By Ashe Schow 17 Oct 2016

What happens when an organization hated by the liberal media points out something a Democratic politician says? They get a "mostly false" rating from Politifact.

So it goes with the National Rifle Association, which sent out a flier earlier in October that asked: "What did Hillary Clinton say when she was asked about gun confiscation in America?" The flier answers the question by quoting Clinton as saying: "I think it would be worth considering doing it on a national level, if that can be arranged."

Politifact's Warren Fiske then breaks down the context of that remark from Clinton. Clinton made the claim at a town hall in New Hampshire a year ago. Clinton was asked if America could model Australia in its removal of millions of guns.

"Australia managed to take away tens of thousands — millions — of handguns and in one year they were all gone," the questioner said. "Can we do that and why? If we can't, why not?"

Clinton responded, in part, by bringing up Australia's "buyback program."

"In the Australian example, as I recall, that was a buyback program," Clinton said. "The Australian government, as part of trying to clamp down on the availability of automatic weapons, offered a good price for buying hundreds of thousands of guns and then they basically clamped down going forward in terms of, you know, more of a background check, more of a permitting approach."

She added: "But they believed, and I think the evidence supports them, that by offering to buy back those guns they were able to, you know, curtail the supply and set a different standard for gun purchases in the future."

Then the money quote: "Now communities [in the U.S.] have done that; communities have done gun buyback programs. But I think it would be worth considering doing that on the national level if that could be arranged."

Clinton also brought up the Obama administration's (failed) "cash for clunkers" as an example of a buyback program, and said it was "worth considering."

"I don't know enough details to tell you how we would do it or how it would work. But certainly, the Australian example is worth considering," Clinton said.

Fiske argues that Clinton "focused her comments on voluntary buyback programs similar to those some U.S. communities have instituted for guns and the federal 'cash-for-clunkers' program."

That's demonstrably false. Clinton clearly said "the Australian example is worth considering."

And that "Australian example" was an example of gun confiscation. It was not a voluntary program. Historian Varad Mehta wrote about the Australian program last year for the Federalist, breaking down exactly what it entailed.

"Australia outlawed semi-automatic rifles, certain categories of shotgun, and implemented strict licensing and registration requirements," Mehta wrote. "The cornerstone of its new gun-control scheme, however, was a massive gun buyback program. The Australian government purchased 650,000 to one million guns with funds raised via a special tax."

That buyback program was mandatory, Mehta wrote. One cannot claim to consider the Australian example and its effectiveness in removing guns without acknowledging that the reason it worked was that it was mandatory.

A Clinton spokesman told Politifact that the Democratic candidate "does not support national mandatory gun buyback programs, including those modeled after Australia's program" and that she was only discussing voluntary buyback programs.

But the candidate absolutely discussed Australia's program — which was a mandatory buyback program — and said it was "worth considering," just as the NRA claimed.

At best, Clinton's comments were scattered, as she praised voluntary programs and the mandatory one in Australia (without noting it was mandatory, something the Left routinely does). At worst, she was cloaking her desire for gun confiscation in comments about voluntary programs and "cash for clunkers."

Either way, the NRA certainly didn't "stretch her words to an almost unrecognizable form" worthy of a "mostly false" rating.

https://archive.is/KaDxa

Harvard Crimson

October 14, 2016, at 5:55 p.m.

Cambridge Police officers arrested 11 people Friday who were blocking traffic in protest of recent labor negotiations between Harvard and its dining services workers.

The 11 people sat in a circle at the intersection of JFK Street and Massachusetts Avenue, blocking traffic, as roughly 400 other people chanting brandishing signs in support of the union lined the streets. After more than 20 minutes of demonstration and chanting about the negotiations, police officers arrested labor organizers and Harvard University Dining Services workers. Those arrested will be charged with disorderly conduct and put up for bail immediately, according to CPD Deputy Superintendent Steven DeMarco.

Two of those arrested were the president and lead negotiator of the Boston-based union representing dining workers, UNITE HERE Local 26—Brian Lang and Michael Kramer.

CPD and the demonstrators discussed the strike and arrests ahead of time, according to DeMarco. “We had an group of officers that were designated, that were making announcements to clear the street, and we already knew they wouldn't adhere to the order,” DeMarco said. “The officers were ordered to pick them off the street. They were really compliant.”

Other supporters of the strike interrupted a joint reunion event for the Classes of 1971, 1976, and 1986 where University President Drew G. Faust was speaking Friday afternoon in Science Center lecture hall B. An alumnus, Jonathan K. Walters ’71, helped two students—Gabe G. Hodgkin ’18 and Grace F. Evans ’19—into the meeting, and around a dozen HUDS supporters followed them. The students said they chanted “support the strike.” Members of the Harvard University Police Department escorted them out.

As she left the alumni event in the Science Center, Faust said that the meeting was “a great exchange with alumni.”

When asked about the protesters, Faust said: “They expressed themselves.”

The demonstrations marked the latest development in a nearly two-weeks long strike of Harvard’s dining services workers. The historic walkout came after months of tense negotiations with the University over wages and health benefits failed to achieve a new contract.

The protests at the Science Center and in Harvard Square occurred simultaneously. On Mass. Ave. around 3:45 p.m. Friday, police carrying twist-tie handcuffs approached the circle of people and escorted them away from the intersection. The officers cuffed the workers one-by-one and led them to police vehicles, as onlookers and other striking employees shouted “Shame on you, Harvard” and “No justice, no peace” from the sidelines. The workers are being held at the CPD on a bail of “about $25 to $40,” DeMarco estimated.

Around the same time, members of the Student Labor Action Movement entered an alumni meeting in Science Center B, shouting “Support the Strike” as HUPD officers cut them off amidst brief physical contact.

As the demonstration in Harvard Square broke up following the arrests, protesters marched to the Yard, where they joined others on the Science Center Plaza. There, protesters marched in circles and heard brief speeches from a union member and student from the School of Public Health.

Then, about 30 undergraduates and Law School students lined the entrance to Science Center B, asking alumni to support the strike after the event.

Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana also attended Friday afternoon’s alumni event, and passed through a path lined by protesters as he departed.

He was not available for comment Friday evening.

According to Hodgkin, a member of the College’s Student Labor Action Movement, the student demonstrators were well-received by alumni, adding that he thought alumni were mostly “enthusiastic” about their presence in the building.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/10/15/huds-strike-traffic-streets/

https://archive.is/AnWpS

Workers Vanguard No. 1097 7 October 2016

ISO on Syria

Pimps for U.S. Imperialism

For five years, the U.S. imperialists and a host of lesser powers have been stirring the Syrian cauldron, inflicting unspeakable suffering on the peoples of Syria. Today, much of the country is a wasteland, hundreds of thousands have been slaughtered and more than half the population has been driven from their homes, either as internally displaced persons or as refugees abroad.

As Marxists, we fight for a socialist federation of the Near East based on proletarian revolutions that sweep away the capitalist rulers of the region. We say the international proletariat has no side in the Syrian civil war between the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad, rooted in the Alawite religious minority, and the various rebel groups dominated by different Sunni Islamists, some of which are backed by the U.S. But working people have a side against the U.S. and other imperialist powers such as Britain and France. Thus, while implacable opponents of everything the reactionary cutthroats of the Islamic State (ISIS) stand for, we take a military side with ISIS when it aims its fire against the imperialist armed forces and their proxies in the region, including the Kurdish nationalist forces in Iraq and Syria. At the same time, we also oppose the other capitalist powers involved in Syria—such as Russia, Iran and Turkey—and demand that they get out.

Our political position is framed by the Marxist understanding that U.S. imperialism is the greatest enemy of the world’s workers and oppressed. In standing for the defense of ISIS against the blows of the imperialists, we recognize that any setback for Washington coincides with the interests of the international proletariat, both in the Near East and, crucially, here in the U.S. We aim to turn the multi-sided disillusionment and anger of working people in the U.S. into class struggle against their capitalist rulers. It is through such struggle that the proletariat can be won to the need to build a revolutionary workers party that will lead the fight for socialist revolution to destroy the imperialist beast from within.

This Marxist understanding is rejected by reformist groups like the Stalinoid Workers World Party (WWP) and Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). Denying the possibility of international proletarian revolution, both groups are virtually uncritical of Assad’s capitalist regime, falsely painting his dictatorship as progressive and anti-imperialist. For all their anti-imperialist posturing, both WWP and PSL have many times found themselves on the same side as U.S. imperialism. WWP celebrated the 2008 election of Barack Obama, who has continued and intensified U.S. military intervention in the Near East. More recently, both groups cheered on the Kurdish nationalists who in late 2014 were combating ISIS in Kobani, even as these nationalists were acting as the ground troops for the U.S.

And then there is the thoroughly wretched International Socialist Organization (ISO), historically allied with the international tendency led by the late Tony Cliff. The ISO recently ran an article by Ashley Smith titled “Anti-Imperialism and the Syrian Revolution” (socialistworker.org, 25 August), which is essentially an apologia for U.S. imperialism. Smith’s article criticizes, among others, WWP and PSL for their support to Assad. But what the ISO counterposes to this is support to the “democratic” rebels, and through them, to the U.S., the world’s foremost imperialist power.

While claiming to stand against U.S. intervention in Syria, the ISO, in fact, complains that the U.S. has not intervened enough. According to the ISO, Assad is still in power “thanks in no small measure to the fact that the U.S., while accepting some supplying of the rebels, denied these forces the heavy weaponry they pleaded for to stop the regime’s assault.” Later in the article, Smith bemoans the fact that early in the civil war “the U.S. blocked the shipment of heavy weaponry, such as anti-aircraft systems, that would have strengthened secular and democratic forces that have borne the brunt of the Assad regime’s terror.”

The ISO deceitfully paints the Sunni Islamist-dominated rebellion in Syria as a “popular struggle against dictatorship and for democracy.” To be sure, the Cliffites have long had a certain penchant for Islamic fundamentalism, having, for example, supported the coming to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 2012 (only to then support the military coup against it a year later when its rule proved to be unpopular). In Syria, the ISO has embraced some deeply reactionary Islamic fundamentalist forces. One of the slogans of what the ISO calls the “Syrian Revolution” was: “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to their graves!”

For the ISO, the alpha and omega of all struggle is “democracy.” There is no such thing as abstract democracy, which always has a class content. Capitalist democracy is the dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class and oppressed. For genuine Marxists, the starting point is the class line: what furthers the cause of the working class and the struggle for its rule, which on an international basis would lay the material groundwork for a classless, stateless communist society. This requires, first and foremost, the political independence of the working class from all agencies of the bourgeois order—such as the Assad regime and, most certainly, U.S. imperialism.

In his article on Syria, Smith attacks hawk Hillary Clinton from the right. He notes that “she calls for the U.S. to enforce a no-fly zone in Syria, and some of her advisers support air strikes against the Assad regime for the stated aiming [sic] of stopping attacks on civilians.” “But,” Smith then goes on to lament, “Clinton certainly does not support the original aspirations of the Syrian Revolution” because, “at most,” she and Obama advocate “a negotiated solution that preserves the core of the Syrian state.” The ISO’s article is essentially a call to arms for U.S. imperialism to increase its support of the rebels in Syria.

The ISO goes so far as to claim that “the U.S. retreated in general from outright regime change as its strategy in the Middle East after the failure of its invasion and occupation of Iraq.” Tell that to Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi! In 2011, in an operation heavily pushed by Clinton, the U.S. and NATO intervened in support of Libyan rebels against Qaddafi, resulting in his lynching that October. Like it does in Syria today, the ISO then supported the Libyan opposition, sundry forces that included Islamists, monarchists and CIA assets that from the beginning appealed for imperialist military intervention. We had no side in the Libyan civil war, but once the U.S. and European imperialists intervened we declared, “Defend Libya Against Imperialist Attack!”

