They say it's recovering, because housing sales are up. Yes, but why are the selling prices going down? Because banks are dumping their toxic mortgages as fast as they can. The dumping is lowering prices, undercutting still more those homeowners trying to sell their homes. Going deeper underwater is not a recovery!

They say it's recovering, because the unemployment rate is getting better. But why is the number getting better? Because the workers who long ago exhausted their benefits are now dropping off the charts. So many are discouraged that they don't look for work every month. The government doesn't count these workers -- sweeps them aside like they aren't there anymore.

In the two months before Christmas, only 300,000 more people found work -- temporary work for the holiday season. But what about the 24 million workers who need work NOW? At that rate, it would take more than 13 years to employ 24 million -- even if Christmas came every two months!

The politicians tell us to elect them either because they are businessmen, or, because they will give tax breaks to help businessmen, whom they call "job creators." Only in the mouths of liars hired to sell the idea that down is up and up is down! Businessmen as a group have laid off 6.3 million workers since the beginning of 2008. Job eliminators!

But maybe the "job creators" simply lost too much money and couldn't pay workers to keep working? Just the opposite! While laying off millions of workers, the corporations, banks and investment funds were stockpiling billions in cash. Too much cash to count.

Today the "private equity" investment funds as a group have over half a trillion dollars in unspent cash hoards. And corporate giants as a group hold more than two trillion more dollars, stashed away unspent. The banks as a group have many trillions more, gifted to them by the government bailouts. The capitalists call this "dry powder" -- money laying in storage.

In storage, when 24 million workers need work! In storage, when society's basic infrastructure -- housing, schools, utilities, roads -- is falling to pieces.

The capitalists say it's their money. But, no. Money represents a social product. It can be a social tool. Value is created by the daily work of millions, using machinery and materials worked up by earlier millions. Money represents accumulated social value.

Society needs that money, now. It must be put to work -- regardless of the claims of a few greedy hoarders.

Those many trillions of dollars could provide jobs for everyone who wants to work. If the demand for goods isn't enough at first to employ everyone for a full 40 hours, then the work can be shared out, while everyone gets a full check to live on. The bosses have jammed three people's jobs into one, already. Every job can be slowed down, made safer, unwound back to three jobs.

Those several trillions of "dry powder" could be taken and used by society to provide a decent improved standard of living. Houses could be well fixed up, medical care could be well provided, students could be well educated, public services could be well restored. Needed work of all sorts could be done and done well -- if those hoarded trillions were put to intelligent use, invested in real work.

The resources exist. The housing that is now vacant, the office buildings now standing empty "for lease," the factories now chained shut, the equipment and tooling now idle -- and yes, the money now hoarded up. Everything is right here at hand, all that society needs to hum and come to life again, and promote the general welfare.

The workers who have produced society's store of "dry powder" have a right to reclaim it, and put it to work, doing the work that needs doing.

Romney's "defense"? That's how "investment income" is taxed. It's true -- in the past two decades, the White House and Congress, under both Republican and Democratic control, worked together to pass one tax cut after another on "capital gains."

The accurate name for that type of income is unearned income. While workers face higher and higher taxes on the money they earn from their work, those who make money on money -- that is, the rich -- pay less and less tax. According to the Congressional Research Service, after-tax income, adjusted for inflation, rose by about 75 per cent for the top 1 per cent from 1996 to 2006, while it dropped by about 5 per cent for the bottom 20 per cent. And the top 0.1 per cent doubled their income.

Yes, Romney, who uses his money to get even richer, needs to be put on the hot seat. But how about the rest of his class -- the big industrialists, bankers and "private equity" speculators?

How much is "not very much"? More than $374,000 from February 2010 to February 2011!

For that amount, many of us have to do real work for 10 years, clocking in and out every single day.

Sure would be -- and our biggest risk comes from religious fanatics (or cynical politicians) like Santorum. He would like the United States to be governed by Biblical, Old Testament law.

What?! He thinks there's a difference?

Would he like to enforce Biblical prohibitions against abortion and homosexuality? Undoubtedly -- that's part of his right-wing platform. How about contraception, adultery, or children talking back to their parents? All are forbidden in the Old Testament -- and all are punishable by death!

How is Santorum's Christian backwardness any different from the Taliban's Muslim backwardness? Religious reaction is religious reaction -- no matter which religion it is.

Michigan's real unemployment rate in the 2011 fiscal year was at 19.2% -- when you include all those without jobs who are left out of the official statistics -- discouraged and part-time workers.

This new law will drive down wages by pressuring workers to accept a lower-paying job when their unemployment insurance is cut.

"Reform" -- it's another word for giving more money to business!

People who know Ocampo painted a picture of him that's anything but that of a gruesome murderer. In fact, he was known to be compassionate and generous to the poor and homeless.

Ocampo himself comes from a family that has lived with the reality of unemployment and homelessness. His father lost his job as a warehouse manager in 2005, and has not found steady employment since then.

Ocampo is an Iraq war veteran. In 2006, the year after his father lost his job, the younger Ocampo joined the Marines. A friend who had basic training with Ocampo said he was "really motivated" and "gung- ho" then.

Ocampo acted very differently when he came back in 2010 after two years of deployment in Iraq. A roommate said he would wake up screaming twice a week. His brother said he would look for bombs in the closets and bathrooms at home. He had trembling hands and hallucinations. His behavior got worse when a Marine friend was killed in Afghanistan.

Upon his return from Iraq, Ocampo also found his father living under a bridge. And he himself met the scourge of unemployment. His brother said Ocampo was always applying for jobs, including at Wal-Mart and other stores, but they would never call him back.

Whatever led him to become a ruthless murderer, if he is the one who killed these men -- one thing is for certain: Izzy Ocampo is a victim of the Iraq war and unemployment.

And the four homeless men who were killed are victims of a war as well -- for there are two different kinds of wars going on. One is waged by the U.S. military, invading other countries -- spreading misery in those countries. The other is waged by U.S. companies, laying off workers -- spreading misery and homelessness in this country.

Both wars are waged on behalf of the rich, to make them richer. Ruined lives are the price -- and workers pay it.

The shipping company, Carnival Corp., of which Costa is an affiliate, hurried to throw the entire blame on the Concordia's captain. It does seem he steered the ship onto the reefs and then was incapable of pulling it off. And he abandoned the ship before all the passengers and crew were safe.

But what the shipwreck really shows is the risk of bringing together thousands people, among whom were very few professional sailors, in what more resembled a floating casino than a ship on the high seas.

In fact, several hours were needed to evacuate everyone. Yet the weather was good and the ship ran aground very close to an inhabited, well-lit coast from which aid came. However, even if the lifeboats had all been operational, the crew had no way to rapidly evacuate thousands of panicked and inexperienced people in an unknown and dangerous environment. What would have happened in the case of fire or storm in the middle of the ocean? What would have happened if the Concordia had sunk instead of running aground?

In order to cut the cost per passenger, cruise lines buy larger ships, needing larger crews, to provide swimming pools, casinos, supermarkets, gyms, ballrooms, even floating gardens and an elevated train on the ship. In this way, shipowners create floating cities. In order to go so close to the coasts that tourists can touch the rocks or to maneuver between two supertankers, cruise ships draw the least possible water, making them extremely unstable in the case of strong winds. There have been several incidents in the English Channel and the Caribbean with cruise ships floundering.

Despite this, the shipowners build ever bigger ships. The next generation will carry 8,000 people aboard. The same logic of profitability prevails in the entire shipping industry. So ships with 13,000 containers stacked in eight layers above the deck go through the English Channel every day, almost blindly. They are way too heavy to be towed to rescue in case of accident. But who cares? They are already building even bigger ships.

This race for size is a race for profit. Carnival had almost two billion dollars in profit last year -- 12% of its income. Let the ships sail on!

Not quite! The cost of putting solar panels on a home is $90,000. Only the well-off can afford it. This is where banks step in. They offer to put on the panels for free, then charge the homeowner for electricity. But the banks get all the tax credits.

And then run off! They sell the installed panels to investors, just like they did subprime mortgages and student loans. Rates go up and the consumer gets stuck with the electricity bills. All in the name of "green energy."

Unfortunately, people couldn't get close to his house -- he lives in a private, gated community. Fortunately, the crowd was loud enough to be heard well beyond those locked gates.

The 1930s: A Determined Attack on the Working Class

After the stock market crash of 1929, the following years saw enormous cuts in production, employment and workers' income.

The bosses drove down the average weekly pay in auto from $33 a week to $20. In addition, there was speed-up, a vicious drive for increased productivity. In the face of a disastrous depression, the big capitalists were determined to preserve their profits.

The Working Class Begins to Resist

Three years after the stock market crash, the working class began to gather its forces. There were almost 1700 strikes nationwide in 1933, most of them in the second half of the year; that was almost three times the number of strikes seen in all of 1932, and the biggest number since 1921.

Despite defeats, the strike movement increased: in 1934, there were almost 1900 strikes nationwide; in 1935, more than 2000; and in 1936, more than 2200. If nothing else, the workers had come to understand that a fight was not only necessary, but possible.

Communist and Socialist Leadership

Communist or socialist militants were at the head of most of the important strikes of this period, including the three most significant mass strikes in 1934. In the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, they were militants of A.J. Muste's American Workers' Party; in the San Francisco longshore and general strikes, they were Communist Party militants; and, in the resounding victory of the Minneapolis Teamsters strikes, they were militants of the Communist League, the Trotskyist forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party.

At that crucial time, the working class found in its own ranks such militants, people determined to see the working class organize itself, to mobilize all its possible forces. Usually only a handful of such militants were present, sometimes only one in a factory. But in many cases, they were the necessary difference.

Sit-Down Victories Open the Way to Flint

Probably the most important victory which prepared the road to Flint came in Akron, where the workers sat down inside their factories.

The first quick sit-down victory in January of 1936 led to a 6-week-long shutdown which forced Goodyear to recognize the union. The next months saw the workers enforce their demands with a rapid-fire series of sit-downs, mostly spontaneous. There were more than 180 recorded in a 10-month period in Akron's tire plants. Firestone and U.S. Rubber fell in line behind Goodyear.

Of course the plant occupations were illegal, and were attacked by the capitalists with every means at their command. But workers everywhere saw something more important: those workers were winning.

The sit-down wave quickly spread from Akron to Detroit. In the months of November and December alone, Midland Steel, Gordon Baking, Alcoa Aluminum, National Automotive Fibers, Bohn Aluminum, and Kelsey Hayes were all occupied.

Flint in 1936: From Fear to Confidence

In June 1936, Wyndham Mortimer, a vice president of the newly formed UAW-CIO, and a militant of the Communist Party, came to Flint to initiate an organizing campaign. Mortimer had been active for years in plants in Cleveland; he had led job actions and strikes forcing the White Motor Company to accept the union.

The first courageous workers to sign up with Mortimer campaigned secretly. Risking discharge if discovered, they pasted union stickers to car bodies rolling down the line. Everywhere the workers discussed among themselves what was happening, as the speed-up and the arbitrary firing continued.

Small spontaneous job actions began. In one week, at Fisher Body #1, there were seven brief work stoppages against speed-up and firing of workers. GM no longer appeared all-powerful.

Workers began to pour into the union office to sign up. Soon, the workers felt strong enough to organize a public meeting at the union hall, where Mortimer spoke. It was filled to overflowing. Membership grew from 150 in October, to 1500 in November, and to 4500 in December.

For the first time, union members wore their union buttons openly in the plants, and GM didn't dare fire them.

GM Is Shut Down

The national leaders of the UAW planned for a decisive strike after the first of the year. But workers' action pulled things ahead. Workers in the Chevrolet plant in Cleveland sat down on December 26, when GM management postponed a grievance discussion. The aggrieved workers sat down in their department; other departments followed. The whole plant was quickly occupied.

When the news spread to Flint, the unionists decided that they couldn't wait any longer. Several of the key plants at Flint were occupied almost immediately.

The strike spread to the rest of GM outside of Flint. Atlanta and Kansas City had already been on strike for over a month. On the 31st of December, Guide Lamp in Anderson, Indiana and Fisher Body and Chevrolet plants in Norwood, Ohio were occupied. On the 4th of January, Toledo Chevrolet joined the movement; on the 5th, Detroit Ternstedt and Janesville Fisher Body and Chevrolet; on the 8th, Detroit Cadillac; finally, on the 12th, Detroit Fleetwood and St. Louis. At this point, GM was forced to close most of its remaining plants.

Flint was the center of GM's empire. The longest sit-down, 44 days, and the toughest fights were engaged there. But the strike extended throughout GM's empire. If the Flint workers carried the most important part of the fight, still, they did not fight alone.

The Workers Realize Their Own Strength

Everything required to make that 44-day occupation possible depended on the workers' own organization. Workers built up barricades, organized patrols inside the plants, secured the entrances, and sometimes mobilized to battle cops. The most famous fight, known as the Battle of Bulls Run, occurred early in the strike. On the 7th of January, the cops attacked with tear gas and guns to drive the strikers out. The strikers responded by throwing the tear gas grenades back to the cops, by soaking the cops to the skin with icy water from the plant's fire protection hoses, and by pelting them with two-pound door handles "just right for throwing" and other heavier metal parts.

Before it was over, there would be a number of skirmishes, each time provoked by the police or National Guard either directly attacking, or trying to force the workers out by cutting off heat, electricity, or food. Each time, the workers used both their control of the plant, as well as their supporters outside, to defend their positions. When the heat or electricity was cut off, the workers threatened to set bonfires. That was enough to have GM turn the power back on. When the food supplies were interrupted, the strikers who remained outside dealt with the National Guard, either diverting them so food could be brought in or persuading them to let the food go through.

Several times it was the working class women of Flint, organized in the Emergency Brigade, who stood up to the cops or National Guard, shaming them and making it more difficult for them to attack the workers inside the plant.

The Flint strike gained national importance, watched by workers all over the country. And many of those workers watching Flint began to sit down in their own factories. Others came to Flint to make sure the Flint workers did not have to face the power of the state apparatus alone. On the days when the threat was the most serious, between fifteen and twenty thousand workers from all over a three-state area were massed outside the two plants which the National Guard stood ready to invade. The battle at Flint belonged to the whole working class, and the workers knew it.

Living a Collective Life

Inside the occupied plants, the necessities of daily life had to be organized. Meals were prepared for strikers both inside and outside the plants. The factories were cleaned up, living areas were constructed, safety was monitored, bedding was found, problems were solved.

Penned up in the factory, the workers discovered among themselves the basis of a rich social life. Many of their memoirs speak fondly of the singing, the discussions, the debates, the plays, the games of chess or checkers or cards, the caricatures drawn by someone who never before realized his ability. They also speak fondly of the work they each were responsible for, work which was carried out collectively and coordinated by the strike committees inside the plants.

The union headquarters became the center for the strikers outside, for the families, for other workers who came to help. They too enjoyed the collective way their lives were lived during that period.

Those who remained outside carried the responsibility, among other things, for spreading the news about the strike, through distributing the strike newspaper, and also through door-to-door discussions in the working class neighborhoods, recruiting for the union.

The decisions about organizing the strike were taken on the spot, by the workers involved. They had daily meetings, both inside the plants, and in the union headquarters near the plants. Later on, it was this fact that the workers had taken up habits of deciding things for themselves, and then acting upon them right away, which caused so many problems for the company when the strike was over. The workers who came through 44 days of self-organization were not ready to let the company make arbitrary decisions, nor order them around.

And neither were they ready to wait a long time for their grievances and complaints to be settled by someone else. In the four months after the strike was settled, there were, according to GM's own figures, 170 quickie sit-downs, organized by the workers on the spot in order to get immediate satisfaction of their demands. The sit-down had given them a sense of their own strength, and confidence in their own ability to handle their problems.

The Victory at Flint: A Victory of the Working Class

The ground-breaking victory at Flint demonstrated something that, ordinarily, American workers have not perceived; that is, the workers at Flint were part of a class, a large class with immense power when it acts together. When the workers finally left the Flint plants after 44 days, their power had forced GM to recognize a union that GM had sworn never to recognize. Almost the whole working class of Flint celebrated, alongside all those workers from throughout the Middle West who had made the Flint sit-down their own.

