That’s criminal!

And the proposals John McCain and Barack Obama made when the latest jobs reports came out were pitiful. Rushing to comment, they criticized each other, but nonetheless proposed remedies that were remarkably similar.

In the short term, they both would provide another “stimulus” package like the one Bush pushed through. That didn’t work so well!

In the long run, they would give more tax breaks and subsidies to the big corporations, pretending that corporations will use the money to create jobs. And that’s been done many times before – the money was given, but the jobs weren’t created.

Why shouldn’t government take that same money, but use it to create jobs directly?

There certainly are plenty of things that need to be done. If every rotting bridge were to be repaired or replaced, if every broken-up road made driveable again, millions of people could be put to work, just making those repairs. And that’s only the beginning of work that needs to be done – work that would launch many millions of jobs.

Dams need to be repaired. Five per cent of all dams in the country are so unsafe they could collapse without further warning – according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. And this doesn’t take into account the levees all up and down the Mississippi River system.

There are almost 50 million students in public schools – and most of them study in schools that are substandard, crowded or even unsafe. And with the number of pupils increasing by over a third of a million every year, tens of thousands new schools are needed, just to catch up.

Playgrounds, parks and rec centers need to be cleaned up, expanded, opened up, added to.

Tens of thousands of clinics and people to staff them are needed – just to take care of all those people without medical coverage today.

High speed rail trains with far-flung networks are needed – so we wouldn’t have to waste all our time getting to work.

With all those things that need to be built or established or run or repaired, there is no reason for any person to be without work. If government – which today uses the money it takes from us to increase corporate profits – if government were to put that money to work creatively, there would be no shortage of jobs. There would be a shortage of labor.

Vast public works programs have been carried out before – during periods when the working class mobilized to fight so that its interests were addressed.

The working people of this country already know what’s wrong, what needs to be fixed, what’s about to fall down, what’s missing, what should be added. It doesn’t take a ten year study to figure it out.

All it requires is the will to start working on it. What’s required is a government that puts the interests of the population before the interests of the wealthy who have lived off government handouts for years.

But that’s exactly what neither party has done, and what neither Obama nor McCain is proposing to do today.

We won’t get the jobs we need by waiting for one of them to get elected. But if we start putting our demands forward now, whoever gets elected can be forced to answer.

Free public education isn’t really free.

In July 2008, the latest figures released, California’s unemployment rate hit 7.3 per cent – its highest level in 12 years. Other figures also confirm the worsening job market. The number of long-term unemployed, whose unemployment benefits have run out, has also jumped. And the number of workers who are forced to try to survive as their hours have been cut from full-time to part-time has increased by more than 800,000, or by one-third, in just one year.

Just as ominously, the proportion of the population in the labor force is also much lower – as many workers seeking work have simply given up.

In fact, the California labor market never really recovered from the 2001 recession. It took four years after the 2001 recession for the number of jobs to simply catch up to the level in 2000, before the recession. And during those years, more than 60 per cent of the new jobs were in housing-related industries, including real estate, finance and residential construction – that is, they were a product of the real estate bubble, which was especially huge in much of California.

While the job growth during the bubble years helped offset the drop in jobs in other sectors during that time period, those sectors tied to real estate have now led to a new sharp drop in the number of jobs.

As the job market grows ever worse, more working people are having no choice but to look to government programs to keep their heads above water. By late 2007, the number of families seeking cash assistance through the CalWORKS Program (the latest downsized version of the old welfare program) rose for the first time in several years, despite harsher requirements meant to make it more difficult for families to get aid.

In addition, close to 100,000 more California households received food stamps in May 2008 than did one year earlier, an 11 per cent increase. The number of children in the state’s “Healthy Families” program, which provides them some form of health coverage, also increased by 58,000 or 7.1 per cent in one year.

Of course, even as masses of people flood into these programs, Republican and Democratic officials are busy finding ways to cut the benefits, that is, when they are not making it more and more difficult to get them in the first place – under the guise of what they call a state “budget crisis” – thus, spreading hardship and misery in the biggest, richest and supposedly most modern of all economies.

Students went to visit the high school serving the very wealthy suburb of Winnetka. This suburb, where some of the richest capitalists live, spends $7,000 more per student than does the city of Chicago. Not surprisingly, the high school the kids visited is beautiful, with the best science labs, art centers, and sports equipment, along with well prepared and paid teachers – in short, the way all schools should be!

Compare this to Chicago, where lack of funds means overcrowded class rooms, crumbling facilities, shortages of textbooks and equipment, and a lack of counselors, social workers and school nurses. There often isn’t physical education, art or music. Not surprisingly, only 55% of Chicago students graduate from high school. Many of those who do graduate are not equipped to get jobs.

The school boycott was tied to a legal suit by the Chicago Urban League against the state of Illinois, demanding drastic changes in the way the state funds education, which depends primarily on local property taxes.

The system of local school boards financed basically from local property taxes goes back over a hundred and fifty years, when the country was made up mostly of small farmers with less variation – in the North – in income. But in our society today, with giant corporations owned by a handful of billionaires, and tens of millions of workers and the poor, the inequality in society and the resulting inequality in the schools is extreme. The average family income in Winnetka is $229,582, four times as high as in Chicago. Today, the richest school district in the state has 1.8 million dollars of assessed property for each student in its schools, while the poorest district has only $7,000.

We can’t even talk about real public school education until society spends the same amount on every pupil, as much in inner cities and rural counties as in wealthy suburbs like Winnetka – with extra spending to make up for impoverished backgrounds.

But John McCain was not to be outdone. McCain campaigned as a “maverick,” presenting himself as someone independent of the Republican Party and the Christian fundamentalist voting base they pander to. So who did he pick for his V.P.? Sarah Palin, a Christian fundamentalist, who stands solidly on all the reactionary positions to which the Republic Party has pandered.

The more the Democrats and Republicans speak of “change,” the more they act the same.

Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee more than five TRILLION dollars in mortgages, nearly half the U.S. total. The U.S. government is now responsible for all of that. And you know what that means: all of us will be the ones to pay for any mortgages in default.

Fannie Mae was set up by the U.S. government in the Great Depression, to buy mortgages from banks. It was touted as a way to allow ordinary people to afford a home loan; but it mainly allowed the banks to lend without risk.

Fannie Mae was partially privatized in 1968, when it was making lots of money. Now that private ownership has run it into the ground, the government is taking it back again.

Back at the beginning of the mortgage crisis, one of the things the government did was to relax restrictions on Fannie and Freddie so they could buy up mortgage packages from financial companies in trouble, bailing them out. Now Fannie and Freddie are in trouble. Of course they are! The debt was bad to begin with!

The U.S. keeps trying to reassure the financial companies that everything is okay. “Don’t worry,” it said, “we’ve got it covered.” It infused over 160 billion dollars into the system last year; the market barely noticed. It bailed out big financial firms including Bear Stearns; the market paused a bit, but then continued its downward spiral.

Five weeks ago, Congress passed a law giving the government the ability to pump money into Fannie and Freddie. But investors sat on the sidelines, waiting for the government to actually start pumping money into those companies before they invested – so Fannie and Freddie’s problems got worse as their stocks continued to drop.

So now the government has taken the big plunge – taking responsibility to repay the whole five trillion owed to big investors.

Meanwhile, people are losing their homes because mortgage companies ran a scam for more profits. People are losing their jobs because companies lay them off due to machinations in the financial system – and then they lose their homes because they can’t pay.

People’s lives are being destroyed – because of the chaos of this capitalist system. This government, whose role is to defend and prop up big capital, barely noticed.

Yet poverty was also UP. It went from 7.8 percent in the state as a whole to 8.3 percent. And in Baltimore City, where poverty was already 19%, it went up to 20%. More than 250,000 people in Maryland had no health insurance.

This apparent confusion reflects how much money a few people make off the impoverishment of the rest of the population.

The greater Washington and Baltimore areas are home to dozens of wealthy executives, the top 100 of whose salaries averaged more than six million dollars apiece in 2007.

The chief executive and the president of Marriott Hotels, located in Maryland, together got 12 million dollars. Yet hotel workers make $12 to $14 an hour. The five top officers of Constellation Energy gained 54 million dollars last year. The rest of the people in Maryland helped pay for those salaries with a 75% increase in the price of gas and electricity. The chiefs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who got 14 million and 12 million, made it while presiding over the foreclosures of thousands of home mortgages.

These wealthy people took their money out of everyone else’s pockets.

In 2005, a white South African construction boss was sentenced to life for ordering a black worker beaten and then thrown to lions. Only some bones were left of the worker.

Last month, this monster of a boss was released from prison, “on parole,” after serving only three years!

How could something like this, thought possible only in the darkest days of apartheid, happen today?

It’s because the end of apartheid in 1990 left the old power structure in South Africa in place. It’s true that a few black people were able to become bosses and politicians, but the same white wealthy class, which installed apartheid and benefitted from it for 42 years, remained in charge.

Today, black and white politicians share responsibility for keeping in place the capitalist system that gave birth to apartheid.

Legal apartheid may have been done away with. But social apartheid – with the black population in its vast majority confined to the poorer layers of the laboring population – remains.

Even if it’s true, these 7000 are only a small part of the approximately 146,000 U.S. troops in Iraq who are supported by at least 80,000 more CIA agents, private security personnel and other U.S. contractors. All those who remain will continue to impose martial law on a population that has been violently uprooted from their homes, and virtually imprisoned in ethnic and religious enclaves.

Meanwhile, as 7000 troops leave Iraq, 7000 others are being added to U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

The U.S. war in the Middle East is not winding down – it is extending and widening into a regional war encompassing Afghanistan and probably Pakistan.

A U.N. inquiry, however, “found convincing evidence, based on the testimony of eyewitnesses and others, that some 90 civilians were killed, including 60 children, 15 women and 15 men. 15 other villagers were wounded or otherwise injured.... Local residents were able to confirm the number of casualties, including names, age and gender of the victims.”

In July, two bombings in the east of the country caused 64 civilian victims, of whom 47 were going to a wedding, including 39 women and children.

The government of Hamid Karzai announced that it wished “to renegotiate the terms of the international presence in Afghanistan.” This is a way of distancing himself from these “blunders” that set the population not only against the foreign armies but also against the Afghan government.

