What interest is there for the workers in this election? The only choice we are offered is between an open enemy and a false friend -- millionaires both of them, defenders of the capitalist system, enforcers of exploitation. The choice we are offered is between a party that speaks for the big banks and the big industrialists -- and another party that, while it gets some of its money from the unions, acts for the big banks and the big industrialists.

Here is the plain and simple truth: there is no party of the working class. And has not been for decades.

One hundred years ago, in 1912, Eugene V. Debs ran for the presidency on the Socialist ticket. He did not expect to win, knowing then, just like today, that money controls the outcome of elections in capitalist society. But he ran to let speak all those who otherwise would not be heard.

Six years later, he was put on trial for supporting the Russian Revolution and opposing the first big imperialist war, World War I. Two years later, while behind bars in federal prison, he won nearly a million votes in the 1920 elections. It was only 3.4% of the vote, but it showed that in the working class there already was a sizeable current who agreed that it was necessary to "organize not to conciliate but to fight against the capitalist class."

Debs was not a "politician," not someone whose aim was to fool as many people as he could. He used the electoral platform to speak the truth about the capitalist system, a system in which we are still trapped: "I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence."

He was truly a militant of his class -- having led the great railway strike of 1894, spending time in prison for that also, declaring, along with Marx, that the emancipation of the working class can be carried out only by the working class itself.

If we want to go forward, we have to resurrect our history -- a history filled with working class militants like Debs, or like the many devoted, and often nameless revolutionary syndicalists who made up the IWW, or the selfless and committed activists who made up the Communist Party or the Communist League.

But it's not just militants, individuals. The working class needs its own party, built around the conviction held by all those revolutionaries that "the working class and the employing class have nothing in common" -- in the words of the IWW.

That's never been more true, perhaps, than today. The capitalist class has engaged itself in a great war, a class war against all of us who do the work necessary to make this society run. Up until now, it has been a very one-sided war, because workers have not found the way to join together in a common struggle against our enemies -- against the bankers, the big industrialists and the politicians and governments that serve the capitalists.

But we could. We don't need saviors to come defend us. We have the forces to defend ourselves. We make the whole economy run. Not only can we make it stop running, in order to defend ourselves. We have the power to put it back to running in a way that can serve all of humanity.

These companies have been reducing their workforce and forcing the remaining workers to pick up the slack. The workers' increased productivity has not benefitted them -- either through higher pay or reduced hours of work. The companies and their owners have taken it all at the workers' expense.

These are words that U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta used when he spoke about two photos published by the Los Angeles Times. The photos show U.S. troops in Afghanistan posing jokingly with body parts, and the Times says 18 such photos were leaked to the paper.

The Pentagon, headed by Panetta himself, demanded that the Times NOT publish any of the photos. The public should not know that the war these officials are presiding over is "ugly and violent."

Panetta declared that the photos depicted actions against the "regulations" and "core values" of the U.S. military.

In fact, that's exactly what these photos show: the "core values" of U.S. imperialism. For more than 10 years, the biggest, most advanced military machine in human history has used all its might and state-of-the-art weapons to rain destruction on Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world -- at the cost of death and suffering to Afghan people and U.S. troops.

Disturbing? These photos? No, what is disturbing -- violently disturbing -- is the war.

In fact, this summit is little more than an election-year stunt. British newspapers are reporting that the agreement will allow thousands of United States troops to remain in the country until at least 2024! These would include American Special Forces soldiers and air power, practically guaranteeing that the war will continue to rage for a long time.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is already the longest war in U.S. history. Since it began in October 2001, the U.S. has carried out bombings, nighttime raids and search and destroy missions that have killed tens of thousands of Afghans, destroyed much of the country, and turned most of the population against the U.S., thus swelling the insurgency.

On a regular basis insurgents carry out attacks inside the most fortified parts of Kabul, called the Ring of Steel. These attacks are only possible with the cooperation and collaboration of parts of the Afghan police and army. Only days before the announcement of the U.S. plan, heavily armed insurgents attacked several embassies and the Parliament plus three provincial capitals and a U.S. air base -- all at the same time.

The Afghan military and police also regularly attack U.S. and NATO troops as well. Rather than getting smaller, the U.S. war is feeding on itself. It is sowing ever more death and destruction, turning not just Afghanistan, but the whole region around it, into a more and more dangerous and explosive hell.

A letter to the students had been taped to the door in the early morning hours. The letter said that the school had lost its federal financial aid certification, and therefore there was "no choice" but to close.

One student was $21,000 in debt after five months at the college. She said, "We're out of our financial aid …. People are not accepting our credits from here to transfer (to other colleges), so we have to start all over."

Like all for-profit colleges, ACT College receives the majority of its revenue from federal financial aid.

The U.S. Department of Education says that this college currently owes students more than $250,000 of unused financial aid that should have been refunded to them. And that the college changed and destroyed records to cover up this theft.

So is the U.S. Department of Education forcing the school to return the $250,000 to the students? Or prosecuting those responsible?

And what about reimbursing the students for classes that they took -- but which won't lead to a degree because the school's credits won't transfer?

No, just the opposite! The U.S. Department of Education simply cut off future financial aid payments to ACT. The college could even open up again using a different name and location.

The government knows very well that corruption and outrageous profits at the expense of students are rampant in this industry. It's the very reason for-profit colleges exist. The U.S. Department of Education simply hands the owners fistfuls of money, letting them charge whatever they please as tuition. The government looks the other way as working class students receive a substandard education, with credits that won't be accepted at accredited schools like private universities, state colleges and community colleges.

The students, on the other hand, will be chased down and their paychecks garnished if they fail to pay back their loans. A hard lesson learned for 300 students at ACT College.

Even a politician like Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart noted that cuts like these have made the jails into "the largest mental health provider in the state of Illinois."

But all of this will supposedly save two million dollars.

Ha! Emanuel's same budget includes four million dollars to build four boathouses along the Chicago River. That's right, boat houses for Chicago's wealthiest residents are at least twice as important to the Mayor than mental health services for the city's population.

In protest, a group of two dozen patients and activists occupied the Woodlawn clinic, which is scheduled to close. The police arrested them, charging twelve with trespassing. But the protests continue, with an Occupy encampment around the clinic and a rally at City Hall.

Debt collection companies embed their agents in emergency rooms and demand that patients pay outstanding bills before they receive treatment.

One debt collector agency, Accretive Health, instructed its employees to tell incoming patients that, in case they don't have credit cards, "if you have your checkbook in your car I will be happy to wait for you."

Hospitals in collusion with these agencies allow debt collectors to have access to patients' records and to pose as hospital staff. Both are violations of government laws and regulations. Not to mention, it prevents people from getting proper medical treatment.

It's just a small corner of a medical system based on profit!

The man died.

Everyone with a cell phone knows you have to regularly charge it.

Did Metro skip that part of the instructions?

His target recently has been working women, young women, poor women -- that majority of the female population who are not independently wealthy, the women for whom health insurance and healthcare clinics boil down to a matter of life and death.

The war on women is aimed at limiting women's reproductive rights -- meaning that women will remain a cheaper source of labor for the capitalist class.

In capitalist society, the labor of women is undervalued, and overall, women earn less than men for doing the same type of work.

Women give birth to and raise children. But capitalist society puts no monetary value on this very important work. Other industrialized countries at least have some type of government paid maternity leave and/or family allocation. Not the United States.

Because women care for children or care for other sick family members, they go in and out of the workforce. They start out at new hire wages over and over again. They end up accumulating fewer credits toward Social Security. They end up with a smaller pension or less in their 401K.

Because women earn less in this society, that creates a wedge that can be used to drive down everyone's wages.

Abortion has always been legal for wealthy women, regardless of what the law said. They had the financial means to discretely pay for the procedure with a trusted doctor. Working class and poor women have gotten abortions too, but much more dangerously when they were illegal. And it has never been widely publicized, but the number of abortions performed has remained fairly steady, whether the procedure is legal or illegal. It shows there is a very human problem underlying the abortion question.

So many of the women who required abortions were denied access to simple, safe and sure contraceptive methods -- whether for economic or political reasons. That goes double for teenagers, who are also denied access to adequate education about their own bodies and their own sexuality.

Abortion, like all issues concerning women's reproductive system, is a health issue. Yet reactionaries turn it into a religious issue, trying to impose their own warped views on everyone else.

The right wing speaks of abortion as the destruction of human life.

Yes, an abortion destroys a potential human life. A fetus, while not yet a person in the same way as a newborn infant, is a potential human being. But the fetus is only part of the broader picture of human life.

Women chose abortion even when it was illegal, and they choose abortion today even when it is difficult to obtain -- because they may be facing alternatives even more destructive to human life.

The birth of a child that a woman cannot provide for involves the destruction of human life. She may have to work herself literally to death trying to provide for that child. Any future for her children who are already born may become impossible once she has more children than she can handle. High unemployment rates and laws restricting eligibility for public assistance have left 1.5 million single mothers without jobs and without cash aid, according to the Urban Institute.

There is also the sad reality that the birth of emotionally unwanted children can lead to the destruction of human life. Newspapers are full of stories about the death of children from abuse and neglect.

It is for these reasons and more that we say that it must be the woman herself who makes the choice -- not her parents, not her husband or companion, not the government nor legislators, and certainly not the churches.

In making her choice, a woman should not be pressured legally or morally, nor have to face right wing fanatics, those dirty old men who hang out outside women's clinics.

The Hyde amendment got around the Supreme Court decision by pretending to cover simply a matter of funding for Medicaid. The Hyde amendment says that federal funds cannot be used when a state's Medicaid plan covers abortion. At that time, President Carter was asked if this legislation discriminated against poor women. He replied, "Life isn't fair."

Today only 17 states use state funds to provide all or most medically necessary abortions.

Every year since 1976, more restrictions have been put on women's access to abortion. But 2011 was the worst year by far: 92 provisions restricting abortion were passed either by Congress or state legislatures.

Many of the specific restrictions on abortion have been portrayed as insignificant. But the chipping away has now reached the point that over half of all women live in states where there is little or no access to abortion. For women in their teens, the situation is much worse.

Because of the worsening economy, more and more public hospitals have closed, either replaced by or taken over by the Catholic Church. In huge parts of the U.S., the only healthcare facility for miles is a Catholic hospital -- a hospital which follows church dogma about women. That means, in large parts of the country, there is no medical facility providing access to birth control or abortion.

"Americans United for Life" is another force in this attack on women's rights. It is an old organization, founded in 1971, but only recently it experienced a phenomenal increase in funding. Last year it joined with a right wing group that lurks in the shadows, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, funded by some of the biggest corporations in the country, including AT&T, Coca-Cola, Exxon Mobil, Johnson & Johnson, Koch Industries, Pfizer, Reynolds American, State Farm Insurance, United Parcel Service and Walmart.

In 2011, AUL worked with ALEC to draft 28 anti-abortion bills introduced last year into state legislatures.

AUL was also the primary engine behind the targeting of Planned Parenthood, whose clinics are the only place where many women can go for family planning and other health issues such as screening for breast cancer, cervical cancer and sexually transmitted diseases.

In the fall of 2011, intentionally falsified allegations in an AUL report were used as a pretext by Republican Florida Congressman Cliff Stearns to investigate Planned Parenthood.

That investigation was then used as the pretext by the "Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation," the pink ribbon breast cancer charity, as its reason for cutting all funding to Planned Parenthood.

Komen, masquerading as an organization that raises money for breast cancer research, in reality is the third big force behind the attack on women's reproductive rights.

Komen's CEO, Nancy Brinker, is a major Republican donor who held several positions under George W. Bush, helping to promote anti-abortion legislation.

Faced with real outrage, Komen was forced to reverse its decision. But the whole ordeal exposed top officials of the Komen foundation for what they are: a bunch of right-wingers, virulently opposed to women's rights.

Some of this country's wealthiest capitalist families fund reactionary ideas: billionaire families like the Waltons of Walmart, the Koch brothers with oil refineries who now fund the Tea Party movement, the Devos family of Amway fame who push charter schools.

These wealthy families, with deep links into the banking system and control over industry are also behind the attempt to destroy public schools so that charters can replace them and produce profit for businesses. They are behind attacks on cities and unions as a means to privatize all city services, so new business opportunities can be opened up for the wealthy.

What kind of a society are these wealthy families creating for us? A world where schools are less and less able to mention contraception. A world where family planning clinics will either have their funds removed or will be terrorized out of existence.

Using the war on women as an election strategy seems like it might backfire this time for the Republicans. Normally, if an economy is really bad, like the one we are in right now, the sitting president does not typically win reelection. If Obama wins after four years of a bad economy, and with a level of unemployment greater than when he took office, it will be because of the Republican war on women. Women are saying in poll after poll that if the election were held today, they would vote for Obama.

But no one should believe that women's rights would be safe if Democrats are put in office.

Despite Democrats posing as strong defenders of the right to choose, the Hyde Amendment passed in 1976, when Democrats had an enormous 291-144 majority in the House, and a 60-40 majority in the Senate. And it was signed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter.

Democrats haven't even been weak defenders of women's right to choose.

One of the quirks of the Hyde Amendment is that it is a "rider" to an annual appropriations bill, which means it must be renewed by Congress every year. So each year, enough Democrats have supported it to get it passed.

A 2010 deal between Democratic President Obama and a group of anti-abortion Catholic Democrats produced Executive Order 13535, which is aimed at permanently continuing the Hyde Amendment's policy of restricting federal funds for abortion.

What's for sure is that after the elections are over, attacks on women will become fiercer again. Women must organize to defend themselves.

In order to pit one group against another, and turn potential allies into enemies, lies get peddled. Reactionaries repetitively push insane lies like: women who use birth control are "sluts," poor people are just "complainers," trade unions "created the financial crisis," black people are "criminals," and immigrants take "our jobs."

Reactionary ideas are sold as a solution to workers' problems. But it doesn't take much to realize that the capitalist class will not solve workers' problems. The capitalist class is organized only to solve the problem of making more money in the next quarter.

In order for society to move forward, the working class must lead the fight to take on our worsening problems and in so doing, open the door to another society.

In 1871, men and women workers took control of Paris, France, and held it for 10 weeks against all the reactionary forces in French society. This historic struggle became known as the Paris Commune. In 1917, faced by economic hardships that had become unbearable, Russian women took to the streets demanding bread. This led to the overthrow of the czarist regime, to the sweeping aside of all reactionary forces and to the establishment and defense by the working class of its own power -- the Russian revolution.

Was it just a coincidence that fights set off by the protests of women led directly to the two most important political struggles of the working class known so far? Perhaps. But it has often happened that women push other oppressed layers of the working class into struggle.

But however it starts, the sooner the working class begins to flex its political muscles, to put itself forward as the new leader of society -- what could eventually become a socialist, a communist society -- the better off working people will be.

In Retirement Heist the author interviews many retirees from auto, rubber, steel, mining and other industries, and their family members, who fought to keep their benefits. Sears retiree Elaine Russell got sick and tired of using her grocery budget to buy prescriptions. Iron foundry retiree John Galloway had enough when hundreds of retirees were told to provide notarized affidavits proving they weren’t dead. Pilot Chuck Ackerman refused to have his pension taken back. Former NFL running back Victor Washington demanded treatment for his concussion and degenerative joint disease. Some of these retirees sued the companies. These stories make the conflicts personal.

The author is an award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter and watchdog. Her book shows companies do not cut retiree pensions and health benefits because they are broke or going bankrupt. They do it to increase profits. Read this 2011 book, and you’ll see that your family is not alone.

The L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is called Metro, admits it has not been doing hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs of signals, tracks and passenger cars on that line. And that is only part of the 1.3 billion dollars in the deferred maintenance backlog throughout the L.A. bus and rail system.

This is not because of a lack of money. Metro's budget is bigger than ever. But most of that money goes into the pockets of private contractors and subcontractors building -- very slowly and very profitably -- a few new transit lines.

The banks pocketed the money, but the workers are now paying for it.

The workers are paying most heavily in Greece, Ireland and above all Portugal, but also, more recently, in Italy and Spain. But no state and no population is spared, nor are they protected from going through the same thing.

The same measures have been applied practically everywhere, with more or less severity, according to the situation, by left wing administrations as well as right wing ones. These measures include lowering or freezing wages; cutting the number of public workers; increasing the value-added tax (the national sales tax, the tax that weighs most heavily on the poorest layers); increasing the number of years of work before workers can get full retirement; increasing health care costs.

No matter what the form, no European state and no population escapes these plans. The result is that the banks continue to receive interest on their loans, but the European economies are sunk in recession and the population is hit with unemployment and growing poverty. It's no different in the U.S.

Today, the recession seems to be worsening. Almost all the European states are affected -- including those, like Holland, which appeared up to now to escape it. Some economists call in the media for "limiting the brutality of these austerity plans."

But, in fact for political reasons, this "brutality," this policy of "generalized austerity" is nothing other than the struggle led by the rich classes, by the bourgeoisie of finance and industry, to make the poor classes, the workers, pay for their crisis. Meanwhile they continue to get rich, despite the crisis, and even thanks to the crisis.

Suspended students are invited to attend the Freedom School and two university professors have volunteered to teach.

This sudden escalation of punishments seems to indicate that school officials are a bit panicked by the third student walk out -- and 5^th demonstration -- at a Detroit public school in the last two months.

Said one Western freshman of administrators: "You are basically keeping us out of school for wanting to better our school.... I was worried the day of the walk out. I'm not now. I'm angry."

The most recent walk out involved unified actions by students from two schools: Western and Southwestern High Schools. Students are worried about the planned merger of their two schools, pointing out that Western is overcrowded already.

Recently about 50 high school students at the Frederick Douglass Academy protested a lack of teachers, and were given one day suspensions. Before that, hundreds of students at Denby High staged a demonstration against their school being thrown into a state wide failing district. And hundreds of students, teachers and parents protested outside Mumford High School. Two demonstrations have been held to protest the closing of the Detroit School for the Deaf.

Any chance of Detroit Public School students receiving an education will come from more students, parents and teachers getting on board with the fight these students have started.

Cuts were imposed in retaliation for union teachers voting NO! on concessions in March.

Students are learning a valuable lesson in solidarity. They are giving themselves an excellent preparation for their own future.

Right now, Detroit supplies a lot of its own power. After this plan, that electrical grid will be transferred to DTE. Right now, Detroit city agencies pay for their power, to the PLD, at a very low wholesale rate. (And, that payment stays within city government.) After the transfer, they will pay DTE -- at a much higher retail rate, 50 percent higher than the current rate.

The city claims this will save money because DTE will be paying to renovate the system. But their plan calls for the CITY to take on 160 million dollars of debt in order to renovate the system -- BEFORE giving it to DTE! By the time the city finishes paying off this debt twenty years later, the cost will be twice that much -- 320 million. The city will be paying, so that DTE can reap the profits from a renovated system.

Detroit politicians are lying through their teeth if they say this deal will save the city money.

And, this plan will leave many residents even more in the dark. The plan calls for the number of lights in the city to go DOWN by the end of the renovation, almost by half.