Within 20 days of the original settlement at the 17 affected GM plants, 18 more GM plants were occupied. Nationwide, beyond the auto industry, there were more than 700 major sit-downs by the end of 1937. In February and March in Detroit alone, 100 factories, stores and offices were occupied by sit-downers for some period of time. Even salesclerks at the Detroit Woolworth lunch counter sat down! Chrysler plants were occupied for 17 days.

Nothing was handed to the workers. As late as 1941, it was necessary for auto workers to shut down the massive Ford Rouge plant in order to crack Henry Ford's resolve never to allow a union on his property.

One Class, One Interest, One Fight

The workers of 1937 had come to view themselves, at least for a while, as part of one single class, with one set of interests, with one fight to make. Their consciousness of that fact was the essential key that secured the victory at Flint in February of 1937, and secured the victories in the massive wave of sit-downs and union organizing that would follow.

Today, the bosses are rolling back every advance won since 1937. They are succeeding because such class consciousness in the working class is but a dim memory. But as the capitalists use today's economic crisis to press harder and harder on workers, it means that workers somewhere, sometime, will feel no choice but to fight in the old ways. Through their fighting experiences they will regain the necessary consciousness to turn the bosses' plans upside down, once again.

But this time, it is necessary not only to upend the bosses' plans, but the bosses themselves. The power the workers have when mobilized like this gives them the means not only to take over a big company, but to take over society and run it in the interests of the population.

International Steel became the new owner in 2003, reducing the workforce to 2,530. Mittal took it over in 2005. The Russian company Severstal took it over in 2008. Then came a 7-month shutdown in 2010, with 2500 workers unemployed.

RG Steel took it over March 2011, reducing the workforce to 2200. December 23, two days before Christmas, RG bosses proclaimed financial difficulties and announced an immediate shutdown of major parts of the plant, laying off 750 workers. Will these layoffs be permanent or temporary? No one knows.

But this is what we do know: the decline in the steel industry is a sign of capitalism in crisis and decay. What an irony to decimate an industry that could produce steel and steel products for improving aged infrastructure and provide thousands of useful jobs.

It makes a mockery of Maryland officials who brag that our state's unemployment rate is improving and things are looking up.

James was a tremendously versatile singer, gracefully mastering musical styles ranging from rhythm and blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll, blues, and gospel. She could sing romantic jazz-influenced ballads like Sunday Kind of Love, Stormy Weather Keeps Rainin' All the Time, and her signature tune, At Last. She soulfully rocked on songs like Tell Mama, Something's Got a Hold on Me, Seven Day Fool, Tough Mary and her remake of Ray Charles' What'd I Say. And she put her own stamp on blues classics like I Just Want to Make Love to You and her own I'd Rather Go Blind.

James' career stretched from the mid-1950s to the early years of the new millennium. She was a major influence on many artists who came after her like Janis Joplin, Diana Ross, and the Rolling Stones and more recent artists like Amy Winehouse and Adele.

Though Etta James received some acclaim near the end of her life, like so many other black artists of her time the enormous impact she made on popular music remains shamefully unrecognized.

City officials said they had no other choice. The city has a budget deficit of 30 million dollars, and it was left with only $300,000 in reserves. The city manager Paul Walters said that the city "faced shrinking tax revenues and state raids on its budget over the last four years."

Budget deficit? The workers didn't cause it. Officials like Walters did.

Santa Ana has set up so-called "enterprise zones," which cover more than half the city. The businesses located in these areas are allowed to reduce their taxes by $37,440 a year per employee, which is more than what almost all these businesses pay to their workers. There are also sales or use tax credits for equipment. All these tax credits reduce the City of Santa Ana's income. That's why there are "shrinking tax revenues."

If there is a budget deficit, get the money back from the business owners who benefitted from it! Stop trying to cut workers' wages to make business more profitable -- and their owners richer!

The Obama administration says it is trying to stop the Iranian government from producing nuclear weapons -- a variation of the same deceitful weapons-of-mass-destruction argument that U.S. officials used against Iraq.

The Iranian government denies the charges that the U.S. levels against it. Iran says it is trying to develop nuclear technology to produce electricity, so it doesn't completely depend on oil for all of its energy. And it points to the fact that the Iranian government started this program back in the early 1970s, with the help of the U.S.!

But even if the Iranian government were secretly producing nuclear weapons, who could blame it? Almost all the big powers that denounce Iran for trying to produce nuclear weapons have their own nuclear weapons arsenals. And the U.S. is the worst. Not only has it actually dropped nuclear bombs on people, the U.S. also has enough weapons to destroy the world population many times. Moreover, several of Iran's neighbors, including Israel, Pakistan and India, also have nuclear weapons, with the U.S. government's blessings!

Yes, Iran is a repressive dictatorship, and a fundamentalist religious state. But this cannot be a problem for the U.S. Most of its closest allies in the Persian Gulf, such as Saudi Arabia, are just as bad or worse. No, the problem for the U.S. is that the Iranian government is rival to the U.S.'s main client states in the region, Israel and Saudi Arabia. To maintain and consolidate its own hold over the Persian Gulf's oil, the U.S. has targeted Iran. Hands off Iran!

In 1979, after 26 years of violent repression, the Iranian population overthrew the Shah. The U.S. government didn't attack Iran directly. Instead, it encouraged Iraq's dictator, Saddam Hussein, to go to war against Iran. That war lasted eight years and resulted in one million deaths. Toward the end of the war, Hussein used poison gas against Iranian troops and Iranian Kurdish towns, with U.S. financial aid and the help of U.S. military intelligence. In the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. government blocked even the most timid recognition of the use of these weapons of mass destruction by Iraq against Iran and the Kurds on March 21, 1986.

Since then, the U.S. has continued to attack Iran, not just through economic sanctions, but terrorist attacks of all sorts inside the country. One of the latest took place on January 12 in broad daylight in Tehran. Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, a 32-year-old scientist and university professor, was blown up after two assailants on a motorcycle put a magnetic bomb under his car. He was the fifth scientist in Iran over the last two years to be assassinated either by the U.S. or Israeli secret services.

This ongoing war by the U.S. sows more death and destruction, makes the entire region more unstable, creates the possibility of even worse wars -- all for the greater good of Big Oil.

It isn't a minor disease, far from it. In France, one person out of five with measles has to be hospitalized, and elderly and frail people sometimes die of it. The disease is very contagious. The virus can be spread through direct contact through sneezes or the coughs of infected people, including by drops suspended in the air, where it remains active for thirty minutes. It can contaminate an entire class, a movie theater or a sporting event.

Fortunately, measles vaccination is very effective: in Africa, big vaccination campaigns succeeded in cutting mortality by 90% from 2000 to 2007. In France, the epidemic is most widespread in areas where the rate of vaccination is the lowest.

Some trends or groups oppose vaccination for religious reasons, and others under the pretext that it's necessary to develop natural defenses without recourse to vaccines. These ideas are dangerous. In most European countries infected people can rapidly be hospitalized and taken care of, but this isn't the case in the rest of the world. Among populations strongly affected by malnutrition, up to 10% of measles cases are fatal and the complications from the disease can lead to blindness or severe diseases like encephalitis. For people infected with HIV, the consequences are still worse.

The World Health Organization says, "In countries where measles has mostly been eliminated, imported cases remain an important source of infection." Genetic studies of the virus show that the virus that began in France wound up in Germany, Denmark, Russia and Romania. Virus of Swiss origin is found in the shanty towns of Latin America. And measles returns to Africa today, in part due to the virus imported from Europe.

This shows the global importance of vaccination, and the completely individualistic irresponsibility of those in the rich countries who would risk the lives of people around the world.

These laws are grossly misnamed. No worker has ever been given a "right to work" because one of these laws passed. In fact, in most states where they exist, unemployment is much higher than average.

The aim of these laws has always been clear: to prevent union organization, by cutting back their source of funds.

Indiana is not the first state to pass this "right-to-prevent-a-union" legislation. But it is the first state in the last ten years to pass such a law. And it is the first state in the industrial centers of the country -- the Midwest heartland, the Northeast and the Pacific Coast -- to do so.

Certainly, states have been chipping away at union rights for decades now. And that's especially so in states, where the Republicans gained control -- since the Democrats have always gained from the electoral help the union apparatuses gave them.

But up until now, even the Republicans held back from this kind of attack on the unions in their strongholds. In the South and the Plains states and parts of the Mountain West, yes -- but not in a state like Indiana.

Today, it seems, the Republicans have crossed that threshold -- and that means that the capitalist class or a good part of it stands poised to tear up the framework that has governed labor relations for the past 77 years.

It was a very formal framework: One that required workers to get the government to certify their right to have a union. One that prevented workers from having a union unless the majority of the workers voted for one.

This formal framework ended up with the company deducting union dues from workers' paychecks and sending them on to the union apparatus, freeing it from even that little bit of worker control.

This formal framework determined that workers could strike only every three or four years when a contract expired -- and, eventually, over the years, not even then.

All of these things, which were the "norm" of labor relations in this country, served the company's desire for "labor peace" and the union apparatus's desire for a stable income.

But they didn't serve the workers. Why can't 40% of the workers, for example, decide to set up their own union and make it function? Why couldn't the workers decide whether or not to pay their dues, based on how the union represents their interests? Why do they have to go through such tortured procedures, instead of just deciding, among themselves, to strike?

This framework that didn't serve the workers is being torn up today -- but not in a way that serves the workers' interests.

Not a single thing in these so-called "right to work" laws makes it easier for workers to set up their own union, to decide when and how to take on the company. Nothing in them turns the union's source of funds over to defending the immediate and long term interests of the workers -- which could only be served by deciding to prepare for a real fight.

Just the opposite. Because, even while the Republicans -- and some Democrats -- attack the union apparatus, both parties increase the legal impediments put in the workers' way: they add more restrictions on the right to strike, more restrictions on the rights of workers to express themselves in the workplace.

There are huge problems with the unions. But the workers can change it; they can take the situation in their own hands.

Let the politicians of both parties keep their grubby hands off the workers' unions.

They gave the auto COMPANIES a lot of money, all right. But they took away OUR money -- raises, COLA, bonuses. They took away OUR right to strike. They permanently took away break time, vacation rights, and overtime protection. They made it easier to dump retirees' pensions and healthcare. And they took away new hires' rights to get into first tier.

And this whole program was started under President Bush.

Democrats and Republicans are OK with "saving the auto industry" by throwing workers under the bus. They play their "good cop, bad cop" roles. Why would we want to support either one?

In the speech, Obama promised to "bring manufacturing back," and with it manufacturing jobs from overseas.

But here's what the chief economist of Comerica Bank headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, the auto industry's center, said: "Manufacturing is a productivity-driven industry and that fundamental force will reassert itself, leading to flat or even declining manufacturing employment even as output increases."

The economist remains reality-based, since he is not running for re-election this year. It was not jobs sent overseas that cut manufacturing employment. It was the push for productivity -- speed-up -- right here in this country.

Stop the speed-up.

The extension of these tax breaks were passed in December 2010 by the Democrats working with the Republicans in Congress. President Obama himself signed them into law!

Obama and the Democrats had denounced these same tax cuts for the wealthy, when they were running for office in 2008.

What do YOU believe -- pre-election promises or post-election actions?

And all the money that they get from bag sales is supposed to go to cleaning the Anacostia and Potomac rivers.

But don't hold your breath for a cleaner river -- unless of course you are standing next to it.

The contract proposal includes a 10% wage cut, an increase in health insurance co-pays, pension benefit cuts, a defined contribution plan for new hires instead of a pension, elimination of overtime pay for more than eight hours, and 1,000 layoffs.

The city had imposed furlough days on city employees in the last concessions -- which amounted to a 10% pay cut. Now the city wants the pay cuts AND for employees to work those days so the city can lay off workers.

This so-called deal was pushed through with threats that Michigan Governor Rick Snyder will impose an Emergency Financial Manager on the city, who will impose worse concessions if the unions don't agree. It was a campaign carried by Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, the City Council and all the media.

Some City Council members jumped in to demand even bigger cuts, 1,300 additional layoffs, closing the remaining city recreation centers, increasing bus fares, privatizing more city services, and, perhaps, ending subsidies to the art museum, zoo, and African-American history museum.

Why in the world should city workers be the ones asked to pay for Detroit's budget mess? Why should the population suffer even more cutbacks?

City workers didn't move corporations out of the city, eroding the tax base. City workers didn't drain the budget by giving tax breaks to corporations to bring work back. City workers didn't give no-bid contracts to politicians' friends. And they didn't authorize high interest loans/bonds in order to fund banks and the wealthy.

Get any needed money from the wealthy -- they have robbed the city for decades!

After a Chevron worker died in an accident caused by company practices, the regulators issued orders to cease operations near the damaged well. Then, after the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that oil companies were not adequately protecting drinking water resources, the two California regulators tightened permit requirements.

In the past, candidate Jerry Brown posed as an ardent supporter of environmental regulations. But Governor Jerry Brown acted no different from his Republican predecessor.

Brown sided with the oil industry and pressured Chernow. Brown proposed to issue permits with minimal oversight. Accidents and contamination would be fixed after the fact. Chernow refused this shortcut and got fired together with his deputy a week later.

When new and obedient regulators started to issue shortcut permits, Brown said: "It's not easy. There are going to be screw-ups. There are going to be bankruptcies. There will be indictments and there will be deaths. But, we're going to keep going."

All these screw-ups and deaths are preventable, but the state's only task is to keep company profits going. Giddyap Brown!

Then in the small print they say it will take until 2015 until those 15,000 jobs (two tier) open up.

15,000 isn't a boom. It's not even a peep.

We, our families, brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts and cousins, need jobs RIGHT NOW.

When workers retired they had no reason to expect this. How were people supposed to plan for their futures, when they were promised for decades that their pensions would be tax exempt?

Michigan workers aren't responsible for the state's budget problems. Take the money from the corporations getting huge tax breaks.

Of course, if there was a real recovery, a growing part of the workforce would be working. But the Labor Department's own figures show the exact opposite. What it calls the labor participation rate is lower than at any time since the recession began in 2007! That means less and less of the workforce has a job, and the depression is getting worse.

Government statistics lie! Are we surprised?

But by that time, the top officials of Komen had been exposed for what they are: a bunch of right-wing Republicans, who virulently oppose women's rights. Komen's CEO Nancy Brinker, the sister of the late Susan G. Komen, is a major Republican donor who held several positions in the George W. Bush administration, which did all it could to promote anti-abortion legislation. In 2010, Brinker made Karen Handel her senior vice president for public policy. When Handel ran for governor of Georgia, she won Sarah Palin's support by describing herself as "staunchly and unequivocally pro-life." In other words, she is ready to condemn women to death by refusing them access to contraceptives and abortion.

Once in charge at Komen, Handel looked for a way to cut off Komen's funding to Planned Parenthood. "I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood," she declared.

Several members of Komen's board of directors resigned over the decision to cut off Planned Parenthood funding. They then came forward and explained how Handel openly worked with Republican Congressman Cliff Stearns, a virulent opponent of Planned Parenthood, who swore to cut its funding and support "now and forever." Handel used Stearns's phony investigation into Planned Parenthood to cut off its funding.

Religious and right-wing zealots and fanatics, who want to control women's sex lives, have opposed Planned Parenthood for a long time. Planned Parenthood provides health services, especially reproductive health care services, including for abortions, contraception, and venereal disease, to almost one-fifth of all women in the country. By attacking the ability of women to get the health care services, these "pro-lifers" are ready to see women lose one of their few sources for cancer screening if they don't have health insurance.

The public outcry against the Komen attempt to cut off cancer screening money for Planned Parenthood shows that women were outraged at this attack. But it also shows how dangerous it is for the purse strings for vital and critical health care needs to be in the hands of privately run charities that have their own political agenda.

