.

“The movement that began when thousands of people filled Baltimore’s streets on March 26 has taken its next steps by protesting at the site of the proposed youth jail on April 10 and marching to City Hall to continuing organizing for justice,” Ceci explained. (WW, April 18, 2012) The Rev. Cortly “C.D.” Witherspoon, Baltimore president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said at the April 10 rally: “Trayvon Martin continues to be our North Star and a martyr for the modern-day struggle for freedom.

“What we accomplished on March 26 was much bigger than one protest. For one evening we shut down City Hall and downtown Baltimore, including the convention center and the circus. Through our sheer numbers and determination, we proved what the power of the people can do.

“We do not intend to go back.”

Witherspoon stated: “The political establishments, both local and national, have proven to be bankrupt; they have done virtually nothing to protect or serve the people. It’s time for the people to organize themselves and to build people’s power.” (workers.org)

workers.org

Jan. 10, 2013

Page 7

With mounting violence against women

Horrific rape sparks mass protests in India

By Heather Cottin An outraged mass movement has brought hundreds of thousands, mainly women, into the streets of India to protest rape and government inaction toward the perpetrators. This explosion of anger and despair was ignited by a horrendous incident in Delhi, which is fueled by many years of rising violence against women.

On Dec. 16, a young woman student boarded a bus in Delhi accompanied by a male friend. The bus kept circling a 20mile area in South Delhi while six men inside the vehicle raped her and also beat her and her friend with iron rods.

The bus’ tinted windows concealed the savagery within as it rolled, unstopped, through a series of police checkpoints.

Almost an hour after they got on the bus, the couple were thrown off, battered and bleeding. A statement by the 23-yearold physiotherapy student provided an account of the horror she and her friend had experienced that night. The woman was violated so brutally that her intestines had to be removed. She died days later of internal injuries.

A deluge of outrage against this crime brought thousands of people into the streets of Delhi in protest. Police attacked the demonstrators on Dec. 21 with tear gas and lathi (5-foot bamboo sticks). With temperatures in the 40s, police sprayed the protesters with water cannons. To discourage protests, the Delhi government shut all roads leading into the area, closed nearby Metro stations and bus routes, and deployed hundreds of police officers. (New York Times, Dec. 29) But instead of being subdued, the protests spread all over India. Trivandrum, Chennai, Mysore, Bangalore, Kolkata, Patna and Cuttack saw thousands of angry demonstrators take to the streets.

Crimes against women in India Patriarchy and misogyny are deeply entrenched in India’s class and caste system. More than 60 percent of women in India live in extreme poverty.

In the last five years, 27 of the candidates for state elections fielded by Indian political parties were men who had faced charges of rape. Police are complicit in cover-ups and are infamous for ignoring rape complaints. In the state of Karnataka, only four people were convicted of rape in 2011, although an average of 500 women have reported being raped there every year since 2006. (The Hindu, Dec. 31) A study conducted jointly by the Indian Council of Medical Research and the Harvard School of Public Health established that girls under five years in India were dying at an abnormally high rate because of the prevalence of domestic violence targeting females in their homes.

Over the last two decades, 1.8 million girls under the age of six have been killed.

Infant girls less than a year old are at a 50 percent higher risk of dying than boys of the same age, while girls who survive that perilous first year have a 21 percent higher chance than boys of dying before their fifth birthday. (Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, Jan. 3, 2011) According to Delhi police, a woman is raped every 18 hours in that city. Yet in 2010 there was only one conviction of a rapist. (India Today, Jan. 7, 2011) In India as a whole, more than 24,000 rapes were reported in 2011, registering a 9.2 percent rise over the previous year.

Some 54.7 percent of those attacked were between 18 and 30 years old. According to police records, the attackers were known to their victims in more than 94 percent of cases. More than 19 cases of child rape

Women lead protests around India.

are reported in India every day.

Police records from 2011 showed an alarming increase in all types of violence against women. Trafficking increased by a staggering 122 percent, while kidnappings and abductions of women rose 19.4 percent, molestation by 5.8 percent, torture by 5.4 percent and killings in disputes over dowry payments by 2.7 percent. (BBC, Dec. 29) The sex industry, which turns huge profits, promotes misogyny. India has become the third-largest user of pornography in the world. (The Hindu, Dec. 30) Economists Siwan Anderson and Debraj Ray estimate that 2 million women in India “disappear” each year. Roughly 12 percent of them disappear at birth, another quarter die in childhood, some 18 percent go missing at the age of reproduction, followed by 45 percent at older ages. The researchers found that women died more from “injuries” in a given year than while giving birth; the injuries indicated they suffered from violence. Each year in India more than 100,000 women are killed by fires.

The Socialist Unity Center of India

(Communist), which has participated in the protests all over India, sees this rapid degradation of women as “a deliberate design of the ruling capitalist class to pollute the mind to view women [as] sex objects ... to dehumanize the people. ... The current phase of dying capitalism [incites] ugly self-centeredness, greed, vile self-consumptive urges and perverse proclivities of relishing commoditization of women,” exacerbated by “capitalist globalization.” (suci-c.in) SUCI (C) member Sumathi Photo: SUCI Venkatachalapathy writes: “All the servitors and defenders of ruling capitalism are squarely involved in either perpetrating or abetting murderous assault on the life and dignity of women. One would find that in many of the rape and other cases of atrocities on women, the accused are either political figures, village touts, mafia dons enjoying political backing or army personnel, police officials, close relatives of industrialists and persons in the proximity of the power-wielders. … [Many a] bourgeois party, in power or in opposition, has long criminal records including atrocities on women.” (Facebook post, Dec. 23) This uprising of Indian women points to a significant step forward in the mass movement. Karl Marx wrote, “The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by the progress of women toward freedom. ... The degree of emancipation of woman is the natural measure of general emancipation.”

A young male activist from Hyderabad, Ramesh Dso, wrote to Workers World, “She died, but still youth are protesting without rest. We also took up massive protests to mourn and rally everywhere.

It is a great step in India.”

First Nations

Idle No More movement sweeps across Canada

By Mahtowin “Idle No More,” a movement led by First Nations (Native) peoples in defense of the water, the land, the sky and their treaty rights, has swept across Canada like wildfire. It is a movement formed by Indigenous women that has been joined by thousands of Native people, allies and now people from around the world.

Throughout Canada and internationally, many have come out to insist that Indigenous sovereignty must be respected. Trains and highways in Canada have periodically been blocked. Native rounddance flash mobs have shown up at shopping malls. Indigenous people from reservations large and small have come out to demonstrate their support.

Social media have been used extensively as an organizing tool. Canada’s cities from Halifax to Ottawa to Vancouver have seen large marches of Native people and their supporters. This is the largest Indigenous movement in Canada since the 1990 resistance at Oka and Kahnawake.

In part, the upsurge in Idle No More was sparked on Dec. 4, when First Nations representatives were physically prevented from entering the House of Commons in Ottawa, where they had planned to raise their concerns about proposed legislation

that would have a tremendous impact on First Nations.