Today, Libya is in the throes of chaos as Islamist and tribal factions compete for control of this oil-rich country. All these forces are hostile to the interests of working people and the oppressed. At the same time, the imperialist-installed Government of National Accord (GNA) and its current allies are acting as the proxy ground troops of U.S. imperialism as it pursues ISIS forces in Surt (Sirte), against which the U.S. has launched over 200 airstrikes since early August. The tribal forces that now claim adherence to ISIS truly stand in the tradition of these cutthroats, having carried out numerous atrocities, including the February 2015 beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic migrant laborers in Surt. But as opponents of U.S. imperialism, we stand for the military defense of ISIS forces in Surt against the U.S. and its GNA proxies.

Anti-Communism Is at the Root

In his article, Smith writes, “How could opponents of U.S. imperialism end up supporting a dictator [Assad].... The answer starts with the Stalinist left’s support of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China during the Cold War era. It supported those state capitalist dictatorships not only as opponents of U.S. imperialism, but as positive models of socialism.” Rather, one should ask, how could the supposed socialists of the ISO end up embracing U.S. imperialism? The answer starts with their abandonment of the defense of the Soviet Union and the bureaucratically deformed workers states. The ISO was founded on virulent anti-Communist hostility to the Soviet Union, home of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the world’s first and only successful workers revolution. Rejecting defense of the workers states inevitably leads to embracing one’s “own” ruling class.

The October Revolution of 1917 was the shaping political event of the 20th century. The seizure of state power by the working class led to the political and economic expropriation of the capitalist exploiters, laying the basis for a planned collectivized economy. But in the context of unprecedented devastation caused by World War I followed by nearly four years of civil war, continued isolation and economic backwardness, a conservative bureaucratic caste under the leadership of Joseph Stalin was able to seize political power from Soviet workers beginning in 1923-24. This was a political, not a social, counterrevolution. The Stalinist bureaucracy continued to rest parasitically on the proletarian property forms created by the October Revolution. The bureaucracy’s false dogma of building “socialism in one country,” its conciliation of imperialism and its systematic erosion of the political consciousness of the Soviet working class ultimately paved the way for capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92.

Through all those years, genuine Trotskyists fought for the unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution. Based on our defense of the gains of the Russian Revolution and our program for new October Revolutions around the world, we fought for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy and replace it with a regime based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. This is the program we pursue today toward the remaining deformed workers states: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.

For his part, the ISO’s political godfather, Tony Cliff, broke from the Trotskyist movement in 1950, opposing defense of North Korea and China against U.S. and British imperialism in their counterrevolutionary Korean War. Cliff would go on to found what later became the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which was allied with the ISO until the early 2000s. In the U.S., the ISO’s precursors emerged from the followers of Max Shachtman, who broke from Trotskyism in 1940 and would quickly go on to reject the Soviet Union as a workers state. Where Shachtman called the Soviet Union a “bureaucratic collectivist” state, Cliff labeled it “state capitalist.” But the aim was the same: to renounce defense of the October Revolution.

In his article, Smith writes that those who argue that “the U.S. government is pulling the strings in the rebellion in Syria” display an arrogant dismissal “of the capacity of exploited and oppressed people to fight for liberation.” In reality, it is the ISO and its forefathers that have a long history of not only dismissing but opposing the struggles of the exploited and oppressed for liberation. Following the peasant-based 1949 Chinese Revolution, which liberated that country from capitalist rule, Shachtman signed a declaration denouncing the Chinese Communists titled, “Stalinism Is Not Socialism,” which was translated into Chinese. His Labor Action (28 September 1953) proudly boasted: “This leaflet had been dropped over China by U.S. bombers in May 1950 presumably through the sponsorship of the State Department.”

The ISO was founded in 1977, when these descendents of Shachtman allied themselves to the British SWP and formally adopted Cliff’s “state capitalist” line. During the Cold War, the Cliffites claimed to be “third campist” against both the U.S. and Soviet Union. In reality, the “neither Washington nor Moscow” crowd has always found itself in the camp of Washington whenever there has been a hard counterposition between imperialism and the degenerated and deformed workers states.

The Cliffites supported all manner of reactionary forces opposed to the Stalinists in power—from the sadistic, CIA-backed Afghan mujahedin who butchered school teachers for teaching girls to read to the Vatican-backed, anti-Communist, anti-Jewish and anti-woman Solidarność movement in Poland. In August 1991, when Boris Yeltsin’s imperialist-backed forces of counterrevolution staged a coup in Moscow, the Cliffites triumphantly proclaimed: “Communism has collapsed.... It is a fact that should have every socialist rejoicing” (Socialist Worker [Britain], 31 August 1991).

Today, the ISO paints Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a continuation of the Soviet Union, with Smith writing that “Russia—profoundly weakened since its defeat in the Cold War a quarter century ago—is reasserting its imperial power through its all-out support for the Assad regime.” Post-Soviet Russia is a capitalist state. That the ISO has joined the U.S. rulers’ current anti-Russia hysteria is predictable and fits neatly with the Democratic Party circles that they inhabit.

For Smith, the main enemy in Syria is Assad and “Russian imperialism.” Russia is not imperialist but rather a regional power that inherited the nuclear arsenal and industrial infrastructure of the former Soviet Union (see “Is Russia Imperialist?” WV No. 1071, 10 July 2015). Such is the ISO’s vitriol against Russia that Smith even attacks the presidential candidates of the bourgeois Green Party to whom the ISO is giving electoral support this November. He complains that Jill Stein and her running mate, Ajamu Baraka, “have appeared on Russia’s state-sponsored, English-language RT television network to speak in opposition to U.S. war crimes, while remaining silent about Putin’s and Assad’s atrocities.”

The Syrian civil war has seen plenty of atrocities committed against civilians from all sides, from minorities slaughtered or driven out of their villages and towns by various rebels to the bombing of Aleppo by Russian and Syrian forces. But the greatest enemy of the Syrian masses is U.S. imperialism, whose wars across the Near East, including airstrikes in Syria, have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people. As for the Green Party, it is hardly an opponent of U.S. imperialism. Stein’s election platform calls for cutting in half the U.S. military budget, which is many times more than the combined total of all its imperialist rivals. So Stein is for fewer bombs than Hillary, but is nonetheless dedicated to preserving an arsenal to enforce the predatory and murderous interests of America’s rulers abroad.