But it won't be happening everywhere equally. The new plan rates neighborhoods from "steady" to "transitional" to "distressed" to justify leaving poorer neighborhoods without lights while giving richer neighborhoods 100 percent lighting. So much for helping residents!

And the city says 20,000 lights will be removed from alleyways. Darkened alleyways behind people's houses will surely make those homes and streets even more dangerous for the residents than they already are. But the city acts as if those lights are completely unnecessary. Sure -- because the politicians aren't living in those neighborhoods!

But don't worry -- citizens will have the ability to "purchase and fund additional lights if they desire more lighting than their allotment." So -- the neighborhoods with the LEAST ability to pay will have to pay MORE if they want the full lighting that the wealthier neighborhoods will enjoy automatically!

For decades, one city administration after another let Detroit's electrical grid and lighting system fall apart. It shut down its power plants, letting DTE take over. It reduced maintenance, and let its substations rot. Now the current crop of politicians says it's too far gone for them to be able to afford to fix it. So they propose to hand it to DTE for nothing -- AFTER they go into debt to fix it.

This has been nothing but a protracted campaign of malicious, contrived neglect.

The deal on Public Lighting is only the first of many to come under the new "consent agreement." This is NOT "fixing" the city. It's not a bailout by the state. It's gutting the city even further -- to "fix" and bail out private industry!

The petition had 203,000 valid signatures -- 40,000 more than needed. But right-wing challengers claimed that the type in the headline was one-eighth of an inch too small.

Two Republican board members voted to block the petition. Two Democrats voted to accept.

It's a tidy little package. The Republicans provide the dictators to turn the screws on workers, while also turning over public resources to banks and corporations. The Democrats win credit for their vote, but Democratic mayors break union contracts, cut services, impose wage and benefit cuts.

The workers and the communities are left holding the bag.

If the activists who devoted themselves to the huge and difficult task of successful petitioning don't want to be left high and dry, they had best ignore the games of both parties, and take their cause directly to the streets. There, they would have far more chance of success.

They are both to blame: they both used their control over the government to support the corporate drive for profit.

It's that drive for profit that produced the unemployment.

Some of the biggest companies in the country have been shifting their cash reserves into the money markets in order to make money off of money, that is, off of speculation. Instead of producing goods and services they have gone on a gambling spree. That drove up unemployment.

Some of the biggest banks invented crooked mortgage schemes, which eventually brought the whole economy to a crashing halt. That meant more unemployment.

Today, with the collapse of the financial markets, some companies are pushing out production again. But they are doing it with fewer workers.

And that means still more unemployment, pure and simple.

Every bit of speed-up means someone without a job. Every added little piece onto your job means someone else without a job.

No, unemployment is no accident. It is a product of the capitalist drive for profit, of all the assorted ways the bosses use to squeeze one more drop of profit from the workers' sweat and blood.

Within the framework of capitalism there is no answer to unemployment. And there is no politician serving the capitalists -- no Democrat or Republican -- who will provide it. The workers themselves have to impose it.

There is, in fact, a simple remedy for unemployment: share out the work, with no loss in pay.

It wouldn't be difficult to do -- look how hard we work today. Every one of these jobs on an assembly line could be split in two or in three, and we would still be working too hard. Jobs answering phones in an insurance company or state offices or hospitals need to be split up -- workers don't have enough time to get people the answers they need. Look at the lines we stand in to get anything done -- that's because companies don't hire enough people to do the work.

There's more than enough work to provide a job for everyone who wants to work -- at a decent wage for everyone. Why not? There's more than enough money floating around this economy to provide a decent wage for everyone, more than enough to keep our wages going up, directly and immediately, whenever prices go up.

The main reason for the mortgage scam was an excess of money sitting in the accounts of the big banks -- money they couldn't find anything to do with. It's still sitting there. Well, use that money productively. Put people to work, pay a decent wage.

Will the bosses want to do it? Of course not.

Will they even admit they have the money? Of course not.

But it is reasonable and necessary. And it could be done -- it just has to be imposed on the bosses and their bankers, imposed by the collective activity of working people who decide no longer to pay the price for the bosses' mess.

Maybe we are not yet to the point that workers are ready to carry out such a struggle. Maybe, in fact, such a prospect seems very far away. But things can change very quickly in a time like this. In any case, it's necessary to have goals and aims in mind when we do begin to fight. It's important that there be people who say to their fellow workers: every one of us should have a job; every one of us should have a decent wage.

Last year former Chicago Bears defensive back Dave Duerson also shot himself in the chest, leaving a hand written note stating: "Please, see that my brain is given to the NFL's brain bank." Duerson, who played 11 seasons as a battering ram, wanted his brain tested for chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE. CTE is a progressive degenerative disease, diagnosed after death in individuals with a history of multiple concussions and other forms of head injury. It is thought to be caused by the accumulation of tau proteins in the brain that kill cells in the regions responsible for mood, emotion and planning. Tau proteins are also found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease but the patterns of deposits differ between the two conditions. Individuals with CTE can show symptoms of dementia such as memory loss, aggression, confusion, poor judgement and depression, which can appear within months of the trauma or many decades later.

In 2010 a 21-year old college football player hung himself. The autopsy revealed that Owen Thomas had CTE. Thomas was a lineman, a position that endures as many as 1,000 hits to the head per season. Even though he had never been diagnosed as having a concussion, this young player had brain damage more often seen in NFL veterans.

In fourteen brains of late NFL players studied, thirteen of them showed signs of CTE.

It is no accident that team owners turned a blind eye to CTE -- and still do. The players are expendable even if they are highly paid. The owners have no problem with using up players to fill seats only to throw them in the garbage heap when they can no longer play.

Shortly after this announcement, the Baltimore Development Corporation announced it was recommending tax breaks for another downtown developer.

That's where the money saved by closing rec centers is going.

Ticket prices at the "new" Howard Theater will exclude many people who grew up nearby, once enjoying music at this historic hall.

Tickets for Chuck Berry's upcoming show cost $95. Michael Bolton, $158.

But the reopening was a success for a local developer, a former public relations officer in the Clinton White House and son of a city judge. DC gave him an eight million dollar grant and a four million dollar tax break.

DDOT promises that buses on the 4 busiest bus lines will run every 15 minutes between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Though, that means the other bus routes will run less frequently. And about that "15 minute" guarantee for the 4 busiest routes: That will actually mean worse service. The Woodward bus ran every 8 minutes less than a year ago! And it ran 24 hours a day. No longer! And three more routes are discontinued.

Buses provide the only public transportation in the city, and the only means for many workers to get to and from their jobs. Riders already face wait times of as much as 60 minutes on many routes, and that's when they run according to schedule! DDOT had completely eliminated 4 routes in the last year and already increased wait times and reduced hours of service on many others.

Students and senior citizens, who once rode for free, now pay $0.75 and $0.50, respectively -- each way -- a lot of money for low-income households. Now the company managing the system wants to require riders to buy a "stored value card," adding yet another burden to riding a bus.

Detroit Mayor Dave Bing has been quite open about his desire to completely privatize the bus system. He already has outsourced its management to a private company. His budget proposal for the next fiscal year includes a nearly 23 per cent cut in the city's subsidy to DDOT.

Cutting DDOT's budget is criminal. The cuts already implemented have practically destroyed what bus service previously existed. They have wilfully imposed malicious neglect on this system -- in order to justify turning it over to private hands.

Bus riders did not cause Detroit's financial crisis and should not pay for it. Get the money from the banks and other big corporations who have bled the city dry!

The State of California cited the Chevron Oil Company in the death of a 55-year-old veteran oil field worker killed on the job.

When he was doing routine work, the ground beneath him gave way, and he fell into a sinkhole filled with boiling liquids. It took seventeen hours for the fire department to retrieve his body.

The authorities found that the steam Chevron injected into the ground to extract oil created this sinkhole. The state fined Chevron $350 â€" less than you can get for running a red light in California.

The director of the California Department of Conservation defended this minuscule fine, saying that the process to extract oil by using steam can be “very tricky” and “the industry itself is learning [this process] as it’s going along”.

So, Chevron is “learning,” and a worker was boiled alive because of Chevron’s rush to make a profit, with the consent of the state of California.]]> Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 -0400 http://the-spark.net/np_916206.html http://the-spark.net/np_916206.html Three hundred thirty-three DC public school teachers were notified this week that they've been "excessed." Their jobs were eliminated due to budget cuts. That's on top of the 384 who were laid off in 2011, and 373 in 2010.

Meanwhile, a look at just one DC public charter school gives a clue to where the budget is going.

Imagine Southeast Public Charter School is a not-for-profit institution, at least on paper. In 2011 the school received enrollment-based funding of 6.8 million from the DC government. And it received another half a million in grants from the federal government.

So what did the school do with the money? In 2011 alone, the school turned around and paid nearly two million dollars in various "operating fees" to a private corporation. That corporation is a for-profit, nation-wide, "charter school operator" called Imagine Schools, Inc. -- along with its shady real estate subsidiary, Schoolhouse Finance.

And what about the teachers and staff? In other words, the people who actually operate the school? Not one penny of those operating fees went to them! The teachers and staff who operate the school are left to make do with whatever is leftover after the Virginia-based "operating corporation" is paid.

No wonder -- in a system like this -- teachers themselves are considered as "excess!"

People like Dan Gilbert, CEO of Quicken Loans, for example. Gilbert got a little unwelcome press, recently, when he applied for a gambling license for a casino he wants to open in Cleveland. A background check revealed a $60,000 "loan" he made to Kilpatrick -- just part of a $240,000 "loan" from him, Roger Penske, Compuware CEO Peter Karmanos, and PVS Chemicals CEO Jim Nicholson, to get Kilpatrick to shuffle off to Houston.

Kilpatrick, by comparison to these guys, is a choir boy.

That was one benefit of the way the government wrote the bankruptcy deal. It let GM dump what it owed -- but use those past debts to reduce its future tax bill.

When companies, from GM to GE, don't pay taxes, we end up paying the bigger share.

When the government gives tax breaks to the wealthy and to big corporations, it cuts services. Roads don't get repaired. Schools and parks and libraries are closed. Tuition for college skyrockets.

The tax break given to GM is just one more "concession" imposed on working people.

In the five years up to 2010, the Greek government purchased more of Germany's arms exports than any other country, accounting for 15 per cent of all German weapons makers' exports. The Greek government is also the top buyer in Europe of France's arms manufacturers. These huge weapons purchases continued when the big debt crisis hit in 2008. In fact, the Greek government increased its military spending from 6.24 billion euros in 2007 to 7.1 billion euros in 2010.

This was no accident. It is well known that the German and French governments, acting in the interests of their own big weapons manufacturers, imposed new arms deals on the Greek government, even as politicians the world over bemoaned the Greek debt crisis. In particular, there was concerted pressure from France to buy several stealth frigates. Germany sold 223 howitzers and completed a controversial deal on faulty submarines. Not to be left out, U.S. weapons makers have sold the Greek military F-16 jets and M-1 Abrams tanks.

All the austerity measures imposed on the Greek population -- the enormous cuts in social spending, jobs, the minimum wage, pensions -- are just a way to rob the Greek working population and the poor in order to enrich the biggest capitalists all over the world.

On May 3^rd, Ghislaine Joachim-Arnaud, the secretary general of the General Confederation of Labor of Martinique (CGTM) and a member of the leadership of Combat Ouvrier (Workers Fight), the West Indian Trotskyist organization, won her appeal in court against her conviction for "inciting racial hatred." She had been put on trial as the result of a complaint made by Jean-François Hayot of the Respect DOM (Overseas Department).

The original court found her guilty -- because she had signed the guest book of the TV station ATV with one of the slogans of the 2009 strike that tens of thousands of demonstrators chanted in Creole: "Martinique is ours, it's not theirs, a band of bekes, thieves, profiteers, we'll kick them out. We've got to continue this fight."

The beke and other bosses' lobby wished to take vengeance for the 2009 general strike and to prevent her from expressing herself freely. The 2009 strike had cost them a great deal.

This is above all a victory for all the workers mobilized around Ghislaine Joachim-Arnaud , for her comrades at work, her comrades in the CGTM -- the principal organizers of the committee to support her. It was also a victory for the militants of some political and union organizations in Martinique which had supported her, including those of her own organization, Combat Ouvrier.

Finally, the defense lawyers, by their legal and militant defense against injustice, made an important contribution toward the acquittal.

But behind all this talk about "growth" is only another attack on the workers' standard of living. Look at what Monti has done since taking over the Italian government last November, when he replaced Silvio Berlusconi. He pushed a new austerity plan, on top of the two previous plans adopted during the summer. Calling it "Save Italy," he increased the age at which workers can take Social Security pensions, increased the national sales tax and other taxes on the population and cut public services. The entire population has paid to save -- not Italy -- but the profits of bankers who speculate on the country's debt.

Monti then announced a new stage preparing for "growth." He claimed the main obstacle to "growth" was Article 18 of the Labor Law, protecting workers against layoffs. He engaged, with the complicity of the union leadership, in a "reform of the labor market," which was supposed to encourage businesses to hire... by letting them lay off without hindrance.

This new talk about "growth" is nothing but a new pretext to give money and opportunities to the bankers. It's been at least twenty years now that these people have been saying that to hire, they first have to be able to lay off. The sole result of this has been the aggravation of the crisis.

But in all the countries of Europe, the workers are beginning to be fed up with suffering under such a swindle.

Banks seem to have decided that student loans are the next big vein to mine. They play on the desire of young people to get an education.

Desire or not, there's a problem: most young people these days can't afford it.

With the cuts in state funding for education, college tuition rates have been skyrocketing. Students and their families have been forced to borrow more and more to cover the costs. In 2010, two-thirds of college students needed student loans, and they carried, on average, over $25,000 in student loan debt. Some students finish college with loans totaling up to $100,000. Except for the election-year reduction to 3.4 per cent, interest rates now range from 6.8 per cent to 8 per cent or even more -- and that's just for the government-backed loans; don't even mention the privately-backed loans, with interest rates that vary all over the place -- just like subprime mortgages. Typically, by the time they pay off their debt, students will have paid more than twice as much as they borrow.

College graduates with so much debt put off buying a house or car and having a family. These college degrees that were supposed to be their ticket to a brighter future, have instead become their ball and chain.

Today, three out of ten student borrowers are at least 30 days behind on their payments. Default rates are climbing toward ten per cent.

But the banks don't worry about getting their money -- the loans are guaranteed by the government, which means the taxpayers are on the hook to bail out the banks yet again.

And the government doesn't worry -- because, unlike other kinds of loans, student loans can't be discharged if a person declares bankruptcy. The borrower is on the hook for life.

Defaulting doesn't hurt the banks or the government, but it makes things worse for the borrower. When the borrowers default, late fees and collection costs get added on to what they already owe. Their paychecks, sick pay and even unemployment checks can be garnished, leaving very little behind to actually live on. And if they live long enough while still owing money, they'll find even their Social Security checks garnished.

College -- a financial salvation? No. More and more students -- and even their parents and grandparents -- are trapped in a pit of debt for the rest of their lives.

Young people, signing away their lives to chase a college degree, are sentencing themselves to a debtors' prison as soon as they graduate!

Already forced to pay a lot to get a university diploma, 57% of the province's students have to go heavily into debt. This new increase didn't pass unnoticed. Demonstrations broke out. On March 22^nd in Montreal, 25,000 students and teachers were in the streets. Many other demonstrations followed, but the government ignored them. On May 4^th in Victoria, where the ruling Quebec Liberal Party was holding its convention, there was a demonstration the police violently repressed, seriously wounding two protestors. Three days later, the fourteenth evening protest occurred.

According to the strikers' spokespersons, an increase in the cost of education would automatically lead to a reduction in the access to higher education, despite loans and scholarships.

Faced with this mobilization, the Quebec Liberal Party proposed to spread out the increase ... over seven years instead of five. "It's not an offer, it's an insult" thousands of demonstrators shouted in the streets.

Forced to receive student union representatives, an Education official announced that an "understanding" had been reached, so the strike must stop. But at the same time, the Quebec Liberal Party announced that the tuition increase was part of the "understanding."

Students at only two schools resumed classes and adopted the agreement. But tens of thousands of students voted again by a large majority to continue the strike. They weren't deceived by propositions that added up to a cut in university expenditures, but not in their tuition.

But today, people working for lower wages, which the top UAW leadership pushed through, may not even be able to buy a home in the first place.

Auto workers haven't had a raise in nine years, and some of us are struggling to hold on to our homes.

The best way to fight foreclosures, is to fight against concession policies that lead to people losing their homes. The best way is to organize a fight so everyone has a decent standard of living.

It wasn't supposed to happen. The Canadian Auto Workers' contract was up for renewal, and the local leadership had unanimously recommended the new contract's terms. All that remained was to vote. The vote was held on Sunday afternoon.

Surprise! The workers voted more than 60% NO. And then they did the next logical thing: they upset the apple cart, and went on strike after the midnight shift.

CBC news reported the CAW local president as saying, "Absolutely I was surprised.... It was a little bit of a shocker. To me it's like committing suicide."

The workers had done the logical thing, but evidently, not what the officers had intended!

In less than 24 hours, management changed their offer, to improve the hated "short shifting" rule. "Short shifting" at Dakkota meant that workers were sent home early, unpredictably, without compensation, whenever the Chrysler plant used less than a full shift's production. After the improvement, the workers then accepted the new contract.

It's not often, these days, that workers find a way to break through the wall of company-union "partnership" and impose a demand or two of their own. True, this action was very small and very brief. But it shows that the rank and file does have leverage -- more than it realizes -- when it seizes the time to act, over the heads of timid union leaders if necessary.

The workers, members of the International Association of Machinists, Lodge 851, are going up against a monster. Caterpillar has long been one of the most ruthless corporations.

Cat was one of the earliest companies to force major concessions on its workforce.

In the early 1990s, it provoked workers covered by a UAW Master Agreement to go on strike, then used scabs and professional strikebreakers to break their strike. Cat routinely threatens to do the same thing again to any workers who dare to strike or it simply shuts their plants.

The 1992 defeat imposed two-tier wage scales on active workers and shifted retiree healthcare benefits into a quickly dwindling VEBA fund that soon ran out. Those 1992 concessions became the pattern for the GM, Ford, and Chrysler contracts from 2007 on.

Yet some Caterpillar workers decided to strike, in this economic climate. The Wall Street Journal cannot understand it! "Are you crazy?," writes the Journal.

It may be true that the odds are long. And it's true that strikes have been very rare in the U.S. for decades -- with the result that the working class standard of living has dropped like a rock.

The contract rejected by the workers would have frozen their wage and increased their health care costs, to the point that second tier workers would be working for eight dollars an hour. As one of the workers quoted by the Journal said, "It's a good wage here, but if you take it away, why work here?"

All we hear these days is: "You're lucky to have a job." The Cat workers of IAM Lodge 851 in Joliet, Illinois seem to have decided that it isn't worth keeping that job without fighting for something better.

When that attitude catches on more widely, the businessmen and their Wall Street Journal will have some real problems to cry about.

There will be a big increase in so-called "collateral damage," that is strikes against the civilian population.