Via Omnibus Bill C-45 and other legislation, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservative government are attempting to gut protections of thousands of waterways and to bypass and destroy the treaty rights of First Nations and make harsh budget cuts that would impact many Indigenous lives. Harper and his government refuse to consult with First Nations about these hastily pushedthrough pieces of legislation that will have immense implications for First Nations.

In Ontario, Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence has been on a hunger strike since Dec. 11. She has said that she will fast until Harper agrees to meet with her and other Indigenous leaders; others including 72-year-old Emil Bell have joined in her fast. So far, the prime minister has refused any consultation with Chief Spence or any other First Nations leadership, despite months of requests for him to do so.

Pent up pain and anger The root of the Idle No More response is the colonial relationship that Canada has with Native peoples, who continue to experience a lack of adequate housing and sanitation, high unemployment and incarceration rates, high suicide rates

and ill health, reduced life expectancy, and lack of educational opportunities for youth while living in a wealthy country built on their stolen land and resources.

Idle No More is a manifestation of the pent-up pain and anger that Native people carry from generations of suffering under colonialism.

Melaw Nakehk’o, who helped to organize protests in Yellowknife [Northwest Territories, Canada], said, “It’s a movement, it’s a continuous thing. It not only has to do with the bills that are passing through, it’s just that we’re not going to be idle anymore. We’re not going to take it anymore.” [Northern News Service, Dec. 24] In 2008, Harper publicly apologized for the residential school system that devastated thousands of Native families and promised to forge “a new relationship” based on “partnership and respect.”

Since that time, however, the Harper government has cut First Nations health funding, gutted environmental review processes, refused to participate in land claim negotiations, ignored the more than 600 missing and murdered Indigenous women across Canada, withheld documents from the residential school Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and cut funding for First Nations educa-

tional and child welfare agencies.

Indigenous people are the fastest growing population in Canada, with many youth who are very conscious of the history of injustices against their people.

Progressive non-Native Canadian activists have been supporting Idle No More, both because they recognize the importance of treaty obligations and because the attacks on Indigenous peoples are part of widespread attacks on working people and the environment, part of selling off Canada’s natural resources and opening up the lands for even further corporate exploitation.

Indigenous peoples throughout the world — who have no borders in the struggle — and their supporters have been standing singly, in small gatherings, in flashmobs and rallies of a thousand or more, to support Idle No More.

For more than a generation, Indigenous peoples have been issuing warnings, about the need to respect their treaty rights, and about the threats to the water and the earth. It is time for others to listen and Idle No More.

Email Prime Minister Stephen H ­ arper: pm@pm.gc.ca Email Canada’s Governor General: info@gg.ca

Page 8

Jan. 10, 2013

workers.org

Socialism

Workers World Party conference

Key to Cuba’s love for human life Excerpts from a talk by LeiLani Dowell, WW managing editor, at the Nov. 17-18, 2012, Workers World Party conference in New York. See video at youtube.com/wwpvideo.

“

An important biological species is in danger of disappearing with the rapid and progressive destruction of its natural life-sustaining conditions ­— man.

We are just now becoming aware of this problem when it is almost too late to stop it.

“It is necessary to point out [that] the societies of consumers are those who are fundamentally responsible for the atrocious destruction of the environment. They are born from former colonial powers and imperial politics, which in turn engendered the backwardness and poverty which are now beating down the immense majority of humankind.

“With only 20 percent of the world’s population, they consume three-fourths of the energy which is produced in the world. They have poisoned the seas and the rivers. They have weakened and punctured the ozone layer. They have saturated the atmosphere with gasses which alter climatic conditions with catastrophic effects from which we are now beginning to suffer. …

“If we want to save humanity from this self-destruction, it is necessary to better distribute the available wealth and technology of the planet. Less luxury and less extravagance in a few countries; for that matter, less poverty and less hunger in a large portion of the earth. … Make human existence more rational. Apply a fair international economic order. Make use of all the scientific knowledge necessary for ongoing development without contamination. Pay the ecological debt and not the foreign debt. Let hunger disappear and not mankind.”

LeiLani Dowell

ww Photo: brenda Ryan

This quote is from the beloved leader of the Cuban people, Fidel Castro, from a speech at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, 13 years before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and 20 years before this month’s Hurricane Sandy. The U.S. has persistently ignored that “tomorrow” is now; it has ignored it at the expense of the growing number of storm victims and survivors.

Over and over again, Cuba has had to pay for capitalism’s crimes against the very environment that sustains us as human beings. Cuba is a small island situated in the Caribbean Sea across from the Gulf of Mexico. So it has always been prone to hurricanes. But these storms have become increasingly destructive and deadly as a result of climate change generated by the profit system’s shortsightedness and greed. In 2006, Cuba was the only nation in the world that met

the World Wide Fund for Nature’s definition of sustainable development.

And yet, each year as storms hit the region, Cuba avoids losing its people to the ravages of the hurricanes. When deaths do occur, they are minimal compared to those in other countries. This year, Cuba lost an unprecedented 11 lives to Hurricane Sandy. The U.S. lost 132 — and those numbers will undoubtedly rise.

One could say that Cuba is able to protect its people because it has more experience dealing with hurricanes. But that’s actually only a small part of the equation.

The bigger part is the love and dedication to human life that a socialist system bestows on its people. In 2008, before Hurricane Gustav hit, Fidel said: “We are lucky to have a Revolution! It is a fact that nobody will be neglected.”

In Cuba major planning and preparation go into hurricane preparedness, and when they do hit, these plans are executed with precision. In Cuba, 55,000 people were evacuated from their homes before Sandy hit this year.

For the Cubans, “evacuation” doesn’t mean what it does in the U.S. — where politicians stand on a podium and yell, “Get out!,” then blame those who “didn’t leave” because they didn’t have transportation, or because they have disabilities or medical situations, or because they have nowhere to go.

In Cuba, a plan is devised for how each person will be evacuated and where each one will go. If, for instance, there is an elderly woman living on the second floor of a house in a wheelchair, people are designated in advance to help carry her down the stairs, and they know which relative or which civil defense area is prepared to house her.

Because lives come before profit in Cuba, any and all resources are commandeered for the emergency relief — from boats and buses to buildings and com-

munication networks. All social, economic and military organizations are involved in the effort and every community. Strong bonds of solidarity tie Cubans together as a safety net against any storm.

Now some would say, well, Cuba’s this small island with a smaller population than the U.S.; they can afford to do this for their population. But the U.S. is the wealthiest country in the world, with the most resources in the world.

There is absolutely no reason why the U.S. cannot effectively organize protection for every single person in the country — no reason, of course, except its priorities. Capitalism’s main focus, its only reason for existing, is to secure the profits of the 1%, the ruling class. People’s lives — especially those of the poor, people of color and workers — are totally expendable.