After the August 22 bombing, the inhabitants of the region threw rocks at the Afghan soldiers who came to aid them, saying, “The Afghan army is our enemy. We don’t want anything from our enemies.”

But “blunders” are inseparable from the operations of occupation troops. For them, as in all “pacification” operations, every inhabitant is a potential enemy, every village is a refuge for terrorists. And the longer the occupation lasts, the more this will become true – and the more tragic it becomes for the Afghan population.

And what a chapter, since Hanford was involved in the second biggest act of mass murder in the history of the world.

The B Reactor produced the plutonium used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. By 1968, when it was permanently shut down, it had produced the radioactive material used in the majority of U.S. nuclear weapons.

Those who would preserve its history today – not as a mark of shame, but in patriotic fervor – are trying to prepare us morally for much worse wars tomorrow.

For years, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, the U.S. had a much different stance toward the Taliban.

When Soviet forces retreated from the country in 1988-89, the Taliban progressively extended their hold over the south of the country, pushing aside the old tribal landlords. They finally took the capital, Kabul, in September 1996. The U.S. and its allies stood to the side, giving their OK. In the years before, they had greatly aided all the Islamist forces who had fought the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, including the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.

But following the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, Bush needed to make a show of force for U.S. public opinion. In the days that followed, the U.S. and its ally Britain began military preparations against Afghanistan, which was presented as the sanctuary of Al Qaeda, under the pretext of seizing Bin Laden. On October 7, U.S. jets began to bomb the country. Bin Laden may have been there, but seven years later, he’s still not caught. And the U.S. is still bombing civilians.

The Karzai regime is far from the glowing image that the imperialist politicians want to attribute to it. A report issued in November 2007 by the U.N., which was the official sponsor of the war in Afghanistan, admitted as much. With respect to the creation of the Afghan police: “Corruption and clientelism seems to affect the police in a particularly grave manner.” The judiciary system suffers from “institutionalized corruption.” And “Journalists risk imprisonment if they criticize the application of Islamic law.”

As for the condition of women, which is so often invoked to justify the coalition’s military intervention, “The U.N. estimates that at the beginning of 2007, thirty per cent of arrested women weren’t detained for penal reasons, but rather essentially for violations of moral order, and that another 30% were detained for adultery.” The condition of women in the territory controlled by the Karzai government is horribly oppressive.

The U.N. report concludes: “The aspiration for a durable peace ... begins to resemble an ideal whose realization seems more and more precarious.”

Ideal? The U.S. intervention, just like those that came before, have made the lives of the Afghan people intolerable.

So far, neither candidate has said a word about this reversion back to the police-state habits of the McCarthy period.

At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement, public outcry against government spying led to restrictions on the kind of information the police “red squads” could keep on citizens, and what they could do with that information. The new rules effectually gut those restrictions.

Of course, the government started ignoring the restrictions almost as soon as they were passed. And since 9/11, it has used “homeland security” as a pretext to junk all the restrictions in fact, if not legally. Pacifists were reported as “terrorist threats.” Tourists taking pictures of famous landmarks – especially dark-skinned tourists! – were arrested for “suspected terrorist activities.” Denver police “infiltrated” meetings of Amnesty International; California agents spied on environmental activists. Maryland state police were recently discovered spying on opponents of the death penalty and of the Iraq war. South Carolina accused striking longshoremen of “terrorism,” and the head of Homeland Security called in leaders of the West Coast longshore union when they proposed a strike.

A Bush advisor said, “This is a continuum that started back on 9/11 ... to focus on the terrorism threat.” No! This was to focus from the start on intimidating those who wanted to be active against the Iraq war and oppose government and corporate policies.

These new rules, and the many like them already quietly implemented, are aimed at giving legal justification for muzzling an entire population. A population which in large majority hates the Iraq war, fears the growing economic crisis, and sooner or later may call the government to account for these problems.

Carrying out war after war and save-the-rich economic policies, the government seeks to spy on, harass and intimidate those who would raise a voice of protest.

An awakening population can dump those plans.

But anyone who ever thought they could use the law has gotten a rude awakening.

Since 2002, there have been 1,273 “whistleblowers” who filed federal complaints about being penalized by their bosses after reporting shady dealings. The government has ruled in favor of exactly 17!

The corporations can sleep well. Their government is on the job!

Creditors of bankrupt Powermate Corp. sued its private-equity owners, Sun Capital and York Street. The suit accuses Sun and York Street of deliberately bankrupting Powermate by paying themselves large dividends while loading the company with impossible levels of debt.

Also, the bankrupt store chain, Mervyn’s, sued its former private-equity owners, Sun Capital and Cerberus Capital. The lawsuit describes how Sun and Cerberus took on massive debt to buy Mervyn’s from Target, then stripped off valuable real estate, paid themselves special dividends, took everything they could get – forcing the company to fold.

In their world this is what’s called “unlocking value.”

Call it by its right name: robbery.

Needless to say, no one believed the cops’ desperate excuse for this carnage – that they felt threatened because Franco had what turned out to be a toy gun. Especially not – since Franco was the fifth person Inglewood cops murdered in just over a year!

The cops’ Inglewood killing spree began on May 7, 2007, when they gunned down 20-year-old Richard Tyson for the simple act of getting off his bicycle and running away from them when they wanted to talk to him about a traffic infraction. The cops later claimed that Tyson, who was unarmed, turned and charged toward them and – fearing for their life – they shot him four times – in the back!

One year later, Inglewood police fired three shots into the torso of 19-year-old Michael Byoune as he was riding with two friends to a fast-food restaurant. Byoune was dead at the scene. The driver of the car, his friend, 19-year-old Larry White, was wounded and survived. A third passenger sitting in the back seat was not hit. The cops later claimed that they were “investigating” a report of gunfire in the neighborhood and felt “threatened” by the three unarmed black men in the car.

During the July 4th weekend, Inglewood police shot and killed 23-year-old Ruben Walton Ortega in an alley as he ran away from them when they sought to question him about a loitering complaint. They later admitted that he was unarmed, but they claimed he was a reputed gang member.

Three weeks later, answering a domestic complaint in the dead of the night, Inglewood cops shot and killed Kevin Wicks, a black postal worker with close to 20 years seniority, at his own apartment door – claiming that Wicks, who lived in a high-crime neighborhood, had a gun. It turned out that the cops had the wrong apartment. But the white cop who did the killing, Brian Ragan, was already under investigation for killing Michael Byoune two months before!

That makes five killings by the Inglewood Police currently “under investigation”: Richard Tyson, May 7, 2007; Michael Byoune, May 11, 2008; Ruben Ortega, July 1; Kevin Wicks, July 21 and now Eddie Felix Franco, August 31. Considering that Inglewood has a population of only slightly more than 100,000, that is something of a brutal record – even for that violent gang, the Inglewood police.

Up until now, the authorities – local, state and federal – have only this to say about it: they are looking into it.

In other words, they are covering up the murder spree.

If Kilpatrick was able to hold on to office this long, it was only because, until recently, he had the full support of other powerful political forces. Michigan’s Attorney General Mike Cox, a Republican, ordered the State Police to call off their investigation into the party and the murder. Famously, Cox declared the party, which thousands of people in Detroit knew about, just “an urban legend.”

Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm took a hands off approach, ignoring the obvious corruption in political circles. Prominent ministers like Horace Sheffield the 3rd expressed support for the mayor. Corporate executives of companies like DTE Energy, General Motors and PVS Chemicals threw their support and fundraising behind him before his re-election in 2006.

Long before his personal scandal broke, Kilpatrick had demonstrated who he served and who he dissed. He gave away the Zoo and the Art Institute, and handed over parks and recreation centers to churches. He tried to sell off Detroit’s half of the Windsor tunnel. Saying the city had no money to maintain parks, recreation centers, streets, lighting or garbage pickup, he cut all those back severely. Public works departments were slashed to the bone. One thousand fewer cops were on the street. Wages of city workers were cut. And work was farmed out to contractors who made big profits while paying barely over the minimum wage. And all of this so corporations could rob the city blind. He gave away huge tax breaks to developers and companies on every pretext.

But as evidence mounted against Kilpatrick, and a state representative called for reopening the investigation into the young woman’s murder, Republican Attorney General Cox, deeply implicated in the coverup, threatened Kilpatrick with jail time for supposedly assaulting a police officer.

With the Democrats worried whether they could carry Michigan for Obama, the scandal surrounding their most prominent mayor was too much of a liability. Democratic Governor Granholm called a hearing designed to oust him from office. And Kilpatrick’s corporate friends told him he had to go.

With no more wiggle room left, Kilpatrick accepted the best deal he could get.

If corporate bosses, politicians and the media protected Kilpatrick for as long as they did, it’s because they were protecting their own interests. When they finally called for Kilpatrick to step down, it was only because the growing scandal threatened to bring down too many others.

In their calculations, the life of a young woman, cut off too soon, counted as nothing.

So, once again, the federal government rushed to the rescue with obscene amounts of taxpayer money. It pumped 85 billion dollars into AIG to keep it on life support and on the very next day injected a fresh 300 billion dollars into financial markets.

But stocks still plunged. So federal officials came up with a proposal for the godfather of all bailouts. They want to use taxpayer money to buy up the securities based on mortgages of foreclosed homes that U.S. financial institutions concocted. The price tag for all this is supposed to come to 700 billion dollars, according to Treasury Secretary Paulson. Others put the cost at a trillion dollars... or more. And that’s on top of the other enormous bailouts over the past year, including for Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The leaders of both parties got behind the proposal right away. President Bush said, “Given the precarious state of today’s financial markets... government intervention is not only warranted, it is essential.” Top congressional Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Charles Schumer, concurred. At a news conference with Paulson and Fed Chairman Bernanke, the proposal’s architects, Senator Christopher Dodd, the Democratic chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, explained why. The new bailout is necessary, said Dodd, because “we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”

All those politicians and officials pretend that an enormous bailout will clean up the financial mess, save the economy from disaster and save people’s jobs, homes, savings, 401(k)’s, pensions.

No it won’t.

Giving these companies even more trillions of dollars is like handing gasoline and matches to an arsonist. Those financial institutions will greedily snap up the money in an incredible feeding frenzy in order to enrich themselves even more, through speculation and every scheme imaginable. The financial mess will get bigger, laying the basis for even worse crises in the future.