The following year, the penalty for murder was reduced to ten years in prison. There remains the death penalty by stoning for adultery, an atrocity imposed on women since 1979 when the religious authorities seized power.

In 2010, faced with international protests, the Iranian regime announced the suspension of her execution, but not its repeal.

Today, the self-proclaimed chief justice of the province where she’s being held announced that for “technical” reasons the death penalty by stoning has been converted to ... hanging.

Everything must be done so that Sakineh escapes this barbarism, so that she’s freed and acquitted. And everything done so that women are freed from this inhumanity.

Women are excluded from certain public ceremonies, from funerals, forced to bunch together on the sidewalks or in spaces reserved for them, and to sit at the back of buses. This is applied not only to the women who belong to the haredim, the ultra-orthodox "men in black," but on all women.

Three women have recently reacted. An eight-year-old girl was seen in tears on Israeli television, refusing to return to her religious school in a settlement in the west of Jerusalem, because she was afraid of being once again insulted and spit upon because of her dress and her sleeves, which these Jewish Taliban think aren't long enough. Some days before, a 28-year-old student refused to sit at the back of a bus. And another woman, even wearing a wig and long skirt in the manner of orthodox Jews, chose to sit just behind the bus driver, refusing to be sent to the back of the bus.

On December 27^th, several thousand demonstrators gathered against this segregation that the fanatics try to impose through moral and sometimes physical violence. The reaction of the fanatics was to respond by a grotesque march where they wore the yellow star, their children being dressed in the stripes of deportees to Hitler's camps, implying by this that the rest of the Israeli population were no better than ... Nazis.

Although the government of Netanyahu and the far-rightist Lieberman is officially hostile to this segregation, it makes the population pay the price of compromises so that it can gain the parliamentary support of religious parties like Shas. The dictatorship exercised by a more and more extremist Israeli power against the Palestinian people once again has consequences for the Israeli population itself.

You would think the world was about to stop revolving around the sun. This two thousand year old, backwards, reactionary institution totally blew a head gasket over what �" free condoms!

Most women, including Catholic women, use contraceptives. Of course the Church knows this. That is why they read the letter during mass �" precisely because they want to dictate women’s personal behavior. They want to politicize women’s reproductive behavior. Most Catholic women have the good sense to ignore the Church mandates and priestly threats of burning in hell for using contraceptives.

Bishops and priests need to stay out of our bedrooms and our doctors’ offices. This is not the Middle Ages.

Despite being the self-proclaimed champion of freedom in the world, the U.S. government deprived them of elementary rights, and detained them in an inhumane fashion. In the beginning, they were held in metal cages outdoors, and suffered abuse of all sorts and confessions obtained through torture.

After spending years in Guantanamo without being accused or judged, some of the detainees were finally declared innocent and were freed. Today, 177 men are still locked up, including 89 considered "eligible for release" but who remain imprisoned because the government doesn't know where to send them. On the one hand, it refused to allow them to come to the U.S., and on the other hand, even though they were innocent, given their detention, they risk being executed if they go back to their home country.

Guantanamo was set up by George Bush, under an executive order in 2002. It was maintained for seven more years by his administration and three more years by Barack Obama, who had promised to close it.

Guantanamo remains the symbol of the barbarism carried out by the U.S., which pretends to free the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

This is the fourth short strike called since last March by the National Healthcare Workers Union (NUHW), which represents about 4,000 Kaiser employees, including registered nurses and mental health and social workers, who left the SEIU in disgust with SEIU leaders' policies.

About 17,000 nurses of the California Nurses Association and 650 maintenance workers of the Stationary Engineers Local 39 joined the strike in solidarity. But the leaders of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents 44,000 Kaiser workers in California, have been telling their members to cross the picket line!

It's outrageous that people who call themselves union leaders -- those at the head of the SEIU -- should so blatantly betray workers' interests.

Workers who remain in SEIU have some decisions to make.

All is well, in fact, for the profits of the German bosses, but it's not the same for those who produce them. German workers absolutely don't profit from this fine economic health. Several recent studies have shown that one in five German workers has very low wages, less than 10 euros ($13) an hour. In Germany, where prices are higher, that buys about a sixth less than it would in the U.S.

There is no minimum wage covering all jobs in Germany. Some industries, like construction and cleaning services, have minimum wages. But the downside is that a laid-off worker must accept any job, even in industries outside their own, and even if the pay is worse. So a number of workers must take two or three low-paid jobs to cope with the cost of living.

Today one third of workers in the western part of Germany and one half of workers in the eastern part work in businesses not covered by union contracts. As a result, their wages are often 30% lower than those covered by a union contract.

But even those covered by contracts aren't assured of having decent incomes. A newly-hired worker in a confectionary shop in Bavaria gets 5.25 euros ($6.77) an hour. Butchers in Saxony and hairdressers in Schleswig-Holstein get 6 euros ($7.74). And in many occupations the wage is below 8 euros ($10.30), for example, in airport security, call centers, cleaning, farm work, etc. Moreover, in the eastern part of Germany, more than 20 years after the two parts were reunited, wages are a lot lower than in the west, in the private as well as the public sector.

When German bosses hire temporary workers, they don't pay them what the job normally pays. After years of discussion, the German government has finally decided that temps will get wages of 7.89 euros ($10.18) in the west and 7.01 euros ($9.04) in the east.

And the bosses, believing they can get away with anything, have truly disgusting attitudes. For example, eight construction workers of Polish origin, working in Essen, fought for two months against their employer who didn't want to pay them the promised rate. The boss wanted to pay them 64¢ an hour. Only their determination allowed them to finally win better wages.

A similar determined fight is necessary if German workers are going to prevent more workers from plunging into poverty.

The L.A. school board has already cut the adult education program down to half, and this kind of talk is a signal that more cuts are to come.

Adult education serves predominantly working people who didn't get a high school diploma or the job skills needed. School district officials are now effectively telling people who already have low pay to go to private schools and pay for education.

Dirty hypocrites!

Politicians are using the economic crisis as an excuse to attack public education and other government programs that the population needs. In California, these attacks happen to come from Democrats, who control both the governorship and legislature. In other states, Republicans do the attacking.

Democrat or Republican, both political parties represent only the interests of Big Business.

Maryland has 325 credits on its tax books, which were estimated to be worth six and a half BILLION dollars in 2010 alone. These tax credits are called "tax expenditures" to confuse everyone.

"Tax expenditures have become a lot more popular because corporate lobbyists have figured out they are easier ways to get subsidies from tax payers," says Greg LeRoy, Director of Good Jobs First, a non-profit research group.

The credits give away an estimated 3.7 billion dollars to businesses, although it is not clear exactly which corporations get what, says Leroy. The state does not keep track.

Will Maryland legislators try to reduce business tax credits?

Don't hold your breath. Last year, they killed off an attempt to end them.

The corporations are the main cause of the Maryland budget deficit, so get the money from them.

Maryland's superintendent of schools admitted that one third of Maryland's counties put less money into their school budgets this year than last -- which shows that the counties will not make up the difference.

Teachers already pay Social Security plus 5 to 7 percent of their salaries for their retirement, like other state employees in Maryland. Now the counties and city of Baltimore will demand still more.

It's nothing but a scam run by politicians who drain public money into corporate bank accounts.

Raphael Cece, one of the young comrades of the paper Rebelle (Rebel), and also a militant of Combat Ouvrier, turned himself in at the police station in Pointe-B-Pitre (the capital) on January 13^th. The police had demanded he come in after a complaint was filed against him.

A good thirty people accompanied him to the police station. The surprised police pretended it was a private matter, but in reality, it was a political affair (as was shown by the thick folder of the paper Rebelle, which was lying on the desk of the cop who called him in). In fact, the complaint was made by Jean Alice, principal of Baimbridge High School, following the September 30, 2011 mobilization.

That day, many high school students went on strike at the call of Rebelle to protest the schools' abuse of power. There had been a lot of harassment since the start of the school year, especially in the Lamentin High School, where 52 students were expelled because their hair didn't please Christian Louis, the head of the school.

In front of Baimbridge, the high school students took up a slogan that's often heard "chak kochon ni sanmdi a yo" which is a popular proverb in the Creole language of the island literally translated "each pig has its Saturday," meaning everyone gets his due! The principal pretends this means it was a death threat against him. That's a laugh.

But Mr. Alice's complaint reveals that the Guadeloupe school administrators were engaged in some strange doings.

Mr. Alice explained in his complaint that he had phoned the school administrator, who put him in touch with Mr. Delag, the boss in charge of its Mobile Security Team. Mr. Delag searched out information, in order to file the complaint against Raphael Cece, and also implicated another student with Rebelle!

It seems that the school administration practices political espionage against youth whose only crime is protesting through a paper.

So ... "every pig will have their Saturday!"

Bank profits will get a boost, executives will walk away with big bonuses and congratulations from Wall Street for another job well-done -- and none of those criminals goes to jail! The charges pending against Countrywide -- one of the major criminals in the whole monstrous scam -- were "rolled into" this settlement. That is, the charges were dropped!

The attorney general of Oklahoma didn't sign on -- because he thought the banks should not have to pay back one thin dime!

So, here's the deal -- here's the thin dime the banks are going to cough up.

Some people who lost their homes to fraudulent practices will get a payment from the banks -- between $1,500 and $2,000. Not even enough to pay for the deposit, plus first and last month's rent that they had to put on another house when they were evicted -- not to mention all the money they had already sunk into their mortgage payments.

About a million families who are "underwater" on their loan -- owing more on their mortgage than the house is worth -- may get some reduction in the balance they owe. Ten million more families, also underwater, won't qualify for the terms of this deal.

And the question is, anyway: why are millions of families "underwater" today?

They had the misfortune to take out a mortgage or refinance right during the worst of the real-estate speculation that the banks' mortgage practices fueled between 2001 and 2007.

When the speculative bubble collapsed, when prices began to come back down, people were left owing two or three times what the house came to be worth.

The banks, that pocketed enormous profit from driving up housing prices, aren't giving back the trillions of dollars they stole in this speculation. They are reducing the principal by a few thousand dollars for only a small percentage of the people they defrauded.

And here's the final nail in the defrauded homeowners' coffin: guess who gets to "monitor" this deal, to make sure the banks fulfill the measly little commitments they made. That's right, the banks themselves.

This mortgage settlement is another brutal demonstration of who owns power today in this country -- the bankers and the rest of the capitalist class.

They made this outrageous settlement simply because they could. They own the power -- and they use their power to increase their wealth at every turn, at the expense of the population.

Until the working class begins to mobilize its formidable forces, there is no way to contest that power today. Every problem we face -- housing, the mortgage scam, unemployment, cuts to wages, cuts to the schools so the banks get more money from the states, cuts to public services, cuts to social services -- every one of those problems is a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the bankers' and the industrialists' drive to accumulate more profit, more wealth in their tiny little corner of the universe, just for themselves.

The power the capitalists have over our lives can be taken away from them -- but only when the laboring population comes to realize that it has no other choice but to fight, no other choice but to depend on its own forces and strive to put its own hands on power.

The accusations are certainly horrible. But the removal of the school's entire staff is an insult on top of injury. The same authorities, who have short-changed schools like Miramonte for decades, are now casting blame on all teachers -- and further disrupting the education of students -- to cover up for their own neglect.

With more than 1,200 students, Miramonte is severely overcrowded. Like other working-class schools, it has been hit especially hard by budget cuts, which have resulted in elimination of staff, as well as extracurricular programs.

Teachers at working-class schools like Miramonte don't even have the time to teach their students properly -- let alone to get to know them a little better through extracurricular activities, or to know what's going on in other classrooms.

Child abusers infesting an elementary school -- that's a horrible thought. But what's even worse is that fertile ground for such crimes has been laid down by authorities -- government officials who keep cutting the money from public education, and school board officials who pass the budget cuts straight on to schools.

Blame the internet? No, electronic books to download from the library website are only 2% of total circulation.

Rather, library operating funds were slashed. The budget for new books was cut 35 percent last year alone All neighborhood libraries have been closed on Sundays since 2009. Other hours have been reduced. Staff have been cut accordingly.

Meanwhile city politicians gave their friends in the construction industry 180 million dollars to rebuild or restore libraries. But that spending went to spruce up "gentrified" neighborhoods where expensive new condominiums continue to be built.

The end result: large, expensive libraries sit empty for hours.

After killing Graham, the cops took Graham's grandmother, who witnessed the shooting, into custody and held her against her will at the police precinct. She was released only after a local state assemblyman intervened on her behalf.

As usual, the cops claimed Graham had a gun and ran from them because he was selling marijuana. But a check of video surveillance footage from the building shows Graham calmly walking into his own apartment, and the cops found no gun on him.

Hundreds of people from Graham's neighborhood came out to protest the shooting. "When they kill young people, the cops claim drugs or guns. The cops frame them," said Molly Gordon, a friend of Graham's family. "The cops had no warrant to enter the apartment. We are not animals. This happens mostly to Black people. They need to take the cops off the force."

When the cops shoot somebody and get no more than a slap on the wrist, they know they have a license to kill. And kill they do. This is the fourth shooting by the New York police in less than a month. Stop murderous cops!

The deal, which is said to "extend" unemployment benefits, actually cuts the maximum number of weeks unemployed workers can receive benefits from 99 weeks to 73 weeks in a few states, and to only 63 in most states.

This is how the politicians extend unemployment benefits -- by cutting them!

Bad enough -- but then they pretend they have to "pay" for the unemployment extension by cutting the pay of federal government workers. New federal hires will be forced to contribute 2.3 per cent of their paychecks to their pension fund, up from 0.8 per cent.

They also claim to be saving federal payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients, and then use that as a pretext to cut preventive medicine and public health programs.

Hidden in the bill, they made a great big gift to the phone companies by giving them government owned broadcast frequencies. They say the companies will have to pay for them, but they're giving them away for practically free.

And of course workers who today get a little bit more in their paychecks will also see their Social Security benefits cut, in all likelihood, when the politicians come back -- after the election -- and point to the shortfall in the Social Security fund caused by these so-called "tax cuts"!

It's nothing but more election year sleight-of-hand, designed to convince us to give these clowns our votes -- and keep quiet!

What's available is Landlord Assistance. Only clients who rent from a "registered vendor" can get this help.

Who has the money to become a "registered vendor" with the state? Big real estate companies, that's who.

Once Michigan's "official" [inaccurate] unemployment rate fell below 9.9 percent, extended unemployment benefits ended. But, according to the Detroit News, Michigan's 2011 unemployment rate was 19.2 percent -- IF discouraged workers and everyone who WANTS A JOB -- but can't find one -- are included.

Unemployment statistics that are out of touch with reality are being used to throw very real unemployed people under the bus.

Instead they had to borrow a lot to do it, and the problem is working 40 hours a week doesn't pay it off.

At the end of World War II the factory work week was 40 hours. Today the average factory worker is producing five times as much per hour of work. The work week could be much shorter than 40 hours, not a lot longer.

Friess, who is a big Santorum backer, remarked: "... Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly."

Andrea Mitchell responded: "Excuse me, I'm just trying to catch my breath from that, Mr. Friess, frankly."

Santorum was sure wishing for an aspirin to put between Freiss' lips -- in order to keep his mouth shut.

But if Santorum disagrees with Friess's "bad joke," let him "distance himself" completely from the rotten anti-women attitudes that lay behind it. For example -- banning all contraceptives. Santorum thinks it's a good idea for states to do that -- or to deny women who use contraceptives the right to privacy.

Santorum may be less crass than Friess. But he's just as misogynous!

The city says these are "mistakes." Perhaps the mistakes have been simple errors. But often not.

One Baltimore city resident put together three row houses four years ago to create a giant home. His assessment was the same as nearby neighbors with half or a third of the square footage compared to his giant house. This homeowner just happens to be the son of the second largest property developer in Baltimore.

Why is it that "mistakes" favor those who are already wealthy?

Why? Because the new building will get a tax break for the next 10 years -- 80% for the first five years, with decreasing breaks for five years after that.

What a deal for Excelon and wealthy real estate developer John Paterakis! And what a rip-off of ordinary city taxpayers!