Meanwhile, Cuba is saddled with a blockade that the U.S. has imposed on it for some 50 years now. This makes getting even the most basic medicines, construction equipment, etc., extremely difficult. And Cuba still takes care of its people.

Again, it’s an issue of priorities.

Not only does Cuba take care of its own, but it also shares its expertise with the world. We can never forget the image of Cuban doctors lined up at the airport, waiting to fly to the U.S. to aid survivors of Hurricane Katrina, only to be rejected

by President Bush.

So this year, as we provide mutual aid, support and love to our sisters and brothers suffering from the storm — as we expose the ravages of the storm of capitalism upon our daily lives — we would like to give our thanks to socialist Cuba for its efforts in protecting the lives of the entire world, both politically and materially.

And we want to renew our commitment to destroy capitalism, so that the people everywhere can live. Cuba’s socialist system shows the way.

Anti-war group calls for vigilance as battle for Syria continues

By David Sole The United National Anti-war Coalition has called upon anti-war activists across the United States to be vigilant against the growing threat of direct Western imperialist war on the Syrian government. ­UNAC’s recent statement said: “The ominous signs of impending war with Syria escalate. NATO is massing troops and military equipment on Syria’s borders, and preparing to install missiles aimed at Syria. U.S. warships are stationed off Syria’s coast.”

UNAC member groups like the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice responded by scheduling “the day after” demonstrations at the McNamara Federal Building in Detroit if the U.S. and NATO launch a direct attack on Syria.

Demonstrations broke out in many Turkish cities against the scheduled deployment of Patriot missiles along the Syrian border. Press TV and the FARS News Agency have given wide coverage to the thousands of students and others in the streets of the Turkish capital, Ankara, and other cities, some along the southern border. Thousands came out in Ankara on

Dec. 25, led by the Turkish Communist Party. Protesters burned U.S. and NATO flags and chanted against imperialism.

The actual military situation across Syria is difficult to determine as President Bashar al-Assad’s government army battles many rebel groups armed and encouraged by the U.S. and other Western powers. UNAC describes as the goal of the U.S. “to gain dominance in a part of the world that holds the vast majority of the known oil reserves.” Much of the Western press is clearly biased, collaborating with the U.S. State Department and the CIA in demonizing President Assad and preparing the public to support a war.

Direct intervention by the U.S. and its allies may be hastened by the failure of the “contra” rebels to win decisive victories and by the continued fighting ability of President Assad’s armed forces. In the central city of Homs, BBC News Online reported on Dec. 30 that government forces pushed rebels out of the Deir Baalbeh district after “days of fierce fighting.”

Other news reports throughout December describe the rebels as able to overrun government positions but not hold them.

A map of the fighting in Syria developed

by the Institute for the Study of War and released on Dec. 4 still shows the contras as mainly controlling areas in the north bordering Turkey, where they receive training and weapons.

The fighting for control of Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, in the north was featured in the New York Times of Dec. 28. The Times had to admit that the six-month battle exposed “the rebels’ difficulties in organizing a coherent campaign … and some of their fighters’ participation in … the summary killing of prisoners. It has also left rebels vulnerable to allegations of corruption, including the theft of much needed food and other aid.”

The destruction caused by this type of fighting is vast. Some estimates claim that up to 44,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands made homeless.

The United Nations estimates that a half million Syrian refugees have crossed into neighboring countries. The violence from the war in Syria could easily spread into Lebanon and Jordan.

Meanwhile, Washington is still having difficulty pasting together a united anti-Assad rebel leadership. Despite months of preparation and billions of dollars in

aid, the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces still exists mainly on paper.

The coalition, formed in Qatar in November 2012 with the guidance of the U.S. State Department, included the Jabhat al-Nusra militia. On Dec. 10, the U.S. State Department labeled the Nusra militia “a front for al-Qaeda” and listed them as a foreign terrorist organization. On Dec. 11, the Obama administration recognized the coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people, pledging hundreds of millions more in aid.

Another continuing difficulty for U.S. imperialist plans is the support given to the Syrian government by both Russia and China. Both are under increasing pressure from the imperialists to end that support.

UNAC concludes its anti-war statement: “We must all agree that the U.S. government has no right to impose its will on other countries, especially those formerly colonized and exploited by the West. … No U.S. or NATO intervention in the internal affairs of Syria! No war!

No sanctions! No intervention! Self-determination for the Syrian people!” ­[UNACpeace.org].

workers.org

Jan. 10, 2013

Page 9

2013: a year to free the Cuban 5

By Cheryl LaBash Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González and René González are five Cuban men held unjustly for their 15th year in U.S. prisons. An International Colloquium in Holguín, Cuba, Nov. 28 to Dec. 1, demonstrated the growing global demand to free these five and outlined united actions to advance that goal in 2013.

More than 330 delegates from 44 countries pledged to intensify the central demand that President Barack Obama use his humanitarian and constitutional powers to return the Cuban 5 to their homeland unconditionally; to support the habeas corpus appeal and the extensive support affidavit by defense attorney Martin Garbus with forums, debates and conferences of jurists exposing the unconstitutional and biased trial; to mobilize a 2013 “Five Days for the Cuban 5” in Washington, D.C.; and eleven additional initiatives to reach out to unions and religious congregations.

The delegates also demanded justice for the 73 people killed in the 1976 midair bombing over Barbados of Cubana flight 455, through extraditing Luis Posada Carriles from Miami to Venezuela. This already convicted bomber, who walks free on the streets of Miami, has been charged with that horrible crime.

The Cuban 5 are hostages to the U.S. imperialist drive, which predates the 1959 socialist revolution, to dominate the people of this largest Caribbean island. In his pamphlet, “Expanding Empire,” Vince Copeland explained: “The first real foreign war of the United States — the Spanish American War — took place almost simultaneously with the first real expansion in U.S. foreign investment. And that is the real secret of understanding that war, as it is of understanding all subsequent U.S. wars. …

“The war with Spain was motivated by the desire to exploit Cuba, Puerto Rico, the rest of Latin America and the Philippines, etc., and to get complete control of the Caribbean so as to facilitate the U.S. control of the contemplated Panama Canal and open up easier access to business expansion in Asia. It was a question of economic expansion and pretty much understood and openly explained as such at the time.” (workers.org/cm/empire1.html) The U.S. naval base and prison in occupied Guantánamo, Cuba — a prison Obama pledged to close in his first term (but has yet to do so) — is a vestige and reminder of the U.S. domination that followed the Spanish-American War. It is a symbol of the overt and covert U.S. aggression unceasing in the 54 years since

Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, Ramón Labañino Salazar, ­Antonio Guerrero Rodríguez, ­Fernando González Llort and Rene González ­Sehewert.

the Cuban revolution: invasion, assassination attempts, biological warfare, media slander campaigns and an economic blockade that thwarts but doesn’t stop Cuba’s socialist development or international solidarity.

Washington’s hostility to the Cuban revolution has continued unabated. In 2003, the George W. Bush administration formed a so-called “Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba,” even boldly publishing a 456-page regime-change plan for re-establishing capitalist exploitation over Cuba’s workers. But much else has changed. For 21 consecutive years in ever larger numbers the United Nations General Assembly votes repudiate the U.S. blockade.