That's not going to stem al-Qaida recruitment, quite the opposite. Al-Qaida was reinforced when one of its heads, Anwar al-Alex was killed last September. The Wall Street Journal reported that drone strikes constitute "a powerful recruitment tool for Al-Qaida and its allies."

Obama is as much a warmonger as Bush was, like him in the service of U.S. imperialism.

Under the pretext of waging the war on terror, the U.S. sows death among the civilian population, but at the same time it sows hatred and the desire for vengeance throughout the world.

Since that first case, doctors have found CTE in about a dozen war veterans whose bodies were autopsied -- leading experts to suggest that PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), which today is treated as a "mental" disease, could instead be a physical ailment caused by permanent brain damage. This might also help explain why there are so many suicides among veterans -- 18 every day, now, more than 6500 per year.

The real number of war casualties is far higher than the official figure, because the official figure ignores the thousands of soldiers who kill themselves after the war. Not to mention the thousands and thousands of veterans, who can no longer have full lives because of injuries, whether authorities call them "physical" or "mental."

All these summits, prime time speeches and repeated briefings for the press allow Obama to go into the presidential election campaign on a platform of ending the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

There is only one problem: the Obama administration is NOT ending the war.

The U.S. continues to bomb Afghanistan from the air. Just a week before the NATO summit, the U.S. apologized for "mistakenly" killing six members of a family in southwestern Afghanistan. The toll on Afghan lives continues to provoke outrage amongst the Afghan population. Recently, hundreds of Afghans, carrying the bodies of four children aged eight to 12 who had been killed in fighting in southern Afghanistan, blocked the Kabul-Kandahar Highway in protest against the U.S. war.

This outrage is also reflected in the sharp rise in the number of attacks on U.S. and NATO soldiers by Afghan soldiers and police. U.S. officials admit that these attacks from the U.S.'s own Afghan "allies" account for 20 per cent of the total U.S. and NATO fatalities.

Neither is the U.S. withdrawing all its troops from Afghanistan by 2014, as promised. On the contrary, the Enduring Strategic Partnership that Obama signed with Karzai specifies that the U.S. will continue to have access to bases inside Afghanistan until at least 2024 -- that is, a decade later. U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan under the cover of being "advisors" and "trainers." U.S. jets, drones and helicopters will continue to drop bombs and fire missiles inside Afghanistan. And U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) will continue to carry out night raids on private homes.

The U.S. war in Afghanistan will continue, just like the U.S. war in Iraq is continuing in a similar form. It will just be more hidden.

This is not a peace treaty. It's simply an agreement between the U.S., its NATO allies and its puppet Afghan government to continue the war.

And it's an election year trick. Remember 2008, when Obama ran as the peace candidate and promised to get out of both Iraq and Afghanistan? Once he got into office, he turned Bush's wars in both countries into his own.

This war, like all wars in this capitalist system, serves the interest of the oil companies, the weapons systems contractors and the banks. And Obama, like Bush before him, are carrying out their dirty work. Obama assumed Bush's timetable for fighting the war in Iraq. And Obama carried out his own troop surge in Afghanistan, tripling the number of U.S. troops.

There are currently 89,000 U.S. troops there. Obama promises that he will reduce troop levels in Afghanistan by 20,000 by the end of 2012. But that will still leave more than twice as many troops there as when Obama took office.

Fall for a politician's lie one time, bad enough -- but a second time is downright foolish.

Mitt Romney says he doesn't remember the incident.

Maybe not. Bullies often don't remember their victims!

Recovery? Only for the Bankers and Other Capitalists

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, which charts such things, the U.S. economy entered a new “recovery,” starting in June 2009.

It’s true, there has been a recovery of sorts â€" for the bankers, other sections of the capitalist class, and all those who live off “unearned income.”

The stock markets have taken off again, with the Dow Jones, for example, effectively doubling the valuation of the publicly held companies it lists. From its low point of 6547 in March 2009, the Dow climbed back up to around 13000 in March 2012 â€" making a tidy bundle for the speculators who jumped in and out of the markets, benefitting not so much from the increase, as from the wild fluctuations that accompanied the ride back up.

By 2010, profits of the corporations had hit a new record: 1.8 trillion dollars in 2010, and then up again in 2011 to 1.9 trillion, before taxes. Profits now make up more of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) than ever.

Despite the usual claims that profits would lay the groundwork for new investment, almost all of that profit went into the avaricious private hands of the capitalist class in the form of dividends and stock buybacks. In 2011, after-tax profit for the whole economy came to 1.5 trillion; 814 billion of that was paid out in dividends. Another 409 billion was paid out just by the top companies in the S&P 500 to buy back their own stock, enriching stockholders whether they kept the stock or sold it. And of course, there are all the other companies not in the S&P 500. The amount of dividends paid out hit a new record, right along with the amount of profit amassed. Even the banks at the very heart of the financial meltdown â€" JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bancorp â€" threw money at stockholders.

Investment? After the bourgeoisie drained money from the corporations, there was no money left for investment. And government statistics on investment testify to that fact, with investment in factories, offices and other business buildings still down in 2011 more than 30% from what it had been in the previous upturn, when it was already very weak. And investment in equipment and software, which was down as much as 30% five months after the “recovery” started, was still down by about 2%. No investment â€" only more wealth to the wealthy.

No wonder corporate and banking executives were rewarded so handsomely. In 2010, the last year for which records are complete, the top 299 companies, on average, paid their chief executive 11.4 million dollars in compensation. Of course, some made much more than others: Viacom’s CEO, for example, pocketed almost 85 million dollars, and Oracle’s CEO, 78 million. Even companies hard hit by the economic downturn, like the auto companies, continued to hand out big bucks. Alan Mulally of Ford, for example, received 13.6 million in total compensation in 2008, 17.9 million in 2009, 26.5 million in 2010, and will get 56.6 million in stock awards for 2011 â€" the rest of his pay package hasn’t yet been revealed.

The Wall Street firms, whose “creativity” helped precipitate the financial crisis, weren’t about to be left behind. Bonuses may have been reduced over the past few years, but overall compensation has gone up, hitting a grand total of 149 billion dollars for the executive ranks of the big investment banks and firms in 2010 â€" a new record. This is almost twice as high as the budget of the state of California, the largest state in the country.

Joblessness Spreads

Not only has there been no recovery for the working class and other poor layers of the population, the push of the capitalists to defend and increase their wealth has aggravated the impoverishment of the population. In recovery, just like recession, the working class, continues to suffer increasing exploitation, pushed by unemployment, a brutal drive for productivity and wage cuts, direct and indirect.

In the current recovery â€" the latest in a string of “jobless” recoveries going back to 1980 â€" the real level of unemployment is not only as high as it was in the worst of the downturn, it is getting worse.

By February, 33 months into this “recovery,” the headline unemployment rate (U-3), which ignores large numbers of the unemployed, had gotten down to only 8.3%. The official full rate (U-6), taking into account short-term discouraged workers and unwilling part-time workers, hit 15.1%. And if the long-term discouraged were counted â€" as they were before Bureau of Labor Statistics revisions were put into effect several times under Clinton â€" the total rate would be somewhere around 20% (Daniel Amerman shows 19.9% and Shadow Stats, 22.5%.) Over one-fifth of those trying to work have been reduced to living on unemployment benefits, on their savings, with relatives, on charity, by work in the underground economy and/or by petty crime.

The news media have been hyping the number of new jobs created over the last three months as something “extraordinary,” with a total of 732,000 new jobs. Overall 3.4 million jobs have been created since the “recovery” began. But that’s nothing when compared to the nearly nine million jobs that were lost since the recession started â€" with two million cut in manufacturing, two million in construction, and over a million and a half in transportation and utilities.

It’s true that the official unemployment rate has been trending down more or less ever since May of 2010, but every bit of this decrease â€" and more â€" was produced by manipulation of official statistics. In January, for example, when the unemployment rate came down from 9.5% to 9.3% â€" which should mean more people are working â€" in fact, it only reflected that one million people were removed from the officially counted work force! The real mark of the jobs crisis is not the official rate, but the proportion of the adult civilian population in the labor force. And it continues to decrease: from 67.1% in 2000, down to 65.5% in mid-2009, then to 63.6% at the beginning of 2012.

The jobs that are available are increasingly part time or temporary. Over one-quarter of all jobs created in February came from temporary agencies.

Ripping up the Younger Generation’s Future

As bad as the overall figures are, the situation for young adults is worse â€" catastrophic in many of the big cities. In 2007, just before the recession began, 5.9 million youth aged 15-19 had jobs; today, only 4 million do. Even their official unemployment rate is 24%. The reality is much closer to 40% or even 50%. And among people aged 20-24 there were fewer jobs, dropping from 13.9 million in 2001, down to 12.9 million today. A recent Pew study revealed that 24% of adults age 18 to 34 are today living in their parents’ household.

The worst of the unemployment hits those without any college. Using the current “official” basic unemployment rate as a standard for making the comparison, those without a high school diploma suffer a 14.8% unemployment rate; those with a high school diploma, 9.5%; with some college, 7.5%; and with a university degree, 4.3%. (Undoubtedly, a large percentage of the ones who do not finish high school never make it into the official labor force.)

Those who recently graduated from the university face a significantly higher unemployment rate than do those who graduated ten years ago, for example. Moreover, the jobs that are available for new graduates today pay significantly less and have less status and prospects than what many had been expecting when they entered college. Even those coming out with an education degree, who in the past would have had no problem finding an opening in the public schools, today can find it difficult to land a position.

This changed expectation is particularly onerous for all those students who come out of college carrying sizeable loans. Like mortgages, college loans are one of the debts that can’t be erased in a bankruptcy, and like mortgages, these college loans have provided a real basis for speculation, with banks pushing ever more and ever bigger loans on unsuspecting students, in order to increase the number of securities based on those loans that can be sold to investors.

For the students who take out these loans â€" which means most of the children of workers and of other ordinary layers of the population â€" student debt promises to hang over their heads after graduation, limiting what kind of jobs they can take, how much they will have to work, what standard of living they can have. A recent estimate put the average loan balance carried by the 2011 college graduates so high that those graduates will still be paying off their college loans when it is time for their own children to enroll in the university.

Black Unemployment â€" A Catastrophe

The black population, as has long been the case, takes on a disproportionate share of the unemployment. “Last hired, first fired” â€" the bitter irony from the times of Jim Crow â€" is still an accurate description of employment practices today. In January, black unemployment, officially, was 15.8%, more than double the white rate of 7.5%, and significantly higher than the Hispanic unemployment rate, which was 10.8%. (Part of Hispanic unemployment “disappears,” however, because larger numbers of people without papers were expelled or simply returned to their own country this past year.) For young black men without a high school diploma, actual unemployment runs around 70%.

In part, these enormous gaps mirror the still overt racism in the country. But they especially reflect all the ways in which race, immigration status and class are intertwined in this country. The black population, in its large majority, is working class, as are most people who come here without papers, particularly those from Mexico and Central America. While a large part of the white population is working class, nonetheless at least a third of the white population occupies the upper levels of the so-called “new middle class” â€" the professions, higher business and finance positions, along with top academic and research positions. This is the part of the population much less affected by unemployment. (For the bourgeoisie itself, in its vast majority white, unemployment has no meaning at all.)

The Bourgeoisie’s Answer to Unemployment: Prison

The fluctuating but always high level of unemployment over the last 30 years has been accompanied by a vast increase in the numbers imprisoned. The Pew Center estimates that nearly six million people cycled in and out of some stage of “correctional supervision” in 2010: in jail, in prison, in a half-way house, or under probation, with nearly 2.4 million people actually in prison at any one time. That’s 2.4 million people removed from the work force, and not counted among the unemployed.

The U.S., both in absolute terms and percentages, imprisons more of its population than does any other country, and significantly more than any other industrialized country. (To compare: Britain, with the highest rate of incarceration in Western Europe, imprisons 151 persons per 100,000; the U.S. imprisons 731, five times as many.)

Imprisonment is pervaded by all sorts of abominations. For the kinds of infractions committed by most working class or poor people, sentences are excruciatingly long, much longer than in any other “advanced” country â€" including for the very young. More than 2500 juveniles, average age 16, are serving life in prison today, without any possibility of parole â€" discarded before even reaching adulthood. On any given day, 50,000 people are held in solitary confinement, many for years. This torture is aimed at breaking and destroying prisoners: no contact with other prisoners, no visitors, no access to TV or radio, little or nothing to read (maybe a bible â€" and often, not even that), little or no material with which to write, no activity other than one hour a day outside the tiny cell for “exercise.” And then there is capital punishment. The U.S. is one of the few “advanced” countries that still imposes the death penalty. Since 1977, when executions were resumed after a ten-year moratorium, 1285 people have been put to death. Today, 3245 more people are still being held on death row.

The prison system, the dirty underbelly of U.S. society, is inflicted at a seven times harsher rate on the black population, than on the white. More than half of all black men without a high school diploma go to prison at some point in their lives. And very many of them go at a young age.

The growing mass incarceration of the poor black population has been called the new Jim Crow â€" with a great deal of reason. Prison has functioned as a real means of social control by a society that increasingly has discarded large segments of the population out of the workforce, with no hope for a job or training â€" particularly of the black population.

Wage Cuts, Benefit Cuts â€" the Road to Poverty

With grinding, unending unemployment weighing on the working class, corporations and public officials have used its menace to cut wages.

From 2005 to 2009, the auto industry led the attack on wages and benefits. The result of this campaign was to cut wages in half for new workers, eliminating fully paid benefits for them, while using a range of inducements to push the established workers out of the plants. Those already retired discovered that their pensions had been frozen and medical care reduced, with the threat of much bigger cuts in the future, as all responsibility for retiree medical care, but only 60% of the funding, was turned over to the union apparatus to juggle. And current workers, who might have believed they were immune to the threat posed by two-tier soon discovered otherwise.

When auto workers did not react strongly enough to stop these cuts, other parts of the capitalist class followed suit, and wage cutting spilled across industries, sometimes under the two-tier form, sometimes in direct wage cuts.

For the past two years, public sector workers have been the ones targeted, as cities, counties, school boards and the states have all pushed to reduce the number working and to impose concessions on wages and/or benefits. Today, they find themselves demonized â€" as auto workers once were â€" as “privileged.”

Since 2000, the real median wage has gone down 7%, dropping 2.3% in 2010 alone. And the wage decrease in the half of the wage scale below the median has been much greater.

The gap between the very wealthy â€" now popularly known as the 1% â€" and everyone else has grown enormously. In 2007, the wealthiest 1% raked in almost 24% of the total income produced in this country. The last time those on top owned such a disproportionate share was 1929 â€" just before the last great crash, the one which led into the Great Depression. The share taken in by the wealthy may have decreased somewhat, given the impact of the financial markets’ implosion in 2008, but by all indications the “recovery” is pushing them right back up. The financial wealth of the country is even more disproportionately owned. While the bottom 80% own only 7% of the wealth, the top 5% own 69% of the wealth, with the top 1% hanging on to 42%, all by themselves â€" a gap that has been rapidly increasing. It couldn’t be clearer that wealth in the hands of the few has its counterpart in the impoverishment of the population.

A Rapidly Worsening Situation

The mortgage fiasco still weighs on the U.S. population. The economists say four million people have already lost their homes to foreclosure and another 900,000 will lose homes both in 2012 and in 2013. Even those still hanging on to their homes are at risk, “owning” a house whose value is less than the mortgage they are obligated to pay: 23% of all homeowners, 11.1 million households.

Increasing numbers of people find themselves without medical coverage. In 2000, 64% had some sort of medical insurance through their employer; in 2010 only 55%. Nearly 25% of working age adults had no insurance of any kind â€" neither from an employer nor from government programs. To the extent that there are social programs that provide any access to medical coverage, most of these are directed at the very poor, at children or at people older than 65, eligible for Medicare, if they worked long enough. But those are the very programs being cut.

Even those who kept hold of medical insurance through their employer discover that less is covered and more co-pays, co-insurance, deductibles and fees make that insurance a dead letter.

Meanwhile the Democrats and Republicans â€" using the Supreme Court as their stage â€" debate each other over the medical “reform.” The Republicans essentially say the current situation is just fine and dandy, thank you, while the Democrats say that the current situation would be fine if only people without insurance were forced to buy it, and if more people were put on Medicaid â€" the very same program that Democrats voted to cut this year!

Poverty â€" even at the level officially recorded â€" is on the increase. In 2010, forty-six million people, including twenty million children â€" lived below the government’s official poverty line. It is the highest number in more than half a century â€" ever since the U.S. began to measure poverty during the Johnson administration.

In percentage terms, 15%, this falls below the official level recorded in the early 1960s. But even the Census Bureau recognizes that its arbitrary definition of poverty has little to do with the actual situation today, and it has been experimenting with an alternate measure. The alternate measure records 48% of the population today living in either poverty or in what the Census Bureau calls “near poverty,” essentially living from paycheck to paycheck with no reserve at all, so that even a short spurt of unemployment is enough to result in utility shutoffs or even homelessness.

Nine million people, almost half of all the retired who are still living in their own homes or apartments, do not have enough money from pensions, Social Security and savings to cover everyday necessities â€" this was the conclusion of a recent study done by the Census Bureau. And about one in five households in the larger population did not have enough money to always put food on the table for themselves and their families.

Social “Safety Net”? Where?

While the bosses were busy destroying jobs, driving down wages and tearing up benefits, the government was equally busy reducing or even eliminating those social programs that could have provided some assistance. The federal government reduced per capita funding for programs under its control â€" particularly Medicaid, welfare, housing assistance, nutrition aid for mothers with infants, community health centers and so on. It’s not only Mitt Romney who so despised the poor that he could blithely say, “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there....” Democrats and Republicans alike, cutting away, pretend that the “safety net” still exists.

Social Security, which so far has avoided a direct hit, nonetheless has been severely reduced year after year in relation to actual inflation. The “adjustments” made to the government’s CPI in 1980 and especially in the early 1990s have kept monthly checks at a level about half of what they should be, according to John Williams of “Shadow Stats.” While the two parties may have held off on any direct cuts this year just before the election, they’ve already made clear that Social Security will be targeted once elections are safely over.

Cannibalizing Public Services and the Public Sector Workforce

Public services continued to take enormous hits in 2011, affecting the daily life of the population and adding to the unemployment. The federal government severely cut back the amount of money allocated to agencies that monitor health, safety, workplace safety, pollution of the environment, etc., as well as to the Park Service. State and local governments have literally dismantled public services that the population depends on â€" in part as the result of cuts in the various “revenue sharing” funds that come from the federal government in support of public services like highways, bridges, dams, levees, public transport.

Detroit and Las Vegas are catastrophic examples of what is happening to the cities, the advance guard of what the capitalist future holds for the working class. Dominated by industries particularly hard hit in the recession â€" gambling and autos â€" both cities had exceedingly high levels of unemployment. And both cities were among the hardest hit by the mortgage crisis. In Las Vegas, tracts of new homes, built on the speculation that gambling would continue to grow, today stand vacant, with city services never completed, decimating the construction industry and the workers who depend on it.