This bailout will not stop the housing crisis from getting worse. It will not stop millions more ordinary people from losing their homes... and their life savings. Nor will it stop the recession from getting much worse, with its increasing unemployment and cuts in pay and benefits. As for inflation, the cost of the bailout will make it much worse, an invisible tax that slices ordinary peoples’ standard of living every day. And at exactly the moment when working people need more social programs and other forms of government aid to fall back on, the politicians will try to cut them, in order to force the mass of working people to pay the full cost of the bailout.

No, this bailout is a disaster. It is a rip-off of monumental proportions. The thieves and con artists at the top of the financial establishment shouldn’t get one cent. They should be thrown in prison.

Working people can have only one response: we have to be protected from the crisis that the capitalists created. The trillions that are going to bail out the capitalists and their profits should be used to create jobs that pay decent wages, improve education, health care and retirement, as well as build what our society so sorely lacks – schools, hospitals, roads, mass transit, flood control systems, parks and on and on.

The Democrats and Republicans will say there is no money for this. We can’t afford it. No, there is plenty of money. And it should go to us and not the filthy rich.

Haiti is located in a region particularly subject to hurricanes and tropical storms. But why do these same climactic phenomena cause 50 or a 100 times more damage and victims in Haiti than they cause in the neighboring countries, such as Florida in the U.S. or in Cuba?

The government of Haiti is incapable of alerting the population when danger is anticipated. There’s no plan in place to allow Haitians to take refuge in areas outside of the danger. Afterwards, the poor people pile on top of each other in whatever makeshift housing they can find, more often than not in areas subject to flooding. In this underdeveloped country, there are almost no sewers or evacuation systems. The very few that exist are not maintained.

Today, the U.N. has sounded the alarm, citing a disastrous situation with great difficulties in implementing a rescue mission. But for years the U.N. military forced stayed in Haiti supposedly to stabilize it. Couldn’t it have constructed an infrastructure and put in place the equipment lacking today? Didn’t they have the means to react as soon as the first hurricane was announced? The U.S. government finally promised to send in a few helicopters to help. The same enormous dollar amounts and technological marvels the U.S. now uses to kill in Iraq or Afghanistan cannot be found to save lives in Haiti.

It is not inevitable storms that kill in Haiti. The population is victimized much more by underdevelopment than by climatic conditions.

Who is responsible? Both U.S. imperialism and French imperialism. From the time of colonialism and slavery to that of the corporate trusts today, the great powers of the world continue to drain the resources out of Haiti, leaving behind a country in extreme misery.

As in past hurricanes, the alarm system put in place by the Cuban state limited the number of victims. However, tens of thousands of homes were destroyed, as was much of the island’s infrastructure.

The Cuban government asked the U.S. government to lift the embargo it had imposed on Cuba for more than 40 years, in order to facilitate rescue efforts, bring in emergency food and import reconstruction materials. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave the cynical response of the Bush administration. She said that Cuba’s request was out of the question since Cuba has not yet engaged in an “irreversible process of democratic change.”

No one can deny the authoritarian nature of the Cuban regime. But such a concern is not what motivates the representatives of U.S. imperialism. Imperialism supports many dictatorial and corrupt regimes, from Latin America to Asia to Africa, responsible for numerous crimes against humanity. The real reason that the U.S. government denied Cuba’s request is that it still cannot tolerate Fidel Castro’s defiance. Ever since the overthrow of the dictator Batista by Castro 50 years ago, Cuba has refused to bow down to the demands of the U.S. government.

Condoleezza Rice is there to remind everyone of Washington's tenacity, even when it means that thousands of Cubans must pay the consequences.

For the estimated 20,000 residents who stayed through the storm it was a public health disaster. There was little to eat as food spoiled in refrigerators, with no electricity in the Texas summer heat. With no running water, people could not flush toilets or wash their hands. Sewage systems backed up, creating foul-smelling air and a growing mosquito problem. Most had no clean water to drink. There were practically no working ambulances to respond to emergencies. Communication was difficult as systems went down. Elderly people ran low on medicines. Those who got through to 911 complaining of seizures, chest pains, or dehydration found no help. Galveston Island’s main hospital refused to accept any but the most dire emergencies.

The situation is likely to get worse. Officials told residents who evacuated before the storm not to return, other than a few who were temporarily allowed to “look and leave” to assess the damage to their homes. Officials say it could take weeks to fully restore electricity. When running water is eventually restored, there will be contamination from sewage and chemicals which flooded homes and debris.

Three years after Hurricane Katrina, Galveston looked like a giant New Orleans Superdome all over again, just more spread out. In the time since Katrina, government officials have done little.

Areas like Galveston are prone to hurricanes. Officials knew something like this was coming and did nothing to prepare for a powerful storm, except to tell people to get out! People were left to their own devices as to how to evacuate. When asked why they stayed, people said, “We had nowhere to go!”

Houston, which was spared the brunt of the storm, suffered less damage, yet is still not fully up and running. The fact that the fourth largest city in the country could be completely shut down is testimony to a system that does nothing to prepare for such emergencies.

Preparation would mean, among other things, constructing electrical lines and towers to withstand high winds, building water and sewage systems with enough capacity to handle storm drainage, and having enough people on staff to handle repairs. After Hurricane Ike, the utility companies had to borrow repair crews from 31 different states to restore power even at the slow rate they’ve managed thus far.

What happened to Galveston, like what happened to New Orleans, is a product of a system that puts profits over the well-being of the population. More than time for that system to go!

The Metrolink bosses hurried to report that the engineer had run a red light. But then they had to backtrack – only their office computers showed that! Then they said he’d been text messaging. Backtrack again – the texts could have been from any time during the day.

The bosses quickly used whatever flimsy fact they had at hand to blame the engineer, so they could duck their own responsibilities!

Railroads across the country, including the Metrolink and the Union Pacific systems, have refused since 1976 to install national “positive train control” systems which use GPS satellite tracking to automatically stop trains that run red signals. Instead, they make the lives of hundreds of passengers per train depend only on the alertness and health of one engineer. Then, they create work schedules for those engineers which guarantee continual fatigue!

The dead engineer, Robert Sanchez, worked “split shift.” He started work before 6 in the morning, had a few hours break between trains, and then worked until 9 at night. The Friday afternoon crash was his fifth day on that schedule, which he worked week after week.

After a similar Metrolink accident in 2005 that killed 3 and injured 260, the conductor said “everyone knows you don’t get much sleep” working for a railroad.

After the 2005 crash, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommended – not for the first time! – that positive train control be installed. The railroads said it was too expensive – as they have said after every fatal crash since 1976! – and that was the end of that.

A retired senior director of the NTSB said, “I’m not surprised that once again there has been a terrible, preventable train collision. It’s extremely frustrating. They know what to do to solve these things.”

Yes, the bosses know what to do, all right – pocket all the money they can, while they blame all the accidents on the workers whom they push beyond their limits!

Tired pilots have been involved in hundreds more close calls. In April 2007, a Pinnacle jet ran off a runway, at the end of a 14-hour duty for the pilot. In February this year, both pilots of a Go! jet fell asleep for 18 minutes, missed their Hawaii landing and headed out to sea. The pilots had been on duty almost continuously for three days.

In April this year, a safety board member told Congress, “Little or no action has been taken.” A veteran pilot said his schedule was often “take a shower, brush your teeth, pretend you slept.”

Rules requiring pilot rest have not been updated since the 1960's, despite many studies proving those rules are blatantly dangerous. But airlines say they are obeying the law, and besides, hiring more pilots would be too expensive.

In other words, the airlines guarantee that the next fatal accident is already in their plans.

The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers bank, one of the pillars of Wall Street, and the rescue of the AIG insurance company from its death throes, show that the crisis of the capitalist economy, which began with the subprime mortgage crisis and grew into a financial crisis, has entered a serious phase.

Because of its financial system, the entire capitalist economy is failing. Capitalism’s economic experts have stepped up their international meetings. Clearly they have no control over events. Their economy, whose control they monopolize and from which they are the only ones to profit, is completely escaping them. They indulge in assuring everyone that everything is under control. Or they speak like Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve, who said that the current situation is a “once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century type event,” the worst in his career. The stock market crash of 1929, the beginning of the longest economic depression the capitalist system has known so far, casts its shadow over even those responsible for the situation.

An economic system which no one can master

The nervous twitches of the U.S. government reflect the panic and hesitations of the leaders of the capitalist world. Last March, the Federal Reserve provided 29 billion dollars to aid Bear Stearns, one of the leading U.S. investment banks, pushed to bankruptcy by the crisis.

A little over two weeks ago, the U.S. government announced it was nationalizing Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the two giants specializing in real estate loans. The take-over meant that the U.S. government put up the colossal sum of two hundred billion dollars.

But then, with a 180-degree turn, it refused to come to the aid of Lehman Brothers. The next day there was a new turn, when once again it opened its treasury vaults to save AIG, one the largest insurance companies in the world, which teetered on the edge of an abyss.

With deregulation, insurance companies, like any businesses with money on hand, became completely free to devote themselves to financial operations. All of them have speculated in the infamous securitized subprime mortgages, which for several years brought in a big return before they collapsed last summer. All the banks have these rotten securities on their books, which today are worth no more than the paper they’re printed on. As a result, the balance sheet of bank after bank has plunged into the red.

This terrified all those involved in this business. Money fled. The mistrust of the banks toward one another dried up the circulation of money. Panic pushed the holders of stock in affected banks or businesses to get rid of these shares as quickly as possible. Stock prices fell. Lehman Brothers’ shares went from $60 a year ago to 20¢! And the stock prices of the two remaining big investment banks tumbled.

For several months since the beginning of the banks’ crisis of confidence, the heads of the central banks and economic ministers put out soothing declarations, while pouring tens of billions of Euros and U.S. dollars into saving the stakes of the speculators, refilling the money circuits among the big banks. But they didn’t succeed in reestablishing confidence.

How to prevent the panic from becoming general?

The Fed seemed to hesitate, zigzagging day-by-day between two strategies, one as risky as the other and completely contradictory.

To let a bank like Lehman Brothers collapse means that the failed bank won’t be able to pay back debts it owes to other banks. In turn, that could risk pushing those other banks toward bankruptcy.