Since then there have been many demonstrations in downtown Cairo to protest against the government and the generals, who are held responsible for the deaths in Port Said. Witnesses, both spectators and soccer players, described how the police force present at the match stood back as hoodlums armed with iron rods attacked supporters of the Cairo team.

The Port Said police at a minimum were passive, proving their complicity in this provocation. Those in power do this a lot. This time it was against Cairo youth from working class neighborhoods, who are the main supporters of the Al-Ahly team. Before and after the fall of Mubarak, there have been provocative interventions. It's not hard to see the hand of the police and army stirring up these confrontations, which are immediately followed by violent repression. This was the case last October at the time of a demonstration of Coptic Christians in front of the radio and television building.

For the moment, the forces of repression aim at the Cairo youth called "ultras." They are youth from the working class who took part in the demonstrations demanding Mubarak's ouster, who are opposed to the attacks of armed partisans, and who ceaselessly continue to demand that the Supreme Military Council and its head Tantawi give up power.

The demonstrators in downtown Cairo protest that the army continues to run the country. For several days, they have been confronting anti-riot police who fired at them killing 12 people and wounding an estimated 2,500 more. The generals, who claim to be a fortress against "disorder," want to justify reimposing the recently-abolished state of emergency. The chain of events in the week following the Port Said soccer game shows the generals intend to stay in power until the presidential election scheduled in June.

But nothing says the population will be duped. Even if most people were only spectators at the Cairo and Suez demonstrations, everyone is suffering heavily from the increase in prices, for example, on heating gas. The Egyptian government is asking for a loan from the International Monetary Fund, so the people will have to face more economic violence that keeps them in poverty, for the profit of the Western powers and the Egyptian privileged classes.

The past 12 days had left 300 dead, and thousands of people packed into shelters are scarcely able to survive.

For almost a year since the first demonstrations against the regime, the opposition against Bashar al-Assad has continued to grow. Repression has become more and more violent. At least 6,000 people are estimated to have been killed. The army has taken control of the entire country. Arbitrary arrests, violence and torture have increased.

The West's embargo on Syrian oil is supposed to deprive the Assad regime of money, but, of course, the main victims are the population.

In cities where 70% of the population lives, bread is getting scarce and the price of goods soars, as does the price of gas and heating oil.

The U.N. and the Arab League dispatched some "observers," who recommended that Assad accept the Arab League's plan. The plan requires all military action to cease, with power transferred to some of the opposition groups against the regime.

The Syrian population is caught in the pincers between a desperate dictatorship, which continues to benefit from the support of the majority of the regular army, Saudi Arabia and Qatar -- whose intentions are anything but humanitarian -- and the Western powers, which have never ceased to pillage the Middle East for their profit. Today the big powers pretend they are concerned about Assad's policy. But he is in power with their blessing, like his father was before him -- doing their dirty work in this part of the world.

An Official Attack on the Workers

The government first took aim against the public sector, demanding an end to a bonus worth 16% of workers’ pay, an increase in worker contributions for health and retirement insurance, a new “solidarity” tax, and lowering the income level at which income taxes are collected. A grade school teacher getting $19,000 a year in 2001 now earns only $14,000 and will soon earn only $11,000.

In the private sector, labor laws are still respected in large businesses, but elsewhere it’s the law of the jungle. There are a lot of medium and small businesses in Greece. On the big boulevards of Athens there are signs saying “for rent” or “for sale,” but with no takers. The Greek Chamber of Commerce forecasts another 160,000 jobs will be lost this year.

Some bosses don’t pay wages, or cut hours of work, especially in trade and restaurants where hours and pay had already been reduced. Many workers are no longer paid regularly. The bosses give them $250 to “hold” them while they wait for their pay. A big daily newspaper, Eleftherotypia, hasn’t come out since 2011 when the workers went on strike after not being paid for months.

Retirees have lost at least 20% of their income. Greek workers save regularly to be able to draw on their savings when they retire. The newly retired always need a few months to get their money. But now, not only are their savings not turned over to them, but many have to wait a year or more before they can get their hands on their own money.

A Harder and Harder Daily Life

A large part of the population can barely survive. Many can only do some small jobs for cash, and even these are rare. And how can someone survive with prices soaring? A government investigation at the beginning of February showed that Greek prices are higher than those in Germany. So people are skimping on heating oil, gas for their car and food. They appeal to the generosity of family and friends. Those who are more isolated go to soup kitchens organized by church parishes and to food pantries organized by charities. The weakest wind up in the streets. Homelessness has increased by 25% in the past two years. There are 15,000 homeless on the streets of Athens.

So now the IMF, the European Bank and the European Union, the great European powers like France and Germany, their banks and their financial companies demand Greece “make an effort.” During this time, the Greek big bourgeoisie has increased its transfer of funds to London real estate, and like all the capitalists of Europe and elsewhere, wait for the moment when the Greek state privatizes assets at a low price, so they can get a good deal on them.

A Greek salesman told a reporter, “We should put [the bankers] in a small, unheated apartment with a $400 a month pension and see can they live like that. Can they live how they’re asking us to live?”

Over the past two years, the standard of living of the population has plunged in half. Now additional measures will lower wages in the private sector, as was already done in the public sector; the minimum wage will be cut by 22%, reduced to $9,100 a year with still less for youth; pensions are being scrapped. Several thousand government workers are being laid off. Legal protection against layoffs is almost eliminated.

Three hundred parliamentary deputies -- sad puppets serving finance capital -- gave their approval to the austerity plan while the population was in revolt. This is what Greek democracy means! Of course, the rest of the "democracies" are just the same! The governments act as the Board of Directors for the capitalist class, and the lawmakers sit there only to approve the decisions of big capital.

Some months ago, they told us that what's going on in Greece is the fault of the Greeks, including workers, retirees and ordinary people, who "live beyond their means," so their state wound up overwhelmed with debt up to the neck! After what has happened in Portugal, Spain and Italy, it's obvious that Greece is not a special case. Greece shows what the future will be in other countries.

The big banks used blackmail against the Greek Parliament, giving them a "choice" they couldn't refuse: either they impose austerity measures on the population or the financial institutions will no longer lend the Greek state money, and it will go bankrupt.

All the states are pressured by the same blackmail. All are overwhelmed by debt. All shake down their populations to pay the banks greater and greater sums. In every country, interest due the banks becomes the main budget item. "Debt repayment" has become the credo of the entire capitalist class, the justification of a gigantic transfer from the pockets of the poorest to the bank vaults. However, the Greek example shows that the more they impose austerity, the more they lower the purchasing power of the majority of the population, the worse the economic crisis gets, and the less are states able to pay their debts.

In Greece as elsewhere, the overwhelming majority of the population has nothing to do with state debt. The debt should be paid by those for whom the states borrowed it: the banks themselves, the capitalist corporations. But the capitalist class makes sure that the workers, the retirees and the unemployed pay its debt.

Economic life is war, through which the most powerful impose their law on the weakest. Above all, the capitalist exploiters impose their law on the exploited.

By coming out on the streets to reject the austerity plan, the Greek exploited classes gave the response that the majority of their pretended representatives are too cowardly to give. But what's happening in Athens also shows that it's not enough to refuse the policy of the capitalists. It's necessary for the workers to fight for their own policy.

The Greek workers are beginning to realize that, based on capitalist policies, they are condemned to misery and decline. We can hope that they come to realize in the course of the struggle that they must intrude on the management of the economy and impose their own demands.

The crisis imposes a choice on the workers: Who makes economic decisions, them or us? Will it be a handful of financiers, in the sole interest of big capital, or will it be the workers, in the interest of the great majority of society?

The choice posed today to the Greek workers is being posed today to workers of all countries.

It's necessary for workers everywhere to find and impose their own answer.

Yes, what corporations are getting away with is immoral. But the policies that King and others carry out have helped corporations to take more and more from the labor of workers. The Flint Sit-Down strikers took on the corporations. They didn't give in to the companies' demands for concessions.

Automobile sales are down at the same time GM's profits are up. In 2011, U.S. sales of cars and trucks were about 12.8 million vehicles. This is nowhere near the 16.8 million in yearly sales that was the average from 2000 to 2007.

With sales down, how are record profits possible? From the theft of wages and benefits from workers, that's how. GM stole retiree healthcare from union and salaried workers. GM pushed half pay for new hires and no pensions. GM froze seniority workers' wages. The list goes on and on.

The estimated $7,000 in profit "sharing" that GM workers will receive doesn't begin to make up for all the money that workers have lost through years of concessions. It doesn't even match what GM workers lose in one year to all the accumulated concessions.

Money that used to be in workers' pockets, allowing them to buy more cars, has been transferred to the vaults of bankers and investors.

On top of this, under the bailout deal, GM now pays hardly any U.S. taxes, also pumping profits.

Record profits? They come from record theft!

This attack on salaried workers' pensions will be the new battering ram for bringing under attack the guaranteed pensions of union auto workers and all who still have traditional pensions.

As the saying goes, it's deja vu all over again. GM salaried employees were among the first to lose retiree healthcare.

Back in 1996, GM made a similar move by tearing up its written promise to salaried workers of retiree healthcare for life. Lawsuits were filed and court cases went on for over a decade. Ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that as long as GM buried a sentence about the right to terminate the retiree medical plan in its thousands of pages of welfare plan documents, then written guarantees in the summary plan documents were meaningless.

Any auto worker and every worker who still has a guaranteed pension is viewing the opening shot in a war. As in any war, when you are attacked, you must resist.

Anyone who thinks they can keep their guaranteed pension plan without fighting back might just as well be wearing pajamas -- because frankly, you are dreaming!

Behind these increasingly hysterical scare stories hides this reality: the U.S. and Israel are threatening Iran. Every day, the Israeli government, the U.S. military's junior partner in the Middle East, threatens Iran with bombing attacks. For three weeks, U.S. naval strike forces, including the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, plied the Persian Gulf, just off Iran's coast, in a massive show of force.

The U.S. has also been carrying out a real economic war against Iran. Ever tighter U.S. trade sanctions over Iran have helped to cripple its economy, collapse its currency and cause worsening hardship for its 74 million people. Reuters now reports that on the streets of Iran, prices for food stuffs are soaring.

Remember how the U.S. government accused Iraq of having weapons of mass destruction -- when it was the U.S. military that dropped millions of tons of weapons of mass destruction on the people of Iraq for nine straight years? Remember how the U.S. accused Afghanistan of harboring terrorists associated with the 9/11 attacks -- when Osama bin Laden, a U.S. protege, was involved, and when the U.S. took that pretext to invade Afghanistan?

Yes there is terrorism all right: In its quest for domination over the Middle East's vast oil reserves and other strategic assets, the U.S. military not only sows death and destruction, but makes the entire region an ever more dangerous powder keg.

McChrystal was a highly placed member of the U.S. military apparatus, ending his career as commander-in-chief of the Western occupation troops in Afghanistan, and playing an important part in the wars led by the U.S. over the last 20 years.

He is hardly the first general to become an advisor for firms with the military as their clients. But he stood out by covering up the activities of soldiers who abused prisoners at Abu Graib, by being pardoned by the Senate for these acts and by successfully intervening with Obama to send more soldiers to Afghanistan.

In 2010, McChrystal went too far. He let himself be quoted criticizing Pentagon leaders and mocking the Secretary of Defense. He had to resign.

But still this old brass hat is well able to win orders from the U.S. military for his new employer Siemens.

At this very moment, another trial is taking place on the crimes of the Franco dictatorship in Spain -- which Garzon began investigating in 2008. A Spanish law from 30 years ago imposed silence about Franco's repression at the end of the Spanish civil war and during his 40-year dictatorship -- in the name of "peace." Two years ago, after the Franco investigation began, Garzon was dismissed from his position as investigating magistrate of the national court.

Judge Garzon isn't some unknown small-town judge. He is a high official in the Spanish state, best known for his determination to extradite the Chilean dictator Pinochet and to prosecute the torturers of the Argentine dictatorship. It is his international prestige that makes all the reactionary political circles of Spain hate him. They feel directly threatened by the investigation of the terror during the Franco dictatorship. These reactionaries were emboldened to challenge him when the right wing won the recent elections. Of course, the right wants to challenge this judge. They are preparing to get rid of workers' rights, the rights of women and all freedoms.

Many in Spain express solidarity with Garzon for carrying out investigations and digging up testimony that reveals the assassinations and tortures their families experienced.

The horror of the Franco years also explains what led to popular protests and demonstrations of sympathy for this judge.

The politicians tell us the federal government has a huge budget deficit. Yes, and one trillion dollars of it was caused by spending on military weapons, whose purpose has been to carry out wars on the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, to a smaller extent in Pakistan and Yemen -- and who knows where else in the future.

Obama’s depiction has nothing to do with the reality of the war or Iraq itself. The U.S. is not leaving Iraq �" the U.S. government has only replaced its own troops in Iraq with a large mercenary army, paid for by the U.S. In October, U.S. Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, described this as “a major surge of contractors there in Iraq �" 17,000 contractors, 5,500 private security contractors.” Other estimates put the number of private contractors at 35,000, and that number is expected to increase in the future. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone has mushroomed into by far the largest embassy on the planet, a mini-city populated by 17,000 employees, contractors, security forces, etc. The U.S. State Department is also now commanding three other major centers, in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan; in Basra, the main port in the oil-rich South; and in Kirkuk, which is located in the hotly contested, oil-rich region in the North. The U.S. also has seven other facilities, for a total of 11 sites that it continues to run, nerve centers in fortified, self-contained installations at strategic points throughout the country.

Officially, the U.S. military is keeping several hundred troops, as “trainers” or “advisors,” under the Office of Security Cooperation (OSC) �" to provide “considerable continuity in the security relationship between the United States and Iraq,” according to the The New York Times (November 30).

Unofficially, a large number of Special Forces and CIA will be working under the Joint Special Operations Command. U.S. Ambassador James Jeffrey admitted as much in a television interview with Ted Koppel on December 12.

Finally, the U.S. is beefing up its already considerable force of 40,000 troops in other countries in the Persian Gulf region (not including Afghanistan). In December, for example, the U.S. military increased the number of troops in tiny Kuwait on Iraq’s border by 4,000, bringing the total number of U.S. troops there to 27,000. On board the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which patrols the Persian Gulf, as well as at several U.S. air bases in countries surrounding Iraq, there are the countless aircraft and missiles that stand ready to attack Iraq at a moment’s notice.

In other words, the U.S. has exchanged one military approach for another. The Wall Street Journal (December 10) made exactly this point in an article with the headline, “In Iraq, the U.S. Shifts to a Large New Footprint.” It described how “…the U.S. involvement there is anything but over…. In place of the military, the State Department will assume a new role of unprecedented scale….” U.S. military forces will now be considered “employees” of the State Department.

As for Obama’s boast about how the U.S. war brought “stability” to Iraq, it would be laughable, if it weren’t so tragic. The U.S. government’s own unclassified data shows that Iraq remains one of the most violent and dangerous countries in the world, with about 30 per cent of all terrorist acts taking place there. The violence in Iraq has been even higher than in Afghanistan, according to “The Quarterly Report of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction” (October 30, 2011). And this violence is getting worse. On December 23, a series of explosions ripped through Baghdad, destroying schools, markets and apartments, killing at least 67 people and wounding 185. It was Baghdad’s deadliest day in more than a year. On January 2, the toll was even worse: 72 people in the Baghdad area were killed in a spate of bombings.

Furthermore, the power struggle at the top of the government almost certainly is helping to intensify the vicious ethnic and sectarian strife throughout the society. Immediately after the last U.S. troop convoy rolled out of Iraq on December 18, the Maliki government went after the top members of his own cabinet, who belong to the largest party in his coalition, which gained more votes in the last election than Maliki’s party. An arrest warrant was issued for Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi, on terrorist charges, forcing Hashemi to seek refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan. Two days later, Maliki placed his own deputy prime minister, Saleh al-Mutlaq, on “extended leave.” Shortly afterwards, a roadside bomb exploded near the government’s finance minister, Rafie al-Esawi. He was unhurt, but two of his bodyguards were seriously wounded.