In Detroit, the sub-prime scam, very consciously directed at older people, has transformed whole neighborhoods â€" previously vibrant, with houses well taken care of â€" into ghost neighborhoods. The response of city authorities is the mayor’s plan to “shrink Detroit” â€" as he put it. Concretely, he imposed several rounds of layoffs, saying the city no longer has the financial means to furnish services to all its neighborhoods. Thus, you might get street lights, you might not. You might get sewer line hook-ups and water, or you might not. Empty buildings might be torn down in your area, or they might not. You might have a fire station within a few miles of your neighborhood or you might not. It all depends on whether the city decides that your neighborhood is “worth saving” or not. If not, according to the mayor, you better move. The city can’t afford you.

The discussion has now reached the point that, under the pretext of a threatened “consent agreement” with the governor, the mayor is proposing to sell off or close all parks, close all recreation centers, or transfer them to churches, close down or sell off almost all city services. The actual consent agreement, just now coming out into the open, aims at abrogating all union contracts, eliminating seniority and work rules, reducing wages, pensions and sick pay â€" as well as selling off almost all city services to private profit-makers.

Other cities may be behind, but almost all are following the same trajectory. Chicago, for example, under the current Democratic administration, has closed 6 of 12 mental health clinics, privatized seven public health clinics, imposed nearly half a billion dollars in cuts on the public schools, cut library services, and opened bidding between city workers and private contractors to see who would keep, or get, the work in recycling centers. It had previously sold off or leased public services (among other things, parking meters, parking lots and a tollway coming into the city) to private “investors” to run and take profit from â€" at the expense of the population. In Maryland, the Democratic governor is proposing to do the same with large chunks of state-provided public services to private companies. In Los Angeles, after cutting 5,000 jobs and imposing 850 million dollars in concessions on municipal workers, “liberal” Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (known as a former union organizer) announced he wanted much bigger cuts in jobs and pensions and that he intends to privatize many city services.

With the crisis, not only is there no question of reducing all the gifts given to the bourgeoisie by different levels of government, but those gifts have vastly increased, leading to round after round of cuts in public services and social services â€" cuts that are far from over.

Gutting Education

The dismantling of public education is certainly one of the most scandalous cuts in public services because it is being carried out at the expense of children, especially the children of the laboring classes. Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, has been pushing plans that require states to close many public schools under the pretext that they are not performing up to the criteria set by the Bush and Obama administrations. Some schools have been transformed into privately-run charter schools. Other schools are “reconstituted,” which is nothing but a pretext to dump a certain number of teachers and to increase class size. Still others are simply closed, at the same time that a new charter pops up in their neighborhood. The application of this policy by local school districts is even a condition to receive certain amounts of federal aid. An important part of the push by the Obama administration is to reduce teachers’ pay by tying it to the results students achieve on tests. Tens of thousands of licensed teachers lose their jobs, while untrained college graduates, recruited by Teach for America, are brought into the schools, inflicted on the children for a year or two, paid lower wages â€" and part of those wages are even subsidized by the various foundations that lurk behind Teach for America.

New Orleans, Washington D.C., and Chicago were the laboratories where these plans were perfected â€" with predictably disastrous results. When Katrina shut the schools and forced evacuation of large areas of New Orleans, it was the perfect time to hand the whole system over to private enterprise. Today over three quarters of the New Orleans school system is run by charter operators. At the same time, other schools were kept shut â€" as a way to drive the poor out of areas the city wanted to “reclaim” for gentrification. In Chicago, the closing of schools, under the pretext of student test scores, etc., was directly used as a weapon of “gentrification” â€" not urban renewal, but black and Hispanic and poor removal, as the old saying went.

The latest version of this whole attack, the “state system” in Michigan, into which were dumped a number of Detroit public schools, clearly shows the point of this whole approach. The union contract covering wages, benefits and seniority is invalidated. The school year is to be longer, with no increase in pay. (The Chicago public schools are already trying something similar by increasing the length of the school day, with no increase in pay.) At the same time, children are to be dumped together into classrooms, irrespective of age, with teachers expected to juggle various types of work all at once â€" in obviously much larger classes. Salaries are to be capped near $50,000, a huge cut for those teachers with the most training, qualifications and experience. Teach for America is to replace the most seasoned, experienced and dedicated teachers. It’s nothing but a plan to get rid of teachers â€" and thus to dump the children in these schools onto the garbage heap.

Two Bourgeois Parties: One Policy

On the political level, the first part of the year was dominated by debates between the two parties over the budget, the deficit and the national debt.

It’s true the national debt is enormous, now reaching more than 15 trillion dollars overall, about 100% of the 2011 GDP. And this debt has increased dramatically since 2008, creating about five trillion dollars of the 15 trillion total in three years time.

But the very items that created the debt and its enormous increase were not on the table for debate: that is, the many trillions of dollars consecrated to pump up the profits of the banks and the big companies; the trillions of dollars spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the trillions of dollars in the bloated military budget with its special contract deals for almost every big company in the country; and all the tax cuts for the wealthiest people and the big corporations.

No, it was a fake debate about the debt â€" a justification for the drastic cuts in the domestic budget the two parties conspired to push through. This fake debate also let the two parties prepare the ground for future cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid â€" cuts that will be imposed after the elections.

Oh, yes, Obama and other Democrats occasionally did pipe up to say they would like to balance cuts in domestic programs with some new taxes on the wealthy. What cynicism â€" coming from the party that was still in control of the Senate, the House of Representatives and the White House when the last big tax cut for the wealthy was passed in December 2010.

In any case, the wealthy kept all their tax breaks, compromise after compromise, even while unemployment benefits were reduced, Medicaid was cut, and all non-entitlement domestic programs were slashed.

2012 Elections: The Republicans’ Gift to Obama?

Certainly, since the elections of 2010, the Republicans have been the most virulent in announcing big attacks. They took advantage of their win in the 2010 elections to push through anti-union laws in a number of states â€" with the aim of weakening the financial clout of the unions, which ordinarily provide the money and the foot soldiers for Democratic party campaigns.

What started in Wisconsin, with the attack on public sector workers’ right to organize, has spilled over into other states, as legislatures controlled by Republicans move to cut off the unions’ financial clout. In Michigan, for example, 20-some bills have been passed and 70 more introduced that in one fashion or another touch on union rights and public sector workers’ wages and benefits. Showing where they want to go, Republican legislators in Indiana passed a so-called right to work law â€" the first industrial state with strong unions to do so.

With the Republican primary campaign now underway, all the Republican candidates have been competing with each other to appeal to the far right wing of the Republican party â€" that section which has been most faithful in recent elections and which has turned out to vote at a higher rate than other parts of the electorate. And this appeal has taken a particularly virulent tone when it comes to women’s reproductive rights. Santorum’s misogynist statements are backed up by laws pushed through by Republicans in one state after another, the aim of which is to deny women access to abortion and/or contraception.

No Republican has been able so far to totally dominate the field. Thus, as the primaries dragged on, it produced an increasing amount of vile, reactionary garbage coming out of Republican mouths, which may well influence the November elections in ways the Republican Party doesn’t want.

Republican rhetoric has almost certainly made Obama appear as a more reasonable candidate, and perhaps will give him the victory, despite the fact that he has presided over such a bad economy, despite the increasing level of unemployment, and despite the fact that his policies have essentially been a continuation of Bush’s policies: on the wars, on the bailout to the banks, on the demands for concessions from auto workers and government workers, on tax cuts for the wealthy, on the dismantling of public school education, on cuts to social programs and public services, and also on the indirect attacks on women’s reproductive rights.

Union Officials “Organize” against the Republican Attack

On the social level, the year was marked by greater activity by the union apparatuses, particularly in the form of demonstrations, and by the appearance of the Occupy protests.

Last winter, the unions set up an occupation of the Wisconsin state capitol building, bringing in the ranks for really massive demonstrations of a hundred thousand or more, several Saturdays in a row, and occupying government buildings, with the slogan, “this is our house,” for a number of weeks. The issue, as the union officials posed it, was not the attack on the wages of public workers. Union leaders indicated they were ready to accept cuts in wages and benefits if the new Republican governor would agree to negotiate those cuts with union leaders. But not only did Scott Walker, the Republican governor, rebuff their offer, he also proposed legislation that would have seriously reduced their dues money.

Whatever the motives of union leaders in organizing the demonstrations, hundreds of thousands of workers responded to the call, including from other states. And those who couldn’t go paid attention, many from other states saying, we need to do something like that here.

But very quickly, union leaders moved to turn this outpouring of anger into the electoral field â€" at the beginning, with the attempt to undo some of the worst attacks on the population. In Ohio, over the 2011 summer, the unions organized a petition drive to get a referendum on the ballot to overturn an anti-union law, and then organized to get people to turn out for the referendum election, which overturned the law by a wide margin. Compared to most questions involving elections, it really did engage people.

But this kind of work was then turned toward Republican politicians. A teachers’ union in Michigan organized a successful recall election removing the main Republican sponsor of legislation that would have eliminated seniority rights and tenure for teachers. In Arizona, there was a similar successful recall election for the main Republican sponsor of anti-immigrant legislation. And today, Scott Walker himself is targeted for recall in Wisconsin.

You would think, given the targets chosen by the unions, that only Republicans have been carrying out anti-worker policies in the states and cities.

Not true. The California and New York governors, Democrats both, have been spearheading attacks on public workers and on teachers. So has Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former top aide, now mayor of Chicago.

In Michigan, although it was a Republican governor who pushed through the latest “emergency financial manager” law, it was the Democratic mayor of Detroit who threatened to bring in an emergency manager if city workers didn’t accept another 10% cut in their wages (after having taken a 10% cut a year ago) and to pay for nearly half their medical premiums, among other concessions.

Then came the competing versions of a “consent agreement” between the state and the city, one put forward by the Republican governor, one by the Democratic mayor. Both aim at setting up a dictator to run the city â€" the disagreement is over who that dictator should be. But both have as their primary goal the stripping of union wages, benefits, and conditions from city workers who up until nearly the end of March refused a suicide vote to give up still more concessions.

Union Officials Prepare the Democratic Party Election Campaign

In the face of these attacks, the essential answer the unions give, even if they have become more active, is to prepare for the 2012 elections.

Their stance toward Occupy Wall Street and similar protests around the country is aimed exactly in the same direction.

Occupy Wall Street, first showing up last September, seemed to pop up out of nowhere, attracting a certain number of young people and others new to politics.

These protests did not just spring up spontaneously however. In different cities, different groupings played important roles in them: academic anarchists, anti-globalization anarchists, students with little political background but experience in student actions, leftists, unionists.

The union officials were prudent in what they did. They appeared only to “support” this movement that they pretended grew up outside their influence. But it’s clear that the union apparatuses, at the very least, helped fund the camps. And, we later saw, many of the camps had benefitted from union money and supplies â€" including tents, mobile kitchens, or portable latrines, etc. And they provided people to help staff the camps â€" student interns from universities, who were paid by the unions. Most important, the union apparatuses were always there for the big demonstrations that happened roughly once a month, providing the numbers, with their staff and activists, that allowed the demonstrations to appear respectable, if not massive.

Eventually, the camps were vacated, and Occupy seemed to die down. Nonetheless, there are promises for more activities this spring. And we can expect to see such activities as well as other protests where the union apparatuses will be, once again, important.

It seems obvious that the union apparatuses hope to use their influence with the young people attracted to Occupy in order to have troops to carry out this fall’s election campaign for the Democrats, and particularly for Obama. The Republicans’ stance in this primary season may have made the union officials’ task a lot easier.

This is not just speculation. The union leaders have said openly that they think Occupy and the re-election of Obama are complementary parts of the same struggle. And when they took part in demonstrations, they not only raised slogans and signs about the 1%, they also raised slogans in support of Obama’s policies.

No Attempt to Organize Against the Attacks

The one thing the leaders of the national unions have not done is to call on the workers to oppose the incessant demands for more concessions in wages and benefits. Worse, they continue to argue that these sacrifices are necessary in order to prop up the companies and thus protect jobs.

In auto, a whole series of gains made over decades, which were provisionally suspended during the previous six years, were definitively suppressed in the contracts of 2011. There was a great deal of discontent when the contract proposals became public. And opposition that had been organized before at Ford, carried over with an echo among Ford workers, who at the beginning, seemed ready to refuse this latest set of permanent takeaways.

Facing this bigger current of opposition at Ford, the company and union leaders presented a contract with significantly bigger bonuses than what were attached to GM and Chrysler contracts. Even so, opposition continued.

Local leaders were given blandishments or faced threats to get them to line up, which most of them did. But it was not until national UAW leaders announced that if the contract was rejected, there would be an immediate strike, that the mood changed. Workers felt this as a threat against them, and not against the company. Opposition evaporated.

But it reappeared at Chrysler, where the attack on skilled workers had gone much further and where the company had not thought it necessary to give much of a bonus at all.

Nonetheless, through a series of maneuvers, the rotten deal passed there also, without any immediate consequences.

This is certainly not the end of the story â€" as can be seen by the fact that city workers in Detroit have until now been able to stand up to all the bullying, and by the fact that workers at EMD, also under a former auto contract, twice voted down a UAW contract there, despite similar maneuvers.

However, in its vast majority, the working class remains silent and inactive, unable to counteract the capitalists’ offensive â€" much less to regain anything that’s been lost.

The Working Class Facing A Catastrophe

The working class finds itself today in much the same economic situation it did in Trotsky’s day in the 1930s â€" sunk in a long-term crisis. But on the social and political level there is a much deeper demoralization today â€" in part because there were militants imbedded in the working class in the 1930s who were convinced that workers would fight and who gave the impetus to the struggles that broke out.

Today’s crisis, now entering its fourth decade, is far from over; the lowering of the standard of living continues, not only unabated, but picking up steam. This is what every single statistic that we cite proves. The bourgeoisie protects itself by driving down living conditions for the working class. Everything that has happened â€" the ongoing unemployment, the attacks on wages, elimination of benefits, destruction of social services and public services â€" testifies to that fact. It’s not a question of politicians, it’s the crisis. This is why the Republicans and the Democrats are much closer to each other today in the actual policies they carry out, even if their rhetoric seems to diverge more widely than ever before.

It’s important to recognize the enormous amount that has been lost over the past 30 years. And first of all, at the level of morale. Most workers today have never been in a fight of any consequence. For more than 30 years, that is, their whole adult lives, most workers have never even seen one.

Undoubtedly, the loss suffered by the working class in the 1930s appeared more brutal, because it hit so suddenly. But the loss workers have gone through during the last 30 years is a testimony to the adage that death by a thousand cuts puts you just as deeply in the grave as the one quick blow.

Needed: A Revolutionary Communist Organization

We have long said that only a revolutionary communist organization is able to offer a way to break the cycle of defeat â€" even at the level of small defensive struggles that might well break out at any moment. Revolutionary communists are the ones who insist that whatever struggles break out, it’s important for workers to try to spread them to their limits, to try to build their own organisms to lead those struggles, and not stay imprisoned within structures that set premature limits. It’s important for workers to see other workers not simply as supporters for their struggles but as allies in the same struggle.

But we can’t stop here. The working class has need of militants who raise the banner of a revolutionary communist program, right now, when the working class not only hasn’t even considered the possibility of building another society, but is sunk deeply in the morass of demoralization stemming from its inability to defend even the most meager gains.

It’s exactly in this situation that communists have something to propose, objectives that correspond to the very deep problems pervading this society, especially unemployment and the sinking standard of living.

It’s not enough to bemoan the unemployment or to act scandalized by the growing gap between rich and poor.

That gap, the enormous socially produced wealth accumulated at the top in private hands, even as the unemployment continues, is the proof that every worker who wants a job could have one, that the work could be apportioned out so that everyone has a wage â€" a living wage, as the unions put it â€" and that those wages could be indexed so they immediately and regularly keep up with the actual increase in prices.

Such ideas correspond directly to the most important problems facing the laboring population â€" the need for a job, the need for a wage that allows one to have an adequate and comfortable existence â€" at the very moment those necessities are being undermined.

The nearly five-trillion-dollar increase in the national debt over three years is the absolute proof that, when the bourgeoisie wants money, the state finds it. Well, the population wants money to be spent on its needs. First of all, an enormous amount of money must be spent to repair and bring back the public services, putting many people back to work, by the way. There is money available that could be spent for doubling the number of teachers, and providing every child with the resources that make learning possible â€" this, too, would create jobs and address the abysmal education inflicted on poor and working class students.

It’s not enough to complain that government is doing things in secret or that the bosses don’t let us know what they are doing. Of course they don’t, because what they are doing is harmful to us, which is exactly why it can make sense to workers that industrial secrets must be abolished, that workers must be able to inspect and control what is happening.

It’s not enough to bemoan the greed of the banks. Of course, they are greedy, but they sit in the center of the economy â€" and that is exactly why workers, long before they begin to struggle, need to think about taking over the banks as one of their important objectives.

Will workers struggle again? We have every reason to believe so. The working class has found ways in much more repressive, much more demoralizing situations to suddenly break free. That’s why it’s important for revolutionary communists to use all the political means at their disposal today to put objectives in front of the workers, objectives that fully correspond to the difficulties the workers face, and at the same time, can lead them to take control of the society in the process of making their fights.

We have to live up to our responsibilities.

After having been plunged into a storm of financial speculation for practically all of 2011, Greece knows for now a certain respite. For how long? No one can say. Certainly not the heads of state of the European Union, who during all this time showed their powerlessness in the face of the financial markets, which they were eager to "reassure." Hardly had one European summit ended, laboriously giving birth to a plan or a draft plan, than it was necessary to start work on a new meeting and a new plan!

The Greek government, led by the Socialist George Papandreou, sank in the storm. In October 2009, the Socialist Party (PASOK)The Socialist Party long ago became a bourgeois party, a bit similar to the Democratic Party in the U.S., had won the legislative elections. The New Democracy, the right wing party in power, was discredited, bogged down in corrupt affairs, and confronting a worsening of the crisis. When Papandreou came to power, he promised important changes. "We've been elected to build a social state, not to destroy it," he said, while making his first budget cuts right after forming his administration!

Two years later, completely discredited, Papandreou had to give up power two years before his term in office was over. His last maneuver, proposing a referendum letting the population vote on his austerity policy, went nowhere and it probably even speeded up his fall. He had committed sacrilege in the eyes of French President Sarkozy and German Chancellor Merkel, by pretending that the policy they had dictated could depend, even a little, on the popular will!

In November 2011, Lukas Papademos succeeded Papandreou, forming a coalition government, which includes the majority-party Socialists as well as ministers from New Democracy, and four representatives of LAOS, an extreme-right nationalist party. So two years after their electoral victory, the Socialists' failure opened the door for ministers from the extreme right, known for being openly racist and anti-Semitic. This is striking!

The new administration is simply a continuation of the previous one. The embodiment of this continuity is the Socialist Venizelos, who occupies the post of Minister of the Economy, as he did in the Papandreou administration.

Papademos is presented as a "technician": he doesn't belong to a political party and was the director of the National Bank when Greece adopted the euro. In this capacity, he was one of those who carried out the austerity policy that had been imposed on the Greek population under the pretext of making the necessary efforts to "be ready for the euro" in 2001. And his mission, like that of the previous administration, is to impose the austerity measures decreed by the European leaders.