But when the Fed or the Treasury gives many billions of dollars to save one bank, aren’t they encouraging all the speculators, including the wildest? Why not speculate? In this giant casino game, when you win, you get the money, but when you lose, it’s the state that pays off your debts!

There is another reason which restrains the Fed from its urge to run to the aid of any threatened bank. However powerful the financial means of the Federal Reserve are, they have limits. Just the two hundred billion dollars spent to nationalize Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, that is, to compensate the speculators, represents a quarter of the Fed’s reserves.

When it costs several tens of billions of dollars just to save one bank, if the Fed used its reserves to help out all the banks lacking cash, it would quickly use up all these reserves.

The U.S. state certainly could print money or create money in the modern, computerized fashion. But this would demonstrate to everyone, both the big banks of the world and the nation-states, that the dollar is no longer worth anything, that the U.S. treasury bonds they are holding in their reserves are only pieces of paper. By trying to restore the confidence of the U.S. banks toward one another, the U.S. government may only create distrust of the dollar itself and of the entire U.S. economy.

The states of the big imperialist powers turn out to be completely incapable of restoring confidence among the big banks, even when they pour billions of dollars into the economy, that is, by making the entire population pay to save the skin of the financiers.

And what would happen if this panic extends into the entire bourgeoisie, small and big? What if all those who have money deposited in banks panicked and sought to get back their deposits? The most optimistic of the economic and political leaders of the capitalist world, while evoking the comparison with 1929, add that the financial world today has an experience and instruments to curb the crisis. For the moment, the only incontestable fact is that they haven’t prevented the crisis from breaking out!

In the nearly 80 years since the crash of 1929, crises keep reappearing, despite all those who pretend that capitalism has changed.

But it hasn’t changed. In any case, not in its fundamentals. The motor of this economy still remains the rivalry to realize the maximum private profit in a blind market. Capitalism’s fundamentals haven’t changed since Karl Marx analyzed its mechanisms and denounced not only the injustices of this economic system and the inequalities that it constantly expands, but also its irrationality and its anarchic character.

The boomerang of finance

For over 30 years, the capitalist system seems to have found the remedy for what is ironically called a “crisis of overproduction.” It’s an ironic expression, because the problem isn’t that we produce too much, but that purchasing power doesn’t develop at the same rhythm of growth as the capacity for production.

Capitalism’s remedy was to turn to the financial sector, which appeared more profitable than production. But all profits, including those in finance, come from production. The elevated profits of the last ten or fifteen years came in reality from an ever growing exploitation of the working class. The share of labor’s income from production decreased while capital’s share grew wildly.

Reducing the purchasing power of the working class by unemployment and by stagnation or lowering of wages, the capitalist class certainly assured itself of several years of higher profits, but it did this by weighing on consumption, that is, on the market.

The development of finance masked this reality and pushed back the due date of this crisis. But the current financial crisis has only boomeranged back into a crisis of the whole capitalist economy.

Starting as a consequence of the whole economic crisis, the financial crisis becomes in turn a cause of a widening crisis. Over the past year, by aggravating speculation, accentuating its erratic character, this financial crisis has led to completely erratic movements in the prices of raw materials, especially oil. It caused exchange rates between currencies to jump up and down, causing disruptions in international trade. It has led to credit becoming expensive and to worsening conditions for obtaining it. All of this weighs on the productive economy. Not only are banks, insurance and real estate companies going bankrupt or threatening to do so, but so are construction companies and airlines. And there is a real threat for certain auto companies – including the biggest, General Motors – and in the chemical industry.

It’s not one bank or one insurance company going bankrupt. It’s not even the financial system alone. It’s the entire capitalist economy.

A declaration of war against the working class

For many years the capitalist class has intensified its permanent war against the working class, in order to save itself from the crisis of its economy. It made worse the conditions of life for the laboring classes. The expansion of the crisis will inevitably lead to an intensification of this war against working people. It will inevitably result in still more layoffs, lower wages, growing poverty even in the rich countries and famine in the poor countries.

The only real question for the working class doesn’t revolve around calculations about the consequences of the aggravation of the current crisis.

The immediate question for the working class and more generally for the laboring classes is how to defend themselves against “the two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices,” to use Trotsky’s expression.

But, beyond that, the question of the future is posed. In the face of growing crisis, we already hear some opinion makers take on not capitalism and its functioning, but “neo-liberalism,” “deregulation” and “globalization,” proposing to return to more state ownership, accompanied by more protectionism. But state intervention, which at this moment the very conservative Bush government is engaged in, turns out to be only another way to make the burden of saving capitalism fall on the workers. All the reformist, social democratic and anti-globalization currents can be heard in this chorus of supposed solutions. All these people are involved in theorizing and putting forth as an alternate program what in fact Bush is already practicing: offering a state crutch to save failing private capitalism.

The workers have no other worthwhile program when faced with the crisis of the capitalist economy than a policy aimed at destroying this economic system, that is, to accomplish the social revolution. Is this utopian? Certainly not as much as believing, while remaining in the framework of capitalism, that it’s possible to avoid catastrophe!

MidAmerican is proposing to buy CEG for less than half of what all its stock was worth just a week earlier on the New York stock exchange! Its stock took a nose dive when the credit crunch made it impossible for CEG to borrow the money it needed to pay off its speculative bets in the energy markets. Speculation combined with the credit crunch brought on its undoing just as it did at AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

CEG became the largest energy trading outfit in the U.S. by using the flow of money from customers at its BGE subsidiary to finance its speculation on the energy markets. This flow increased dramatically during the last two years when BGE imposed a 75 percent rate hike in electricity on its residential customers.

It’s obvious that none of these rate hikes produced more efficient power generation and distribution. Higher rates just went into the speculation that has now brought down all of Wall Street.

In a nutshell, this is what the next election is about: all those fat contracts and guaranteed profits that are at stake. This is the real competition between the Republican and Democratic Parties.

John McCain has suddenly morphed from a staunch defender of deregulation into a populist, going from “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” to loudly denouncing the “greed” and “corruption” of Wall Street – while going along with all plans to hand billions of dollars to those same greedy, corrupt speculators.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has seen fit to lecture us like a schoolteacher on the crisis, regulations and bailouts – without saying anything of substance. He talks about the “failed philosophy” of Bush and McCain, while doing nothing to fundamentally challenge that “philosophy.”

And, of course, both Obama and McCain blame the other guy – and the other guy’s party – for the mess the economy is now in. McCain even blames his own party!

The candidates’ tones and rhetoric might be different – but the proposals they make are much the same.

Both McCain and Obama now talk about regulation – more or “better” regulation of the financial industry. This is kind of like going to a den of thieves and asking one thief to “regulate” the rest of them.

McCain and Obama support the recent slew of government bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and AIG, and they both support an even bigger bailout of the banks that hold worthless mortgage paper. They both say that such bailouts are “necessary” to keep the entire system from collapsing.

Not true – it’s not necessary. First, the money they’re pouring in WON’T keep the system from collapsing. At best, it only encourages more speculation, leading to an even bigger collapse. And second, there are other ways to use that money that would address the real economic problems.

By their own lowball estimates, the government has already committed one trillion dollars to the bailouts; most experts put that amount at two trillion dollars or more – and much more might be on the way. Effectively, the government plans to reach in and pull ten thousand dollars from the pocket of every adult in the country, and hand the money over to the failing banks and insurance companies. That’s just for starters.

Why not give that same trillion dollars to create jobs, to rescue homeowners caught up in this fraudulent mortgage squeeze?

If either McCain or Obama had the interests of ordinary working people in mind at all, they would be proposing such a thing. And they would propose that such a bailout of ordinary people be paid for by taxes on corporations and the rich. But they don’t – neither one of them. Instead, both support handing over several hundred billion more dollars to the banks and Wall Street traders – the very criminals who made the mess.

And then they dare to ask us for our vote!

The Bush administration has presided over one disaster after another, starting with the bloody quagmires in Iraq, Afghanistan and now even Pakistan. The economy is bad, starting with huge job cuts. Prices on necessities are skyrocketing. The housing crisis continues to get worse, with two million foreclosures predicted for 2008.

To top it off, the Wall Street meltdown is threatening working people’s savings and threatening to morph into a major depression. Meanwhile, all Bush does is push stupendously costly bailouts – paid for by taxpayers.

The polls show the population is very angry and blames the Republican for this incredible mess. So why don’t those same polls show the Democrats benefitting from this anger?

Of course, polls are only polls, and elections can produce much different results, above all with the current volatile situation in the country.

Nonetheless, today, the Republican McCain and the Democrat Obama are nearly tied in the overall popular opinion.

Do these polls show an unwillingness of whites to vote for a black candidate?

It’s obvious the country is racist, and that this will have an impact on the election. But that doesn’t nearly begin to explain the situation – first of all because many white working class voters, tinged with racism, were ready in the past to give their votes to black candidates who spoke to their problems and their concerns. For example, when Jesse Jackson used a populist language in addressing them, he gained a lot of white votes, especially from the white working class.

The fact is that Obama, like the rest of the Democratic Party, has systematically avoided touching the real problems facing the working class. Today McCain is using a more populist language and presents himself as the more radical candidate – and that’s absurd. He’s neither radical, nor a populist.

Obama spent weeks not talking about the problems of the economy, not talking about jobs, not talking about price increases, not talking about medical care, etc. At least not talking in a fashion that lets people recognize their problems in what he says.

Even some astute Democratic politicians recognize the problem. Willie Brown, for example, a former Democratic speaker of the California State Assembly, and then mayor of San Francisco, wrote after the Republican convention, “The Democrats are in trouble.... Suddenly, Palin and John McCain are the mavericks and Barack Obama and Joe Biden are the status quo, in a year when you don't want to be seen as defending the status quo.” In describing Palin’s speech to the Republican convention, Brown said, “She didn't have to prove she was ‘of the people.’ She really is the people.”

It should be obvious that Sarah Palin stands for some of the most reactionary ideas in the world, but the response of many liberals to her candidacy helps to obscure that. Instead of criticizing her for her politics, they criticize her for her “style,” for buying “do-dads at WalMart” as Maureen Dowd wrote in the New York Times; some criticize her for running for office while raising children, etc. Those personal attacks only drive more working class women to identify with her.