The deadly violence that marks Iraq today is the consequence of the U.S. divide and conquer strategy. From the beginning of the war, the U.S. divvied up official positions in the government according to sectarian and religious ruling cliques, and encouraged the formation of militias and gangs run by warlords and tribal chiefs.

A “Successful” Quagmire

The U.S. went into this war with the idea �" at least on the part of the Bush administration �" that its own military would topple Saddam Hussein and quickly establish its own order in the country. Instead, almost nine years later, its own military practically slunk out of the country like a dog with its tail between its legs.

When the U.S. pulled its troops on December 18, 2011, it did not do so with flying colors and a big parade. Instead, the last contingents to leave snuck out in the dead of night, accompanied by an armada of helicopters scanning the ground for rocket attacks and armored vehicles. The U.S. military clearly had so little trust in their counterparts in the Iraqi Army, that U.S. officers deliberately misled their closest Iraqi collaborators into believing they would see each other the next day.

It could not have been more clear what the U.S. had produced in its nine years of war against Iraq �" another quagmire.

By the summer of 2009, the U.S. was pulling its troops out of all Iraqi cities and towns, in an attempt to lessen the U.S. “footprint” in Iraq �" and by the way, reduce the number of U.S. targets available to the insurgency. A year later, the U.S. military officially stopped all combat missions, moving its troops into well fortified bases from which they only infrequently strayed. But the U.S. could not really protect even these strongholds. The New York Times (June 26) reported that rocket and mortar attacks on U.S. bases had been increasing over the year, causing more casualties. In June, 2011, for example, 14 U.S. soldiers were killed in attacks on their bases.

Even in the heavily fortified Green Zone where its enormous new embassy is enthroned, the U.S. was vulnerable. Rockets and missiles hit the Green Zone when Vice President Joseph Biden paid an unannounced visit in July 2010. And the Zone was bombarded again in July 2011, during a visit by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta.

The very presence of U.S. troops added to the resentment in all parts of the Iraqi population. The U.S. media, reporting on the supposed end of the U.S. occupation, were hard pressed to find an opinion other than “good riddance.” Ali Jassem, 32, an unemployed worker in Baghdad, told The New York Times (December 13): “They [the U.S.] did not achieve anything, or let’s say they achieved bombing, killing and explosions. They delivered false promises. They didn’t bring anything good for us, for the people; they only brought politicians who are out for themselves.” The anger against the U.S. occupation was so strong, the Times commented, “…it is significant that in both Sunni and Shiite areas, there are some who say that life was better under Mr. Hussein … even from those who shudder in the next breath when recalling the dictatorial nature of his regime.”

For the U.S.’s own military, this near decade of war has caused real problems. Since before the “surge” of 2006-07, the generals, including many at the highest levels, have openly voiced their concerns about what the war in Iraq, coupled with the war in Afghanistan, was doing to their army. It had put huge stress on the troops, many of whom were redeployed to a war zone 3, 4, or even 5 times. Among those who have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan, 625,000 returning troops have now filed for disability. And the demoralization of the troops is reflected in the fact that more active duty troops and returning soldiers have taken their own lives than the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq. The multiple tours of duty threatened to “break the army” or at least severely erode the military’s ability to deal with other “crises” and “contingencies” �" as the generals called them.

Then there is the problem of money. So far, the war has cost about 800 billion dollars over nine years. Adding other expenses, including interest on the debt and the ongoing cost of medical care for veterans brings the final cost of the war to at least four trillion dollars, say economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes.

General Karl R. Horst, Central Command’s chief of staff, voiced enthusiastic support for getting his troops out of Iraq. “I think it is healthy. I think it is efficient. I think it is practical,” he told The New York Times (October 29). In other words, it is “healthy” for the U.S. military. And it’s both an “efficient” and a “practical” way to serve the interests of the oil companies, who, in this mess of a situation, are content to have only certain areas of the country controlled, the zones with oil.

They Got What They Came For: Iraq’s Oil

In destroying the old state apparatus left over from Saddam Hussein, the U.S. also loosened the grip of the Iraqi state on the oil industry. And in fueling and playing on ethnic and sectarian tensions and divisions inside the country, the U.S. potentially split that industry in two parts: one controlled by the central Iraqi government and the other controlled by the regional government of Kurdistan in the north.

The oil companies have now jumped in to play the two sides off against each other. ExxonMobil, the biggest oil company in the world, signed a contract with the central government to pump oil from fields in the South, near Basra, where most of Iraqi oil now comes from. In late November, Exxon signed a contract on much more favorable terms with the Kurdish government in the North to drill for oil there. The Maliki government threatened Exxon with losing its right to bid on future auctions in the South. But these threats apparently didn’t worry Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron, and the Italian company, ENI, which announced that they, too, are ready to sign up with the Kurdish regional government.

If the Kurdistan regional government succeeds in keeping control over the oil resources in its territory, this will encourage other regional governments to do the same thing. And that could set off a new round of fighting over which sets of warlords, tribal chiefs and/or religious leaders get the crumbs from the table of the international oil companies and banks. The end result may well be a further break-up and balkanization of the country, leaving the oil reserves ripe for the picking.

Certainly Iraqi oil production is seriously reduced as a result of the U.S. invasion and war and the succeeding civil war. But the big international oil companies and the banks that stand behind them have gained a much vaster control of future production and profits than they had before.

The value of this prize should not be under-estimated. Iraq’s known reserves currently rank third in the world in terms of size. But international geologists estimate that unexplored territory contains vastly larger reserves. These reserves are relatively close to the surface and don’t have to be extracted in rough seas or Arctic tundra, so the cost to get the oil out is extremely low, barely a dollar a barrel. And the oil’s generally high quality means it is cheap and easy to refine.

The balkanization of Iraq could, of course, bring more disorder, with all its risks and dangers for the oil industry. That’s exactly why the U.S. government is boosting its mercenary forces in Iraq under the command of the State Department, and why the oil companies are beefing up their own private security forces and mercenary armies.

Nationwide protests against the worsening conditions broke out last year in Iraq, lasting several weeks. The demonstrators called for better social services, electricity, water, stable food prices, more jobs, less corruption (Iraq is rated the fourth most corrupt country in the world by Transparency International) and government reform. And there was a great deal of anger aimed against the U.S. occupation. The protests varied in size, but they were held throughout the country and they cut across sectarian and religious divisions, from Basra in the South to Baghdad and Tikrit in the center of the country, up to Mosul in the North and Sulaimaniya in the autonomous Kurdish region.

Iraq’s important religious leaders, such as Moktada al-Sadr, whose main base of support is in the Shiite slums of Baghdad, and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, opposed the demonstrations. Meanwhile, the government responded with force. There were numerous reports of police opening fire with live ammunition at demonstrators, using tear gas, carrying out beatings and arresting thousands. The Maliki government also closed the offices of the Iraqi Communist Party and the Iraqi Nation Party, after accusing them of leading the demonstrations in Baghdad.

The religious hierarchy’s opposition to the demonstrations, as well as the repression by the state apparatus, offered a kind of reassurance to U.S. imperialism, as it prepared to remove its troops, that the Iraqi authorities can control the population sufficiently for oil production to go on.

The Price Paid by the Iraqi Population

This war has left the country in ashes. The future for the population is already extremely bleak, and the further break-up of the country and possible civil war threaten disaster beyond what has already been suffered.

By far, the bulk of the people killed in nine years of war have been civilians. The U.S. military’s own logs, released by WikiLeaks, enumerate 122,000 civilians killed. Surveys of the Iraqi population by the advocacy group Just Foreign Policy estimate that almost 1.5 million civilians have either been killed or died because of the conditions brought on by the war.

The CIA estimates that Iraq’s per capita income is now so low that it ranks 161st in the world �" compared to what it was before the various U.S. wars on Iraq, when the country ranked at the top in the Middle East. Iran, suffering under years of U.S. embargoes, sanctions, assassinations of scientists and other acts of a secret war, still ranks 104, far ahead of Iraq.

Even the most basic infrastructure is practically non-existent. Most of the 64 billion dollars that the U.S. officially spent on reconstruction went only to enrich the big U.S. construction companies and a few wealthy Iraqis, leaving the population with little or no electricity and drinking water, while sewage often pools in the streets. People living in cities and towns near oil producing areas, like Basra, the second largest city in the country, are inundated by soot and smoke.

The U.S. dropped thousands of bombs across Iraq laced with depleted uranium, the radioactive waste produced from manufacturing nuclear fuel. British researchers uncovered a massive increase in infant mortality and rates of cancer in cities like Fallujah, which were heavily bombarded, exceeding “those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” In the province of Babil, reported cancer cases rose from 500 in 2004 to 7,000 in 2008. And in Basra, the childhood leukemia rate has more than doubled over the last 15 years, according to a study published two years ago in the American Journal of Public Health.

As the U.S. pulled its last troops out of the country, some reporters visited the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, where the U.S. had launched two massive military sieges in 2004, to try to break the resistance against the occupation. In this city of 300,000, doctors in the local hospital reported that close to 2,000 civilians, mainly women, the elderly and children, have been killed, and skeletons continue to be pulled out of bombed buildings. A majority of the residents were displaced from their homes during the siege. While most have returned, thousands remain homeless. After the siege, the government had promised a reconstruction program. Two of the highlighted reconstruction projects were a water purification plant and a wastewater treatment project launched in 2004. Seven years later, the sewage system remains unfinished, its future uncertain. Meanwhile, the water treatment plant provides clean water for less than 20 per cent of the population. The neighborhoods that bore the brunt of the battles are now dusty dirt roads strewn with garbage. “Everything here is bad,” a bakery worker told a reporter for al-Jazeera (January 3), “No water, no electricity, no good health care. We have between 75 and 80 per cent unemployment. Widows have no rights, no compensation.”

The sectarian strife spawned by the war drove families out of their homes. Many of those who did return are now being forced out again, due to the new upsurge in fighting. The U.N. Refugee Agency estimates that there are still five million Iraqis who have fled their homes. Close to three million are refugees in their own country. A big proportion of them are crammed into 380 settlements scattered around the country. They have little access to clean water, sanitation or medical care. Many are deemed to be illegally squatting and cannot get the documents necessary to register for welfare relief or take jobs or enroll their children in schools. Another two million fled Iraq for neighboring countries Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Syria, with little prospect of being integrated into the community, or even gaining residency rights so they can work. Those in Syria, with its escalating violence, are now being uprooted again, having to seek another place of safety.

Women have been particularly hard hit. The war, the economic hardship and upsurge in religious extremism have led to a huge increase in violence against women �" including honor killings, rape and kidnapping. Before the Gulf War in 1991, Iraq had the highest female literacy rate in the Middle East, and more Iraqi women were employed, in skilled professions, like medicine and education, as well as working class jobs, than in any other country in the region. Now most women are forced to remain at home, without jobs or education. Many Iraqi women who fled to neighboring countries have found themselves unable to feed their children. Just to make ends meet, tens of thousands of them �" including girls 13 and under �" have been forced into prostitution.

Bulldogs for Imperialism, but Victims Also

Another generation of young Americans has been transformed into imperialism’s pit bulls, themselves suffering all the moral, physical and psychological destruction that such a war holds for imperialism’s own army.

Beyond the nearly 5,000 killed in the war, are the suicide deaths that mount up year after year as soldiers return. According to the VA itself, every 80 minutes a veteran of the two wars tries to kill him or herself �" that figures out to 18 a day, or almost 6600 in one year’s time. Then there is the greater amount of domestic violence, alcoholism, drug use, etc.

The Pentagon reports only 32,226 wounded �" a number that wildly understates the toll. Various studies have been done by the Pentagon’s own Brain Injury Center, the RAND Corporation, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. They estimate that as many as one-third of all women and men return from their deployments in Iraq with traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress, depression, hearing loss, breathing disorders, diseases and other long-term health problems.

Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, who have been brutalized physically and psychologically, are returning to a country where they face untold problems �" first of all getting adequate medical care, a job and a place to stay. This country pays lip service to them as so-called returning “heroes,” but does not recognize the damage that has been done them.

No Exit

The U.S. has laid a whole country to waste, imposing on the Iraqi population a descent into chaos and barbarism �" a war that from the beginning was based on lies and fabrications, driven by the interests of the oil companies, other major corporations and the biggest banks.

To these last nine years of war must be added the bloody cost already paid by the Iraqi people in the Iraq-Iran war from 1980 to 1988, which the U.S. encouraged; the first Gulf War of 1990-91 and the massive bombing carried out ever since. This latest chapter of the U.S. war on Iraq is not over yet for the Iraqi people, not by far.

It is a war that the troops of this country have also paid heavily for. And this war is not over and neither is it the last of U.S. imperialism’s wars.

The Iraq war gives the exact picture of the enormously barbaric impact of imperialism, the human price it extorts from populations around the world, including in this country �" all in the search for a few more dollars in profit.

The shutting down of the camps may have put an end to what many activists called "the first phase." But it certainly did not eliminate Occupy as a political phenomenon. Some people who were active in the camps speak of taking a break in order to prepare an "American Spring" when the camps will be re-established. Others have been involved in more traditional style demonstrations and actions, aimed at a multitude of targets, often organized by already established organizations, such as the unions, left or community groups.

So the question is, where is the Occupy movement going -- to the extent that we can speak of a single movement. There are large differences from one city to another; and a wide range of views, even diametrically opposed views, within a single city. There is no clear agreement, for example, over what role the unions should have in Occupy, or what attitude Occupy should have toward friendly Democratic politicians and toward the upcoming elections.

In any case, the apparatuses of many unions have certainly shown their intention to use whatever influence they might gain in Occupy to recruit forces for the 2012 Democratic Party election campaigns, especially that of Barack Obama.

Fresh Air in the Political Atmosphere

Springing to life, supposedly as the result of a proposal circulating through social media sites, roughly 2,000 people came down to Wall Street on September 17, with hundreds remaining that night in Zuccotti Park, "occupying" it.

In fact, there had been a foreshadowing of the take-over-Wall-Street idea last spring. New York City unions organized four marches in May and June, which flooded through the Wall Street area, blaming the big Wall Street banks for budget cuts to NYC schools, city services and the city workforce. The last June demonstration brought out 20,000 unionists and their allies, marching from Brooklyn across the bridge down into Wall Street. That was immediately followed by a three-week "occupation" of City Hall Park -- called "Bloombergville," in an ironic toast to NYC Mayor Bloomberg. And activists in Washington D.C., concerned with the wars, the problems of health care and the lack of jobs, had taken out a permit last summer for a permanent camp in a park in that city, to start on October 6.

In any case, the takeover of Zuccotti Park, especially after the mass October 1 arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge, served as a kind of beacon, from which the idea of "occupying" public areas rapidly spread to almost every major city in the country and to many medium size cities, as well as university cities and even a few small towns.

None of the camps were more than a few thousand at their height, and most, if we count essentially only the people who stayed in the camps, were not much more than some hundreds, and many were often less than that. But the very existence of the camps, and the assemblies associated with them, served as focal points for pulling tens of thousands into some actions. And the slogan that rapidly became the watchword of Occupy, "We are the 99%" -- even if it was in fact inaccurate socially -- spoke to resentment widespread in the population.

In an earlier time period, working people might have looked with distrust on a crusade like this -- somewhat marginal, composed for the most part of young petty-bourgeois people. Not this time. Workers seemed to appreciate the fact that young people camped out in the middle of the cities, in seeming defiance of the authorities. Some have joined the demonstrations, and even a few, the camps. Denouncing the wealthy 1% and the banks, the Occupy activists touched a raw nerve.

Today, the richest 1% of the population get almost one quarter of the total income of the country, the biggest share since an earlier generation of Wall Street titans pocketed a similar amount in 1928. And the disproportionate hold on wealth is even greater. By 2009, the richest 1% owned 42% of the country's financial wealth, while the bottom 80% owned only 7%. And the gap has been growing.