According to an April 15 New York Times article, the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, “Ends with discord over Cuba.” Even Colombian host and U.S. ally, President Juan Manuel Santos, called the U.S. position “a cold war anachronism,” and said, “Hopefully within three years we will have Cuba as part of the summit.”

While the U.S. blockade cruelly costs such a small country working to overcome the legacy of colonialism and slavery, economic ties with Brazil, China, Venezuela and many other countries are growing.

Collaborative development through the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of the Americas (ALBA) helps all of its partners.

Growing Latin American unity can be seen in the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, formed in 2010 as an alternative to the U.S.-dominated Organization of American States.

According to Andrés Gómez, president of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and a Cuban who lives and organizes in Florida, the 2012 U.S. election showed another change.

“He said that 47 percent of Cubans living in that state voted for the Democratic candidate, 10 percent more than in the 2008 presidential elections. … This changing trend is due to demographic transformations of the emigration, because those emigrants from the 1960s and 1970s with a more hostile position toward Cuba, are now a minority below 2 percent of the Miami residents while their descendants maintain positions different from those of

their parents.” (Cuba News, Dec. 26) Mirta Rodríguez, mother of Antonio Guerrero, characterized the year 2013 as decisive in the fight for the liberation of the Cuban 5. On Dec. 24, Prensa Latina reported that she told the Nordic Brigade visiting Havana that mobilizing U.S. public opinion in favor of the cause to free

U.S. agent’s family calls for negotiations with Cuba

By Cheryl LaBash As of Dec. 3, U.S. Agency for International Development contractor Alan Gross has been in jail in Cuba for three years after his arrest on Dec. 3, 2009. He was subsequently convicted of installing secret communication devices in three cities on the island and sentenced to 15 years. On Nov. 16, Gross’ family filed suit against USAID and the U.S. government, calling on the U.S. to sit down with the Cuban government to discuss releasing him.

On Dec. 1 and again on Dec. 2, viewers of NBC evening network news saw a report by investigative journalist Michael Isikoff that included coverage of Gerardo Hernandez and his spouse Adriana Perez. One of the Cuban 5, Hernandez was sentenced to two life terms plus 15 years for protecting his Cuban homeland from hotel bombers and other paramilitary gangs based in Florida — perpetrators of a violent war against Cubans and tourists.

This war has taken thousands of lives over more than 50 years.

Essentially, Hernandez and his four comrades were in the U.S. to provide ­intelligence to Cuba to defend against U.S.-based terrorism. Its aim is to defeat the sovereign right of the Cuban people to choose their own socialist economic system.

Isikoff’s story revolved around the

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anniversary of the arrest of Alan Gross.

Coached by the U.S. State Department, the media spin in 2009 falsely portrayed Gross as a humanitarian providing better internet communication for Cuba’s Jewish community. Not even staunch repetition could make that story fly after an Associated Press investigative report by Desmond Butler broke on Feb.13, 2012.

Originally written in October 2011, the heavily fact-checked article revealed that Gross, traveling on a tourist visa, involved other innocent travelers to transport his equipment in their luggage. But Gross was a U.S. government contractor installing “a specialized mobile phone chip that experts say is often used by the Pentagon and the CIA to make satellite signals virtually impossible to track,” among other devices. (Business Week, Feb. 13, 2012) In a new turn, the Gross family filed suit in U.S. federal court asking for damages from Gross’s employer, Development Alternatives, Inc., and the United States of America. They are now calling on the U.S. government to negotiate with Cuba without preconditions. Cuba has already expressed willingness to discuss the situation of Alan Gross and other issues of mutual interest, but so far the U.S. has refused.

The obvious solution is a prisoner exchange of Gross for the Cuban 5, as the NBC coverage implied.

Portugal’s railroad workers strike

By G. Dunkel

Low-Wage Capitalism

her son and his four comrades requires breaking the wall of silence surrounding the case that exists in the U.S. LaBash represented WW newspaper at the Holguín Colloquium. On Facebook, “like” Friends of the Cuban 5. For more information, go to theCuban5.org, antiterroristas.cu or freethefive.org

To get a loan from the Euro Zone and the International Monetary Fund, the Portugal rightist government was only too happy to dissolve its laws protecting workers. Now bosses are allowed to change hours and working conditions according to their wishes, to lay off workers at will and to ignore vacations and holidays. The government has adopted a strict austerity policy.

Various unions have been using partial strikes to protest these changes and put pressure on the bosses. Since June, the railroad workers strike every holiday.

The railroad strike Christmas Day was

particularly effective. Besides the railroad workers, the bus operators and light rail workers in the Lisbon area went out, almost completely paralyzing mass transit in Portugal’s largest and capital city.

Since October, dock workers at Portugal’s four main ports — Lisbon, Setubal (south), Figueira da Foz (center) and Aveiro (north) — did not work the midnight to 5 a.m. shift, weekends and holidays. This partial strike, costing the Portuguese economy 400 million euros a month, forced manufacturers to ship through Spain.

After the bosses agreed to negotiate, the dockers suspended their strike­ Dec. 28.

Page 10

Jan. 10, 2013

workers.org

editorials

Emancipation and incarceration

E

ven as the U.S. officially celebrates the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans make up the largest portion of this country’s enormous prison population.

The great hopes generated by that document brought a flood of Black men escaping from chattel slavery into the ranks of the Union Army, thus turning the tide of the Civil War. But their hopes for real freedom were dashed in 1877 when the government, dominated by Northern industrialists and bankers, made their “Great Compromise” with the wealthy Southern landowners. Northern troops were withdrawn, allowing Ku Klux Klan-type terror to force Black farmers back onto the plantations in a new kind of slavery, the sharecropping system.

This brutal history and the generations of both official and extra-legal racial discrimination that followed partially explain why today, of the 2.6 million men and women caught in the U.S. “justice” system, the largest group is African Americans, with Latinos/as, Native people and poor whites making up almost all the rest.

Michelle Alexander’s book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” examines this ugly reality in profound depth and is a great

contribution to rising consciousness on the true character of U.S. “democracy.”

Even such a brutal legacy can be overcome, however. Certainly, tens of millions hoped it would be when they voted in the first African-American president four years ago, and then re-elected Barack Obama this past November.

What stands in the way? It is the decline and degeneration of the capitalist system itself.

When the U.S. went through a great industrial boom after World War II, it looked as though the new opportunities opening up for Black people in cities like Detroit, Chicago, New York and Oakland, Calif., would undermine the hold of racism in the country. And the movement of millions for civil rights overcame segregation and Jim Crow.

But today capitalism is in a jobless crisis that has torpedoed the hopes of workers in these and many other cities and towns. With massive, permanent unemployment, racism becomes a major factor in how the state disposes of “surplus” workers by throwing many of them behind bars.