But the Democrats can’t criticize her for her politics: the Democrats just put in a plank, for the first time, advising women not to have abortions – as though women make such decisions in a light-minded way. The Democrats have also gone out of their way to court reactionary religious groups.

Since winning the primaries in June, Obama has gone out of his way to advocate positions that are openly reactionary, for example, supporting the extension of spying on the population; he has shifted from emphasizing his supposed opposition to the war in Iraq, to calling for an extension of Middle Eastern wars. He went so far as to denigrate black men in a speech on Father’s Day, accusing them of irresponsibility in raising their children, while ignoring how social and economic attacks impact the black family. Thus, Obama’s speech did nothing but reinforce racist attitudes existing in the white population.

Nonetheless, there is vast support in the black population for his candidacy, which will translate into a high vote for him. Of course. His election, like his candidacy, stands as a symbol of barriers falling for the black population.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t distrust among black workers toward him, just as there is among white workers.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the polls is the high level of distrust shown toward both candidates, McCain and Obama. With good reason. Neither candidate offers an answer to the disastrous situation confronting the population, and many workers know that.

The Democratic primaries were barely over before Barack Obama began demonstratively to move his campaign to the right. Only a few hours after the last primary votes were counted, he addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the primary pro-Israel lobby in the United States. He asserted Jerusalem “should remain 100% undivided” under Israeli control, and he pledged to work to “isolate Hamas.” Calling Iran the biggest threat to peace in the region, he tried to explain away his earlier offer to meet the leaders of Iran, without any preconditions, saying instead, “I would be willing to lead tough and principled diplomacy with the appropriate Iranian leaders at a time and place of my choosing if, and only if, it can advance the interests of the United States.” Taking a page from George W. Bush’s book, he blustered, “I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel.” Ironically, he put the emphasis on the military threat exactly at the point the Bush administration was moving to soften U.S. relations with Iran, hinting the U.S. might establish an embassy in Tehran for the first time in 28 years.

A few weeks later Obama threw out that calculated bombshell, saying “When I go to Iraq and have a chance to talk to some of the commanders on the ground, I’m sure I’ll have more information and will continue to revise my policies.” Even if he rushed to bend the stick the other way later in the same day, he had made the point: his position on Iraq and withdrawing troops was not nearly as firm as many people had taken it to be.

But it was on the domestic side that his move to the right was particularly glaring. Calling public financing a barrier to the influence of wealth over the elections, Obama had pledged to keep his campaign within its limits. Instead, he became the first presidential candidate since public financing was enacted in 1971 to turn his back on it.

Having once urged a moratorium on the death penalty on the grounds that its imposition was “flawed,” he now declared himself in agreement with the minority opinion presented by the two most reactionary justices on the Supreme Court – Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia – who argued for its expansion to cover crimes less than murder.

In mid-June, he met privately with extreme right-wing evangelical leaders – including several of the most vociferous opponents of abortion and public schools. Two weeks later, he announced that not only would he continue Bush’s program of handing over government money to religious institutions, he would expand it. And, in an interview with Relevant, a Christian fundamentalist magazine, Obama showed himself ready to chip away further at Roe v. Wade: “I have repeatedly said that I think it’s entirely appropriate for states to restrict or even prohibit late term abortions as long as there is a strict, well-defined exception for the health of the mother. Now, I don’t think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother.” Like many other politicians who pretend to defend women’s right to choose, Obama was ready to erect still another limitation on that right in order to pander to the anti-abortion crowd. These limitations, taken together, have seriously reduced women’s legal access to abortion.

The clearest expression of how much Obama was trying to reposition himself was his vote for Bush’s bill, expanding the legal authority of the executive to spy electronically on American citizens, while guaranteeing that any company that had earlier broken the law helping the government to spy would not be prosecuted. For months, he had promised to help bottle up the bill in debate, which would have prevented the Republicans from easing it through while Bush was still in office. But when the vote came, he broke off his campaign to return for the vote, joining a minority of the Democratic Party to give Bush what he asked for – and what one of Bush’s advisers called “more than the President had hoped for.”

Certainly, Obama isn’t the only slippery character running for president. John McCain had already been moving to junk the image he had cultivated as a “maverick,” a different kind of Republican who, on a few high profile issues, had appeared to take more “liberal” positions, almost like a Democrat.

McCain had once voted against Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, saying: “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief.” Today, his good conscience seems to have deserted him – he says he would reinstate those tax cuts for the wealthy, which are scheduled to expire in a few years.

He once opposed off-shore drilling for oil and natural gas on environmental concerns, as well as on grounds that the oil companies benefit too cheaply from public lands. Not now. With the current high oil prices providing the pretext for additional hand-outs to these monstrously wealthy companies, McCain rushed to give them another chunk of public resources, announcing his support for these giants on the same day Bush did.

McCain once had said that, although morally opposed to abortion, he would not support repeal of Roe v. Wade because it would force innumerable women to go through “illegal and dangerous operations.” Today, not only does he say he favors overturning Roe v. Wade, he denounces abortion regularly, even when it’s not on the agenda, for example, in a recent forum on the economy. Having once called right-wing Christian fundamentalist leaders “agents of intolerance,” and “corrupting influences on religion and politics,” McCain embraced those same “agents of intolerance,” seeking their support.

On immigration, McCain had differentiated himself from most of the Republican Party with his proposal to offer legalization, even if very limited, to some of the immigrants without papers. But from the moment he started campaigning, McCain began to focus his comments on “closing the border.”

Both candidates had built up a certain aura of a “new politics” – McCain with his “maverick” stance, and Obama with his talk about “change.” But this “new politics” was clearly and always only a stance. McCain, a maverick? Not hardly. His own record shows it. In 2007, McCain voted with the Bush administration 95% of the time. So far in this election year, 2008, he has given his vote to Bush 100% of the time.

Obama’s idea of “change”? It’s a return to the same old Democratic Party apparatus and leftovers from previous Democratic administrations. Take one look at his closest advisers, starting with his key economic adviser, Jason Furman, who has close ties to Robert Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury secretary who moved on to head Citigroup. The AFL-CIO describes Furman’s views as “focusing too much on corporate America and not enough on workers.” Among other things, he applauded Wal-Mart – whose anti-labor policies are well-known – calling it a model for other businesses to follow. Or look at Obama’s foreign policy team. Most of the 300 and some “experts” come right out of the Clinton administration – which, according to the Wall Street Journal, committed troops to more parts of the globe than any other administration since World War II. It also laid the groundwork for the invasion of Iraq.

The media pretends that candidates must move to the right to get elected. Not true! Above all, not this year. Why has there been so much enthusiasm and attention during this year’s election campaign if not for the popular hope that this year’s candidates represented a change from politics as usual in Washington? Only one quarter of the population supports Bush and his policies – how could anyone pretend that it is necessary now to start embracing many of those same policies to get elected?

Perhaps McCain feels he must move to the right to reinvigorate that coalition of well-off petty bourgeois and right-wing religious fundamentalists who have been the base of the Republican party for years. But Obama’s move to the right can only harm his chances, since a Democrat depends on votes from the working class and poorer parts of the population to get elected.

In any case, both candidates are junking their earlier pose of a “new politics” in order to prepare for assuming the presidency, getting ready to carry out the policies that the bourgeoisie wants – and to do it without having to face a population in which they had cultivated too many illusions. This is especially true on the issues that matter most to the population today: the war, health care and the economy.

Both Agree: Extend the U.S. War on Iraq into Afghanistan

The 2006 mid-year elections were strongly marked by the population’s dismay over the war in Iraq, and it cost the Republican Party dearly. McCain and Obama both became more vocally critical of the Bush administration, even if they seemed to be staking out nearly opposite positions on the war.

McCain criticized the administration for how it was carrying out the war, and particularly for not sending as many troops as the military had asked for. Thus, when the Bush administration moved at the beginning of 2007 to increase the U.S. force in Iraq, McCain put himself forward as the strongest defender of this so-called “surge.” Today, claiming the “surge” has dramatically changed the situation, McCain claims the credit for pushing the administration to carry it out. In other words he was more of a “hawk” than Bush.

Obama, on the other hand, faced with the growing opposition to the war in 2005-2006, began to pose as an opponent of the war “from the beginning. ” In reality, his early opposition boils down to little more than one speech he made in 2002 in Chicago before the war started – a very timid speech, characterized by his insistence that he was not against all wars, or even most wars. He was against invading Iraq because it would be “a stupid war,” which interfered with the wars the U.S. should be waging! And by mid-2004, he was giving practical support to this “stupid” war. When running for the Senate, he was asked by the Chicago Tribune what differentiated Bush’s policy on Iraq and his own. Obama’s answer, July 24, 2004: “There’s not much difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage. The difference, in my mind, is who’s in a position to execute.” And, when he got to the Senate, he voted for the very first Iraq funding bill to come up and every subsequent one, right up to the point he officially started his presidential campaign – hardly the anti-war candidate he made himself out to be at the beginning of the primaries.

Today, both Obama and McCain effectively line up behind Bush, as they each prepare to take over as “commander in chief.” They may dispute with each other, but both pretend, as Bush does, that the situation in Iraq has “improved.” McCain regularly gives credit to the surge. Obama credits the “new tactics” devised by General Petraeus and the “brilliant performance” of U.S. troops.

You would think they were talking about a board game rather than a war that has already killed nearly a million Iraqis and displaced five million more, the majority of whom were driven out of their homes in ethnic cleansing campaigns that were the hallmark of the “surge” – or of the “new tactics” devised by General Petraeus. To say, as Bush, McCain and Obama all do, that the level of violence is “lower” today in Iraq is like saying that the graveyard is quieter.

The situation for the population of Iraq is catastrophic – and it is not over, no matter who wins the U.S. election. Nor is it over for U.S. troops. McCain quite openly calls for continuing the war on Iraq. Obama, while repeating his pledge to bring the troops out 16 months after coming into office, now hastens always to say that he would leave a “residual force” in Iraq. And lately his advisers have been informing the media that this “residual force” could amount to 50,000 troops!