The springing up of Occupy reinforced and expressed the bitterness simmering in ordinary layers of the population about their worsening situation. And its rapid spread was a challenge to the decades-long demoralization oozing through the working class and other ordinary parts of the population.

For the first time in decades, the political atmosphere was not being shaped only by organizations like the Tea Party, whose populist rhetoric has always been a front for the very wealthy who fund it, using it to pull the middle classes and part of the working class in an openly reactionary direction. Instead, there were people in the center of all the cities, at the same time, under the Occupy name, with the same 99% slogan, denouncing the wealthy and the banks.

During the weeks the camps existed, thousands of people were arrested. Some were people who decided to be arrested, in order to make a kind of "civil disobedience" statement; for example, most of the 700 people arrested on October 1, on the Brooklyn Bridge. Some were arrested within the framework of an agreement with police or authorities allowing people to decide to be arrested; for example, many of those arrested in various cities in the bridge protests of November 17, or in October in Chicago. But there were also others, especially in Oakland, who faced a tough round up by the police, involving clubs, tear gas, and even rubber bullets. But however the arrests went down, those arrested drew wide moral support from ordinary layers of the population.

With the Camps Shut Down, Occupy Seems to Be Everywhere

As the camps were vacated, signs with the Occupy name began to appear in a much wider range of activities, aiming at more targets than in the first days. And that gave the sense that Occupy was continuing to grow.

In some cities, Occupy activists reinforced or added the Occupy name to actions carried out by groups who had been organizing legal activity and support for people trying to have their mortgage rewritten; for example, in Las Vegas, San Diego and Detroit. They joined in demonstrations at Welfare offices carried out by advocates for the poor and welfare rights organizations. In cities like Oakland or Atlanta, they joined with activists who had a history of protesting actions by the police. In Los Angeles, they joined with the AFL-CIO, SEIU and immigrant rights groups to protest actions taken by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). In Michigan, they caravanned with United Steel Workers members to support locked out workers in a Findlay Ohio Cooper Tires plant.

Some demonstrations seemed aimed mostly at keeping the Occupy name on the front of the stage; for example, Occupy activists joined in at the end of the nationally televised Pasadena Rose Parade -- the preliminary for one of college football's biggest bowl games.

Other actions shared a kind of "social worker" outlook, for example, working with the churches in several cities to provide Thanksgiving meals for the homeless or with social service activists to set up a free "health fair" in Washington D.C.

In some notable cases, Occupy activists carried out actions for people, in the name of those people, substituting themselves for the people involved. On the West Coast, for example, from Vancouver Canada down to San Diego, activists carried out several one-day demonstrations in November and December to block the entrance of the ports, with a range of signs supporting port workers and the ILWU, and denouncing globalization. The one-day demonstrations were symbolic, but they attracted attention and sympathy, particularly the first time, from many of the workers whose access to the port was blocked. However that may be, the Occupy activists did not take into account how people would react, much less how to engage them -- other than handing some of them a leaflet telling them their port would be shut down, asking support for the Occupy protest. And there was some resentment among the port workers, particularly on the second one-day shutdown.

In some cases, like the "anti-commercialism" protests on the Friday following Thanksgiving, Occupy activists were outright contemptuous toward the "99%" they pretended to represent. In many cities, activists paraded through big chain stores like Wal-Mart, denouncing "commercialism," bunching to clog the already long check-out lines -- in the face of people who rush to the stores to get a chance at the big sales that are traditional that day.

Other actions picketed the headquarters of the politicians -- especially Republican politicians, including at the places the Iowa caucuses were held, and earlier at a conference of conservative Republicans in Washington D.C. However, when it seemed that only Republicans were being targeted, Occupy Wall Street demonstrated in front of Democratic office-holders, for example, outside a Democratic Party $25,000 a plate fund-raiser for Wall Street's high rollers in New York.

Congressional offices of both Democrats and Republicans were "occupied" in December in an action essentially organized by the unions and their liberal allies, but with support from Occupy activists. The "occupiers" stayed in Congressional offices until a representative talked to them or until the office closed.

In January came "occupy the court" -- small demonstrations in Washington and in federal courts around the country -- to protest the "Citizens United" decision. The Republican dominated Supreme Court had ruled in 2010 that since corporations are "persons" in the eyes of the law, there could be no more limits placed on their contributions to election campaigns than on the contributions of human "persons." It's a decision that the Democrats particularly worry about, since the Republicans ordinarily, but not always, get the bulk of corporate election money.

On a monthly basis, ever since mid-October, Occupy has called for demonstrations either in conjunction with the unions, or "coincidentally" on the same day that the unions had announced their intention to demonstrate. Generally, these were the biggest of the demonstrations, given the ability of the unions to provide troops. Over a hundred thousand people demonstrated across the country in November, for example. For these demonstrations, the unions made little attempt to call out the rank and file, but even with just their apparatuses, staff and some activists, they gave Occupy the appearance of a mass movement on those days.

A Movement without a Program, without Demands, and without Leaders

From the beginning in New York, Occupy groups declared that they had no program, other than the "process" itself, no demands to make on power, no leaders who represented them, no one who would speak for them.

In one sense, Occupy was doing nothing but giving a kind of expression to the anarchist views that many of its originators shared. And they were using much of the same very formal and restrictive rules of functioning -- including elaborate hand signs -- that had surfaced earlier in Spain in the movement of the Indignados. Decisions could be made in the assemblies or in the "groups" only by "consensus, " that is, total agreement. (Given the interminable discussions, "consensus" soon became "modified consensus": in some cities, 90% was enough to by pass an objection; in other cities it took only 66.7%.)

More basically, this insistence on no demands and no program was a reflection of the enormous heterogeneity of those attracted to Occupy. Even the first September demonstration brought together, as its "originators," academic anarchists, "non-violent-passive-resistor" anarchists, hackers, anti-globalization activists, along with communists, trade unionists and student activists from Bloombergville, as well as people who had been to the protests in Spain. Soon added to that melange were Libertarians and supporters of the extreme-right-wing and elitist Lyndon Larouche. There are people who had voted for Obama in 2008, but had been disappointed in him, along with those who saw no choice but to vote for him again in 2012, given how disgusting the Republicans are. There are students employed by the Ron Paul campaign, and student activists paid as interns for the unions, many of whom were active in the college "sweatshop" campaigns. As more groups around the country began to declare themselves part of Occupy, some were organized in conjunction with local leftists, some with liberal organizations loosely linked to the Democratic Party, like Action Now, or Rebuild the Dream, or even Move On, for example. Others, like some of those on the West Coast, included young people who styled themselves after the window-breaking anarchists of the WTO protests.

How could this mixed bag decide what should be the aim even of the demonstrations at the banks, for example? Should they demand that Congress resurrect the old banking regulations of the 1930s, or should they aim at getting rid of the Federal Reserve, or denounce the politicians who bailed out the banks -- or simply denounce the banks? There might have been leftists in almost all the Occupy groups from the beginning, but Occupy itself was certainly not about to call in question the very capitalist system, of which the banks are an integral part.

In fact, given "consensus," not to mention the insistence that Occupy has no program, issues like this were decided for Occupy, by people acting in its name. Thus Occupy DC issued a kind of program, "The 99% Deficit Proposal," which essentially repeated, almost verbatim, all the propaganda liberal Democrats were making about the budget. It was introduced with an explanation that it did not represent the views of other Occupy groups, nor even of all the people active in Occupy Washington. Nonetheless, it was widely circulated as representing the views of Occupy. It was, for example, paid for as an ad in the papers by Occupy San Francisco.

Who would decide who spoke for Occupy -- these groups that declared that they were "horizontal," that they had no hierarchy? In the absence of a "hierarchy," it seemed that anyone could.

In fact, very quickly, the various Occupys did develop a hierarchy -- to the extent they didn't start out with one. There may have been a rule that no one could "facilitate" -- that is, chair -- a meeting two times in a row. But there quickly developed a "Facilitators Working Group" to decide before the assemblies, who would "facilitate," what would come up, how to present it, etc. Later, for example, in New York, people from the Structure Working Group prepared a proposal to set up a "Spokes Council" that would regularly take over many of the "process" decisions from the General Assembly -- including for example, what to do with the half a million dollars that had been donated to Occupy Wall Street. The "consensus" required to take the decision to set up the Spokes Council was arrived at in a relatively lightly attended general assembly on October 23, after similar proposals had been voted down several times before.

None of this is very extraordinary and wouldn't even cause much of a raised eyebrow these days -- except it highlights the cynicism behind all the talk about no program, no leaders, no hierarchy.

Of course, in a mass movement, there would be a wide range of views. But the only way for those views to be tested -- as opposed to be talked about -- would be for all those who have different programs, policies, proposals to stand for them openly under their own name, to carry them out under their own name, to confront different policies with each other.

But Occupy is not a mass movement. If there were a mass movement, people who wanted to control it against the interests of the forces active in it would act exactly the way Occupy has been set up now, with a way of functioning that serves to hide the real decision-making behind the scenes.

It's this unclear situation and arcane way of functioning that allows the union apparatuses, structured as they are, to play a very big role in Occupy -- and for purposes very different than those of many of the young people today drawn to Occupy.

Pretending to Be Little More than "Supporters"

At the beginning, the union leaderships took a back seat to the young people active in the camps and the assemblies, quietly offering financial help, donating food, supplies, tents, bringing in their troops for the occasional big demonstrations. They weren't publicly at most of the activities, but their numbers at the big demonstrations with their jackets, hats, t-shirts, etc. gave them weight and influence -- as did their student interns who became some of the most responsible people allowing the camps to function.

Many of the big demonstrations were papered with signs, prepared by the unions, calling for support for Democratic Party electoral propaganda. For example, along with two SEIU locals, "Good Jobs Better Baltimore" and "Move On," Occupy Baltimore sponsored a march for jobs in November, which called on "Congress" to pass the "Rebuild American Jobs" bill -- Obama's bill, which Congressional Republicans had opposed. If implemented, that bill would have given more money to business than anything else. But given the title of the bill, and the Republicans' refusal, the demonstration was little more than a ploy to embarrass the Republicans as people voting against jobs.

Certainly, there are people active in Occupy in different cities who very clearly express their distrust of both parties, and often their distrust of the union apparatuses for pulling activists into actions that lead people into next fall's election campaign. Occupy Los Angeles, for example, issued a statement strongly critical of SEIU for trying to use the Occupy name for that purpose. (SEIU had paid for a number of Occupy Los Angeles activists to go to Washington, supposedly for an Occupy demonstration, but then pulled many of them into a conference organized by Take Back the Dream, in preparation of the elections.)

In general, however, the union leaders have been prudent not to call on Occupy openly to support the Democrats. Instead, they have been accumulating credit by supporting Occupy and by turning out forces for Occupy demonstrations, beefing up its numbers. And, as SEIU's president, Mary Kay Henry did, many of them have presented themselves for arrest in an act of "civil disobedience" along with Occupy demonstrators.

The aim of the union leaderships is to use the credit they win to bring young people attracted to Occupy into the new ranks of Democratic party troops this coming spring -- much as Move On was used in 2008 to attract disaffected young people, pulling them in as active troops on the ground for Obama's election campaign.

It's Necessary to Understand this Capitalist Society

Some young people have been attracted to Occupy. Moved by the glaring inequalities, outraged, wanting to change the situation they find themselves in, they have thrown themselves into activity.

To work to turn out the vote in another election campaign for one of the two big parties is exactly the opposite of changing anything. It is the old lesser evil argument that has diverted people for years and helped to produce the current horrible situation.

If there are people, young and not so young, who don't agree with this, who don't want to be maneuvered once again into activity that will turn back against them, it's necessary to understand how this capitalist society really functions, the role the politicians play, the capitalist class they serve, the hold that class has today on all of society.

All the talk about no program, no demands, no political party is a way to hide from those questions.

On the contrary, these are the questions it's absolutely necessary to deal with. It's necessary to have a clear view of who does what in this capitalist society, of which class owns and controls, but also which class has the power to take control out of the capitalists' hands and use it to build a new society.

It's necessary to have a clear vision about what kind of society it is necessary to build. That society is one without profit. It is called a communist society.

This year’s most important event in the evolution of the global capitalist economy was the return of the financial crisis, under the form of the so-called “sovereign debt” crisis. Its diverse expressions include the euro crisis, stock market turbulence, the threat of a new crisis in the banking system and the return of inflationary policies, open or hypocritical. The insane turmoil in finance is the expression of the crisis of the capitalist economy as a whole. At the same time, it is one of the aggravating factors for this crisis. Even official statistics note that economic activity has slowed. The growth of unemployment globally is certainly the most significant marker of the period, which began in 2007 with the American housing crisis and still continues. The World Trade Organization (WTO), one of the official economic organizations of the bourgeoisie, has sometimes designated it as “the Great Recession” in reference to the Great Depression that followed the stock market collapse of 1929.

The earlier phase of the crisis was the freezing up in bank liquidity following the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers. The means used to overcome that boomeranged, unleashing the next problem: the hundreds of billions of dollars handed over by the major governments to the banking system and big capitalist groups aggravated the financialization of the economy and increased government debt. This massive assistance by governments to the banks and big companies assured them two short, prosperous years. Profits increased. Production in principal sectors from auto to information technology continued to decline, even while governments and economists began in 2009 to salute the recovery. For profits, there was a recovery. From the capitalist viewpoint, profit is the alpha and the omega of the economy.

The Balance Sheet of the Bailout of the Financial System

Even in this period of high profits, unemployment remained high. The economic base for the creation of surplus value was expanded only through an increase in exploitation, not through an increase in the number of those who were exploited. Profits, in production as well as in finance, ultimately come from the surplus value created by exploitation in production. The financial gifts by the governments allowed some big companies, especially in auto, not only to survive, but also to thrive with high profits. But it increased demand only in an artificial and temporary manner. It did not convince the capitalists that the market was expanding, which could have made new investments in production profitable.

The balance sheet of the governments’ bailout of the financial system essentially only turned private debt into public debt. And the new financial jolts that began in August 2011 represent a greater threat than those of 2008. Not only are private banks in danger of undergoing a chain reaction of bankruptcies, but so are countries. This is the concern of the financial system �" and not only in Europe �" faced with the possible bankruptcy of Greece and the domino effect that this could trigger.

The Euro Zone in the Financial Storm

Having begun in 2007 with the mortgage crisis in the United States, which was transformed into a banking crisis in 2008, the financial crisis then bounced over to the European Union. The euro zone is now the epicenter of the crisis.

We are not going to discuss the specific form of speculation against the euro zone, and less the almost daily shocks. We will only say that speculation found the fault lines in the euro zone: the European states had created a single currency, but did not align their fiscal systems; above all, they did not set up a state authority able to intervene on currency matters. Speculators seized the opportunity.

Inside the euro zone, political leaders and the media, both of which serve finance, blame Greece for the chaotic turbulence around the euro. But they all know that any other state in this zone can be hit, whether it be Italy or Spain tomorrow, or maybe France the day after tomorrow. In fact, when it comes to sovereign debts, speculation can break out elsewhere in the world (not to mention the other forms of speculation that can break out).

The sovereign debt crisis is only the current manifestation of a succession of crises due to financial speculation �" one hundred of them of varying seriousness �" that sprinkle the history of finance since the end of the 1960s. The monetary crisis that led to the implosion in 1971 of the international monetary system, which had been put in place after World War II at Bretton Woods, opened up a long period of crises and stagnation of production.

The European Union, and especially the euro zone, corresponds to the interests of big industrial and financial groups in Europe and the United States. The European Union may gradually have established a parliamentary functioning �" which is, however, powerless. But the sole aim behind the building of the EU was to provide the big companies with a wider economic space than their respective national markets. However, the financial activity of these groups is today in the process of destroying the foundations of the euro zone and the European Union. This may be contradictory �" but it is only one more contradiction in the capitalist economy today.