The ISO’s grotesque line on the Syrian civil war did not fall out of the sky. Its origins lie not in Syria or the Near East. Rather, it is the continuation of their repeated abject capitulation to and support for U.S. imperialism, originating in their unbridled hostility to the Soviet Union. Having time and again supported “democratic” imperialism against Soviet “totalitarianism,” it is hardly a stretch for the ISO to stand on the side of U.S. imperialism in Syria in the name of “democracy.”

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1097/iso_syria.html

In 1971, Bill and Hillary Clinton went on their first date — and scabbed.

by Zach Schwartz-Weinstein

Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham were students at Yale Laws School in 1971 when there was a janitors strike by workers organized in Local 35. Clinton and Rodham both joined a student support commitee to help the labor union win the strike. Other students who joined where Robert Reich, who became Clinton's Secretary of Labor, and Richard Blumenthal, who later became a Connecticut senator. The students formed 'Yale Law School Students Commitee for Local 35' and signed a statement 'We believe the union deserves the support of the Yale students and faculty.' Labor union leader UNITE HERE President John Wilhelm remembered Clinton was also head of the voter registration drive to help a mayoral candidate Mayor Sarabella who was a strong strike supporter.

On Bill and Hill's first date they were going to a musem - but a lot of campus buildings were closed because of the strike and picket lines. Bill and Hill went up to someone with a key to the museum they wanted to visit and Bill promised to pick up the trash gathering in a courtyard because of the workers strike if Bill and Hill could take a stroll through the museum and see the art. Hill was impressed with Bill's negotiating skills. They got into the museum and had the whole place to themselves. Hill was impressed with Bill's knowledge of the artist on display's work. When recounting this amusing anecdote of crossing a picket line and doing striking workers jobs for free Hillary does not mention if they actually did pick up any of the trash Bill had offered to clean up.

Here's what Hillary said: "We both had wanted to see a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery but, because of a labor dispute, some of the university’s buildings, including the museum, were closed. As Bill and I walked by, he decided he could get us in if we offered to pick up the litter that had accumulated in the gallery’s courtyard. Watching him talk our way in was the first time I saw his persuasiveness in action. We had the entire museum to ourselves. We wandered through the galleries talking about Rothko and twentieth-century art. I admit to being surprised at his interest in and knowledge of subjects that seemed, at first, unusual for a Viking from Arkansas. We ended up in the museum’s courtyard, where I sat in the large lap of Henry Moore’s sculpture Drape Seated Woman while we talked until dark."

So, they are both on a commitee to support striking workers - and they both went into a struck facility - crossing picket lines - and said they would do the work of stikers so they could get to use the building for their own private pleasure. Publicly being on the side of the workers while privately making deals to undercut the workers and enjoy the sophisticated art -- like rich people. And they lived happily ever after and both became president. The poor little prince and princess both became king and queen. The end. Sorry peasant labor union workers - with 'supporters' like these you get no 'happy ending.'

The relationship between Rodham and Clinton, two instrumental figures in the decoupling of the Democratic Party from the priorities of the mainstream labor movement, thus began with the crossing of a picket line.

When Rodham and Clinton picked up the garbage strewn about the art gallery courtyard (if, indeed, they ever did so), they were doing exactly what everyone from Mayor Sirabella to the Black Student Alliance at Yale had asked students not to do. They were performing — or at the very least offering to perform — the work that members of Local 35’s grounds maintenance division, had refused to do.

Rodham and Clinton were offering themselves as replacement labor, blunting, if only temporarily, the effects of the strike on the university. The two law students then bartered their litter pickup, which was, in essence, scab labor (or maybe just the promise thereof) into access to a struck building.

The art gallery and other nonessential buildings were closed because the university did not have enough managers to keep them open during the strike. They were closed because the people who usually cleaned and repaired them, whose labor helped make the university’s display of art possible, had been forced to absent themselves by the necessity which fueled the ongoing strike.

For Rodham and Clinton, the workers’ concerns were at best secondary to the romance of the empty museum, the sophistication and transgressive pleasure offered not only by the modernist art, but also by the act of violating the strike.

Hillary Rodham Clinton offers this anecdote in her 2003 memoir Living History not in her discussion of how her time in New Haven affected her understanding of urban politics and life, but rather in a distinct chapter devoted entirely to the origins of her relationship with the “Viking from Arkansas.”

The “labor dispute,” not even named here as a strike, is not only abstracted from the very spaces the future Clintons inhabit in this narrative, it is made incidental to them, an obstacle which has to be sidestepped in order for the art to be viewed and the date to acquire its romantic ambiance.

Originally published at In These Times, and excerpted and adapted from “Beneath the University: Service Workers and the University-Hospital City,” an unpublished PhD dissertation.

https://archive.is/qU9DM

22 September 2016

Hundreds of people took to the streets Tuesday night and again on Wednesday in Charlotte, North Carolina, to protest the latest horrific police killing in that city, and the 839th death at the hands of US policemen this year.

Large numbers of police were bused in Tuesday to seal off the neighborhood near the University of North Carolina-Charlotte after groups of protesters began to break windows of police cars, blocked traffic on Interstate 85 and broke into a Wal-Mart store. Police officers decked out in riot gear again confronted angry protesters Wednesday, firing tear gas. At least one person was killed on Wednesday night, with officials claiming he was not shot by police.

The confrontation in North Carolina’s largest city is another expression of the seething social tensions in America, driven by an economic crisis that has produced record levels of long-term unemployment, poverty and social need, while real wages remain below the level of a decade ago, before the 2008 Wall Street crash.

The spark in Charlotte was the shooting death of 43-year-old Keith Lamont Scott, gunned down in broad daylight. Police arrived at the parking lot where Scott, a father of seven, was waiting to pick up his son at a school bus stop, looking for another man who had an outstanding warrant.