And that’s only the half of it. McCain and Obama both would take whatever troops were spared from Iraq to expand the war in Afghanistan. Obama has said he would send at least two additional combat brigades, an unspecified number of troops needed for support, plus additional troops from other NATO countries, plus “more helicopters, more satellites, more Predator drones in the Afghan border region [with Pakistan].” McCain has said he would send three additional brigades, counting NATO troops, plus money to double the size of the Afghan army, plus pressure to unify the military command in Afghanistan. Obama goes so far as to say that if the Pakistani government doesn’t do what the U.S. requires in the tribal regions, he would send U.S. troops into Pakistan. In reality, McCain and Obama are simply proposing to do more of what Bush has already begun to do: in the last year, the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan increased from 26,000 to 34,000, with more increases on the way, as the military continues to announce more extended tours for Marine units scheduled to leave Afghanistan.

Today, the U.S. government imposes the rule of U.S. corporations around the world, under the pretext of fighting terrorism, just as in earlier decades it did so under the pretext of fighting “communism.” Of course, neither the Democrat nor the Republican question that. They both, as Bush did, dredge up the “terrorist threat” to prepare the U.S. population to be both cannon fodder in more wars and executioner of other peoples throughout the Middle East.

As a Wall Street Journal opinion piece somewhat cynically commented, June 2, 2008: “Want more George W. Bush foreign policy? Elect John McCain – or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. Regardless of who wins in November, the current foreign policy will live on in the next White House. None of the main candidates has disavowed the war on terror. Each has called Mr. Bush tactically deficient. But the debate over the war on terror is over how, where and when. The candidates have all argued they would do a better job of fighting it.”

Reforming Health Care in the Interest of the Insurance Industry

“Our nation must make a promise, a solemn promise. We must pledge to help our citizens find affordable medical care.... These reforms are the act of a vibrant and compassionate government.”

Who said that? In fact, it was Bush when he was pushing the Medicare D “reform” through, but it just as easily could have been either McCain or Obama today, because they make the same kind of grandiose statements about reforming the medical care system in the interests of the population – even while using that system to provide more money to big business, just as Bush did with Medicare D.

McCain says he will simplify the system, making it possible for everyone to have insurance – then offers a $2500 “rebate” to every individual and $5000 to every family to pay for their own medical insurance, to be paid to the insurance companies. In fact, it’s clearly a way to make it easier for employers who currently offer medical insurance to get rid of it. All the more so, since workers who fight to keep their employer-based insurance would discover that they would be penalized, with their benefits counted like wages on their W-2 tax forms. Finally, McCain offers to let individuals put part of their rebates into “health savings accounts” if they buy “less expensive” insurance coverage. McCain’s “reform” is nothing but a way to put the responsibility on every individual to come up with the money to cover their own medical expenses – while leaving in place a system that prices medical care and medical coverage out of the reach of ordinary working people, and even of a great many middle class people. It’s obvious that the rebates don’t begin to cover the costs of medical insurance for a family, not to mention all the other medical expenses. They are simply another Trojan horse attacking existing social programs.

Yes, McCain, like Obama, promises to “control costs.” But many of their cuts of so-called “unnecessary” costs would harm the population: for example, reductions in Medicaid payments for long-term care. Another example: both would cap settlements that hospitals or doctors have to pay when their sloppy work harms someone – as though it were outrageous settlements, rather than outrageous medical errors, that are the problem. As for other high costs, both propose to encourage “competition” in the medical insurance industry, claiming this would make the industry itself lower its own costs. Bush made the same claim about competition controlling drug prices when he was pushing Medicare D – and we see how well that worked!

Obama’s major proposal is to legally require all parents to get medical coverage for their children. They could get coverage through an employer-based plan, if they still had it; they could buy private insurance if they have the money; they could register for medicaid or SCHIP if their income is so low they qualify. Everyone else would have to buy insurance from a new “public insurance plan,” to be administered, of course, by private insurance companies.

While leaving the current expensive system in place, Obama would require people who can’t find the money to buy medical insurance to find it anyway! Just like McCain, he puts the responsibility on the individual, without changing the circumstances that make it impossible for most working people to buy insurance today.

Of course, concrete details about McCain’s and Obama’s plans are missing – just as they were in 2003 when the Medicare D “reform” was passed. But, just as with Medicare D, McCain’s and Obama’s proposals both clearly offer more benefits to employers whose workers demand medical coverage, and they offer a bigger boondoggle to the medical insurance industry. Neither does anything to touch the existing market-based system. They just reinforce the provision of health care by profit-making entities – which is at the root of the enormous inefficiency and lack of access to medical care that exists today in the United States.

Economic Programs as a Way to Subsidize Big Business

Right after the end of the primaries, Obama announced he would focus his campaign on the economy. And McCain regularly makes speeches about it. Both campaigns feature “Economic Plans” prominently on their websites.

But which economy? Plans for which class?

Obama and McCain would both tinker once again with the tax code, giving tax credits or exemptions, which each claims would lower the total tax bill of working Americans. But these are the kind of promises that get made with every new tax bill, with what results we should all be familiar with by now. Every tax cut pushed through by the Bush administration was justified by a similar claim. No matter what was said about providing tax relief for the working population, every tax cut served to reduce the share of the overall tax burden paid by the corporations and the wealthy.

This time also, the largest share of the tax cuts would go to the corporations and the wealthy. With McCain, this is more obvious, since from the beginning he has said he would extend the Bush tax cuts set to expire in 2010 – tax cuts which provided 66% of the benefits to the wealthiest 20% of the population.

Obama, by contrast, began his campaign promising to tax the wealthy, while cutting taxes for those most in need. But he has already “refined” that position quite a bit – changing his definition of those most in need to include people making a quarter of a million dollars a year!

But the real benefit for the wealthy in Obama’s tax plans rests on the multitude of special tax cuts for various businesses – for example for businesses producing ethanol, “clean coal,” wind energy, or hybrid vehicles, or for big companies engaged in “advanced manufacturing,” or for “small businesses” – and that barely begins to scratch the list of all the various ways he proposes new tax breaks for business. Like other Democrats before him, Obama widely adds special tax breaks to specific businesses, making the tax code ever more complex so that no one has any idea of who is getting what – other than the wealthy who hire accountants to get it for them.

What about the real problems facing the working population – like prices and jobs, for example?

Bring up the high prices of food, energy and housing, and Obama and McCain both use them as the pretext for offering more government money, in the form of subsidies or tax breaks, to the big corporations. McCain spoke about high oil prices, then offered to open up off-shore drilling to the big oil companies. Obama denounced him for it, only to turn around and say he might “compromise” and do the same. McCain said he would impose a three-month gas-tax holiday – without requiring the oil companies to lower their prices at the pump! Obama offered another tax incentive package like Bush’s recent ones. Those incentives have already been more than eaten up by the increasing inflation of the last few months. Neither Obama nor McCain even talks about reining in the massive price increases.

What about jobs? Both candidates propose the same remedy: give more tax cuts to the corporations, under the pretext that this will encourage them to create jobs. That’s nothing but what Bush has been saying for the last seven years – and how many jobs did his tax cuts help create? Jobs, no. Those tax cuts simply lined the pockets of the biggest corporations and of the wealthy who benefit from their investments in these corporations.

No, McCain and Obama are not talking about creating jobs – and sometimes they even admit it, even if indirectly.

McCain, for example, said it might be necessary to offer GM a government sponsored bail-out based on the provisions of the Chrysler bail-out of 1980. That bail-out prominently featured the government’s demand that workers at Chrysler give up concessions in their wages and benefits. It was, in fact, the first open demand for concessions in the auto industry. And it laid out the path that the Big 3 would follow in the nearly three decades since: reducing wages and benefits through various schemes, while cutting jobs ferociously.

Obama, for his part, recently praised Ford for its newest “restructuring plan,” claiming as Ford did that it would create jobs in the U.S. If there is anything a Ford restructuring plan won’t create, it’s jobs. Every “restructuring” the big auto companies have carried out has focused on reorganizing work and the production process in order to eliminate jobs. The same is true in every other big industry – which can be seen by comparing today’s employment and production figures to those of a decade or so ago.

Obama and McCain’s “economic plans” are only more of the same that has made the population pay for the vast increase in wealth of this tiny minority that owns, runs and benefits from the biggest companies in the country.

Don’t Go Out of the Voting Booth with Illusions

It’s understandable that many workers, white and black, want to vote against the people who have held office during this disastrous last period, especially against the Republicans – if for no other reason than to express their anger.

And it should come as no surprise in a country as profoundly racist as the United States that a big majority of the black population would want to vote for Obama. His candidacy represents, at least symbolically, the falling of barriers standing in the way of the black population. There is an enthusiasm for the idea that there could finally be an African-American president. As many people said: “It’s time, it’s past time, it’s overdue.”

But Obama’s candidacy does not open the door for the large majority of the black population who are working class or poor.

In the first place, to say that is to read the pages of history backwards. Doors were not opened by Obama, but for him. His candidacy was paid for by the bitter and angry struggles of generations of black people in the streets of this country – struggles that radically uprooted the legalized system of Jim Crow.

Obama does not represent the interests of the black working class population. In fact, he reproaches the ordinary black population with the accusation that they themselves carry an important part of the responsibility for their situation – a situation marked by severe poverty, high unemployment and lack of educational opportunities.

He blames the victims of poverty and misery for the poverty and misery in which the society has mired them. It is his way of reassuring the bourgeoisie and the reactionary petty bourgeoisie, white and black, that he is not the “black” candidate held hostage by “black special interests.” It’s why, for example, he distances himself from even the social-democratic-style reformists, like Jesse Jackson, whom the bourgeoisie has always been a little wary of. By his very words, his very campaign, Obama makes it crystal clear ahead of time that the vast majority of the black population, especially its poorest layers, should expect nothing, absolutely nothing from him if he is elected.

Whether Obama or McCain is elected, the wars will continue – and grow wider. They both say it. The corporations and the wealthy who own them will continue to be given hand-outs by the government – and they both say that. Neither represents the interests of the working class.

The big bourgeoisie certainly has no fears about either of them. The bourgeoisie know they will be served by either one. That’s why they have been ready to finance both. If they have given significantly more to Obama up to this point than they have to McCain, it’s not because they distrust McCain. Perhaps they think Obama can do a better job of diverting the population. In any case, whichever one is elected will be their servant.

Workers must have their own policy and they must find the way to carry out their own policy, which means to organize their own struggles, no matter who is elected.