There is now great potential for a united fightback, led by the most militant and conscious workers, those who have suffered the most. It must take on the issue of the racist state and demand: Mass emancipation, not mass incarceration!

What fiscal cliff?

By Mumia Abu-Jamal Taken from a Dec. 11 audio column at prisonradio.org.

From every TV and radio news broadcast, the words “fiscal cliff” are being mentioned, in a tone and frequency of dread and fear.

Listeners, viewers and readers can sense the dread and faux fear, but little clarity arises from the dust.

What is the fiscal cliff?

It is a political creation — made by Congress itself, as a self-made rule to force agreement (but really to blackmail political opponents), or else massive cuts will be automatically made in defense, social services and other government programs.

In the Mel Brooks-made cowboy comedy “Blazing Saddles,” a Black sheriff moseys into town to the shock and surprise of the white townspeople. When things get ugly, the sheriff, played by actor Cleavon Little (1939-1992), pulls out his Colt .45 and points it at himself, warning them to get back, or else he’ll shoot.

The fiscal cliff? It’s “Blazing Saddles.”

But it’s no comedy.

As Workers World’s Larry Holmes sees it, this so-called “fiscal cliff” is a recent political invention designed to erect an American austerity program — cutbacks in social services so that more money could be sucked up by the ruling 1%.

Holmes, in remarks made to a recent Workers World party conference, made the following analysis: “We are going to hear a lot about the so-called ‘fiscal cliff.’ It is worldwide austerity. In Greece, in Spain, in Portugal, in Ireland, in South Africa, all throughout Latin America and here in the U.S. From the point of view of the capitalists, the idea is to fix their system on the backs of the workers. They can’t get it from profits because of overproduction, so let’s just go literally into the body of the workers and get more pounds of flesh by stealing things from them. It is a mad, insane exercise in destruction, social destruction.

It really should be called ‘the terminal crisis-of-capitalism cliff.’” (workers.org) In sum, this is economic warfare parading as a political conflict between two capitalist parties. It is a self-made squabble among brothers.

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Emancipation Proclamation and Night Watch

By Dolores Cox Jan. 1, 2013, is the 150th anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. Effective Jan. 1, 1863, during the Civil War, the document declared that enslaved people of African descent in all states rebelling against the Union would be “forever free.” In commemoration of this anniversary, the U.S. Postal Service will be issuing a stamp.

Months earlier, Lincoln announced that if Confederate states did not cease fighting and rejoin the Union by Jan. 1, all enslaved people in those states or areas would be declared free from that day forward.

The Proclamation gave hope to those enslaved, who gathered the night of Dec. 31, 1862, in their churches waiting up to midnight for word of their freedom, by word of mouth, telegraph or newspaper.

The Proclamation did not itself immediately free the four million enslaved people nor could it be enforced in areas under control of the secessionist Confederacy, which ignored it. And it didn’t apply to slave-holding states that hadn’t rebelled against the Union. But it paved the way for the abolition of slavery under the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ratified on Dec. 6, 1865. The 15th Amendment, passed during Reconstruction on Feb. 3, 1870, supposedly gave all male U.S. citizens the right to vote regardless of race, color or past servitude.

This amendment did not apply to any African Americans, male or female, in the South until 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was enacted through mass struggle.

Freedom delayed In Galveston, Texas, freedom didn’t come until 1865. News of the emanci-

pation was suppressed due to the overwhelming influence of slave owners. June 19th is considered the effective date when the last enslaved people discovered slavery had ended.

The date is known as “Juneteenth” and is recognized and celebrated as the “Fourth of July” for many Black people in the U.S. When the United States gained its independence from the British, Black people were still enslaved. In 1963, a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place. It attracted 250,000 people.

The tradition of “Watch Night” is deeply rooted in the history of African Americans, especially at a time when the community is still struggling. New Year’s Eve church services in Black churches still celebrate the day before the Proclamation became law. The five-page document may be read aloud at these services. And possibly a sermon may address the progressive and sometimes regressive moves that Black people have struggled and continue to struggle through.

Enslaved people inside the U.S. lived under one of the most inhumane experiences in human history. And the wealth created by more than 200 years of their free labor has benefited mainly the 1% — the ruling class — and least of all, African Americans themselves. The legacy of slavery still divides those who live inside the U.S. — a morally corrupt country that thrives on policies that help reinforce racist attitudes of Black people as being inferior, even subhuman.

Racism continues to be tolerated, insidious and pervasive. Every day in the U.S., African Americans are reminded of their slavery legacy. Therefore, social justice is still being fought for daily.

Fiscal axe aimed at Social Security Struggle can still stop austerity cuts Continued from page 1 low-wage workers have meant billions and billions in profits for the global corporations. At the same time the globalization of the job market has empowered them to slash the wages of workers in the U.S. as well as throw millions out of our jobs and our homes.

So they have hoarded this vast wealth, kept safe by their well-heeled millionaire servants in Congress — 47 percent of Congress are millionaires. (Center for Responsive Politics) Why aren’t they investing much of it in new production? Because now that they have created this vast global system, it has become clear that they cannot sell all the goods and services the workers can produce — at least, not at prices that would produce the rate of profit the capitalist sys-

tem demands. So they see the workers as a “burden” and are out to slash every hardwon gain, from pensions and health care and education to the right to unionize.

They must be made to know that these attacks on the workers will create even more resistance. The Occupy movement, with its focus on the immense wealth of the 1%, is already a testament to the rising tide of anger and organized resistance to the capitalist crisis. Mass worker demonstrations at state capitals in Wisconsin and Michigan have shown that a fightback spirit is rising. European workers have already begun continental campaigns of huge demonstrations and general strikes.

In the end, these issues will not be settled in the halls of the legislatures. They will be settled in the streets.

Marxism, Reparations & the Black Freedom Struggle An anthology of writings from Workers World newspaper. Edited by Monica Moorehead. Includes: Racism, National Oppression & Self-Determination Larry Holmes Black Labor from Chattel Slavery to Wage Slavery Sam Marcy Black Youth: Repression & Resistance LeiLani Dowell The Struggle for Socialism Is Key Monica Moorehead Domestic Workers United Demand Passage of a Bill of Rights Imani Henry Black & Brown Unity: A Pillar of Struggle for Human Rights & Global Justice! Saladin Muhammad Alabama’s Black Belt: Legacy of Slavery, Sharecropping & Segregation Consuela Lee Harriet Tubman, Woman Warrior Mumia Abu-Jamal Are Conditions Ripe Again Today? Anniversary of the 1965 Watts Rebellion John Parker Racism & Poverty in the Delta Larry Hales Available on amazon.com Haiti Needs Reparations, Not Sanctions Pat Chin and other bookstores

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Jan. 10, 2013

Page 11

U.S. to deploy troops to 35 African countries

War Without Victory

by Sara Flounders “By revealing the underbelly of the empire, Flounders sheds insight on how to stand up to the imperialist war machine and, in so doing, save ourselves and humanity.”

– Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, Pres. of U.N. Gen. Ass., 2008-2009, Foreign Min. of Nicaragua’s Sandinista gov. 1979-1990

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With the formation of AFRICOM in 2008, the U.S. has intensified its military interventionist policies in Africa. The war against Libya in 2011 represented the first full-scale AFRICOM operation on the continent.

This operation in Libya resulted in a partnership with NATO and other allied states in the region, including Egypt and Qatar. Over the course of the operation, imperialist forces flew 26,000 sorties over Libya and carried out some 9,600 air strikes, killing tens of thousands of people and displacing as many as 2 million Libyans and foreign nationals working and living in the oil-rich state.

Nonetheless, the war against Libya has brought neither peace nor stability to the country and the region. Internal political divisions among the pro-U.S. rebel units and the ongoing resistance by the loyalist forces have required the escalation of Pentagon and intelligence personnel on the ground.

The attacks on Sept. 11, 2012, that destroyed the so-called U.S. Consulate and annex in Benghazi were a clear indication of the failed nature of the Libya project.

The attacks resulted in the deaths of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and other personnel, which included CIA and Navy Seal operatives.

In the immediate aftermath of the Benghazi attacks, the Obama administration announced the deployment of at least 50 Marines and a team of FBI agents, as well as dispatching additional warships in the Mediterranean off the coast of Libya and placing more drones over this North African state.

The political fallout in the aftermath of the Libya attacks exposed the administration’s cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the destruction of the U.S. compound. Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was forced to take the fall in the subsequent scandal that revealed the false characterization and information promoted by the White House.

In Mali, where a military coup took place in March 2012, the administration is seeking, through AFRICOM, to deploy regional forces through the Economic Community of West African States. The pretext is that they are supposedly part of an effort to curtail and eliminate groups linked to al-Qaeda. Such groups have

youth and students, immigrant and workers' organizations in order build a progressive movement for social justice and change.

423 Ultimately it is our goal to work towards the liberation and freedom of all peoples living in the U.S. and around the world.

Africa & Imperialism

Articles by Abayomi Azikiwe from the pages of Workers World n Africa struggles against imperialism n WikiLeaks on U.S. role in Africa n Tunisian masses rebel n South African workers strike n Famine in the Sahel n Women at forefront of liberation struggles n Africa increases trade with China

Continues existing policy

been operating in the north of the coun- imperialists to pursue their interventry, which has been effectively partitioned tionist policies in Africa. Led by the U.S.,

by Tuareg elements divided between na- France, Britain and other NATO states are escalating their involvement to secure tionalists and Islamists.

However, the Malian government had oil and other strategic resources that are maintained agreements with the Pen- abundant throughout all regions of the tagon for several years leading up to the ­c­ontinent.

Also, Washington and its allies perceive coup, which involved joint training and the growing role of the People’s Republic war games.

But U.S. military cooperation with the of China as a threat to imperialist interMalian armed forces did not provide the ests through its economic partnership capacity for the government to halt the agreements with various African state.

Tuareg insurgency in the north or prevent The Conference on China-Africa Coopthe coup. Additional Pentagon interven- eration, founded in 2000, has held five summit meetings, with the most recent in tion can only lead to further instability.

Somalia has been a battleground for 2012 in Beijing.

China is the largest trading partner U.S. military forces for the last two decades when in 1992 the Pentagon, during with the African Union bloc, and this the George H.W. Bush administration, de- cooperation is poised to grow over the ployed 12,000 Marines in what was called coming period. Africa, impacted severely “Operation Restore Hope.” In a matter of by the global crisis, will continue to be a months, Somalis mobilized an anti-occu- battleground for the West in their futile pation resistance war that led to the deaths efforts at maintaining economic, military and political dominance. of U.S. troops and thousands of Somalis.

This new U.S. threat requires the interDuring the Clinton administration, both U.S. military forces and U.N. troops vention of anti-war and peace movements in the U.S. The United National Anti-War had to withdraw.

Nevertheless, U.S. intervention in So- Coalition, the largest and most represenmalia has continued and intensified over tative of the anti-interventionist alliances, the last six years through the deployment is issuing a statement opposing the most of Washington’s Ethiopian ally in 2006 recent Pentagon initiatives in Africa.

UNAC has held two national conferand in more recent years with the occupation by the African Union Mission to the ences since 2010 that have drawn huge Somalia and the Kenya Defense Forces participation from throughout the U.S. and internationally. This included a mass since 2011.

At present over 17,000 African troops demonstration in New York City which allied with the Pentagon and the CIA are attracted thousands in the spring of 2011 occupying Somalia, but this Horn of Afri- against the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya and Iraq. ca state is still unstable.

It was UNAC that called and led the On Dec. 30, the Obama administration announced that it was deploying 50 troops anti-NATO demonstrations that attracted to Chad in order to assist in the evacuation 15,000 people to Chicago during the milof U.S. personnel from the neighboring itary alliance’s summit in May 2012. This Central African Republic, where there is organization is seeking to hold a national now a civil war against the government of campaign against drones in 2013.

President Francois Bozize.

The U.S. had already targeted CAR for intervention in October 2011. Then the White House announced that it was dispatching Special Forces and advisors to ostensibly assist in tracking down members of the Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA is a rebel group started in northern Uganda, itself a close ally of Washington. (Press TV, Dec. 30) In the October 2011 deployments, four states were targeted: CAR, Uganda, South Sudan and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

All these states have natural resources that are key to the U.S. and the world capitalist S at u r d ay system. This is the underlying reason behind the Pentagon and CIA’s escalating involvement on the continent. river Side Church ChurCh • 490 riverSide drive • New Riverside • 490 Riverside Drive • New York york City

t of two small rooms e. From then to now, en carried out by a ers, working in ith other people’s bilizes for change tions, classes, fact rnet, web sites, ing, and more to nd disinformation. e on a daily basis nizations. o building broads to oppose ting against racism, ng repression and mass incarceration, tion of workers here at home. With paign, the IAC strives to draw from e struggles, and bring together comlesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer people,

The Barack Obama administration revealed plans to deploy 3,500 troops to nearly three dozen African states to purportedly address a looming “al-Qaeda threat,” according to a Dec. 24 statement.

The Pentagon is dispatching soldiers from the 2nd Brigade’s Heavy Combat Team of the 1st Infantry Division based in Fort Riley, Kan. Official reports indicate that the Pentagon forces will operate as small units in conjunction with various governments, including Libya, Somalia, Niger, Mali, among others. Gen. Carter L. Ham, commander of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), made it appear as if this is a new initiative on the part of Washington. Yet it is a continuation of the ongoing policy that has accelerated under the current administration.

A key figure in this project, set to begin in March, is Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who headed the Multi-National Force during the later years of the Iraq occupation. The White House claims the military teams will be involved only in training and equipping efforts and not direct military combat operations.

Gen. Odierno said in late December that the idea for this type of training mission came to him while he was commanding U.S. and allied forces in Iraq, an overall operation that lasted nearly nine years.