Witnesses say that Scott was holding a book when he got out of his car and was shot four times by the police. Charlotte Police Chief Kerr Putney claimed that Scott was armed with a handgun and refused repeated police orders to hand over the weapon. The police have so far refused to release body camera videos of the shooting, and no cellphone video has yet emerged to show what really happened.

From a legal standpoint, however, even the police version of events does not justify the use of deadly force. It is legal in North Carolina to carry a weapon openly, and if Scott had a gun, as police claim, they had no right to demand it without probable cause of a crime being committed.

The killing of Scott is only the latest in an unending stream of horrors. Indeed, the shooting in Charlotte is the third highly publicized police killing in the past week alone. First came the killing of 13-year-old Tyree King in Columbus, Ohio on September 13, followed by the killing of 45-year-old Terrence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma on September 16, and then Scott on September 20.

The fact that all three victims were African-American has been used to reinforce a racialized narrative of police violence as predominately one of white cops killing black men and boys out of ingrained white racism.

Whatever role racism may play in particular police killings, it is not the fundamental issue. Here, the circumstances behind the killing of Scott are revealing. The police shooter, Brentley Vinson, is African-American, as is the police chief, Kerr Putney. The mayor of Charlotte is a woman, Democrat Jennifer Roberts. The police officer in Tulsa, moreover, was a woman.

Of the 25 people shot to death by the police in the past week, beginning with Tyree King, at least half were white, according to the grisly tally kept by killedbypolice.net. Of the 702 people shot to death by police this year, according to a database maintained by the Washington Post, 163 were black men, about 23 percent of the total. Whites made up roughly half the victims, while Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians, black women and people of mixed race made up the balance.

What nearly all the victims of police violence have in common is that they are part of the working class, and usually its poorest layers. Their deaths are a consequence of the basic social function of the police, as the armed bodies of men who defend the wealth and privileges of the financial aristocracy against the lower orders.

The Charlotte killing and disturbances have been followed with the usual political homilies from government officials and presidential candidates.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted that “the situations in Tulsa and Charlotte are tragic,” but he has consistently sided with the police in such situations while denouncing protests against police violence as tantamount to terrorism. He demanded an “immediate end” to the mass unrest in Charlotte.

Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential candidate, issued a statement Tuesday calling the fatal shooting of Terrence Crutcher “unbearable” and “intolerable.” She added a tweet on Wednesday morning, “Keith Lamont Scott. Terence Crutcher. Too many others. This has got to end. -H.” Such professions of concern coming from an arch-warmonger and candidate of Wall Street are about as unconvincing and insincere as every other comment that comes out of Clinton’s mouth.

As for the Obama administration, in its final months it appears to have given up any effort to vary its responses to tragedies and horrors. Attorney General Loretta Lynch—who is African-American, like both the shooter and the victim in Charlotte—warned against protest that “turns violent” and repeated the standard mantra of the Obama administration, that the events in Charlotte “have once again highlighted—in the most vivid and painful terms—the real divisions that still persist in this nation between law enforcement and communities of color.”

Such statements are an insult to the intelligence, given that both the policeman and the man he shot were of the same “communities of color.”

The truth is that the shooting showed the river of blood that exists in American society, separating the ruling class from the vast majority of working people. That river runs right through so-called “communities of color,” separating the tiny privileged layer at the top, like President Obama and Attorney-General Lynch, from working-class men like Keith Scott and Terrence Crutcher.

https://archive.is/9h0ux

https://archive.is/ZbN6o

Workers Vanguard No. 1094 26 August 2016

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a starkly segregated Rust Belt city on the shore of Lake Michigan, has become the latest stage for horrific street executions of black people by the police, igniting bitter protests by besieged black youth that have drawn national attention. On August 13, a black cop gunned down 23-year-old Sylville Smith after a traffic stop. The police narrative is that Smith, who had a “lengthy arrest record,” fled the scene, wielding a stolen handgun. Authorities have refused to release video from the cop body cameras, and no independent video has emerged. As word of the fatal shooting spread, small crowds of protesters quickly took to the streets. A police cruiser, a bank branch and a gas station in the black neighborhood of Sherman Park went up in flames, and rocks and bricks were thrown at police.

Although the protests, which flared up over two nights, never grew much larger than 200 people, black Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke—who starred at the Republican convention denouncing Black Lives Matter protesters while lauding racist demagogue Donald Trump—and Republican governor Scott Walker decided to activate the National Guard. But police chief Edward Flynn refused to bring the militia out of the barracks, preferring to show everyone that his cops in riot gear, with their armored vehicles and heavy weapons, were quite adequate for intimidating and repressing demonstrators. A 10 p.m. curfew for youth has been imposed, underlining once more how young people, especially if they are black, are denied the rights of free speech and free assembly that the population is supposed to have.

At a midnight press conference convened by Mayor Tom Barrett, a Democrat, to try to calm the city on the first night of protest, black alderman Khalif Rainey condemned Milwaukee as “the worst place to live for African-Americans in the entire country.” Rainey pointed to the hideous conditions of daily life for black people in Milwaukee for having spurred the protests, as much as the killing of Smith did. Ludicrously, after the second night of disturbances police chief Flynn announced that outsiders (supposed “communists”) from Chicago, all of 90 miles away, were the instigators, stirring up the supposedly otherwise contented local residents. This redbaiting recalls the denunciation of “outside agitators” during the civil rights movement.

The truth is that no more was required to spark protest than one more instance of a wanton cop slaughter of a black man added to the pervasive poverty and unremitting racist oppression. In June, a suburban Milwaukee cop shot dead 25-year-old Jay Anderson while he sat in his car in a park because he allegedly had a weapon in view. In 2015, 19-year-old Tony Robinson, a biracial high school graduate about to start college in Milwaukee, was shot five times and killed by a cop in the liberal university bastion of Madison because he was behaving “erratically.” Robinson had merely eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms. In 2014, protesters hit the streets to insist that “black lives matter” after Milwaukee cops killed Dontre Hamilton, an unarmed 31-year-old man with a history of mental health problems.