Greek Crisis ... or Crisis of the Euro

Greece is paying first of all for the inability of the main European bourgeoisies to truly unify Europe. While they laboriously gave themselves a single currency, they refused to renounce their own states, which would defend their interests in the competition that opposes one to the other, and would be more likely to aid them financially.

With the aggravation of the crisis beginning in 2008, the capitalists of all the European states called on their own states for protection, leading to an increase in state deficits and indebtedness everywhere.

Speculators thus profited from this situation, playing on the differences in the financial situation of the different states of the European Union. While the German state paid an interest rate of 4% a year for a ten-year loan floated in financial markets, the Greek state watched its interest rate increase month by month for the same type of loan, reaching 20%. It is this rise in the interest rates that finally led the Greek state to the edge of bankruptcy, obliging other European states to intervene by lending it the money it can no longer borrow on the financial markets.

In fact, the speculators didn't bet only on the fragility of Greece, but also on the fragility of the euro!

Greece's difficulties are not unique. Greece may be one of the weakest links in Europe, but there were others before it, like Iceland and Ireland. And there will be others after Greece, like Spain and Italy, which have recently been the target of speculators.

A State Long Dominated by Imperialism

More fundamentally, the "fragility" of Greece, which it shares with many other European states, comes from the fact that it belongs to a zone dominated since the 19^th century by the big European imperialist powers, and its development has been shaped by their grip.

Recall that the modern Greek state was born in 1832, as a result of its struggle to gain independence from the Ottoman empire, a struggle which was victorious only due to the intervention of France and Britain. These two powers imposed a monarchy on the Greek population and decided who would reign, putting the obscure Otto of Bavaria on the Greek throne. They continued intervening in Greek political life, sometimes deposing a monarch who frustrated their interests, while imposing another ... then recalling the first one years later!

The Greek state was, from its birth, politically and economically subordinated to French and British imperialism. Twice before, in 1898 and 1935, it had to declare it could not pay back its debts, victim of a "structural deficit," as the economists say. Greece, which was very weakly industrialized, always imported more than it exported.

In 1898, an international debt commission was set up with representatives of France and the United Kingdom deciding on Greece's budget and running state monopolies. The European imperialist powers imposed this same form of domination over many regions of the world.

Since that time, the situation has changed little.

In fact, with the entry of Greece into Europe in 1981, and above all since the adoption of the euro in 2001, the hold of imperialism over the Greek economy has increased.

Certainly, the Greek state has benefitted from subsidies for modernizing the infrastructure, so much so that these subsidies became the main source of foreign currency. But these investments were above all intended to improve the transportation, freight and international transit needed for the development in Greece on behalf of commercial and industrial businesses of the Western European powers.

Some economists and politicians today question whether the entry of Greece into the euro zone wasn't an "error" due to its "economic backwardness." They are nothing but hypocrites!

The Greek state presented accounts to the European Commission that were "fixed" in a way to meet the admission criteria defined by the Maastricht treaty, criteria which supposedly imposed precise constraints on the public finances of any state adopting the euro as its currency. This accounting legerdemain was only made public some years later. We know today that Goldman Sachs, the U.S. bank, was the main project manager for this doctoring of the Greek state's finances. And the current Greek Prime Minister, Papademos, played an important role in this operation as director of the Bank of Greece.

But the European Commission at the time wasn't very fussy, because Greece's adoption of the euro was good business for the European capitalists, the German and French in particular. Greece offered them a market where their income wouldn't be endangered by stormy variations in exchange rates. The capitalists were the big winners of this operation.

France today is one of Greece's main trading partners and many French companies are present in Greece. Arms contracts, for example, are profitable to a large extent to the French and German companies, Thomson, Matra and Siemens. The Greek defense budget represents 4% of the Gross Domestic Product, making Greece the country that proportionally spends the most on arms. In 2010, in the midst of the crisis, Greece bought six submarines from Germany for 6.6 billion dollars, six warships from France at 3.3 billion dollars, along with combat helicopters for 527 million dollars. France is particularly well served. If we add the Mirage 2000 jet, armed vehicles, missiles of all sorts and drones, Greek purchases have made it the third best client of the French arms industry over the past decade. Notice that successive austerity plans never questioned these past contracts!

Banks, in particular, knew how to profit from the entry of Greece into the euro zone in 2001. They lent massively, to the private sector as well as the public sector. They reinforced their presence through their affiliates, often buying up Greek banks. Those most involved in Greece are three French banks: Credit Agricole, Societe Generale and BNP Paribas. The volume of loans to the Greek State increased by 50% between 2005 and 2007, going from less than 80 billion dollars to 120 billion.

The outbreak of the subprime crisis in 2007, far from stopping this development, gave it new momentum. The banks utilized the enormous amounts of cash that the central banks put at their disposal at a very low cost to increase their loans to Greece. The higher interest rates they demanded from Greece allowed them to pocket juicy profits.

The bankers figured that they didn't have to worry about Greece's ability to pay back its debts. Its membership in the euro zone guaranteed an intervention if needed by the big European powers.

Up till then, their calculations were correct!

"Save Greece" ... or Save the European Banks?

When the aggravation of the crisis in 2009 led to a deterioration of Greek's economic situation, the possibility of Greece defaulting on its payments became more of a threat.

The first alarm came in December 2009, when the credit rating agency, Fitch's, lowered its credit rating for long term loans from Greece's four main commercial banks. From then on, Greece watched its cost of credit soar. The bankers, using the pretext of the risk they ran, charged usurious rates. In so doing, they pushed the Greek state toward bankruptcy.

But, at the same time, they put pressure on the European states to intervene to guarantee the payment of the Greek debt ... and thus the profits that these usurers counted on grew by strangling the Greek state.

The French and German banks, the main holders of Greek debt securities (holding respectively 26% and 15% of Greek public debt), found themselves the most exposed to the risk of Greece defaulting on its payments.

That gave the French and German governments a supplementary reason to intervene. On top of "saving the euro," Sarkozy and Merkel had to safeguard the interests of their own national banks!

On February 11, 2010, European leaders had their first extraordinary meeting to discuss Greece. On March 25^th, an agreement was finally reached between the leaders of the European Union and the International Monetary FundThe IMF is financed by 187 states, but the great powers, beginning with the United States, occupy a preponderant position, playing the role of fireman in the international financial system. In the 1980s and '90s, it dealt with many Third World states that were unable to pay back their debts. for an "aid plan" for Greece. In exchange for a 3-year loan of 145 billion dollars, these financial backers imposed certain demands on the Greek government.

This long text gave precise, detailed figures for all the expected measures aimed at making the Greek population pay the debt. Very clearly, the heads of the European states guaranteed the bankers that the Greek government would make its population pay.

The memorandum stated that some of these measures had to be put in place within the year, for example, the increase in the Value Added Tax (which, according to the authors, had to bring in "at least 2.5 billion dollars for the whole year"), and the cut in public workers' vacation days and bonuses (measures from which it expected "net economies of two billion dollars").

The same text also specified the basic contours of the Greek state budget for 2011 and imposed "structural reforms": a reform of pensions that required workers to work more years to qualify and to start retirement later ("including for workers in hard and difficult work"), the development of a plan of privatizations, the closing of railroad lines running at a deficit, etc.

A "troika" was set up with the representatives from the European Union, from the European Central Bank (ECB) -- supposedly independent of the European states -- and from the IMF, which would ensure that the Greek government respected its commitments. Every three months, there had to be an evaluation "following detailed criteria," as a condition for further financial aid. Afterwards, European experts sent to Athens were opposed several times to releasing part of the loan made to the Greek state, deciding that it hadn't sufficiently satisfied its commitments.

In fact, the Greek state put itself under a kind of trusteeship.

Under the pressure from financial markets, the European leaders announced in July 2011 a second "rescue plan," providing for a new payment of 130 billion dollars and the restructuring of Greek debt. The representatives of the banks holding Greek debt securities came to the meeting. They didn't meet in the same hall as the heads of state, but Sarkozy and Merkel had to meet them in the middle of the night to get their agreement. Quite a symbol!

Contrary to what was said, no real sacrifice was demanded of the banks. It was proposed that they agree to erase 50% of the Greek debt; but on the financial markets, Greek securities were already exchanged at a discount that put their price even lower than half their value. In reality, the European states guaranteed the bonds held by the bankers at a value higher than the markets offered. Above all, the European states guaranteed that, whatever happened, the banks would get paid.

But up to the last minute, the bankers wanted to dictate their conditions to the European heads of state, who, nevertheless, frenetically bustled about finding a solution to the problems of these same bankers!

Everyone Agreed on Making the Greek Population Pay

If the European governments often disagreed over how they should intervene, there was one thing on which they all agreed: the Greek population had to pay the bill for the crisis.

In this domain, the Greek government of the Socialist Papandreou truly did everything that it could to satisfy the European leaders.

The first austerity plan, adopted in May 2010, representing a sort of tax on the population worth an estimated 6.3 billion dollars, provided for a rise in the Value Added Tax -- an indirect sales tax (with the general rate going from 19% to 23%, the reduced rates from 4.5% to 5.5% and 9 to 11%) -- and several direct sales tax increases on consumption (40% more on gasoline, around 20% more on tobacco and alcohol).

The Greek government also decided on a retroactive cut in the Christmas and Easter bonuses and vacations that had already been paid to public employees. This meant a 7 to 8% wage cut for more than 600,000 national, regional and local government and government enterprise workers. Concretely, a public employee getting a wage of 1,000 euros a month ($1,370) had the pay reduced to 900 euros. Public worker wages and pensions were frozen (and wages above $32,000 a year were cut by 10%).

The attacks against the standard of living of the population have come one after another. In September 2011, wages and pensions of public sector workers were cut (pensions above $1,600 a month were cut by 20%).

Many prices went up in a brutal manner: electricity and transportation by 40%. This occurred when the average wage in Greece in 2009 was $9,500 a year, with prices already at the same level as in western capitals! Even before the worsening of the crisis, Greeks had been forced to have a second, even a third job.

The government imposed a "reform" of Social Security pensions. The length of time necessary to contribute in order to get the pension was increased to 40 years instead of 37, and the retirement age was raised from 58 to 60. Public and private pensions higher than $1,800 a month are to be taxed.

The right to health insurance has been cut back and the number of days necessary to work to get coverage have been increased.

The government announced that there will be only one worker hired for each five government workers retiring and those working for a fixed time under contracts won't be kept on. This represents a vast layoff plan affecting about 35,000 people.

Then came the September 2011 austerity plan, which planned to put 30,000 government workers "on reserve" with 60% of their pay. In reality, that amounts to the first step in a layoff, since they have twelve months to find a new job in the public sector.

The government has launched a privatization plan, saying it would bring in 66 billion dollars. Summing up, anything that can be sold will be sold: government oil companies, airports, ports, the electric company, the postal system, road, rail and waterways, sewage systems, racetracks ... and even four Airbus jets that the government wants to sell on the secondhand market!

Budget cuts have led to a dramatic deterioration in all public services. In the schools, teachers and textbooks are lacking; in healthcare, the 40% cut in the hospital budget led to personnel shortages. In transportation, the government is closing "non-profitable" rail lines, defined as those more than 50% empty. Today, in Athens, no one knows when a bus will come, and in the provinces, no one knows where buses go. As a result of the reduction in service, drivers are led to improvise depending on the wishes of the passengers. School buses have often been eliminated in the provinces.

The government is also attacking labor legislation, reducing the time by half for advance notice of a layoff, and cutting unemployment compensation in the private sector. It is also attacking union contracts.

Finally, to complete this long list, it's necessary to cite the creation in September 2011 of a particularly unpopular and unjust property tax, paid by the owner or the renter who occupies the place. Since there is no land registry in Greece, it's put on the electric bills, with the tax applied to every building getting electric power. So those who don't pay will be threatened with having the power cut off.

The Church and Ship Owners Spared Austerity

But this tax doesn't apply to everyone: the Orthodox Church is exempt. In fact, the church pays no tax. It has enjoyed this privilege since 2000, when the Socialist administration decided that the taxes the church paid brought in too little, so it was useless to continue them.

Nevertheless, the Church has very important riches, with property amounting to some 320,000 acres and a large amount of financial capital. It owns nine million shares, equivalent to 180 million dollars, in the Greek National Bank, and the archbishop of Athens sits on its Board of Directors.

Moreover, in Greece, an important part of Church expenses are paid for by the state, because the state pays the priests' salaries. Overall, the Church receives more than 260 million dollars a year from the public budget.

The shipowners also benefit from a total tax exemption written as an article in the Greek Constitution. They were given this privilege in the aftermath of World War II so they would rebuild the completely destroyed Greek fleet. Today, obviously, the situation is quite different. The Greek fleet, the largest fleet in Europe, is among the largest globally. Judging by the nationality of the owner, and not by the flag the ships fly under, the Greek shipowners are, in fact, first in the world. But the Greek government refuses to question their exemption.

A State in the Service of the Greek Bourgeoisie

The shipowners benefit from a particularly shocking privilege, since it is official and so particularly visible. But all the capitalists escape a great part of taxation.

The French media have rambled on about "fiscal fraud," which is supposed to be a "national sport" in Greece. But it's first and mainly a sport of the rich! Only the richest can send their fortune to foreign accounts in Switzerland, for example, where the sums deposited by Greeks amount to 370 billion dollars.

In March 2009, when the government considered a surtax on incomes above $200,000, they could find only a dozen taxpayers who declared that much income.

Nevertheless, these great fortunes aren't difficult to find ... if you really look! There are rich families at the head of capitalist corporations in Greece, who prosper, often making alliances with big foreign multinationals, like the Marinopoulos family, owner of Carrefour stores in Greece, or the Veropoulos family, owner of Spar, a large retailer, to only cite the most visible brands in the country.

And it's not a question of the Greek state's lack of "efficiency" in "modernizing," another argument often repeated. The explanation is not technical, but social: the Greek state doesn't want to make the rich classes pay. It is at their service; it is tied to them by thousands of human and financial links. And everyone who has run the government during the past years, whether right wing or Socialist, whether they govern separately or together, have only one concern: make the working classes pay for the crisis and permit the Greek bourgeoisie to profitably carry on its business.

The Consequences of the Austerity Plans

In two years, the austerity measures have caused a terrible impoverishment of a large part of the Greek population.

Even sections of the petty bourgeoisie, up to then rather protected, saw their standard of living drop due to the rise in prices and taxes. They were affected also by the fact that the cut in salaries was larger for the best paid government functionaries (teachers saw their salaries reduced by two-thirds in a short time) and the recession led to many bankruptcies. According to the Salonika Merchants Association, one out of every five store owners had to shut their doors between January and September 2011.

The number of the unemployed jumped strongly upward. According to official statistics, unemployment rose from 6% in 2008 to 14.5% in October 2010. At the beginning of 2012, it probably surpassed 20%, particularly affecting the youngest (almost half of 18-to-25-year-olds don't have a job).

But these figures greatly underestimate the social catastrophe striking Greek workers. Officially, the number of active workers dropped in 2010 in all sectors except agriculture. That simply means that thousands of people, without a hope of finding a job, try to survive by "returning to the land."

As a consequence of the increase in unemployment and the different "reforms" of medical insurance, the number of people who are no longer covered by the health insurance system has increased. In very little time, thousands of people have been thrown into poverty. According to official statistics, three million people out of a population of eleven million, that is, 28%, were considered poor.

But this poverty is above all measured by the number of homeless who live on the sidewalks of Athens and Salonika. Many immigrants who came from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Balkans, who worked in construction or in cleaning, have been laid off, and due to the closing of centers that could give them shelter, can now be found on the streets.

Where the organization Doctors of the World opened a medical center in Athens, replacing the clinic, which had just closed due to the lack of financing,11,000 people came for treatment in the first few months.

This new poverty affects many young Greeks, even those whose studies allowed them to graduate from the university. The youth who demonstrated in 2008 during the student mobilizations said they belonged to the "generation of 600 euros" ($9,500 a year). Today, the press evokes the "generation of 400 euros," those youth who consider themselves lucky to find low-paying job training or jobs paying $2.75 an hour.

Mobilizations Against Austerity Measures

The government's attacks aroused mobilizations in the population. The union federations -- Adedy in the public sector, GSEE in the private sector and Pame, the union connected to the Communist Party -- called for general strike days almost every two months over the last two years. Each time, these appeals led to strikes, especially of public workers. Massive demonstrations of tens of thousands of people took place in Athens.

At certain times, in particular September-October 2011, mobilizations weren't limited to these days of action. Strikes took place almost every day among public workers, in the government ministries, in transportation, among port workers, garbage collectors, fire fighters ... in general opposing cuts to wages and privatizations. Even the police and coast guard demonstrated against pay cuts.

High school and college students occupied many schools and thousands of students mobilized to denounce the reform calling for "privatization" of the universities. Professions less used to demonstrating went into the streets: lawyers, taxi drivers and even merchants.

On October 28^th, the day of a Greek national holiday, demonstrators prevented the usual military parade from taking place and forced President Papoulias (President of the Greek republic, an honorific post) to leave the area. Almost all the politicians who attended the military parade that day were attacked verbally, or even physically, by demonstrators.

These mobilizations were big. The workers expressed their exasperation and their anger, but also their despair faced with a situation that seems unending. While many demonstrators demanded the resignation of the administration and "of any political power favorable to the economic measures imposed by the memorandum," they didn't formulate demands that could constitute objectives for struggle. Anyway, perhaps the combativeness of the Greek workers wasn't enough to stop the on-going steamroller. But without the proper perspectives, no movement would have been able to stop the attack. If there had been proper perspectives, which could have been verified in the course of struggles, even defeats could prepare new struggles in the future.

The Workers Must Prepare the Struggles of the Future

What occurred in these past months in Greece concerns workers everywhere in many respects.

It shows how the crisis of capitalism can lead an entire country into a catastrophic regression, pulling it down almost to the level of a Third World country.

And also it shows the necessity for workers to prepare themselves for future struggles, by having their own program. This did not happen in Greece. Faced with the bourgeoisie and its representatives of all political stripes, whose program is an array of measures against the workers and all popular layers, the workers must also have a program, with measures capable of protecting them from the crisis by making the capitalists and the rich classes pay. Such a program can only be a program of struggle, imposed by mobilizations.

On December 4, 20 years after the Soviet Union disappeared, there were massive demonstrations denouncing the rigging of the legislative elections by Vladimir Putin. In protesting the way the Russian regime governs the country, these demonstrations also called into question all the old lies and hymns of praise about the virtues of democracy that accompanied the dismantling of the USSR 20 years ago.

At that time, those who sang the praises of bourgeois society, both inside the USSR and in the rest of the world, extolled a bright future of liberty, democracy, prosperity and economic development for the peoples of the ex-Soviet Union. It was a deception, a shameful lie -- as if capitalism, a system that was leading the world to catastrophe, could bring about such things. Twenty years ago, this was obvious, and it should have been said. Instead, these lies and deceptions were pushed by the right, as well as by those on the social democratic left and, unfortunately, even by some circles of the extreme left.