(Washington Times, Dec. 23) Despite this disclaimer, Odierno said the mission will represent a different military orientation toward the continent. He claims, “In the past, we just said, ‘Hey, if you need us, call us and we’ll be there,’ but now it’s much more specific.” He says being on hand in the countries will make U.S. intervention more effective.

Such a statement by the former commanding officer in Iraq suggests a more aggressive military role for the Pentagon in Africa. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the same type of rhetoric was fed to the public regarding the character of those occupations.

Odierno, who has been in the U.S. military since the war against Vietnam and southeast Asia, typifies imperialist notions that the Pentagon can deeply penetrate the societal cultures and win over various population groups in order to reach Washington’s objectives. Though this was the game plan in Iraq and Afghanistan, the level of resistance to foreign occupation grew substantially over the period of the Pentagon’s occupation.

This strategy uses what the Pentagon calls the “Regionally Aligned Forces” model. It is designed to train and coordinate military structures from the African states in order to attack those forces Washington considers are operating contrary to U.S. economic and political interests. This effort will also draw in other imperialist states from NATO, including Britain.

British Col. James Learmont, an exchange officer working with the Pentagon on the deployment project, said in the same article, “Responsiveness is a pretty key component of this because everybody

wants us to be more responsive — in other words, quicker. … [B]y aligning ourselves with combatant commands, it gives them more capability, capacity and the ability to respond quicker.”

The official line is that the U.S. and its NATO allies will avoid direct military offensive operations. But Col. Learmont exposed this lie by admitting, “If their combatant commander does require something that falls into the operational bandwagon, then we have the facilities to react to that with the approval of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff.”

Consequently, if the mission deems it necessary, actions will be carried out that are solely dependent upon U.S. capabilities.

423

By Abayomi Azikiwe Editor, Pan-African News Wire

The International Action Center

presents a Birthday/Anniversary

Ga�a

January 12, 2013

Imperialism in crisis The continuing economic malaise in the capitalist countries is compelling the

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

Ramsey Clark

Founder of the International Action Center, Former U.S. Attorney General Human rights lawyer & international advocate of people’s rights 5 p.m. Hors d’oeuvres 6 p.m. Program & dinner buffet (halal and vegetarian foods included)

• • Tickets must be reserved in advance. To buy your ticket now; • To make a donation to support the publication of anthology of Ramsey Clark’s articles; • To donate to continue the work of the International Action Center; go to RamseyClarkIACgala.com or www.IACenter.org View latest GALA news at ramseyclarkiacgala.com/ Like us at www.facebook.com/RamseyClarkIACGala

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¡Proletarios y oprimidos de todos los paises unios!

La tragedia de Sandy Hook

Las armas no son su verdadero origen Por Larry Hales Traducción de Ricardo Garcia Pérez, revisado por MO. A la mayoría de las personas les resulta inconcebible que haya alguien capaz de hacer daño a un niño de forma deliberada. En realidad, la mayoría experimentaría idéntica reacción ante la cruel desconsideración de poner en peligro la vida de un joven.

De manera que cuando empezó a difundirse la noticia del reciente tiroteo en la Escuela de Educación Primaria Sandy Hook de Newtown, en Connecticut, no cabe duda de que la primera reacción, sobre todo de los padres y madres, fuera de pavor.

Eran niños pequeños entre las edades de 6 y 7 años, que empezaban a tener cognición del mundo que les rodeaba, con la mirada resplandeciente, aparentemente con todas las posibilidades a su alcance, pero su luz se extinguió.

Fue crudo, casi inimaginable, pero sucedió; 20 vidas jóvenes junto con las de seis educadores y otro personal no docente. La madre del presunto asesino, que fue hallada con cuatro disparos en la cabeza, todavía estaba en pijama. Y la del propio asesino, de solo veinte años, que a todas luces se suicidó. Todos desaparecidos, muertos.

No debería suceder, pero sucedió y sucede. El tiroteo de Sandy Hook del 14 de diciembre está siendo calificado como la segunda matanza más importante en un centro educativo, detrás de la ocurrida en el Politécnico de Virginia en el año 2007. No ha sido un suceso aislado en este país. Ni siquiera este año.

Aunque parece que ha pasado mucho tiempo porque los medios de comunicación han dejado de hablar de ella, la matanza del teatro Century 16 del centro comercial Aurora, cerca de Denver, sucedió tan solo en el mes de julio. En total, en el año 2012 se han registrado en Estados Unidos más de una docena de matanzas masivas a tiros.

En algunas, como en la de Oak Creek, en Wisconsin, donde un supremacista blanco entró en un templo sij y mató a siete personas, los motivos están claros. En otras, como en la de Aurora y en esta última de Sandy Hook, no parece haber una razón particular que impulsara al presunto asesino a matar.

Como sucedió en la de Aurora con James Holmes, los medios de comunicación han presentado a Adam Lanza, el varón blanco de 20 años que presuntamente cometió los asesinatos de Sandy Hook, como un pistolero solitario perturbado, pero muy inteligente. Se dice que tenía pocos amigos, pocas relaciones incluso, que guardaba distancia con su propio hermano mayor, de quien llevaba su identificación. Amistades de Nancy Lanza, la madre de Adam, afirman que ella raras veces daba detalles de los problemas que tenía con él.

A Adam también se le ha caracterizado como alguien sin emociones, incapaz de sentir dolor físico según un ex consejero, Richard Novia, que además fue el jefe de seguridad del distrito escolar hasta el año

2008. Su hermano mayor, Ryan, afirma que Adam sufría trastornos de personalidad, tal vez síndrome de Asperger. Pero los expertos dicen que eso no le predispondría en modo alguno para ejercer violencia de forma premeditada.

Adam fue apartado de la escuela durante un breve periodo de tiempo y fue escolarizado en su casa. Según las autoridades educativas, se le asignó un psicólogo. Su tía, Marsha Lanza, recuerda a la madre de Adam lidiando con la escuela para asegurarse de que su hijo recibiera las atenciones que necesitaba.

Nancy Lanza, su madre, fue también una de las personas que enseñó a Adam a disparar. Tenía docenas de armas y se la ha calificado como una de las llamadas “survivalist” [obsesionada con catástrofes] extravertida. Como no consiguió comprar un rifle dos días antes del tiroteo de la escuela, Adam utilizó finalmente las armas que su madre tenía en casa.

Las causas subyacentes ¿Es a esto a lo que se reduce todo? ¿Es el meollo de esta cuestión que el joven tenía acceso a numerosas armas de fuego? ¿O se trata de algo más profundo? ¿Qué impulsaría a alguien tan joven a cometer un acto tan abyecto?

Las causas subyacentes de semejante acto nacen de las contradicciones fundamentales de la sociedad moderna en esta coyuntura de la historia y en la economía política estadounidense en particular. La política y la superestructura también están conformadas por la base económica.