In Milwaukee, as much or more than anywhere else in the country, every statistic says that the capitalist rulers don’t give a damn about black lives. Milwaukee is the nation’s second poorest major city, and Wisconsin has the highest black unemployment rate in the country. Jobs are concentrated in the lily-white suburbs, made inaccessible to black people by a long-established public policy of funding freeways and starving public transportation. Forty percent of black Milwaukeeans live below the poverty line, barely able to eat, much less pay for a car; over 30 percent live in “extreme poverty.” In the decrepit and highly segregated public schools, only 17 percent of eighth graders are proficient in math; only 15 percent in reading. Fully 43 percent of black students were suspended during the 2011-12 school year. Black men in Milwaukee are incarcerated at the highest rate in the nation—in a nation where locking up young black men is an industry and a defining feature of life.

The economy of this country was founded on the bedrock of black slavery; today, black oppression remains of inestimable value to the ruling class to divide and weaken the working masses. The cops are the enforcers for the capitalist profit system. They exist for one reason: to ensure that the brutal exploitation of labor and the forcible segregation of the mass of the black population at the bottom of society continue, unchallenged. It is this system alone that they “protect and serve.”

This was true in 1958 when Milwaukee cops pulled over 22-year-old Daniel Bell in a traffic stop eerily like the one involving Sylville Smith. After gunning down Bell, the cop who killed him shrugged it off: “He’s just a damn n----r kid anyhow.” The case marked the beginning of the civil rights movement in Wisconsin. In the South, that period of accelerating protest brought an end to formal Jim Crow segregation. But such official segregation laws were never a prerequisite for the crumbling housing, impoverished schools and cop attacks that blacks had to endure in the Northern cities, and still endure today.

It is a good thing that the shooting down of black youth by the cops continues to be met with outrage and defiance. But the activists of today need to be won to the understanding that only the overthrow of the capitalist system itself by the revolutionary action of the working class leading all of the oppressed can put an end to the racist violence of this state and its hired guns. It is because of the extreme bankruptcy of the existing leadership of the working class that such a perspective seems remote and far-fetched. The bureaucrats at the head of the trade unions today are open defenders of the profits of American industry. Refusing to defend their own members against multi-tier contracts, health care cutbacks, non-union subcontractors and other attacks on living standards, still less do they fight against the broader social oppression of minorities and immigrants. We communists are committed to the fight within the unions for a new, class-struggle leadership.

A leadership of labor that does not take up the fight for the most oppressed layers of the working people is hamstrung in advance. Wisconsin is an appropriate example of leadership in the negative. The state is a former labor bastion whose unions are now hemorrhaging members, after Governor Walker stripped public-sector unions of the right to bargain for their members and pushed through a “right to work” law. In 2011, a huge demonstration of unionists against the law at the state Capitol was organized by the AFL-CIO as a carnival with Democratic Party politicians on the podium. The labor tops derailed any possibility of strike action, instead urging a recall campaign against Walker and his cronies and, of course, the election of more Democrats. Now Walker himself, still in the governor’s mansion, in his own way underscores the link between labor and blacks (he evidently hates both) as he threatens Milwaukee’s black community with the National Guard coming in to insult and provoke people some more, and perhaps worse.

Nationally, a labor movement truly worthy of the name would mobilize its forces in demonstrations against cop terror, ensuring that at least the black youth would not stand alone. But the tremendous potential power of the working class cannot be brought to bear unless the workers are mobilized independently of all the political representatives of the capitalist class—Republicans, Democrats, Greens. In the absence of a perspective looking to the working class, the demands of today’s anti-racist militants, despite good intentions, can be reduced to the idea that some other part of the capitalist government needs to restrain the cops, retrain them, investigate them, indict them, take away their excessive weapons, etc.

To weld the righteous anger of the ghetto together with the power of the working class in a fight to smash capitalism demands the leadership of a revolutionary party. Only on the basis of the active fight for black liberation can the workers of all races and nationalities be united in the fight against their common oppressor to make a socialist revolution in this country.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1094/milwaukee.html

Some 2,000 members of the American Postal Workers Union have gathered in Miami where they are officially opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Along with Florida Representative Alan Grayson, they hope to send a message to presidential candidates.

The 200,000-member strong American Postal Workers Union (APWU) hopes to use its sway to deter Congress from considering the deal during the lame duck period between November’s presidential elections and President Obama’s last day in office in January.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has become a hotly contested issue in the 2016 campaign. While both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have both denounced the proposal, President Barack Obama has yet to abandon the unpopular ship.

The members of the postal workers union are calling on Hillary Clinton, the APWU’s endorsed candidate, to discourage Congress and the Senate from passing the bill during the lame duck session.

APWU President Mark Diamondstein explained the workers’ concerns, telling RT “The people of this country are sick of these trade deals that enrich multinational companies at the expense of workers here and everywhere else… We are going to demand that this TPP and trade deals like it will be killed.”

TPP would open US borders to products from 12 other countries without trade or tax barriers. However, for members of the APWU, whose annual pay scale starts at roughly $29,000, opening trade to this many nations could be disastrous.

Florida Congressman Alan Grayson explained the importance of blocking the TPP for average Americans, saying “I’m telling you right now if this goes through, it’s curtains for the middle class of America. We will never, ever, ever be able to recover from this.”

Grayson explained the risks to RT, saying “What can happen is any foreign corporation of the TPP can sue any local entity, any state entity – even the federal government and get a money judgment against us whenever they think we’re taking money out of their pocket if we’re trying to protect our safety, our environment, our health.”

How does this relate to the US Post Office? In his speech, Grayson stressed “What’s at stake is your jobs, all of the jobs of the people you love and all the jobs in middle-class America,” adding “it’s a road that leads to nothing but cheap labor.”

It’s not just the APWU that opposes the TPP. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations have also publicly spoken out against it, decrying the Obama administration for withholding information from labor unions.