Inside the USSR, a crushing majority of political leaders from the bureaucracy itself joined in the chorus praising capitalism. They enthusiastically discovered the supposed virtues of capitalism -- some even claiming they would implement a "500 day program of transition to a market economy." On the eve of the break-up of the USSR, almost all of them still belonged to the regime's hierarchy and its only party, which called itself communist. The leaders of the bureaucracy, not the people of the Soviet Union, pushed that break-up, seeing in it their own self- interest.

To understand how that happened; why the events unleashed such jubilation in the small world of ideologues, journalists, politicians of the bourgeoisie; why, 20 years later, the same or similar people are so distressed over what they call "Soviet nostalgia" by the people of the ex-USSR; and also to measure the impact of the disappearance of the USSR on the society, we must return to the formal foundation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), at the end of December 1922 and to the installation of Soviet power by the Russian Revolution of October 1917.

From Revolutionary Soviets to the Bureaucratic Degeneration

By 1991, the USSR bore little resemblance to the power of the soviets (councils) made up of worker, soldier and peasant deputies in 1917 that had overthrown first the czar and then the bourgeoisie. The USSR of Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the other successors of Stalin, was in almost all respects the opposite pole of the USSR of Lenin and Trotsky. But Stalin and all his successors nonetheless owed their existence to the revolutionary and socialist origins of that distant past.

In October 1917, Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik Party led the exploited masses of Russia to take power and began to lay the foundation of a society without exploitation of human beings by human beings, a society that would pave the way to a socialist future. But the Bolsheviks never conceived that this future could be built in one country alone, even a country as vast as Russia. On the contrary, they understood that their revolution would be short-lived if other victorious socialist revolutions did not join them, especially in the economically developed countries. This is why, after the Second International sank into its sacred union with the bourgeoisie during World War I, the Bolsheviks quickly founded a communist international, aimed at forming a world party of the revolution.

After four years of daily horrors on the battlefields, the people and the proletariat of Europe turned against those responsible for the slaughter of World War I: the possessors and their system. In Finland, Hungary and, above all, many times in Germany the proletariat tried to overthrow the power of the capitalist class and replace this power with their own. But they did not succeed anywhere other than in Russia. Everywhere, the social democratic parties came to the rescue of the possessing classes. Where the capitalist class was not able to strangle the revolution, drowning it in the blood of the workers, the great powers stepped in with military force.

In Russia, the partisans of the old order, who launched the civil war after October 1917, were supported militarily by imperialism. They did not succeed in destroying the young workers state, but they almost completely destroyed the country, which was already among the most underdeveloped in Europe. A great number of militants and revolutionary workers perished at the front, or from destitution. After years of world war and civil war, to survive from day to day became the major problem for the workers, who were physically, morally and politically exhausted. During the 1920s, the working class exercised only nominal political power. In reality, with the workers no longer having the means to control their own state apparatus, nor even the desire to do it, the growing bureaucracy found power falling into its hands. The state apparatus, as Trotsky said, was transformed in a few years, "from an instrument of the working class into an instrument of bureaucratic violence against the working class."

This social layer, which usurped the power, had no other ambition than to profit from their positions and their privileges -- privileges that were miserable in an absolute sense, but enormous within the context of the nearly general state of famine. Aspiring to everything that could reinforce their position, parasitically living off the gains of October, the bureaucrats identified with the reactionary formula of "socialism in one country," launched by Stalin. For Stalin and his partisans, it was a way to announce to the worldwide bourgeoisie that they did not seek to spread socialism.

The companions of Lenin, who remained faithful to the ideals of October and thus to proletarian internationalism, could only fight against this negation of Bolshevism. Lenin had died in January 1924. It was left to Trotsky to lead the struggle of the Left Opposition against the Stalinist current inside the Communist Party, the Communist International and at the head of the state. For several years, the communist oppositionists fought toe to toe to save the workers state from bureaucratic degeneration. But in a situation of retreat in the revolutionary movement, inside and outside the country, they were finally defeated. The Left Opposition was eliminated politically, before being eliminated physically in the camps and prisons of the GPU (the political police) and during the Moscow trials from 1936 to 1938.

Consequences of Stalinism on the Workers Movement inside the USSR

In order to reinforce the bureaucratic regime that was to lead the USSR, Stalin had several generations of militants assassinated. Those militants had accumulated a political and organizational experience during three revolutions and the first years of the Communist International that was unparalleled during the history of the workers movement.

There were terrible consequences from this annihilation. Inside the USSR, when the working class regained its strength and energy, especially when it gained great social weight with the industrialization of the 1930s, it found itself disarmed, without either militants or organizations to transmit a political, militant and organizational heritage. This breach ruptured the transmission of traditions and the gains in consciousness from one generation to the next, a rupture on a scale that was unprecedented and which weighed on the working class until the disappearance of the USSR. And it still weighs on the ex-USSR, above all when the workers had or could have had a chance to intervene in the course of political events.

In 1962, for example, when worker riots broke out in Novocherkassk after the government raised food prices by 30 per cent, the regime of Nikita Khrushchev drowned the riot in blood. This revolt seemed to have no impact, although there were similar reactions in several other industrial cities.

A quarter of a century later, we see the weight of this rupture at a completely different level with very different consequences. During the political torment of the Gorbachev epoch, the proletariat -- the social class which was both the largest and most concentrated in the urban centers of the USSR -- remained essentially a spectator. And in 1990-91, when the great miner strikes broke out in Russia and Ukraine, they were led by the so-called "democratic" fraction of the bureaucracy in its fight against the central power. In the period immediately after the dissolution of the USSR, when there were workers' struggles, they developed in isolated fashion, often with the workers' backs forced against the wall by one of the many privatizations. These struggles developed without any organization that could have addressed the workers on the field of their own class interests. With the workers engaged in fights, a political program was indispensable, a program of struggle against the attempts to restore capitalism, as well as against the monopolization of the state-run economy by the bureaucracy and the capitalist apprentices. This revolutionary and communist program would have opened up another perspective for the workers and for society as a whole. It would have sought to provide the working class with a way to take advantage of the hate felt by the immense majority of the population towards the pillagers, the friends of Yeltsin, who were grabbing up state-owned enterprises and were responsible for the brutal impoverishment of the population. The goal of this program would have been for the workers to contest for the leadership of society and to seek to rebuild an economy rid of bureaucratic parasites and rid of the new owners of the factories, largely considered illegitimate in the workers' milieu -- and even well beyond this milieu.

Today, such a program is still just as vital. And, today, when tens of thousands of oil workers in Kazakhstan can defy those in power for months, militants are needed to defend this program. It's just as necessary in Russia, where a fraction of the population takes to the streets to reject the regime, even if, as 20 years ago, it is predominantly members of the "middle class" who are mobilized.

... And in the World

The assassination of the revolutionaries who had made the October victory possible also had dramatic consequences on the international level. When the social democratic and Stalinist leaderships betrayed the rise of workers' struggles of the 1930s, there was no longer an international of the working class movement worthy of the name -- at least none which had weight and authority and reached into all the countries, as did the international represented by Lenin, Trotsky and their comrades at the beginning of the Communist International.

Stalinism gave invaluable aid to the worldwide bourgeoisie, helping it to wipe out the better part of the revolutionary movement of its epoch. This tragedy continues to weigh on the workers movement long after Stalinism, as such, disappeared.

Nonetheless, despite everything that Stalinism did for the bourgeois order (from the tragedy of the Chinese Revolution of 1927 to the capitulation to Hitler without a fight in 1933, to the smothering of the Spanish Revolution in 1936, to the restoration of the imperialist order after 1945, to the crushing of the workers movement in Eastern Europe and notably the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, etc.), the USSR remained a body that was foreign to the world of the bourgeoisie. Even in the 1970s, when the USSR was under Brezhnev and his elderly team who carried out a policy that was entirely reactionary and conservative, it remained an inspiration and a point of support for emancipation or opposition movements in many places around the globe -- despite the bureaucracy and above all despite its leaders. Above all, its very existence, an anomaly in a world dominated by imperialism, constituted a sizeable proof that another social and economic organization was possible. State ownership of the means of production, economic planning and the monopoly of foreign trade allowed the USSR to sustain a high rate of development, despite Stalinism and despite the fact that the USSR was cut off from the international division of labor. The country was able to construct a powerful industry, despite the 1929 crisis and all during the collapse of the capitalist economy in the years that followed. The USSR, even of the bureaucrats, showed that society could develop on different bases than those of capitalism, thanks to the impulsion from a revolution that overthrew the power of the bourgeoisie and expropriated the capitalists.

According to the partisans of the bourgeois order, December 1991 marked the end of what was supposed to be a social nightmare that had lasted 70 years. A regime that recognized neither the market, nor private property could not last -- so these apologists had been saying for all that time. So, finally, when the USSR collapsed under the blows of its own leaders, the partisans of capitalism celebrated. It was the end of the "Soviet century," as the historian Moshe Lewin called the last century. It was a century when the October Revolution and its aftermath "shook the world," as the revolutionary John Reed said, and shook it in long-lasting fashion.

Journalists, politicians, academics, ideologists of the bourgeoisie exulted to see"the greatest utopia of the 20^th century overcome," according to a special edition of the French newspaper, Liberation (September, 1991). Academics like Francis Fukuyama proclaimed "the end of history" -- nothing less! Since October 1917 had aimed to blaze a pathway to a future freed from capitalism, the disappearance of the USSR signified there was no other future except bourgeois society -- so all these people said. But whether they like it or not, the reality of this bourgeois society today puts on the agenda the fight against the capitalist system, which leads humanity into the abyss.

Social Dictatorship of the Bureaucracy, Personal Dictatorship of Stalin

The victory of Stalinism over the Trotskyist Opposition at the end of the 1920s was not enough to ensure stability for the regime. The newcomers to power had reason to fear that sooner or later their dominant position would be called into question by the working class. Even deprived of its party, the working class still had hundreds of thousands of workers who embodied a long experience participating in revolutionary struggles.

Another danger also threatened the regime. The old possessing classes had not given up taking their revenge. And they were encouraged and reinforced by the fact that Stalin had eliminated the revolutionary vanguard. The empirical policy of a regime that broke with Bolshevism, having no other objective than to maintain its grip on power, contributed to the growth of such dangers. Even worse, none of the individual bureaucrats gave a damn about these dangers. Their only concern was to be allowed to profit as much as possible from their position.

The bureaucrats' privileges, unlike those of the capitalists, were not based on private ownership of the means of production, which is the justification in bourgeois society for the private appropriation of the fruits taken from the exploitation of the workers. The bureaucrats' privileges were derived from their parasitic hold over a society transformed by the revolution after the bourgeoisie was expropriated. What the bureaucrats took from the economy, and their anti-democratic way of governing over the society, tended to empty the gains of the revolution of their meaning and to compromise them. But the bureaucrats did not seek to call into question collectivization of the means of production and of exchange, or economic planning. It was precisely on this base that they lived as parasites and from which they drew their privileges.

The power struggles inside the leading circles, just as the ever-present risk of a successful counter-revolution, created real dangers for the regime, leading it sometimes to take radical measures to assure its own survival.

To protect the social dictatorship of their caste, the regime imposed over the entire society an iron discipline, which rapidly became the dictatorship of one leader, elevated as the supreme arbiter, Stalin. The regime imposed a ferocious military discipline on the working class and on the peasants, who were either in the collective farms (known as kolkhozes) or sent to build new industrial centers. Workers could be sent to a concentration camp for being more than 10 minutes late to work. The intelligentsia was forced to applaud the personality cult around Stalin and his whims, along with the reactionary ideas imposed on the arts, culture and sciences -- or else, they risked ending in a prison camp.

The repressive logic of the dictatorship led it to protect itself from its own privileged caste's irresponsibility. The bureaucrats rapidly found themselves under the permanent threat of execution, ordered by the tyrant.

Internal crises followed growing tensions on the international scene, including the rise of Nazism, the Spanish Revolution, the rush to war and the invasion by Hitler. The victory over Nazism was made possible by the sacrifices and courage of the Soviet people, while the Stalinist leadership disorganized the Red Army. Reconstruction from the devastation of the war took place at a time when the Cold War was beginning. All these crises helped Stalin to impose his personal dictatorship over the society for more than two decades.

Things changed radically with the death of the tyrant in 1953. The bureaucrats forced those who succeeded Stalin to stop threatening their lives, and even their positions. But these changes were not for the working class or the rest of the population.

Under Brezhnev, who headed the bureaucracy after the fall of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964 until Brezhnev's death in 1982, a consensus evolved between the Kremlin and the entire layer of the privileged that anyone could go about their business as long as it didn't compromise the established positions of any one else, or the stability of the system.

Pillage by the Bureaucracy Accelerates

Under the cover of what Gorbachev called "Brezhnev's stagnation," the bureaucracy was able to increase significantly and with almost complete impunity what it took from the social body. The bureaucracy reinforced its organization into powerful clans around leaders who became almost permanent fixtures at the head of republics, ministries, customs, KGB (political police), enterprises with foreign business and banks dealing with other countries. Becoming permanent heads of veritable fiefdoms, these top bureaucrats established solid business ties with the "milieu" that proliferated in the "shadow economy," and more generally everywhere that a team with one hand on a bit of power could gain greater and greater advantages.

As the circles of power gave carte blanche to this parasitism, which became organized on a grand scale, it exhausted what remained of the economic dynamism inherited from the revolutionary conquests of October. Under Brezhnev, unbridled pillage caused the economy's growth to run out of steam.

In the years after Brezhnev's death in 1982, the last of those left over from his politburo, sometimes called "the dinosaurs," disappeared. In 1985, Gorbachev was elected Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party, and then declared that he wanted to restore order to the economy, and do the same thing in the society. He called this perestroika, that is, rebuilding from the ground up. The simple announcement of such a plan led a number of bureaucrats to feel that their income was directly threatened.

At the highest spheres of power, there was a kind of silent opposition. To get around them, Gorbachev and his team made allies in the middle layers of the leading apparatus, promising them more autonomy from the "center." For similar reasons, Khrushchev had done the same thing during the post-Stalinist "thaw." But for Gorbachev, these measures were not sufficient. So, he turned to the intelligentsia, holding out the prospect of a little more freedom of expression -- or glasnost, Gorbachev's other key slogan. Then, the petty bourgeoisie, even the intellectuals not content to live off of spirituality, were promised "free enterprise."

In the Soviet Union, private ownership of the means of production had been abolished. But it still legally existed with cooperative ownership (in agriculture with kolkhozes, and in some forms in housing). Suddenly a huge number of so-called cooperatives came into being. Behind this legal term were hidden the many small private enterprises.

Power Struggles and Opposition Turmoil

This raised a lot of enthusiasm and whetted the appetites of many petty bourgeois who dreamed of living "like in the West," which meant to profit freely from their money, even to be able to invest capital in the means of production like in West Europe and America. They called that "aspiring for democracy." That also provided a wide opening for demagogic one-upmanship from some of the "younger" generation of leaders in the ruling party who had supported Gorbachev. Chief among them was Boris Yeltsin, a deputy member of the politburo and a rival of Gorbachev, who took the head of the camp that styled itself "democratic."

While Gorbachev believed that he had won over millions of petty bourgeois with his policy of glasnost, "open debate," "freedom of speech," and then the creation of cooperatives, Yeltsin and his friends posed as self-proclaimed democrats and spoke of the new rule of "democracy" and "liberty," which they boasted about installing.

The number of publications mushroomed to a level that the dissidents who had put out the underground samizdat would never have dared to dream of. Even censorship was abolished. Elections were organized with numerous candidates, a practice that had not been seen since before Stalin. Other parties than the CPSU, the party which had pretended to be communist in the days of the Soviet Union, gained the right to exist, even before the monopoly status of the CPSU could be taken out of the Constitution.

Millions of Soviet citizens passionately watched the debates in the Supreme Soviet, which were broadcast for the first time on television. People were eager to learn, from newspapers and books, things that had not been known by most of the public. They were eager to follow the "return of the names" of militants, writers and scientists, whom Stalinism had made disappear doubly: they were assassinated, and then all trace of their existence was erased from the official history, libraries etc. And demonstrations protesting against the authorities, which had once been unthinkable, drew very large crowds and multiplied to the point that they became nothing out of the ordinary.

Confronted by this upsurge increasingly directed at it, the central power no longer knew what kind of attitude to take. By letting the upsurge continue, the authorities encouraged their opponents more. But by bringing in the army to carry out a bloodbath, as in Georgia and the Baltic Republics, they reinforced nationalist sentiment in the local population and the local politicians who advocated independence. And the bureaucrats leading each of the Soviet Union's 15 republics did everything they could to make sure that the massive pressure of the population in demonstrations reinforced their hold over their own fiefdom at the expense of the central power. The local bureaucrats were strengthened by the fact that Yeltsin, the head of Russia, the biggest republic, called on the other republics to "gain as much autonomy as possible" in order to reduce power in the hands of Gorbachev, the leader of the central bureaucracy.

Green Light for the Bureaucrats to Satisfy their Appetites

The major issue, even if much of it was hidden from the eyes of the population, was the power struggle which had been going on inside the bureaucracy for decades. Ever since this parasitic social layer had usurped power along with Stalin, it sought to free itself from all control, even from its own political rulers.

When Yeltsin and his supporters at the top of the apparatus talked endlessly about "democracy," the bureaucrats understood that they would no longer have to bow to any constraint or control over their own activities, even coming from the authority issuing from their own ranks. The promises of "liberty" from the "reformers" may have encouraged millions of petty bourgeois to dream, but those illusions would soon be severely dampened. The bureaucrats, however, didn't dream; they acted. While the central power weakened and then became paralyzed, the bureaucrats put their hands on anything that could give them a rapid, large return.

The bureaucrats -- those in charge of enterprises, government ministries, the KGB, the CP, and the administration of republics or regions -- established cooperatives and then joint ventures (companies owned by Soviet and foreign capital) even before the privatization laws of 1992 and 1993 legalized this hold-up of the century. Their goal: empty the public enterprises of their assets and take the revenues of the most profitable sectors. They had no difficulty doing this, since they had the upper hand on everything they pillaged. Thus, Gazprom, the giant in the worldwide natural gas industry, was constituted into a private company by those in charge of the Soviet Ministry of Gas. Less known, but just as scandalous, was the secret smuggling of huge amounts of money into Western countries as early as 1987-1988 by high officials in foreign trade, the heads of the military-industrial complex, allied with the heads of the KGB and the departments in the central committee of the CP.

Shortly afterwards, many little banks popped up under the direction of this or that clan from a sector of the bureaucracy. Each of these cliques were eager to have its own machine for transferring wealth outside the country, without having to submit to any control.

While top officials boasted that they were "democrats," "reformers," or "liberals," they increasingly appeared to be advocating a return to capitalism, that is, the foxes of the bureaucracy were in the Soviet henhouse. The USSR did not survive.