... Skyrocketing oil prices were on the agenda at the G8 summit of the eight major industrial countries, with China, India, and Korea in attendance this time. Representatives of the countries discussed how oil price increases were threatening the economy. “If we do not do something about the situation, it could bring on a global economic recession,” shouted one minister of energy. But officials did nothing but talk. The price of oil will continue to rise if that’s what is wanted by the small handful of oil companies dominating the worldwide distribution of oil. Under capitalism the real power is not in the White House – where a discredited Texas clown is at home – nor in France’s Elysée Palace nor in England’s #10 Downing Street. The real power lies in the board rooms of the big industrial or financial companies.

The Skyrocketing Price of Oil

After several years of progressively higher prices, the price of oil really skyrocketed this year. For ordinary people in the rich countries, especially wage earners, this price increase in oil came on top of other price increases, especially food. These factors raised the cost of living... and also hit many small businesses, like trucking.

Of course there are many big companies that are also hit by the increase in oil prices, such as the airlines and the U.S. auto industry.

The rise in oil prices is another contributing factor in the instability of the world economy, which is buffeted by financial and banking crises. As always in a period of crisis, those who are the strongest will find the way to make others pay for their higher costs. Companies that don’t have such possibilities will sink, bringing down with them their entire workforce.

Some already are talking about the “third oil shock,” referring to the 1973 oil crisis that shook the world economy. What the oil shocks of 1973 and 2008 have in common is that they are both an expression of the economic crisis. More precisely, they represent the oil companies’ strategy to anticipate the consequences of the crisis. Yet, at the same time, they are a major aggravating factor in the crisis.

During the first oil shock, crude oil prices tripled in a few months. This time, the huge price increases came after a long period of gradual increases.

Within a period of seventeen years, from 1986 to 2003, crude oil prices remained relatively stable at $20 to $25 a barrel. In 1998 oil prices even dropped to $10 a barrel.

But since 2003, prices have never stopped going up. In early June 2008, the price of a barrel of oil on the world market approached $140. Prices had gone up over 500% in five years, that is, they are five times higher in 2008 than they were in 2003! And these prices are fourteen times higher than they were ten years ago, at their lowest point in 1998....

As during previous oil price increases, the government and news media strive mightily to invent explanations. These range from the changing climate to the political problems of one or another oil producing country, to the unquenchable thirst for oil of China or India.

And each time, the media pulls out the old refrain about how limited oil resources are. Despite the lies, the truth spilled out of the mouth of Jean-Jacques Mosconi, a director of French oil giant, Total: “The high price of oil is not caused by a lack of oil reserves but by a lack of productive capacity.”

Those old enough to remember the oil crisis of 1973 may recall the experts saying at that time that there were only 30 years of oil reserves left in the earth. In other words, the gas pumps should have dried up five years ago.

If there is a limit to the oil reserves, it has not been reached. The directors of Total expect a continual increase in worldwide production until about 2020; then they expect production to level off. They estimate their own reserves will last 40 years. And that doesn’t take into account any new discoveries during that time period.

Oil company directors are quick to blame the oil producing countries for the lack of oil production. During the G8 meeting in June, they called on OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, to increase their production. History repeats itself. Thirty years ago, political leaders and the news media accused the “oil sheiks” of causing the first oil shock. Today, they explain that it is caused by instability in Iraq – which is real but whose fault is that? – or in Nigeria. Sometimes they blame Malthusian policies of oil producing states that want to conserve their oil reserves. But the last decades have proven that the oil producing states, with their differing situations and interests, have never been able to agree on a common strategy... except when it corresponded to the wishes of the major oil companies. The major oil companies may not always control the extraction of oil but they control all refining and distribution. They are able to influence the petroleum markets much more than can OPEC, since each OPEC member carries out its own policy. In addition, there are plenty of oil producing countries that do not belong to OPEC, notably Russia and Norway, both large exporters.

Production Capacity Deliberately Reduced by the Oil Companies

The oil companies today are following the same strategy as the one that brought about the first oil shock of 1973. Instead of massively investing in exploration, instead of building new refineries and transport, such as super-tankers, pipelines, etc., they prefer, in a period of economic instability, to raise their prices to increase their massive profits. As a monopoly, they are able to implement this strategy.

To gain the maximum profits from oil with a minimum of investment is the best way for the oil companies to force consumers to pay in advance for exploration and future investments in new forms of energy, which the big oil companies plan to control.

The tendency for prices to rise, coming from the oil companies’ strategy, fosters speculation because other industrial and financial groups gamble on raw materials, especially oil.

This scenario is well known and described regularly by economic commentators. After being driven out of real estate speculation, massive amounts of capital in search of profits descended on raw materials.

Oil, in particular. Such an indispensable product necessarily attracts capital searching for a place to make a bigger profit when the price of oil seems to be permanently on the rise.

Investors or speculators buy a piece of paper representing a certain quantity of oil and then sell it at a comfortable profit at a specified date. The pieces of paper that represent the buying and selling take on a life of their own, being bought and sold in their turn.

According to a recent investigation by the newspaper Le Monde, these fixed term contracts for oil represent 30 to 35 times the volume of real trading in oil. According to a researcher at French bank, Société Generale: “From 2000 to 2006, the amount of oil has increased 13% while the amount of derivatives, that is, the speculative pieces of paper representing the buyings and sellings at fixed terms, increased 260%”!

In other words, this increase in speculative demand pulls prices upward. This speculation causes a much greater increase than does real demand by China or India!

How much does speculation account for the actual increase in oil prices? Who can say? The question has no real meaning since the oil companies themselves speculate on the prices of what they produce.

On June 6^th, the price of a barrel of oil increased by $11 on the New York Mercantile Exchange in a single day, which has never happened in the entire history of the oil industry. Obviously it was not due to growing demand from China or India. Nor was it due to the hypothetical exhaustion of the oilfields in 40 years. It can be explained only by short term speculative maneuvers.

Speculative Boom in All Raw Materials

The same kind of thing is happening to most raw materials. We hear less about it because consumers are not directly affected by the rise in prices of copper, aluminum or nickel. But obviously they are indirectly affected because when these prices go up, the big companies pass on the price increases to consumers. Or at least the companies powerful enough to pass on price increases do so.

In any case, the prices of copper and aluminum have raced upward for three years. In 2003, a ton of copper traded for $1,544. By mid-February 2008, it peaked at $8,884 a ton.

Just as with oil, the big companies have decided not to invest and just as with oil, speculation has vastly increased the rise in prices.

Speculative funds don’t come from outside the industrial and banking universe, but rather emanate from that universe. These speculative funds may not know anything about copper, aluminum or nickel, but they know about financial instruments. That allows them to work with capital far beyond their own. They use the capital of the big capitalist groups that turn to them to make profits; they also mobilize credit from the banks. By speculating using largely borrowed money and by juggling a multitude of instruments that the world of finance has invented over the last 20 years, some groups have made 100% profit in just a year of buying and selling raw materials.

“The massive amounts of capital flooding into markets for raw materials, which have been turned into financial assets like any other, do not correspond to the amounts of these products actually traded,” sadly wrote a commentator in Le Monde. The article adds that all this kind of trading corrupts “the normal functioning of the market.”

But where does the normal functioning of the market end? And at what point does it become cancerous?

It is the same capital. One part is invested in production to extract surplus value through exploitation, while another important and growing part is used for financial operations. These financial operations dealing with credit and currency exchange and the raising of capital are indispensable for the functioning of companies. Even “derivatives,” which today make up the most dangerous forms of speculation, were invented to protect corporations from various risks. The line between speculative capital and the so-called normal workings of capital is thin and quite elastic.

Despite the fact that raw materials have been turned into “financial assets,” they remain indispensable for industrial activity. Speculation does not take place in a financial sphere that is disconnected from production. So it enlarges the convulsions of the capitalist economy.

Partisans of the capitalist economy think that the market economy cannot be surpassed. They say society has not found anything better than the law of supply and demand to match society’s ability to produce and fulfill its needs. But this so-called “law” takes into account only the demands of those with the money to pay and thus rejects the elementary needs of most of humanity. Furthermore, with the growing financialization of the economy, even the demand of those who can pay becomes more and more of a fiction since it mixes demands corresponding to real needs and demands that come from speculation.

Food Has Become a “Financial Asset”

The consequences are particularly drastic when the raw material turned into a “financial asset” is food. It’s nothing new to speculate on cereals and thus starve people to death. But modern capitalism invented financial instruments that take this speculation to an unprecedented level. In so doing, it multiplies the number of victims.

Certainly, speculation does not explain everything. It only amplifies things. Behind the inability of a growing number of poor countries to feed their population is an entire evolution, a history intertwined with the history of capitalism.

After numerous hunger riots in the poor countries, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation, the FAO, held a summit on “food security.” Those blabbermouths produced a lot of resolutions and declarations about the 800 million people who regularly suffer from hunger and malnutrition, those reduced to famine by the brutal increase in agricultural prices.

The FAO’s director confronted the states with their responsibilities: “These sad developments are merely the chronicle of a predicted catastrophe.” Yes, it is a catastrophe and the whole world sees it coming. But no one does anything about it!

During the FAO summit the French agricultural minister gave what amounts to a sort of self-criticism: “After decolonization we didn’t provide enough aid to these countries to help them develop their agriculture and feed their population.”

“Not enough aid”? How dare he say it? What about the responsibility of colonization? French colonialism used the whip to impose the cultivation of cotton in Chad and oil seed in Senegal, to profit French companies Boussac and Lesieur! Big import-export companies got rich from the international trade in rice that replaced local food staples driven out by the cultivation of oil seed or cotton. And the French used forced labor to build the few railroad lines and roads designed for transporting those products back to France.

Self-sufficiency in food did not disappear by chance, or even by some decision of the local population. It was deliberately destroyed, first and foremost, by the colonial powers and then by the capitalist market.

The workings of the capitalist economy are so marvelous that the capitalists no longer need whips or forced labor to impose market crops for the rich countries on the farmers of the poor countries and their venal governments. Included for this overseas market are fruits and vegetables out of season, products which the local population never sees. The latest “innovation” taking up more and more land once used to produce food is the production of biofuels. A vicious circle is complete. Because they systematically increased the price of oil, the oil companies made the production of biofuels profitable enough to attract capital. Ever more peasants are forced to abandon food production. Instead of producing food, they must buy it in the marketplace. On the world market the agricultural production of the industrial countries, which is mechanized and often subsidized, is more profitable.