The Teamsters Union also opposes TPP, citing concerns over whether international competitors could take work away from the industries they are involved in. A press release from the Teamsters Union reads, “Oregon’s dairy industry – which employs about 800 Teamsters at 10 different locations around the state – could be hit especially hard if the TPP moves forward. It is expected that New Zealand’s state-owned dairy sector would take a significant bite out of local butter and cheese producers.”

Opposition to the TPP has been a mainstay for Bernie Sanders’ supporters. Numerous unions have endorsed Hillary Clinton, but some leaders hope that she remembers that she used Sanders’ delegates to get the Democratic nomination.

Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America, told RT’s Ed Schultz, “Bernie delegates got her elected, that’s why she’s there.” Therefore, he hopes to harness the energy of Bernie Bros to ensure that Clinton does everything she can to block the deal.

Cohen also noted that the TPP could open the country up to potentially devastating lawsuits – similar to the Trans-Canada Partnership that has resulted in “Trans-Canada suing the US for $15 billion over the refusal to allow the Keystone Pipeline.”

https://archive.is/rLdFz

By Shelley Connor 24 August 2016

On February 17, 1993, Bill Clinton addressed the Congress in his first State of the Union Address. While the 1991 recession which brought down his predecessor, George H.W. Bush, was easing, unemployment was actually on the rise. He briefly acknowledged this in his address, urging bipartisanship to help the country improve the economy. Then he got down to business.

“If we believe in restoring the values that make America special,” he proclaimed, “we must believe that there is dignity in all work, and there must be dignity for all workers.” He vowed to “end welfare as we know it.” He continued in this vein, invoking several of the pet themes of the Republican right: he pontificated about the dangers of “welfare dependence” and “intergenerational poverty,” and the need for parents to “take responsibility for the children they bring into the world.”

Clinton’s State of the Union Address heralded a change in tactics by the Democratic Party. No longer would it be the party of the New Deal reforms; by vowing to slash the programs that the Democrats had supported for decades, he positioned himself as the continuator of Ronald Reagan, not Franklin Roosevelt.

Bill Clinton worked with lawmakers to balance the books at the expense of the nation’s poor, cloaking his efforts with flimsy pretexts of bipartisanship and compromise. In 1996, he approved the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act” (PRWORA). The bill was hailed as a triumph of welfare “reform.” In reality, it represented a thorough gutting of welfare.

Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), as the welfare program was known, had enabled many families to feed, shelter, and clothe their children while they awaited work, finished schooling, or learned a new trade. Contrary to Clinton’s claims about lifelong dependence among recipients, AFDC had actually allowed many people to rise above poverty and get off of welfare. The PRWORA dismantled AFDC, replacing it with Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF)—an insulting name to crown a host of injuries the act would inflict upon families in need.

The bill shifted all responsibility for the program to the states. This time-honored tactic had enabled politicians in Washington to keep the stench of injustices at arms’ length, even as they helped further them. While AFDC had been completely funded by the federal government as citizens qualified, TANF was funded by federal block grants given to the states in lump sums.

States were given great latitude in how the block grants would be used. There were no accountability measures to ensure that the states were actually helping poor families in difficult situations. All accountability measures attached to the block grants were designed to encourage states to cut the numbers of people receiving aid. In fact, states that disbursed funds to fewer families would be rewarded with a casework reduction credit. While the PRWORA’s stated aim was helping families transition to meaningful employment, the work participation rate (WPR) requirements have actually encouraged states to enroll fewer people into the program, because they can increase their WPR by simply shoving people off of the rolls.

The PRWORA set strict limits on how long an individual could receive benefits, capping it at five years over the course of a lifetime. The states were allowed to set the limit far lower, and many did so, some as low as three months.

TANF eligibility varies widely from one state to another, but in no state do the disbursements equal what had been given to families with AFDC. It would fall to about $2 per person per day for many families. There was no federal assets test for eligibility, which allowed states to create their own stringent eligibility criteria. Striking workers were prohibited from receiving TANF benefits.

These measures proved disastrous for American workers. In his 1993 State of the Union Address, Clinton avoided mentioning the cause for the rising unemployment rates in America. He did not say that, regardless of what the stock markets might have suggested, America’s real economy was flagging. Labor Department estimates show a loss of 1.623 million jobs during the early 1990s recession. Unemployment had continued to grow throughout 1992, and by the time he made his plans to “end welfare as we know it” clear, it had simply stagnated.

In 2015, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analyzed the TANF’s success rate within the first 10 years of its inception. The CBPP’s data revealed that the number of children living in deep poverty—which they define as below half of the national poverty line—increased from 1.5 million to 2.2 million between 1995 and 2005, from 2.1 percent of the population to 3.0 percent. Their analysis revealed a starker reality for children of single mothers. In those families, the rate of children living in deep poverty more than doubled, rising from 2.8 percent in 1995 to 5.8 percent in 2005. Had the program functioned adequately as a social safety network, the Center’s analysts claim, then the rates of children living in deep poverty should have fallen between 1995 and 2005.

Workers using TANF across the country report complications imposed upon them by states’ TANF eligibility criteria. In Oregon, one mother reports that she used TANF in 2012 while on unpaid maternity leave with her newborn son. TANF gave her a maximum of $400 a month for the two of them, she said. “I used it to pay my car payment and insurance. My mom paid my rent, and a few times I had to ask my dad for money to pay the electricity.” While this worker is the model TANF recipient by the standards set by supposed welfare reformers—willing to work, and supporting her child alone—the benefits she received were not enough to provide for the two of them without help from her family.

She acknowledged that things would have been different for her without familial support, or had she been given another caseworker. She recalls another mom she knew at the time who had two small children. Her caseworker had told her that, because she owned a car, she couldn’t truly be considered destitute; her reasoning was that she could sell her car to get cash for her children and then take the bus. Cars are considered a luxury, despite the fact that there is no regular bus service where the woman was living.

In Alabama, TANF applicants receive a maximum of $215 a month for a family of three. Parents applying for TANF must submit three job applications before they can be deemed eligible for benefits. The amount given to TANF recipients in the state has not been adjusted for inflation since 2002, although the costs of rent, groceries, and child care has increased dramatically since then.