The Central Power in Decline

Starting in 1990, the bureaucrats who headed the republics took control over their own republics' "exports" to the rest of the USSR in order to keep their own fiefdom's wealth for themselves, as well as to show their opponents at the top level of the bureaucracy who was boss. As a result, trade between the different regions contracted, and production by enterprises throughout the USSR quickly slowed down. Store shelves were emptied and rationing for the population was introduced. This provoked a crisis that developed into generalized economic chaos, while the leadership of the Soviet state descended into political paralysis. More and more leaders, be they those calling themselves "democrats," or "conservatives," as well as Gorbachev and those around him, all declared that it was necessary to end state ownership and economic planning. In reality, these had already been ended by the bureaucracy's plundering of the enterprises. Gorbachev came to speak of "market socialism," in order to avoid bluntly saying: restoration of capitalism. The Soviet Union was on the verge of imploding.

At the same time there was an explosion of nationalisms and often nationalist rivalries. Throughout the country officials made proclamations about their republic's "sovereignty" in a kind of competition between different nationalist movements.

In August 1991, some sectors of the regime's hierarchies tried to prevent the crumbling of the state from continuing to the point of no return. They decreed a state of emergency. But this only exacerbated the political anarchy. Even in the army, the police and the KGB, there was no one to apply the orders. Three days later, those who had decreed the state of emergency either gave up or committed suicide. Yeltsin, who had been demanding for months that Gorbachev resign, finally had definitively overtaken Gorbachev. But once the country had broken up into legally independent units, Yeltsin and those around him at the head of Russia didn't have much more control over the course of events than did Gorbachev.

Everywhere, including even where they hadn't thought about it before, the heads of the bureaucracy hurriedly proclaimed not just sovereignty, but the independence of "their" republic... and its wealth. In the republics and regions, the heads of the bureaucracy went to work to reinforce their hold over their own fiefdoms by basing themselves on the largest ethnic group of the population, at the expense of local minorities. This led to more and more confrontations between sections of the population living side by side. In the Caucasus, Central Asia and Moldavia, trying to impose themselves on the population, the bureaucrats stirred up ethnic conflicts, playing on the resentments of the poor to turn them against other poor people.

In this climate, on the 8^th of December, 1991, Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk and Stanislau Shushkevich, the respective leaders of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, decreed the dissolution of the USSR. They did it surreptitiously, without any mandate, in a hunting lodge near Minsk. The Baltic Republics had not waited for this to declare their own independence. The Republic of Georgia celebrated this decision. But others were confronted with a decision that was taken behind their backs. Kazakhstan, the Soviet republic encompassing the second largest land area, protested.

The highest spheres of the bureaucracy had dismantled the USSR in order to get rid of the central authority. They then divided up the spoils.

Two decades later, the conflicts emanating from this dismembering have not been resolved. There has been no resolution between Armenia and Azerbaijan, where a first war broke out in 1987 over the control of the small enclave of NagornoKarabakh. Nor has the conflict ended between Georgia and its own republics, Ossetia and Abkhazia, which became protectorates of Russia. Neither has the conflict ended between the Romanian-speaking Moldavia and the Russian-speaking secessionists in Transnistria where Russian troops are stationed. Neither has the conflict been settled in the Fergana Valley and the region around it that is made up of peoples pulled much earlier from three independent Soviet republics in central Asia which are now ruled by despots. Not to be forgotten is the mosaic of peoples who make up the Caucasian republics of the Russian Federation and live daily with the fear of attacks and other acts of violence by armed gangs, some of whom have ties to the state. The president of Chechnya, for example, is a religious fundamentalist gangster. The Kremlin gave him a free hand to use gangs of killers to impose order on Chechnya, which has already suffered through two devastating wars in 15 years.

There has been a regular threat of open war (between Russia and Georgia during the summer of 2008) or of gigantic pogroms against ethnic minorities (in Azerbaijan in 1990 or in Kyrgyzstan in 2010), making these last two decades a living hell for the people of these regions.

Today, the different states that came out of the Soviet Union are in different situations. But they have one thing in common: they have all suffered from the USSR's dismemberment.

First, because their production and enterprises were brought into existence and developed within a unified and planned framework and were meant to be complementary and interdependent. Except perhaps for Russia, these separate countries could hardly constitute viable national economies all by themselves.

Second, because hundreds of different peoples and ethnic groups living in eastern Europe, Russian Siberia and Asia had been displaced and mixed inside the same huge country. According to the Soviet constitution, all these peoples were equal, at least as equal as they could be under the boot of the bureaucracy. Stalinism in this field, just as others, had carried out the height of abominations. From 1936 to 1951, the policy of terror led to the deportation of many peoples or minorities to other regions of the USSR. These included Poles, Germans of the Volga, Koreans, Baltic peoples, Karathais, Kalmuks, Chechens, Ingouchans, Balkars, Tatars and Greeks of the Crimea, Moldavians, Armenians. These peoples faced frightening conditions. "A giant, murderous transfer had poisonous consequences throughout the existence of the ex-USSR," wrote J.-J. Marie, in the 1995 book, The Deported Peoples of the Soviet Union.

But the situation grew even worse when the administrative borders of the different republics were transformed into national boundaries. Officials at the highest levels of these new independent entities often played the majority of the population off against one or the other minority. Often, the same people who constitute a majority on one side of a border are in the minority on the other side. Officials have stirred up calls for recovering lost territory and nationalism, encouraging the hatred of neighboring peoples.

When the Kremlin negated the right of people to self-determination, it resulted in two horrific wars fought by the Russian Army against the people of the tiny republic of Chechnya seeking independence. The Kremlin, or rather certain cliques fighting for power, stirred up tensions, especially nationalist tensions, in this region where Stalin had deported many peoples. The so-called Chechen war has spread to the entire Russian side of the Caucasus.

Even in the most Western regions of the ex-USSR, the national question has continued to reappear with violence directed at people. Large Russian minorities in the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania today suffer discrimination and sometimes are deprived of their rights, a reversal of the situation produced by the policies of Stalin and his successors, trying to Russify the Baltic countries. The leaders of the European Union, to which these states now belong, had nothing to say. The Baltic states, having grown dependent on West European capital, especially Scandinavian capital, were among the hardest hit in Europe when the financial crisis struck in 2008. All the nationalities -- wage earners in private industry, public sector workers, retired people -- faced falling income and growing unemployment.

Of the 12 other former republics of the Soviet Union, those of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan) and to a lesser measure those of the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan) saw their ancient conflicts reignited and supplemented with new ones. During the time of the USSR, the economy of these regions developed more slowly compared to that of the rest of the country (even if, compared to their neighbors in countries outside the USSR, the Soviet system allowed them to progress economically, culturally and socially). They also suffered from a vestige of the old clan relations, combined with cronyism on a grand scale and the system of cliques from the Brezhnev period. Some of the most memorable scandals concerning the diversion of state property took place in the Central Asian part of the Soviet Union.

Since the fall of the USSR, this region witnessed corruption and nepotism pushed to extremes never before seen. The clans, often based on family ties, took power, in some cases well before the fall of the Soviet Union (in Azerbaijan and even earlier in Kazakhstan, whose current president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was already prime minister in 1984 and first secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party in 1989). These regimes are dictatorial and generally outlaw all organized opposition. Religion often serves as the official ideology and as a means to control the population. Women have been crushed and pushed back to the Dark Ages. These regimes do not even pretend to respect a minimum of democratic decorum. No problem for the powers that control them today, whether Western or Russian. For the military, commercial and energy strategies of the Western and the Russian powers, these countries, rich in hydrocarbons or well situated for pipelines, are treated as mere pawns.

The immense majority of the people in the ex-Soviet republics of Central Asia and the Caucasus live in terrible misery. Generally, they live under dictatorial regimes that are corrupt and reactionary to their bones. But the media and government officials of the supposed democratic countries don't make this an issue. Their oil companies and other big exporters have too much at stake. The barbarism of these regimes guarantees order for the exploiters and especially for their profits.

By contrast, Western officials condemn the regime of Belarus for being what they call "the last dictatorship in Europe." Its head, Stanislav Levchenko, tramples on all forms of opposition, imprisons competitors during elections he feels he must organize, and leads his country with an iron fist. But the West doesn't blame him for that. In this field, he is no different than many other rulers with whom the Western governments have good relations. The real problem for these governments is that while certain parts of the economy have been privatized, the regime maintains a large public sector, within forms like those that used to exist in the USSR. For those who rule the international capitalist order, this is what is unforgivable.

When it was part of the interdependent framework of the Soviet economy, tiny Belarus's economy had been very specialized. When the USSR disintegrated, Belarus's economy became much more fragile than that of other ex-Soviet republics in the face of international competition. The bureaucracy at the head of Belarus saw that its only salvation was to maintain an economy that was largely state-owned. Of course, that was not a protection for the economy, especially after the crisis of 2008. During the crisis, trade with the West was reduced, and Belarus's principal economic partner and semi-political ally, Russia, imposed draconian commercial and financial conditions. But even if the Belarus population continues to suffer under a dictatorship, it no doubt also must have the impression that until recently, it had escaped the much worse social and economic fate of the Russian and Ukrainian populations.

In Ukraine, as in Russia, the standard of living of the working classes collapsed with the disappearance of the Soviet Union. The leading team in Ukraine tacked between making a rapprochement with the West, European Union and NATO and rejecting it, which led to warmer relations between Ukraine and Russia. But Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych has not gone so far as to adhere to the economic union that Russia recently constituted with Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Ukrainian leaders who are "pro-Russian" refuse to go very far in a rapprochement with their large neighbor, despite a great deal of interdependency between their economies, because most Ukrainian bureaucrats see no benefit in it for themselves. The Ukrainian leaders have their fiefdoms and sources of enrichment for their clans in the Russian-speaking eastern part of Ukraine, where the principal economic power of Ukraine is located (mines, heavy industry). But this is exactly what they are trying to protect, and why they don't want agreements that could submit their enterprises, their fiefdoms and their clans to any supervision outside the Ukrainian businessmen-bureaucracy.

Ukraine flatters itself for being the co-organizer with Poland of the next European championship soccer tournament. But the renovation of its hotels, sports arenas and transportation network for this event hardly moves forward. The state treasury has been empty for years, and it doesn't even have the means to offer either bread or games to the population. The rapacity of the bureaucrats and the successive teams of leaders, along with the effects of the 2008 crisis, have left the country on its knees. What was supposed to be the second largest soviet republic has to depend on IMF loans to balance its budget.

The Case of Russia

Russia is by far the largest republic, and, with 143 million people, it is the most populous. Economically, it is the richest republic of the ex-USSR. Certainly, it is not as bad off as Ukraine. As opposed to Ukraine, Russia has much more petroleum and even more gas, making it the largest exporter in the world. This assures it a comfortable flow of foreign currencies. Russia's subsoil contains all the raw materials used by industry worldwide.

If it weren't for these raw materials, Russia's finances would be non-existent, given the great extent of the pillage of the economy, which even Russia's leaders bemoan as unfortunate. President Medvedev observed that, since the post-Soviet collapse of Russia's economy, the country has been "in a humiliating state of dependence" on its exports of raw materials. From 1991 to 1999, or less than a decade after the end of the Soviet period, the index of Russian production dropped by half. In all domains, including armaments -- which is a paradox for a country that was the second leading military power during the post-war period -- Russia has now been reduced to importing a big part of what it consumes and what its industry needs. To pay for that, it can only count on the foreign currencies that it gets from exporting petroleum and gas -- which have increased seven times from 2001 to 2008 -- and to a lesser extent on what it brings in from its exports of minerals, precious stones and wood.

Even here Russia's dependence is obvious. It may export a lot of wood, but it must hand it over to Scandinavian companies for production, and Russia imports wood products that have a high value added, such as wood pulp for paper. It is only one illustration, among many, of the fantastic drop in productive capacity that occurred over the 20 years since the disappearance of the USSR. In the field of agriculture, the effects of the destruction of cooperatives or state-owned structures (kolkhozes or sovkhozes) show up on store shelves. The big stores offer fewer products produced in Russia, and more imports from big Western European agricultural companies. This also is an indicator of desertification of the rural regions. The state-owned and planned economy had allowed "habitation points" to be implanted and developed, even in regions abandoned under czarism. But by 2009, nearly 10 per cent of the 155,000 villages that had existed in Russia in 1990, no longer existed.

There is a huge gulf between reality and what the "specialists" and other "good doctors" of the market economy predicted during the 1980s. They descended onto the USSR to advise Yeltsin and his cohorts how best to replace the state-owned and planned economy, which they described as inefficient, by a system that was supposed to assure renewed growth and development.

This new system certainly allowed swindlers to get rich as quick as lightning. And it enabled Western companies to conclude enormously favorable contracts in petroleum and industry, contracts it took years for their Russian partners to free themselves from. But for all the rest, what they presented as a transition from a collectivized economy toward a supposedly market economy produced a nightmarish situation. The bureaucrats sold off state property for their own profit in a way that brought chaos difficult to imagine in all spheres of society, including at the political level.

Bureaucrats sold off enterprises at bargain basement prices to themselves and plundered them. Enterprises stopped functioning, depriving workers of their wages for months, and they stopped paying their suppliers, forcing cuts to the workers at those companies also. What Western advisors to Russian leaders called "shock therapy" was designed to empty the pockets of the population in order to fill the bureaucrats' bank accounts in foreign countries. Prices exploded. In a few months, inflation hit 1,000 per cent and continued to increase to 2,000 per cent. The small savings of those who had some were reduced to nothing, throwing into poverty tens of millions of retirees, workers without wages, workers in the public or social sectors, which without subsidies stopped functioning. Then there were the "reforms," the hypocritical name designed to legalize the transfer of as much state property as possible into the hands of bureaucrats turned businessmen. They hurriedly liquidated everything that didn't seem profitable enough or immediately resold anything that could produce a big profit.

Who Profits from the Crime?

"Only 10 per cent of Russia's inhabitants profited from the collapse of the USSR and the reforms that followed," was the title of a recent article in on the first page of "One of RBK" (June 22, 2011), a Russian business journal, which commented on a study done by the Russian Academy of Sciences. These conclusions are so evident, no one in Russia questions it. Even the Western commentators and ideologues of the bourgeoisie have dropped their predictions of progress and promises of democracy, with which they once filled the media.

Twenty years ago, our tendency was part of a tiny minority which went against the current of these makers of public opinion, conformists and defenders of the established order. We said that nothing good could come for the people from the conditions that the USSR was sinking into, the race of those at the top to enrich themselves, the irresponsibility of the top leadership.

In the text concerning the USSR, dated October 27, 1990, which was submitted to the 1990 Congress of Lutte Ouvriere, we wrote, "Were workers to allow the return of capitalism in the USSR, even partially, they would not enjoy the affluence, however relative, of the West. Rather they would experience a lower standard of living, unemployment and the end of the limited social benefits they had before. The standard of living of the population of the USSR as a whole would not go up, quite the contrary. It would go back to the level of the Third World -- even if shop windows were filled with Western goods unaffordable for the overwhelming majority. The 'reserved shops' would be open for all, but their customers would be just as exclusively selected... This would be a setback for the world proletariat..."

In March 1991, in an article of Class Struggle titled, "USSR: An Attempt at a Bourgeois Counter Revolution, Bureaucratic Zigzags -- What Policy for the Working Class?" we again wrote, "The only thing that is certain is that if it leads to anything it can only be a society offering a greater possibility of accumulation and enrichment for a few and impoverishment for the majority if not the whole of the proletariat. This greater inequality could be sweetened by a small dose of 'democracy,' of a similar type to that offered to the poor by the big 'democracies' in poor countries like Brazil and India. But even this is not certain."

For the Lutte Ouvriere congress of 1991, the text edited a few weeks before the implosion of the USSR affirmed: "A proletarian revolutionary organization in the Soviet Union should include in its program the struggle against privatization and against the restoration of capitalism. It should use the price which the masses are being made to pay in the current situation, in order to mobilize them on this issue.

Similarly, it should defend planning, both ideologically and, if possible, in practice. This is one of the few means, at the present time, of opposing, among the masses, the break-up of the Soviet Union, by showing that there are interests common to all peoples in the former Union which need to be preserved. Only the proletariat can simultaneously defend freedom and diversity and also the broadest possible federation benefitting from common planning."

Two decades have passed and this assessment has been verified. The Soviet economy collapsed. Just after the end of the USSR, its revenue was so low that enterprises were practically reduced to bartering between themselves.

The economy may have partially revived after the Russian state stopped making payments during the crash of 1998 because its treasury had been ransacked; but the economy remains extremely weak. Russian authorities themselves admit it. Certainly, a layer of small business people has emerged alongside the mass of bureaucrats and millionaires who grew rich under the wing of the state. But this "new middle class" was ruined in 1992 to 1993 during "shock therapy," and again in 1998, and once more in the period starting with the 2008 global financial crisis. But whatever the future holds for this "new middle class," the general situation has in no way been stabilized.

Capital flight, which has continued for 20 years, attained new heights in 2011. According to the Russian Vice-Minister for Economic Development, "80 billion dollars in private capital was removed from the country" in 2011, or more than double the amount in 2010. And no one believes that it will return, wrote the business daily, Vedomosti (November 2, 2011), in an article entitled, "This Money Will Not Return." For the last 20 years there has been no public or private investment in production. Nor has there been any development of the economy and reinvestment in infrastructure. Although President Medvedev launched a "modernization" of the economy and released colossal amounts of funding for a "Russian Silicon Valley" located near Moscow, nothing has been done. Public money disappears in the bottomless pockets of the regime's privileged layers -- not only because corruption attains ever greater heights, but because the well-off bureaucrats and new bourgeois have no confidence in their own system.

A Terrible Decline for the Laboring Classes

The Russian Academy's statement that "90 per cent of Russians" were losers over the last 20 years is no doubt a statistical reality. But it hides the social reality. Because the workers in the cities and the countryside had the most to lose from the collapse of the USSR under the blows of the leading caste.

The petty bourgeois who believed, or wanted to believe that this collapse would bring them happiness and material comfort and who accepted to play the role of foot soldiers for the so-called democratic camp -- what did they lose, besides their savings, or perhaps some illusions in the affair? Even that remains to be seen.

But the workers lost both materially and socially, much more than anyone else, from the disappearance of the USSR.

At the material level, workers bore the shock, the full whip of the "shock therapy" of Yeltsin, Gaider, and their Western advisors. Workers, retirees, technicians, employees, teachers, nurses -- they all had their wages and pensions gutted by inflation. They also had to face mass unemployment, something unknown when the Soviet Union existed. Auctioned off and dismantled, enterprises laid off or, more commonly, simply stopped paying their workforce for months. And when workers finally received their salaries or pensions, they weren't worth anything, given the hyperinflation of 1992-1993.

With the disappearance of the USSR, tens of millions of workers were impoverished and reduced to permanent destitution in regions where there were no jobs. Millions of Moldavians, Tadjiks, Uzbeks, Ukrainians were forced to emigrate in order to survive. Often, they went to Russia, where they were treated like pariahs, fleeced by the police, and employed in the most laborious and worst paying jobs.

How could anyone be surprised that alcohol and drug addiction ravaged the population! In Central Asia, the many low-paid jobs linked to drug trafficking were often the only way to make a living. But everywhere, many searched for a way to forget the daily hell in an artificial paradise. And since public medical and social services ceased functioning -- because they were no longer subsidized and were privatized and unaffordable -- the state of public health took a huge leap backwards for the laboring population. Diseases like tuberculosis returned with a vengeance. Other diseases, such as AIDS, spread. Nothing was done to fight against any of these diseases. Life expectancy fell steeply to 62 years, a level that had been surpassed more than 50 years before. The world had never seen such a drop before, except in times of war.