A number of poor countries, especially in Africa, although once self-sufficient in food, have become dependent on the world market, on its fluctuations, its convulsions and, as a consequence, on its speculators and its speculation.

Humanity has paid dearly for the basic inability of its economic order to satisfy the elementary needs of society. Not only is it unable to deal with shortages, it creates them!

A Fundamentally Irrational Economy

Political leaders are completely unable to avert the catastrophes brought about by the functioning of the economy. That is not their role. Their role is to open wide the coffers of the state to the big companies. It is to implement the policy required by the big companies. And it is also to justify this social order to the population. And when they do not fulfill this role efficiently, they are meant to be used as a safety valve: they are kicked out by elections in imperialist countries or by armed violence in poor countries. So the system goes on, and nobody sees the economic powers that manipulate them behind these political puppets.

What is happening in the rich industrial countries and more disastrously in the poor countries shows that the laboring classes have to defend themselves even to prevent a catastrophic decline in their living conditions.

The price increases for oil and other raw materials have already revived inflation worldwide, adding to the banking crisis and the subsequent credit crisis. These prices have also increased the rivalry between corporations involved in successive stages of production because they want to make their clients or their contractors pay for the increasing costs. Obviously, all of them look for ways to make their wage earners pay. Each company will try to compensate for the increase in the cost of raw materials by squeezing labor costs.

In all the countries, the first oil shock was followed by an offensive against all wage earners. The same thing is happening today. Over and over, there are commentaries asserting that wages must not go up so that price increases for raw materials and food staples don’t lead to high inflation. This is part of the psychological warfare against the working class carried out by the politicians and the lackeys in the media in the interests of the bourgeoisie. In other words, one more time the capitalist class will try to make the wage earners pay for the disorders of its economy and the plunder by its big trusts.

It has become vital for the working class to defend itself against the two main diseases that hit the productive class of this society: unemployment and the plunge in purchasing power of their wages.

To defend themselves against unemployment means to impose a redivision of work among everyone without a loss in wages. To defend themselves against the loss of purchasing power means a general increase in wages and a sliding scale of wages, that is, an automatic indexing of wages to the rise in prices. In addition to these two main objectives, the governments must be forced to repeal all the measures they have taken to impoverish the laboring classes in order to enrich the wealthy (like cuts in public services and schools and health care, increases in the age at which Social Security can be obtained, etc.)....

All these struggles are necessary to prevent the laboring classes from plunging into poverty. But they are purely defensive. As long as capitalism remains the economic and social organization, it will continue to reinforce the grip of the big groups over the planet, with all its dire consequences. That means continued rivalries over profits, speculation, colossal waste on the one hand and famine on the other. It is not possible to regulate the basic problems of society within the framework of the capitalist economy.

There are many who recognize and denounce the threat for humanity represented by the growing control by a few hundred big financial groups on the planet, those which dominate the production of raw materials, energy and food. Less numerous, however, are those who understand that this domination is inseparable from the capitalist order and that, for a long time, it has caused humanity to go backward. Today’s crisis and its dramatic consequences are the expression of the impasse of the economy and the failure of the bourgeoisie, the social class that dominates and feeds off the society.

The problem is not simply to be conscious of these problems but to prevent humanity from rushing toward a precipice. There is no other alternative to the present evolution of society than the political overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the destruction of its economic domination.

But for this alternative to be realized, what is necessary are forces that defend a policy with this perspective. The multiple and often massive and violent responses against the price increases for oil, raw materials and food show that capitalist society is no more stable than it was when a powerful workers movement consciously aimed at overthrowing it. The only difference is the profound retreat and atomization of the workers movement itself.

The plundering by the big capitalist groups, their contempt for the basic interests of the vast majority of the population causes, as it did in the past and as it will in the future, reaction by the population, riots and revolts. Many of these could ignite a revolutionary process able not only to threaten capitalism but to overthrow it.

Globalization – about which there is endless talk concluding that nothing can be done – is not just globalized plunder by the big trusts. It has also reinforced the global proletariat by transforming tens of millions of peasants in China, India or Africa into proletarians. It has brought them together in immense slums where there are the same conditions that existed in the industrial cities of England during its industrial revolution. But today’s slums exist on an incomparably larger scale. And globalization, as it pulls down certain barriers between nations, mixing peoples, unifies their destinies.

Revolutions are the conscious expression of unconscious processes that develop in the depths of society. What is missing and missing drastically today is this conscious expression, with the will to push economic and social evolution to their ultimate transformation: the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, the overthrow of capitalism and the reorganization of the economy on the basis of collective property.

More than a century ago, Trotsky spoke about the crisis of leadership of the working class. Today that leadership crisis has spread to the entire workers movement and its organizations. It is precisely this retreat of the workers movement that leaves the door open to all sorts of organizations, which are virulently reactionary, nationalist, fundamentalist and ethnicist. But paradoxically the fact that these reactionary forces act today shows that society is pregnant with serious social calamities.

Lenin said that bourgeois society is always oozing a multitude of crimes that can ignite a revolution. The hunger riots in the poor countries and, in a certain way, even the waves of protest against the rise in prices show that his remarks have not lost any of their currency. But in order that a revolt not be stifled as soon as it begins or for it not to be taken advantage of by forces ready to channel social anger but not to transform society, the proletariat has to be able to intervene in events as a social force conscious of its own political interests.

The only question of our epoch is how and when a political force capable of embodying this perspective will arise and win, on this basis, the confidence of the only social class able to carry out such a transformation – that is, the proletariat of our times in all its diversity.

The wave of xenophobic attacks that took place in the poor ghettoes of South Africa’s urban areas in May came as a shock, due to the horrific pictures of the events shown by the media, particularly pictures of people who were burned alive. There was also some disbelief that the so-called “Rainbow Nation” founded by Nelson Mandela, born out of decades of struggle against the racial segregation of the apartheid system, should be shaken by xenophobia on such a scale.

What these attacks actually showed, however, is that not only are some of the wounds left by the apartheid days still open, but also that the post-apartheid regime’s policies have done little to heal them. This wave of xenophobia is the by-product of the regime’s ongoing anti-immigrant demagogy combined with its anti-worker policy that has become increasingly intolerable for the vast majority of the population over the years.

Alexandra Reaches Boiling Point

The attacks began in Alexandra, a mainly black township located within the municipal boundaries of Johannesburg (the economic capital, and center of gold mining). Alexandra is just two miles away from the wealthy town of Sandton, the glossy financial center of Gauteng province.

On May 11 – a Sunday night – what was described by the media as an “enraged mob” went on a rampage in the poorest streets, picking out mainly Zimbabwean immigrant residents and venting their fury on them. Apparently they accused them of stealing their jobs and houses and causing crime.

Over the next three nights door-to-door checks for “foreigners” took place. South Africans had to show their ID cards to be passed over. Immigrant families were told to just get out and leave their belongings, which were then looted. Dozens of immigrants were severely beaten, whipped and stoned. By the end of these first days, three men had been killed. Two of these men were not actually immigrants, but native South Africans, and it seems one of them was shot because he had refused to take part in the violence.

One Malawian, who had lived in Alexandra for 23 years, described how a gang of 10 men broke into his house, ransacked his possessions and beat him up. A Zimbabwean woman told how she was set upon and beaten until she fled, bleeding badly from the head, with her own neighbors shouting “Good riddance. Go away Makwerekwere” (dirty foreigner).

Hundreds had no option but to seek refuge in the local police station, even though the police have a terrible reputation among immigrants, because they regularly extort, beat up and arrest migrant workers, regardless of whether they have the correct papers or not. (Immigrant workers are obliged to have with them at all times papers certifying that they are allowed to work, have paid for their visa, etc.)

Five hundred extra police were deployed in an attempt to calm down the situation, resulting in running battles between the population and the police, many arrests and with rubber bullets injuring quite a few more people.

Xenophobic Attacks Spread

By May 15, the xenophobic attacks had begun to spread. In Tembisa, a township north- east of Alexandra, two more people were killed and more than a dozen shacks were torched. One of those killed was Walter Ntombela, who had been a Metal Workers’ Union shop steward for 10 years and was long-settled there, but happened to come from Mozambique originally.

The violence also spread to Diepsloot, north of Johannesburg, where mainly Somalis were targeted. In Kya Sands, also in the north, a mob set afire a barricade of wood, furniture and gas bottles to prevent police from getting through, while they went on a rampage, looting, burning and beating up anyone identified as “foreign,” whether they were indeed “foreign” or not.

Some of the worst attacks took place in townships and settlements in the urban sprawl which follows the gold reef, along which are the gold mines reaching to the southeast of Johannesburg. In Reiger Park’s so-called “Ramaphosa Informal Settlement,” further gruesome burnings, toy-toying (jump-dancing which symbolized the victory of the poor against apartheid) and attacks against Mozambicans and other migrant workers occurred. This was where burning blankets were thrown upon a man who had been beaten almost senseless, thus causing him to burn to death. It was this picture of a human fireball which was to symbolize the spate of horrific xenophobic violence.

In Thokoza, many shacks were burned. In Actonville, the black owner of a small business was killed when his house was burned with him inside it, after he was accused of hiring foreign workers. The men who killed him were said to have come from the local mine hostel and adjacent settlements. One immigrant was killed and two critically injured in the “Joe Slovo Settlement” in Boksburg.

Shopping streets in the center of Johannesburg were looted. By the end of the first week one of the main streets was crisscrossed with makeshift barricades of barbed wire, concrete and tires. Just south of the center, in Jeppestown, shops had their shutters ripped off and were stripped. Many of these were owned or rented by Nigerians or other immigrant traders. Gangs wielding machetes and clubs went door to door, slashing and beating up foreign nationals who had lived in the area for years.

One eyewitness reported what happened: “The pavements ... are thronged with knots of men, many of whom are drunk and carry sticks which they drop hurriedly when they see the cops approaching. The officers stand guard, rifles at the ready, as the family pack up their stock and household goods. The landlady is disgusted: ‘If they are forced to move out, no one else must try to come in here. I refuse to rent it to anyone else. Let it stand empty.’ Sylvia Khumalo (63) sits on a bench on the other side of the road, watching in disb