The Ups and Downs in International Trade

The year 2009 was also the year when international trade declined. After several decades of permanent expansion, international trade had been brutally halted, starting in November 2008. The plunge in 2009 was the largest since World War II. According to the WTO, trade declined by 22 per cent of its value and a little bit more than 12 per cent of its volume. This decline in trade was linked to the decline in production, but it also was a consequence of the financial crisis of 2008. About 90% of international trade requires short-term credit, according to the WTO. The crisis of confidence between the banks, and the generalized lack of confidence that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers, led a number of companies to give up financing international operations, lacking guarantees from the banks. This decline in 2009 puts the so-called recovery of 2010 in perspective. And it was a very limited recovery. By the first half of 2011, international trade had once again begun to decline.

High Profits

As the 2010 results of the big companies came out in March 2011, big business was swimming in euphoria. In the United States, the companies that make up the S&P 500 �" which consists of the 500 biggest companies �" made 700 billion dollars in profit, close to their 2006 record (Les Echos, March 3).

The same thing in France: 82.5 billion euros in profits for the 40 big companies that make up the CAC 40. That is below their 101.4 billion in profits in 2007, a record year, but the 85 per cent growth in profits in 2010 ended the stagnation of 2009 (Le Monde, March 5). It is significant that the highest growth in profits came, in addition to the banks, from the auto companies or companies connected to them, like Peugeot, Renault, Michelin, which all benefited from state aid, as well as from companies like Vivendi, which live on expenditures from state or local authorities. Investments in manufacturing nonetheless fell by 2 per cent (according to INSEE, the Bureau of Statistics and Economic Analysis). And real investment, that is, the construction of more factories, is being carried out mainly in the big semi-developed countries (China, Brazil or India). These investments essentially are aimed at getting around protectionist barriers put up by the semi-developed countries, in order to conquer part of their national markets.

High profits sharpen competition, not only between big companies in the same sector, but also between the mastodons of the same big country, situated either upstream or downstream in the process of production. Upstream, the prices of raw materials skyrocket, as a result not only of the appetite of big production groups, but also even more of financial speculation. While speculation had been at the origin of the 2008 financial crisis, threatening the banking system with bankruptcy, nevertheless, it took off again, as soon as the immediate threat had passed. And the inflationary policy of the governments has continued to feed it.

The Rise of Inflation

In the United States, this inflationary policy was openly carried out under the vague expression, “Quantitative Easing,” under which the Federal Reserve bought bonds issued by the U.S. government. It’s nothing but a new name for the old practice of printing money. This manipulation allowed the U.S. Treasury Department to finance an extra 600 billion dollars, practically everything the federal state needed to cover its budget shortfall in 2010. (Le Figaro, June 14, 2011). The Bank of England follows the same policy. The Central European Bank also dumped 75 billion euros (100 billon dollars) into the economy by buying securities from Greece, Ireland and Portugal, despite legal barriers established in the treaties that accompanied the formation of the Central European Bank.

With fresh money at very low rates of interest provided by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, financiers rapidly increased their speculative operations, focusing on shares in the stock market, raw materials, the euro and other currencies. They contributed to a big part of the increase in the prices of minerals and of raw materials, giving a wild, jolting character to the price increases. The same is true for the price increases for raw materials in energy. Despite the crisis, oil and gas prices are increasing, and the profits of the oil companies, skyrocketing.

Speculation in the stock market created a bubble that burst in August 2011, and the beginnings of a panic amplified the drop. Since then, share prices vary day by day in jolting upheavals. This doesn’t stop the speculation; in fact, it offers new possibilities.

Financial groups can make fortunes even when speculating on declines in stock prices. And beyond speculation in the strict sense, falling share prices of a big company can offer a more powerful and wealthier competitor the opportunity to buy enough shares to take control of that company. Companies are buying back large amounts of their own shares, rather than investing �" reflecting the aim of increasing the fortunes of shareholders by increasing the value of each share of stock. But it is also a way to keep away a possible predator.

New Instruments of Speculation

During the months following the 2008 panic, financial products were hit by unbridled inventiveness. The diversity of financial products had an increasingly complex and risky character. Worth a special mention are the different securities, representing a kind of insurance against possible losses. Thus, today, there are credit default swaps (CDS) that insure against a default in payment of a sovereign debt, that is, a kind of insurance against the bankruptcy of a debtor state. Given the prevailing climate of uncertainty, the volume of these CDS’s exploded. These insurance securities are themselves an object of speculation. Their volume amplifies the speculative moves and links the banks to each other, all of them existing as both insured and insurer.

Despite their imagination, financiers cannot enlarge the planet, but they did find ways to speed up financial operations. “High Frequency Trading” allows traders, or more exactly their computers equipped with software specially designed to make a gigantic number of trades, buying and selling shares or currencies in a few tenths of a second. These types of trades have grown from 9 per cent to 40 per cent of all shares sold on European exchanges from 2007 to 2011 (Economic Images of the World 2012, published in September 2011). In a sign of how finance has gone incredibly mad, one of the “regulatory measures” that is seriously discussed is to limit the speed of the computers used in speculating.

The crisis in financial operations in September 2008, just as the dazzling recovery of these same operations a few months afterwards, have each contributed to financial concentration. The 10 biggest banks in the world (including Bank of America, JPMorganChase, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, UBS, Citigroup, HSBC) carry out 77 per cent of all currency transactions on the world market and, as a consequence, they dominate speculation. Behind the neutral expression, “financial markets,” is the harmful ability of 10 boards of directors to intervene in the world economy.

Financial groups don’t work just with their own money, but with the liquid assets of big industrial groups.

Despite the crisis, the industrial groups of the S&P 500, which in 2010 had 940 billion dollars in cash, were able to gain 700 billion dollars in profit on their operations. (Images Economiques du Monde 2012). These companies consecrated only what was strictly necessary to productive investments, and even less to paying their employees. Despite spending 300 billion dollars buying back their own stock in order to increase its value, they still had considerably more left to place in the financial system.

Starvers of the World

The most odious form of speculation in raw materials is on food. The price of grains increased in 2006, 2007, and 2008, only to skyrocket again beginning in 2010.

The prices of wheat and corn �" which were, at the beginning of the 2000 decade, respectively $80 and $110 a ton �" rose to $160 and $220 in 2006. After prices leveled off in 2009, the prices resumed rising in 2010. In the spring of 2011, the price of a ton of wheat was $350!

Even worse: prices are not only overall higher, they are also more unstable. In 2008, for example, the price of a ton of these two cereals, so important for feeding the planet, hit peaks of $240 for corn and $400 for wheat.

There was the same evolution for rice, whose price per ton hit $150 at the beginning of 2000 and $350 eight years later, causing hunger riots in a number of big cities in Southeast Asia and West Africa.

The capitalist groups don’t have confidence in the future of their own economy and in the future growth of the marketplace. What they don’t invest in production is directed toward financial operations that contribute to the speculative increase in raw material prices, which then makes productive investment less profitable.

During 2010, the price of raw materials increased on average by 50 per cent (Les Echos, March 9). The industrial enterprises decided to pass through the price increases of raw materials. This intensified their struggle over the division of profits with the capitalists involved in distribution. In the jungle of this intense competition, the relationship of forces is decisive. A number of subcontractors or smaller distributors paid the cost, while the workers of these companies, who are the first victims of “cost reduction schemes,” paid a much higher cost.

Public Debts, a New Excuse to Extort Money from the Exploited

Public debt nourishes finance. But the extent of this debt is threatening to bankrupt whole countries. Public debt is the new flag that is being waved to impose new sacrifices on the exploited. Austerity policies, being carried out everywhere today, correspond to the interests of the capitalists. The wage freeze and the legal lengthening of the work week give the bosses weapons to increase exploitation. The reduction of social spending allows a greater part of the budget to go to the capitalists. At the same time, this reduces the number of consumers and shrinks the markets for capitalist expansion. By becoming more dependent on the state and its ability to extort money from the working masses, big capital demonstrates more and more clearly its parasitic nature.

The immediate cause for the brutal fall in stock prices was the bursting of a speculative bubble. Following after the fall in price of bank shares, the stock market capitalization of the big enterprises dropped 20 or even 30 per cent. But this was not only a financial phenomenon. It also meant that capital is not optimistic about the profit these enterprises will produce in the future.

Since the middle of August, the specter of a recession floats once again over heavy industry, steel, and automobile. In only one month, European enterprises linked to steel saw the value of their stock plunge by 34 per cent (ArcelorMittal, for example, plunged by 38 per cent).

The memory of the recession that followed the financial crisis of September 2008 is still too fresh not to serve as a warning. In 2008, the automakers foresaw a drop in sales and reduced their production so they would not accumulate costly inventory. That pushed their steel suppliers to shut down a number of blast furnaces. This then reverberated throughout industry, in particular against machine manufacturers, whose sales collapsed. In 2011, the same mechanism is beginning to be set in motion.

The Crisis of Finance, the Expression of the Crisis of the Economy

The financial crisis has another effect on production. Although one cannot yet speak about a crisis of confidence among the banks, as in 2008, it is already difficult for companies to get the credit necessary to run their businesses. This lack of confidence by the banks is not limited to small and medium-sized companies whose representatives denounce the difficulty in obtaining loans, even those whose business appears healthy.

“Difficulties of French banks makes the placement of loans for airplanes more fragile,” was the headline of Les Echos on September 22. The difficulties in the aviation industry are worse because purchases and sales are in dollars. Speculation against the euro, which makes European banks weaker, does not encourage American banks to respond favorably to requests from European banks to refinance loans in dollars.

Beyond these problems, austerity measures taken by all the governments to satisfy the demands of financial capital limit the ability of a growing part of the population to consume, and therefore also limit the market for the products of industrial capital. Financial capital thus undermines industrial capital, even if they are two forms of the same capital. To believe the opposition between them could be resolved is a delusion.

Anti-Globalization: a Moderate Critique of Finance, Without Calling Capitalism into Question

Today it is fashionable to denounce the excesses of finance. The economist Joseph Stiglitz, ex-economic adviser to Clinton, and Nobel prize winner in economics, and considered one of the leading theorists opposing globalization, entitled his work analyzing the last developments of the crisis: “The Triumph of Greed.” As if greed was something unknown to capitalism before the fateful deregulation of the 1980s!

To critique “neo-liberal policies,” deregulation or even globalization or financialization of the economy, and to remain at that level, without explaining how all this is rooted in the evolution of the capitalist economy, is a way of defending the capitalist economy. The fact that the Socialist Party, the Communist Party and parts of the extreme left also take up these kinds of explanations shows that they put themselves fundamentally on the terrain of the bourgeoisie.

To the question of why there is such a development of financialization, the antiglobalization movement offers only platitudes. They go no further than denouncing the neo-liberal policies that governments follow or denouncing the influence of the “monetarist theories” of bourgeois political-economy gurus. They do not explain why these policies became dominant at a specific moment in postwar economic history �" after the first signs of the economic crisis appeared at the end of the 1960s.

It is obvious that national States and their leaders played a role at each stage of the financialization of the economy. All the measures taken to “deregulate” �" to get rid of the obstacles in the way of investing or moving capital from one country to another, from one sector to another �" were taken by the national States. But governments simply translated into legal terms the evolution of capitalism itself, of its internal dynamics �" sometimes anticipating that evolution.

The antiglobalization movement exposes the economic neo-liberal “theorists” who argue that markets regulate themselves. With good reason. The multiplication of financial crises and their growing seriousness prove the stupidity of such arguments. But the crises of the capitalist economy have always existed, even when the market was more or less regulated. And let’s not forget that the regulated market bred the deregulated market. First it incubated it, then it gave birth to it. It prepared the financiers to demand it, economists to justify it and politicians to provide its legal framework. So how could a return to regulation �" if that were possible today �" be preserved in the capitalist economy?

The preponderance of financial capital over industrial capital has a history that stretches back more than a century. It’s even one of the characteristics of the evolution of capitalism that has reached maturity, or senility, as Lenin put it; one of the signs that capitalism has passed from the stage of competition to the monopoly stage of imperialism. In the context of this global evolution, financial and productive activity evolved symbiotically. Their respective roles reflect the rhythm of the capitalist economy.

Regulation: One Method of Saving Big Capital

The regulatory measures wished for by economists who pose as experts for the bourgeois left were reinvented in the context of the 1929 crisis and the years of depression that followed. They took on different forms in the imperialist democracy of the U.S. and under the fascist regime of bourgeois Germany, but the goals were the same: to save big capital.

During World War II, “regulation” was the norm in all imperialist countries. This regulation not only didn’t stop the major trusts from prospering but, on the contrary, the war was a period of enrichment for the biggest sharks of the capitalist economy.

Regulation continued long after the war, imposed by the need to give State crutches to private capital because it couldn’t, on the basis of private profit and competition, accomplish all the tasks of reconstruction and of restarting production. Even in the imperialist countries, particularly those of Europe, the State not only regulated, it played an important role in production and credit. Myriad legal and administrative rules were drawn up, among them the separation of the respective activities of banking and insurance; and the compartmentalizing of deposit banks and investment banks within the banking system itself. Moreover, in the relations between countries, an international monetary system with the dollar predominating was established, and controls over currency exchange were added.

Those years stand as proof that it is possible for the capitalist system to be stuffed with regulations, but also as proof that, if we don’t make fundamental changes to the capitalist economy, to private ownership of the means of production and to the race for profit, then the crises will not disappear; and as soon as the rules initially designed to help big capital become restrictions, capital will throw them off.

The Reagans, Thatchers �" the high priests of neo-liberal capitalism �" were only instruments, carrying out the wishes of big capital at a particular time in its evolution.

Among the nonsense it has spouted, the antiglobalization movement criticizes the treaties of Maastricht and Lisbon for forbidding the Central European Bank to lend to States, causing the States to borrow from the financial markets, thus making them prisoners of those markets. Increasing public debt is apparently due, therefore, only to the interest paid to private banks.

It’s true that an important part of the debt is interest owed to the banks and that the decision of governments to finance themselves on capital markets, paying interest, has been an immense gift to the financial system. But the antiglobalization movement’s explanation is partial and given for selfserving reasons.

First of all, while they vilify the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties, which were the legal foundation in Europe for limiting what the Central European Bank can do, they purposely avoid mentioning the fact that public debt is also considerable in the U.S. and Great Britain, even though these two countries are not in the euro zone and were therefore not concerned by the obligations in the Maastricht and Lisbon treaties.

Second, presenting a return to the right of each country in the euro zone to print money as an alternative to the current financial crisis is in no way a solution to overcome the crisis, nor does it give a more favorable perspective to the exploited classes. It’s only an inflationary policy. And even if it is implemented by a national State, it is nonetheless a policy designed to empty the workers’ pockets by destroying their purchasing power.

Circumstances may persuade the bourgeoisie to adopt this policy. The U.S. is already doing so. Europe also, to some extent. Workers obviously should not find themselves lining up behind the policy of the bourgeoisie, whether it aims at monetary stability or whether it is inflationary. This again raises the need for the working class to put as one of its objectives the sliding scale of wages in order to preserve its purchasing power.

In the text of last year’s congress, dedicated to “The capitalist economic crisis,” we noted that: “Contrary to the fears in financial circles, and among the political leaders of the great imperialist powers, the frenzied printing of money has not, or not yet, caused the high inflation of the 70s....

“It’s as if the economy were compartmentalized and the surplus cash due to printing money were absorbed by the financial system itself.”

It is nevertheless probable that the cash created by the frantic printing of money in the U.S., in Great Britain and to some extent in Europe, will simultaneously feed the casinos of the wealthy and cause inflation for the masses.

The antiglobalization movement is careful never to call into question the foundations of the capitalist economy even while criticizing some of the damage it does. No surprise that they aspire to be economic experts for the Socialist Party. They are already flattered that the very reactionary duo of Sarkozy and Merkel looks kindly on their Tobin tax, a tax which is derisory since it changes nothing fundamental in the capitalist economy, the true cause of the crisis, while it hardly touches the financial speculators’ interests. The latest meeting of the G20, that coterie of imperialist dignitaries, even put the idea of taxing financial operations on their rhetorical agenda.