In a situation of wide unemployment and impoverishment, the birthrate in Russia and Ukraine fell with the end of the USSR. And the population continues to shrink rapidly, reversing the long-term trend upwards. Despite the influx of millions of Russians and immigrants coming from "neighboring countries," that is, ex-Soviet republics, the Russian Federation's population fell from 149 million in 1991 to 143 million in 2010.

Since Gorbachev, social inequalities have exploded. They form a yawning gulf between a privileged layer (three to four million bureaucrats and bourgeois) and the rest of the population, with more than 21 million people living below the official poverty line. Unemployment officially is eight per cent of the active population. But in reality, it is much higher. Many of the unemployed with tiny benefits or no benefits at all prefer to manage on their own as best they can. Certainly, except in a few places, the worst misery of the Yeltsin era has disappeared. But the worsening job situation due to the world crisis, the new attacks against public services, the increasing erosion of wages by inflation, the privatizing of social services (health and education) which now have to be paid for -- all this means that even in the big cities, the misery is so rampant, the population has to struggle to survive.

Beyond the individual fate of millions of workers over the last 20 years, the fall of the USSR has collective consequences for the working class. In the time of Brezhnev or of Gorbachev, the working class not only was the largest class in the USSR; it existed throughout the country, often concentrated in giant enterprises. There were hundreds of metallurgy or chemical complexes, such as Uralmach in Sverdlovsk-Ekaterinaburg, where there were 40,000 workers. And they were found in all the large and medium-sized cities.

The privatizations and the destruction of the economy by the pillage of the bureaucrats for 20 years reduced a great deal of this industrial network. In the giant old factories, there are only a few thousand or just a few hundred jobs left. And with the end of planning, the rupture in relations between the ex-soviet republics has left the enterprises without suppliers or markets.

Of course, in Russia there are still dozens of "mono-towns" where life revolves around one large factory -- towns that were constructed during the industrialization of the 1930s. During explosions of workers' anger one or two years ago in some of these towns, the entire population was in solidarity with the workers. In a city at the center of power this could create problems for the government. Now it says that it wants to dismantle some of these cities.

This only underlines that what the privileged and the owners have gained from the disappearance of the USSR is the disorganization of the industrial base of the working class, diluting it in the population, reducing its numbers and weakening its social weight. This is in spite of the fact that new enterprises, such as auto companies, which are often owned by Western companies, have been built, creating new industrial centers, like at Kaluouga near Moscow, to take advantage of the low cost of the workforce.

But as far as the working class is concerned, the determining factor remains its combativity and its political class consciousness. In 1917 in the Russia of the czars, a tiny working class, limited to a few big centers, succeeded in bringing down the autocracy and bourgeoisie and to shake the world.

A System that Doesn't Resemble Anything Known

At the end of December 2011, Russia joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) after 18 years of negotiations. The WTO is made up of 153 countries that represent 94 per cent of world trade. Until it joined, Russia had been the only big country that did not belong to the WTO.

Apart from vetoes by Ukraine and Georgia, two members of the WTO that had their own bones of contention with Russia (for Ukraine it was over gas, and for Georgia, over territory), what blocked these negotiations for so long? Russia itself. More exactly, its leaders didn't want to accept the conditions set by the WTO for granting favorable commercial relations. Russia's exports continued to be taxed at a higher level than those of WTO member countries, and it did not receive financing for what it imported. The WTO used these unfavorable conditions as a bargaining chip against the Russian government, which refused to give up its own massive subsidies to its economy (in the industrial and agricultural sectors especially); which continued to protect its banking and insurance sectors (the Russians restricted foreign financial groups from opening branches on its territory that would not be ruled by Russian law); which protected its telecommunications industry; which taxed agricultural and industrial imports that would harm local industries that have higher production costs; and which subsidized the prices of some consumer goods (in energy, food).

In brief, Russia did not want to give up the way the economy it had inherited from the USSR continued to function, notably certain state controls over foreign trade. That may have created a handicap in Russia's foreign dealings, but it assured income protected by the public authority for numerous sectors of the bureaucracy.

The Russian state finally ceded, but not because it had given up defending the bureaucrats' interests. The Russian press insists that the Russian bureaucrats were able to obtain measures that can be managed, and that the power will find the way to compensate the losses to certain protected sectors. The authorities are more discreet in what they claim. In any case, the media pushes the idea that the government had no other choice but to accept these measures; that if the government wants to attract foreign investment in the most advanced sectors or even for industry, it had to accept the WTO's conditions imposed by the global industrial and financial groups. Everyone knows that Russia is at a dead end, that the well-off practically don't invest in the country, and have only one motto: "Take the money and run."

Thus Russia ends up being reintegrated into the world market. But very slowly. And not by the front door, as the great partisans of capitalism promised 20 years ago. It is reluctantly admitted, as with the WTO, and only as an "emerging country," in other words, not as bad off as some other countries, but economically weak. Yet, it wasn't so long ago that the USSR was considered one of the two super-powers. Now when a big door is opened to it, it is always the door of the Western investment banks or rather one of their subsidiaries set up in tax havens. While the pillage of the economy and the exploitation of the Russian working class serve to balloon the bank accounts of the "new rich," they also serve American and West European financial capital.

It took less than a decade of unlimited pillage of the economy and continual weakening of the central power for the country to default on its payments in 1998. The state under the alcoholic President Yeltsin was a picture of ruin and powerlessness.

It was against this situation that some ruling Russian circles wanted to respond with Putin. A product of the KGB, Putin tried to restore the authority of the state by pushing down regional barons of the Russian bureaucracy, who behaved as independent powers. He also brought the "oligarchs" to heel, who had made fortunes controlling entire sections of the economy and profiting from the complicity of the weakened central power and the support of the big apparatuses of the bureaucracy.

Among these ruling circles who looked to Putin were the leading bodies in the various military services (ex-KGB, the army, police, etc.) -- the so-called "force" ministries. They decided that they had not been well served by the scramble for control of the economic resources of the USSR. They took advantage of the situation to get their revenge on some of the social climbers who lost their connections in the government when Putin came to power. Vladimir Gusinksy, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky fled abroad or were put in prison after being cut off from the part of their fortune they not could take in their baggage -- such as their oil companies. Other "oligarchs" did not have to be told twice. Aven Petr, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Potanine, Roman Abramovich, Alexander Smolensky returned to the state (for a good price) most of the enterprises that they had stolen from it. Leaving for a semi-voluntary but golden exile, they live a parasitic high life in more or less retirement in France or Great Britain.

The sweep of the broom wielded by Putin and by the men of the KGB "unprivatized" the Russian economy somewhat, starting around 2000. But it was not re-nationalized, because the enterprises that returned to the bosom of the state are today found under the personal control of very high bureaucrats.

There are private bosses in Russia, even capitalist billionaires like one finds elsewhere. But much more numerous and with much more power are the heads of public companies, which often issue some stock -- they owe their positions to high functionaries close to power, if not heads of various departments.

The central power took back control of the jewels of the Russian economy, first of all the energy sector which provides foreign currency. The men of the "force" ministries were propelled into all the levels of the economic-administrative machinery of the state where decisions are made.

According to a former advisor to Yeltsin, the privileged caste is composed of three and a half million bureaucrats holding responsible positions in the "vertical power" dear to Putin: in the numerous organs of control, inspection, as prosecutors, in the hierarchy of the police, military, in the information service, customs.

Corruption, Bribes, Pillage: Diverse Aspects of the Same Reality

When they are not at the head of a semi-public enterprise, or even really private ones, these bureaucrats serve as a protection without which no enterprise of any importance could function in the ex-USSR. Regularly denounced by the central power, corruption rots all economic and social life. According to some media, the cost of corruption represents one-third of the state budget! And this pillage of the state, the economy and the population continues to grow. According to the minister of justice, 225 elected local officials were convicted, but only two deputies to the Duma, because deputies are covered by legal immunity. In 2010, 120 investigators, 12 prosecutors, 48 advocates and three judges were convicted of corruption. As for the general of the FSB (the successor to the KGB) who controlled the public institution in charge of the internet, he was just "replaced." He is in prison for being mixed up in trafficking stolen smart phones.

Bribes, the kind of corruption that most affects ordinary peoples' daily life, have also increased greatly because the lower levels of the bureaucracy don't usually have the means to directly extort money from the state or the enterprises. "Everyday Corruption -- 164 Billion Roubles [or $52 Billion] Were Spent on Bribes Last Year in Russia" was the big headline in RBK, (June 15, 2011).

Millions of bureaucrats, who are the backbone of the regime, constitute at the same time, its social base, representing an estimated 12 per cent of the active male population. Having control over the principal sources of revenue, they can leave "free enterprise" for others. Small business owners know not to extend their business to the point of drawing attention from those in power, and the problems that could cause. The smallest problem could result in having to give their business to one or another group of bureaucrats in league with judges who could find a legal pretext to expropriate a business. As for the bloody settling of accounts between businessmen, even if they are less covered by the media than during the time of Yeltsin, they have not disappeared.

At the beginning of 2000, when Putin succeeded Yeltsin, promising to bring stability to a state that was in the process of sinking, many bureaucrats applauded. The rest of public opinion was also tired of a decade of deprivation and scandals of all kinds in the name of "democracy." The middle classes, which amount to 20 per cent of the entire Russian population and which had been upset, accepted, according to a Russian journal (Gazeta.ru, December 15, 2011), "stability in exchange for the monopolization of power," by Putin. Since that deal coincided with economic improvement the petty bourgeoisie gave it credit for its improving income. But, the journal continues, "the deal expired mainly because of the economic crisis [beginning in 2008], but also because of the actions of those in power."

In 2008, Medvedev succeeded Putin as president of the Russian Federation. Some people in the petty bourgeoisie scrutinized the smallest disagreement between the two of them. Disappointed by Gorbachev, then by Yeltsin, and finally by Putin, they put their hopes in Medvedev. Medvedev, they said, was modern, younger and seemed reluctant to make the kinds of decisions made by Putin. He even declared that he would run for president in 2012. Against Putin? They had their champion!

Alas! It was Medvedev who, in October 2011, enthroned Putin as candidate of Russia United, the ruling party, probably making Putin the future president. What's more, Medvedev led this same party during the legislative elections in December. This crystalized the frustrations and disillusionment of the "middle classes," leading them to punish the party. And then, when people didn't know anyone who voted for Russia United but the party still "won" the elections, it was too much.

As soon as the legislative election results were announced, disgust was so great that people took to the streets in big demonstrations. Rather than becoming discouraged by the arrests and convictions of the first demonstrators, even more demonstrators took to the streets crying,"No to the party of crooks and thieves!" There were youth who were demonstrating for the first time and older people also, who said that they hadn't seen such large demonstrations since the fall of the USSR. Much of the crowd was made up of representatives of what are called the intelligentsia (journalists, lawyers, artists, architects, actors, students), as well as the owners of small businesses. And all of those who had been pushed out of power were also there, including former ministers from both the Yeltsin and Putin regimes, liberal politicians, right-wing parties, extreme right-wing nationalists, center-left formations, and finally a few far-left groups.

From what is known, workers have been largely absent from the demonstrations up until now. Undoubtedly, they don't identify with the well-known people in the demonstrations, who are generally from the right-wing and usually criticize Putin for not installing a bourgeois political system as quickly and completely as they would like.

The workers may have had good reason for not mobilizing in these demonstrations. But they had just as good reason as the petty bourgeoisie -- even if they do not have the same reason -- for being indignant about the system and to want to combat it.

The Only Policy for the Future: Communist and Revolutionary

The effect of the demonstrations during the upcoming presidential elections appears to worry the regime. In a speech, Putin denounced "extremist provocations" which would push the state "toward chaos, like in 1917." In playing the "me or chaos" song, he perhaps hopes to frighten a big part of public opinion -- including some of the demonstrators -- who well know that he had restored order in the beer garden, which is what the country had become under Yeltsin.

Putin just pulled out of his sleeve billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov to run as a right-wing opposition candidate for president, which is acceptable to the Kremlin. Prokhorov had already been asked to take the lead of a right-wing opposition linked to the Kremlin. As Prokhorov jumped into the game, Putin took umbrage and had him kicked out of his part just before the legislative elections. Right away, the puppet won a small aura as an oppositionist who Putin can now profitably recycle. Will this gain some public support? Or will Putin demand that Medvedev resign and let Putin return immediately as president, posing as the country's savior in the midst of the crisis, a scheme that had worked during past elections? Finally, it isn't very important.

It is much more important that these events that are shaking the Russian political landscape bring forward a new generation that engages itself politically, understanding the meaning of the defeats, the successes and the past struggles. Within this generation, it is necessary that workers learn to orient themselves facing their current enemies and their "democratic" predecessors who are partisans of a bourgeois society just as hostile to the workers as the current regime. And don't forget, the well-to-do and the regime keep the nationalists in reserve as a breeding ground of an extreme right that is racist and xenophobic -- "just in case."

What is more than ever necessary is that militants, revolutionary organizations, socialists and communists worthy of the name find a way during these events to address the workers; that they convince the workers not to remain spectators, nor support one or another camp, equally opposed to the working class, as they did during the events two decades ago, but to fight as workers for a policy conforming to their own class interests. A policy that fights for a future not under the rule of the bourgeoisie, big or small, flanked or not by the bureaucracy, but for a future rid of exploitation of human beings by human beings in Russia, as everywhere else. It is a communist future that their ancestors opened the door to nearly a century ago with the victory of October 1917.

Not just Fox News -- we expect vile racist garbage to come spewing out of the mouths of those right wing fanatics, funded by some of the wealthiest people in the country.

But the sedate, proper media do exactly the same thing -- they just do it more "politely," pretending that in this situation it's perfectly normal to be neutral, to give us both sides of the story.

There aren't two sides to this story. Trayvon was lynched, every bit as much as all those young black men during the 1930s, 40s and 50s were lynched just for looking the wrong way.

Yes, he wasn't lynched with a rope, hung from the branch of a moss-draped Southern tree. He was gunned down in the street by a vigilante who condemned him to death for being "suspicious" -- that is, for being nothing more than a young, black man, walking naively down the street.

Just as with all those lynchings of an earlier day, his murderer goes unpunished. In the modern-day racist state of Florida, the murder of a young black man calls forth no punishment. And if punishment ever comes, it will only be because of all the angry rallies and demonstrations not only in Florida, but around the country.

Trayvon Martin was supposed to be one of the lucky young men -- a football player, respected in his school, living a somewhat comfortable life. But he was killed anyway.

It could not be more clear -- in this modern-day racist United States of America, it is open season on young black men.

The impoverishment of the black community puts millions at risk.

One in ten young black men will die before they reach the age of 18. Some are killed by racists, some by cops, some by the medical system, some by other young black men -- young men living in the dire circumstances that poverty and unfulfilled needs create. Lack of jobs -- a 70% rate of unemployment if you are black, without a high school diploma. Lack of access to decent schooling -- this country spends less than one-third as much on poor black children in the big urban centers as it does on the children of the wealthy white bourgeois out in their suburbs.

More young black men will end up in prison than get into college -- because there aren't jobs for those without an education, and there are few decent schools that could provide a real education to children who are poor and black.

Nearly half of all young black men in urban centers come out of school functionally illiterate. From the day they start until the day they leave school, they are jammed into classrooms where individual attention isn't even a passing dream.

This, too, is a kind of assassination, a kind of lynching of a whole generation of young black men -- and young women too.

There is enough wealth in this capitalist society that this systematic deprivation could be overcome in a generation. More than enough. And the racism that feeds on poverty could be overcome. But none of this will be done by a system whose basic aim is to keep accumulating more wealth in the hands of a tiny bourgeois class, while further impoverishing the population.

This system certainly can't provide justice for Trayvon Martin and his family, nor will it shut down the open season on young black men. This can only be imposed by the population itself, especially by the black population, and it can be imposed by all those young black men who today recognize themselves in Trayvon Martin.

For decades, city politicians gave away subsidies and tax breaks to the auto companies, one after another. And the city has gone deeper in debt to the big banks linked to these giants.

Chrysler had schemes going for decades, getting tax breaks that lasted for 14 years every time it "modernized" an old plant. A skeleton work force kept them open -- just long enough to wring every last penny out of each of those tax breaks.

Ford got big tax breaks when it built the Renaissance Center on the Detroit River. It benefitted from large city reconstruction in the area, making the RenCen more valuable.

Ford got more aid when it wanted to vacate the RenCen, with the city and state paying for infrastructure improvements and giving tax breaks to GM who took the RenCen, and to real estate interests who took GM's old headquarters.

GM got tax breaks for building a new plant in the city, while it paid nothing for leaving old plants vacant and decrepit, destroying the surrounding neighborhoods, and draining tax rolls.

Max Fisher got a tax break for putting up luxury housing on the waterfront, and another tax break when his son-in-law got the city to clear out large sections of housing near an area Fisher and friends wanted to gentrify.

William Clay Ford, one of the Ford family, got the city to take title on land, clear it for him -- and then give him tax breaks for the downtown stadium he wanted for his football team.

Pizza king Mike Ilitch got the same treatment for his new baseball stadium. And now his family wants city help to pay for a new hockey arena -- replacing one the city built earlier.

Peter Karmanos ended up with a big spot of very expensive property, cleared by the city, which also dug up and re-routed downtown streets to accommodate Karmanos, who wanted company headquarters for Compuware on that very spot.

Oh, and that's only the beginning of the story, the very tip-top of the iceberg that is sinking Detroit today -- an iceberg of tax breaks that fed every major corporation out of the public treasury, and demolition that ripped apart vibrant working class neighborhoods in the city.

Every one of these deals put the city's finances tighter in a hammer lock. Every one meant cuts in city services or new bonds floated with the big banks. Or both. And the banks made out like bandits on all these loans -- many so twisted they could only have been invented by a criminal mind.

These villains that robbed the city for decades say Detroit is now bankrupt. The bill has to be paid. And, according to them, the population and city workers should pay it. Gut parks, recreation centers, bus service, fire and emergency service, lighting, water and sewer lines. Get rid of city workers, cut their pay, eliminate their medical care and pensions. Give away public property.

The population of Detroit didn't create the problems. The capitalists did, searching for ways to prop up their profit at public expense. And they didn't do it only to Detroit. They did it and are doing it everywhere, throughout the country.

For four decades, going back to 1971, this country has been in a permanent economic crisis, bumping from one financial disaster to another, one recession to another.

The capitalists and bankers have not paid the price for the mess they created. For four decades, they used the public treasury as their own bank account. City, state and federal governments gave them a permanent bailout, gutting public and social services everywhere in the country.

Detroit may be the first major city to be put up for auction. But Detroit's problems -- the capitalists and banks which gutted it -- are every city's problems.

Every worker in Detroit and elsewhere who is outraged today is right. Everyone who is angry is right. Why should working people quietly go along with the capitalists and bankers who want us to pay for their crimes?