Además, debemos señalar la burda hipocresía de la narración que ofrecen los medios de comunicación dominantes y los políticos que aparecen para manifestar su dolor a las familias que lo sufren.

La vida es algo valioso, y la de una persona joven mucho más. La mayoría de las personas piensa que la vida de un joven rebosa potencialidades. Como es natural, para algunos/as se abren más posibilidades que para otros/as debido a su riqueza material, su prestigio, su nacionalidad o su expresión del género. Pero las cosas cambian. Donde hay vida, hay posibilidad de cambio. Los menores que perdieron la vida podrían haber sido agentes para hacer del mundo un lugar mejor.

Cuando el presidente Obama manifestó su condolencia y habló de responsabilizarse de los niños de otros y de dar a los niños la posibilidad de que vivan su vida felices, quizá no pensaba en los niños de Pakistán que han perdido su vida por ataques de los aviones estadounidenses no tripulados.

Tal vez no había pensado en los niños de Gaza, que murieron por bombas lanzadas por Israel pero financiadas por Estados Unidos, ni en los niños de Iraq o los niños de cualquier otro lugar que sufren a causa de las políticas de guerra y la estrangulación económica estadounidense.

Quizá no haya pensado en los millones de niños que mueren de hambre cada año a causa de la desestabilización neoliberal de las economías de países subdesarrollados.

Seguramente no pensó en los niños de progenitores deportados. O en Trayvon Martin, o Jordan Davis, o en los niños y

nietos de Anthony Anderson, que fue asesinado por la policía de Baltimore. Seguramente no conoce el nombre de Ramarley Graham, ni de los muchos cuyas vidas se perdieron a causa de la brutalidad policial. Ni en quienes murieron por falta de atención sanitaria o acabaron olvidados por la paulatina desaparición de las redes de protección social.

Los medios de comunicación no hablan de nada de lo anterior. Aunque, claro está, la vida de un niño palestino no vale menos que la de uno de los niños pequeños muertos en la Escuela Primaria de Sandy Hook.

Sin embargo, el hecho de que parezca depositarse mayor valor en una vida que en otra, y de que los medios de comunicación y los políticos puedan hablar con generalizaciones sobre lo valiosa que es la vida de un menor al tiempo que persisten y ponen en práctica políticas que conducen al sufrimiento de centenares de millones de ellos, sólo empieza a acercarse al meollo de la cuestión.

Adam Lanza no se crió tras un caparazón impenetrable, sufriera o no de algún trastorno de la personalidad. Sus acciones y el acto final que presuntamente ha cometido resulta darse en un contexto social.

Siglos de cultura de las armas Hay, no cabe duda, una cultura de las armas. Sin embargo, quienes promueven una regulación de la tenencia de armas aspiran a que se produzcan cambios en la superestructura legal; en que la legislación dificulte adquirir o almacenar armas.

La Asociación Nacional del Rifle destina millones de dólares cada año a mantener grupos de presión, así como la Asociación de Propietarios de Armas de Estados Unidos (Gun Owners of America) y otras organizaciones similares. Los fabricantes de armas han estado obtenido beneficios récord.

En los últimos años, Sturm Ruger y Smith & Wesson, responsables del 30 por ciento de las pistolas existentes en Estados Unidos, han visto cómo se han disparado las ventas. Aquí las armas representan un sector que factura 4.100 millones de dólares anuales.

Estas cifras solo corresponden a la industria de las armas de fuego de uso personal, no a la de los grandes fabricantes de armamento como General Electric, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin y demás empresas que reciben del gobierno federal decenas de miles de millones de dólares anuales.

De todas formas, la cultura de las armas es algo más que eso. Estados Unidos se forjó a base de conquistar tierras, tierras arrebatadas a sus habitantes originales, que fueron masacrados: hombres, mujeres y niños. Naciones y pueblos enteros desaparecieron muertos por armas de fuego, cuchillos y una forma incipiente de guerra biológica según la cual se empleaban materiales contaminados para introducir enfermedades extrañas en los pueblos indígenas.

La esclavitud se mantuvo con la fuerza de las armas y con una violencia atroz que fue testigo de la aparición del primer cuerpo policial normalizado: los cazadores de esclavos. Hasta el día de hoy, ha sido la violencia lo que ha mantenido la he-

gemonía política y económica estadounidense en la mayor parte del mundo.

El predomino de Estados Unidos está al servicio de una clase reducida que debe sus orígenes a la fundación de Estados Unidos y del capitalismo. Estados Unidos y Europa occidental no deben su riqueza al ingenio, ni a la supremacía de las poblaciones de sus respectivos países, sino a la agresión descarnada, el robo, la esclavitud, la violación y el genocidio. Como escribió Walter Rodney en De cómo Europa subdesarrolló a África , “el desarrollo de Europa [forma] parte del mismo proceso dialéctico por el cual África quedó subdesarrollada”. Eso mismo se puede decir de Estados Unidos en relación con el resto del planeta.

Así es como nació la cultura de las armas, una cultura de la violencia. No es más que el simple reflejo del actual orden social mundial.

Violencia, privilegios y alienación Este es el contexto en el que Adam Lanza se educó: un contexto de violencia, privilegios y, también, de profundo aislamiento. Aunque Lanza pudo haberse visto rodeado de toda clase de cosas materiales, cosas que la inmensa mayoría de la población del planeta jamás verá, hay un vacío profundo en el hecho de simplemente poseer objetos.

La sociedad capitalista fomenta el individualismo, la competición por la supervivencia. En la sociedad estadounidense moderna las personas viven alienadas del fruto de su trabajo y entre sí. La cultura consumista que las revistas liberales tanto critican es una manifestación de la alienación en la sociedad capitalista moderna, que es parte de la cultura decadente que se va madurando más, generación tras generación.

Se le ha echado la culpa a las armas.

Se hacen llamados para leyes de control de armas más estrictas, lo que dejaría el monopolio de la violencia a la policía, que sustenta las actuales relaciones sociales.

Pero el verdadero motivo del incremento de este tipo de actos y del trastornado estado en que viven los jóvenes es el [actual] orden social.

Quizá las familias de los niños que murieron en Sandy Hook no puedan nunca reponerse de verdad. ¿Cómo van a poder hacerlo si llegarán las fechas de sus cumpleaños y las voces de esos valiosos niños no se escucharán y jamás se materializará todo su potencial?

A veces, la ciencia puede resultar insensible, pero en el núcleo de un revolucionario anida el deseo de cambiar el mundo, de ver desmoronarse el viejo orden en pos de algo mejor, más humano, basado en asegurar que todas las personas de la sociedad tengan un porvenir.

El único modo de empezar a afrontar una tragedia como la matanza de Sandy Hook es abordar los problemas fundamentales que existen. En última instancia, es al sistema capitalista al que hay que culpar. Mientras exista, la vida de los niños corre peligro, ya sea por la violencia, el hambre, la negligencia o las catástrofes originadas por el calentamiento global.

Todo ello está basado en un sistema que ya ha sobrepasado su utilidad.