The governmental left, along with antiglobalist theorists, are bidding to carry out the wishes of big capital should the current financial chaos bring it to ask for help from the State.

The return to a more “Statist” terminology and the evocation of nationalization haven’t come out of nowhere. It is possible that new rules will come out of the current crisis to try to confine finance a little, to protect the national or European economies by using protectionist measures.

Financial Concentration and the International Division of Labor

If the crises of the capitalist economy are always catastrophic for society, particularly for the exploited who are pushed into unemployment, they are simple pulsations in the economic life of capitalism. For the major companies, crises are often favorable because they cut out dead wood, getting rid of the less viable companies. They are periods when capital is rapidly concentrated. The will to control energy sources and minerals, which are essential to production, is combined with the speculative skyrocketing of prices, and this sharpens the rivalry between the major specialized companies who share the planet. They take advantage of the surfeit of financial capital to merge or to buy out one another. (In 2010, the total spent on mergers and acquisitions reached a record sum of 2.48 trillion dollars.)

The hold that a few monopolies or oligopolies have on the mineral riches of the planet was reinforced. As it already was in the time of Lenin’s “Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” their hold is complete in the essential sectors of petroleum, iron, bauxite, gold, copper and nickel, and it aggravates the antagonism between cartelized and noncartelized industries.

One of the consequences of the hold that the big trusts have over the sources of raw material is the control the trusts have over the underdeveloped countries in which those raw materials are found. This results in a local ruling layer being put and kept in place, a layer whose duty is to prevent the exploited classes of their country from sharing in any of the return from the country’s mineral wealth. Africa, where a number of countries have particularly rich mineral deposits, remains the continent with the poorest population. Even if colonial domination has run its course, these countries remain totally dominated by the major companies. Even if no Fashoda incident highlights the race to share out colonies, the rivalry between capitalist groups seeking to control the resources stands behind many of the civil or ethnic wars.

Mergers and acquisitions in the extraction industries aren’t aimed at increasing the merged company’s production capacity. They simply allow the most powerful multinationals to grab the markets that previously were beyond their reach.

This quantitative extension of the major monopolies has also brought about qualitative change. All the major companies have solid national bases and, as far as major American companies are concerned, a huge national market, but they are also present in a large number of countries. Their strategy has been to develop all the specific qualities in other nations that would serve the companies’ interests (proximity to raw material sources or the price and the quality of the workforce, etc.). Together with their subcontractors and their suppliers, they make up conglomerates whose tentacles grasp the world economy as a single whole. By favoring specialization, they refine the international division of labor. The large multinational firms have become international production networks, which include a multitude of plants in a multitude of countries, each holding a specific place in the production process for the global market. They have thus pushed the “universal interdependence of nations” (Marx, The Communist Manifesto) to an unprecedented level.

The international division of labor is now organized, for the most part, within these major conglomerates and according to their needs. Under the reign of big capital, the development of the multinational constitutes a formidable shackle, which submits the world to the search for profit for the fewer and fewer boards of directors that dominate the world economy. But these multinationals also are a sign of the growing socialization of production.

Imperialism �" From Lenin’s Time to Now

Lenin, in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, foreshadowed in his day how much of a weight monopoly capitalism would become.

“The extent to which monopoly capital has intensified all the contradictions of capitalism is generally known. It is sufficient to mention the high cost of living and the tyranny of the cartels. This intensification of contradictions constitutes the most powerful driving force of the transitional period of history, which began from the time of the final victory of world finance capital.

“Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations �" all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism. More and more prominently there emerges, as one of the tendencies of imperialism, the creation of the ‘rentier state,’ the usurer state, in which the bourgeoisie to an everincreasing degree lives on the proceeds of capital exports and by ‘clipping coupons.’ It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not. In the epoch of imperialism, certain branches of industry, certain strata of the bourgeoisie and certain countries betray, to a greater or lesser degree, now one and now another of these tendencies.”

Since Lenin wrote this text, the great imperialist states have tended to become rentier states and leave production to the “workshops of the world” in underdeveloped countries, from China to Brazil and a string of countries in Eastern Asia. This has made the contradictions more pronounced between the rentier states, in which financial activity has taken over from industrial activity, and the poor countries, whose growing industrial activity feeds the financial activity of the imperialist countries.

But since Lenin was a revolutionary communist, he saw what this development would bring in the future:

“When a big enterprise assumes gigantic proportions, and, on the basis of an exact computation of mass data, organizes according to plan the supply of primary raw materials to the extent of twothirds, or threefourths, of all that is necessary for tens of millions of people; when the raw materials are transported in a systematic and organized manner to the most suitable places of production, sometimes situated hundreds or thousands of miles from each other; when a single center directs all the consecutive stages of processing the material right up to the manufacture of numerous varieties of finished articles; when these products are distributed according to a single plan among tens and hundreds of millions of consumers (…) �" then it becomes evident that we have socialization of production, and (…) that private economic and private property relations constitute a shell which no longer fits its contents, a shell which must inevitably decay if its removal is artificially delayed, a shell which may remain in a state of decay for a fairly long period….”

Lenin’s “fairly long period” has in fact been a lot longer than the revolutionary communists of the time thought it would be. Barely a year after Lenin wrote Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916, the capitalist world was shaken by the powerful wave of revolution that began with the Russian revolution, but the wave was not strong enough to destroy capitalism. We know the rest of the story.

Society paid for the survival of capitalism with the crisis of 1929, the Great Depression, fascism, World War II and, as a sort of boomerang effect, the degeneration of the workers’ state itself.

Twenty years later, in The Transitional Program, Trotsky wrote, “The objective prerequisites for the proletarian revolution have not only ripened, they have begun to get somewhat rotten.” The transformation of society is taking a lot longer than Trotsky thought it would.

But the obstacle is still the same as Trotsky described. An economic and social organization, even if it has been obsolete for a long time, does not fall until it is overthrown �" in other words, not unless there is a revolutionary class, putting itself forward to run society and to fight for power.

Despite the destruction brought about by World War II, despite all the damage caused by the perpetuation of capitalism, despite the succession of crises that have shaken it, during the years when the capitalist economy was regulated and the years since it was not, humanity has continued to develop its scientific and technological knowledge and therefore the efficiency by which it exerts a growing power over nature. The division of labor on a global scale, which has continued to develop, is part of this growth, even if it has exacerbated the inequalities and heightened the chaotic nature of this development.

Financialization: Its Continuity and Amplification in the History of Capitalism

Financialization is not a break in capitalism’s history. It has not changed its laws, nor any of its contradictions; on the contrary, it has amplified them.

Financialization has contributed to the concentration of the world economy into a single whole. It has widened the polarization between the wealth of a small minority and the poverty of the greatest number, between the owners of capital and the exploited, between rich countries and underdeveloped countries. It has accentuated all the contradictions of the capitalist economy. It has given economic life a still more chaotic character than before.

In this dreadful waste that the perpetuation of the capitalist order has cost humanity, we must count the considerable price paid in multiple wars, with or without direct intervention by the imperialist powers; and the famines, particularly those caused simply by speculation on food products.

Above and beyond the millions of dead and wounded in the wars caused directly or indirectly by imperialism’s domination of the world, we should also take into account what humanity loses by the restriction of so many people to a vegetative life, exclusively preoccupied with surviving from day to day, with no access to education or culture.

The economists of the bourgeoisie have invented a “Human Development Index” (HDI) to fill in what the GDP does not show. But the damage that comes from the survival of capitalism cannot be counted by a statistical index. How many child Mozarts, da Vincis, Rembrandts, Balzacs, Einsteins, or Marxes die of hunger before reaching adulthood? How many survive but have no chance to join the ranks of those who help to further humanity?

At the time of Marx, a communist organization of the economy, with socialized production and distribution, was only an inspired anticipation.

At the time of Lenin, because the Bolshevik party took power in an underdeveloped country, it had to try to do, by means of administration by the workers’ state, what capitalism had not done in Russia. Facing this Herculean task, Lenin knew what he was talking about when he said that the Russian economy wasn’t suffering from too many monopolies but from too few.

His main preoccupation during the years that preceded his death was to insist on the need for censuses, in order to know what means of production then existed in Russia.

Despite the tardiness of the proletarian revolution since the first try in 1917, history has not stopped.

Although the deadline is further away than Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin or Trotsky thought it would be, the question “socialism or barbarism?” has not yet been definitively decided, even if moldering imperialism has resuscitated a multitude of barbaric forms from the past, such as religious fundamentalism of various stripes, ethnic sectarianism or chauvinism. To all of these should be added others, coming out of human activity itself: like the nuclear threat or, more generally, all the threats to nature and the environment represented by production for profit only.

It is as true now as it was in Lenin’s time that the gigantic multinationals that devour the product of human activity in the four corners of the world, also herald what society can become. The growing socialization of productive activity and imperialist globalization are the tributes paid by vice to virtue, by rotting capitalism to the future, communist, reorganization of society.

Down with Reactionary Ideas �" Even When Wrapped Up in Left-Wing Language

An important aspect of the political fight of revolutionary communists is the fight against those who, under the pretense of attacking this or that consequence of the survival of capitalism, do it with reactionary ideas, which, at best, cannot be applied, and at worst would represent a step backward.

Revolutionary communism cannot be reduced to defending acquired advantages. Protectionism or de-globalization, even when rehashed by the left, is not only a stupid idea in the face of the great interdependence of economies. (How many factories spread over how many countries are involved in the production of an airplane? How many workers here in France work for an American, Japanese, English or even Chinese company?)

Protectionism has been a little �" and already very little �" progressive for poor countries that were trying to protect their national economy against imperial robbery. But in the imperialist countries, even when protectionism is presented as a way of protecting workers, it is pretty obvious that it is going to be used against competition from workers in poor countries, in Africa, China or Mexico. In whatever convoluted way it is presented, protectionism sets workers of one country against their class brothers and sisters from other countries and chains them each to their imperialist bourgeoisie.

Humanity can be emancipated from capitalism only as a whole. It is as a whole and by taking advantage of the division of labor prepared by capitalism, up to and including by globalized imperialism, that it is possible to reorganize production, consciously and rationally, on a planetwide scale.

The future of humanity is not a world with a “Fortress Europe” and a “Fortress America,” each protecting their privileges against the sea of misery in the rest of the world. That would not only be humanly vile. It would be unrealistic. Capitalism builds twentyfourfoot walls and puts barbed wire around territories that are considered privileged; it gives carte blanche to the crooks in top positions who direct the hunt against immigrants. But it cannot make these walls impassable. And the barriers it puts up to protect itself from the poor people of poor countries don’t protect it against the poverty that grows even inside these capitalist heavens.

Communist revolutionaries took Stalin’s saying that it was possible to have “socialism in a single country” as a sign that Stalinism had passed irretrievably into the capitalist camp and had accepted a capitalist future for society.

Humanity cannot move forward until it has rid itself of the economic power of the bourgeoisie, starting with its vision of the world. The only perspective really opposed to a world dominated by imperialist capitalism, regulated or not, depends on the capacity of the proletariat to play its historic role. Even more than in Trotsky’s time “the turn is now to the proletariat, i.e., chiefly to its revolutionary vanguard. The historical crisis of humanity is reduced to the crisis of the revolutionary leadership.”

They say it's recovering, because housing sales are up.

Housing sales may be up -- but only because banks are dumping their toxic mortgages once again. Selling off repossessed homes is driving down prices, undercutting homeowners who are trying to sell their homes.

That is NOT a recovery!

They say there's a recovery because the unemployment rate is getting better. The unemployment rate may be getting better, but the percentage of people who have a job is ... worse. Workers who have been unemployed for a year are being dropped off the charts. If they don't look for work every week, they're not counted -- even if there aren't any jobs out there for them to find.

In the two months before Christmas, only 300,000 new people found work -- temporary work for the holiday season. But what about the 24 million workers who need work NOW? At that rate, it would take more than 13 years to employ 24 million -- even if Christmas came every two months!

They say there's a recovery because factory output is up. Yes, it is -- a little. But only because the bosses squeeze more work out of the same number of people.

There is NO recovery in things that matter to working people -- jobs and a decent standard of living.

There IS one recovery, however -- in profits. Corporation after corporation announces record profits. That means bigger bonuses for the executives, bigger payouts for big stockholders.

The corporations making those big profits are not using them to invest in more factories, or buildings. They aren't increasing wages. And they certainly aren't paying more taxes, which could be used to improve public services.

No, they are hoarding that money, and they are speculating with it.

Today corporate giants hold over two trillion dollars, stashed away unspent. "Private equity" investment funds have over half a trillion dollars in unspent cash hoards. The banks have many trillions more, including from government bailouts.

The capitalists' hoarded money represents the labor that millions of workers put out. That accumulated hoard was created by the daily work of millions, using machinery and materials worked up by earlier millions.

That money the greedy hoarders have accumulated needs to be put to work.

Those trillions of dollars could be used to produce the goods and services we need, providing jobs for everyone who wants to work.

If the capitalists say there isn't enough demand for their goods, then let the work be shared out, and slow down the speed on the jobs -- with no loss of pay for anyone.

We could all work fewer hours, at a slower pace -- and not be dead tired when we come home. And everyone needing a job could have work, everyone getting a full check to live on.

The money the banks stole from our taxes could be used to fix all those things that are rotting away. Repair vacant housing. Provide medical care. Build and repair schools. Provide a decent education to every young person. Restore public services. Repair roads, bridges, tunnels, dams.

The resources exist. The housing that is now vacant, the office buildings now standing empty "for lease," the factories now chained shut, the equipment and tooling now idle, the people without a job -- and yes, the money now hoarded up.

Everything needed is right here at hand. Put it to useful work. That would make society hum and come to life again.

These laws are grossly misnamed. They have never given workers a "right to work." If workers had a "right to work," how could we have such outrageous unemployment?

The aim of these misnamed laws is crystal clear: to prevent union organization by cutting back the unions' source of funds.

Indiana is not the first state to pass "right-to-prevent-a-union" legislation. But it is the first state in the last ten years to pass such a law. And it is the first state ever in the Midwest, the Northeast and the Pacific Coast -- the industrial heartland.

Certainly, states have been chipping away at union rights for decades now. That's especially so in states the Republicans control. The Democrats tend to leave the union apparatuses alone because they gain from electoral help the unions give them.

But up until now, even the Republicans held back from this kind of attack on the unions in states where unions were strong. The Republicans have never before passed such a law in an industrial state like Indiana.

Today, the Republican have crossed that line. It seems that an important part of the capitalist class is ready to tear up the framework that has governed labor relations for the last 77 years.

It is a very formal framework. One that requires workers to get the government to certify their right to have a union. One that prevents workers from having a union unless the majority of the workers vote for one.

This formal framework ends up with the company deducting union dues from workers' paychecks and sending them on to the union apparatus, freeing it from even that little bit of control by the workers.

This formal framework gradually determined that workers could strike only when a contract expires -- every three, four or more years.

All of these things, which were the "norm" of labor relations in this country, served the company's desire for "labor peace" and the union apparatus's desire for a stable income.

But they didn't serve the workers. Why can't 40% of the workers, for example, decide to set up their own union and make it function? Why can't there be several unions in the same workplace, with workers deciding which to join, depending on what each one does? Why shouldn't workers strike right when they have a problem if they want to?

In passing "right-to-work" laws, the Republicans are tearing up the 77-year-old "labor peace" framework -- but not in ways that serve the workers' interests.

Not a single thing in these so-called "right to work" laws makes it easier for workers to set up their own union, to decide when and how to take on the company. Nothing in them requires that the unions use their funds to defend the immediate and long term interests of the workers -- which can be served only by preparing for a real fight.

Just the opposite. Whether or not they attack the union apparatus with such laws, both parties increase the legal impediments put in the workers' way. They add more restrictions on the right to strike, more restrictions on the rights of workers to express themselves in the workplace. Democrat and Republican governors both demand more wage and benefit concessions from public workers and teachers.

There are huge problems with the unions. But these are the workers' organizations. The workers should be the ones to fix them.

Let the Republicans -- and Democrats -- keep their grubby hands off the unions.