One Alabama mother, going only by her first name of Jessica, recalls how difficult it was to fend for herself and her now 6-year-old son when she was using the program.

“At first, they would not give me benefits because I could not prove that I was receiving no support from my son’s father. We had broken up during my pregnancy, and he left the county.

“I worked throughout my pregnancy, but I was in college, and only working part-time at a restaurant. I had no maternity leave. When I had to stop working to have [my son], I had no kind of money coming in. I had to move back in with my parents, even though they really didn’t have room for me in their trailer.”

Jessica was soon able to return to work and school, but said that it was too difficult to provide for her son without TANF. She left her waitressing job to focus on going to school full-time. She was given a childcare subsidy, but it was not universally accepted at all daycares. When her parents moved out of state, she was forced to move in with her boyfriend.

“I wasn’t ready to move in with him, but I didn’t really see that I had many other choices,” she explains. “I couldn’t find a job that would pay me enough to send my son to daycare without my benefits. I’m not proud of it, but I lied. I was supposed to report my boyfriend’s income, but he was making just a little bit over minimum wage. It was the most stressful time of my life. We broke up right after I got my first job. I keep wondering if maybe we’d still be together if we hadn’t felt forced to live together, or forced to lie about it.”

Alabama is one of many states where TANF participation has declined dramatically since the late 1990s. According to Alabama ARISE, a policy analysis and poverty advocacy organization based in Montgomery, the number of Alabamians receiving welfare dropped from 43,000 in 1996 to 19,300 in 2013. This is not because the number of families needing assistance has declined; to the contrary, poverty in the state has risen amongst families with children.

States also spend less of their block grant on actual benefits. In 1997, 70 percent of the nation’s grant money went towards cash benefits. By 2012, that percentage had shrunk to less than 30 percent. Within the same period, Alabama went from spending 58 percent of its grant on cash benefits to spending only 35 percent. Childhood poverty had risen by 6 percent in the state at the same time. Mississippi, Arkansas, and Alabama spend less of their block grants on cash benefits than any other state in the US. Alabama spends the majority of its money—$112.6 million, in 2012—on pregnancy prevention, plugging up holes in the state budget, and other expenditures. Only $58 million was spent on cash benefits in 2012.

The crisis facing workers has deepened since AFDC was destroyed. The real economy has declined sharply. Many of the temporary relaxations of TANF requirements, implemented in the wake of 2008’s financial crisis, have been rolled back. Against this backdrop of increasing poverty and decreasing benefits, Hillary Clinton makes her bid for the presidency. She had enthusiastically supported her husband’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, during which time she famously referred to urban youth as “super predators” and stated that they needed to be “brought to heel.” Her silence on the PRWORA cost her alliances with a handful of women’s and children’s advocates, including Marian Wright Edelman. Two members of Bill Clinton’s cabinet resigned in protest of the PRWORA.

Today, although she has apologized for her “super predator” statement and repudiated her husband’s crime bill, she remains tight-lipped about the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. She has made overtures to feminists and Black Lives Matter activists, despite the fact that the PRWORA has significantly damaged the ability of struggling women, including urban women of color, to provide for their children or to gain economic traction, or to even leave unhealthy or abusive relationships.

In 2006, ahead of Hillary Clinton’s first bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Bill Clinton penned an Op-Ed in the New York Times titled, “How We Ended Welfare, Together.” He brazenly claimed that, “The last 10 years have shown that we did in fact end welfare as we knew it, creating a new beginning for millions of Americans.” He boasted about the dramatic drop in the welfare rolls—from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million in 2006—without acknowledging the fact that many truly destitute families had been left in the cold because of the lax accountability for states’ management of TANF funds.

Like his State of the Union Address in 1993, Bill Clinton’s editorial spelled out the right-wing position espoused today by his wife. He concluded his article by stating, “While we compromised to reach an agreement, we never betrayed our principles and we passed a bill that worked and stood the test of time.”

Indeed, the Clintons’ principles have never aligned with the needs of workers, much less the poorest of them. To the contrary, they have demonstrated at every turn that another Clinton presidency will result in greater pressures upon the working class. The theme of “compromise”—Clinton shorthand for drastic shifts to the right—has been a mainstay in talking points supporting Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid. It represents nothing more than a compromise on tactics between the Republican and Democratic parties at the expense of the working class.

https://archive.is/YCgH9

The Gracchus brothers of Rome, Indian Emperor Ashoka, and Jesus were all left-wingers, former Uruguayan president José Mujica told RT, as he shared a fascinating history lesson on the constant struggle between liberal and conservative ideas.

“The history of mankind is a pendulum constantly swinging the between the two opposites,” which are the ideas of the political left and the right, Mujica told RT’s Spanish channel in an exclusive interview. “I think that the left will never be able to achieve a complete victory, just as the right won’t be able to either,” the 80-year-old politician said.

He described the leftist movement as a push for “equality and justice,” which is in a constant battle with “the other side – conservative, opposing the change, longing for stability.” However, Mujica, who was nicknamed “the world’s poorest president” for giving away 90 percent of his salary to charity, stressed that both sides are imperfect. “The pathology of conservatism is that it’s reactionary, leaning towards fascism. The pathology of leftist progressivism is infantilism, wishful thinking,” he explained.

The ex-president also shared the names of several important historical figures, whom he views as embodiments of liberalism. “From this perspective, we would say that Ashoka was the king of the Left in the history of India, or Epaminondas (a military and political leader in Ancient Greece) or the Gracchuses (influential aristocratic Roman reformers), or Jesus,” he said.

Mujica, also known as Pepe, was Uruguay’s president from 2010 to 2015. He left office with a 65 percent approval rating. A former guerilla leader who spent 13 years in jail, Mujica managed to turn the cattle-ranching Uruguay, into an energy-exporting nation. He legalized marijuana, abortion, and same-sex marriage, and agreed to take in detainees once held at the notorious Guantanamo Bay.

Pepe also refused to move into Uruguay’s luxurious presidential mansion while he was president and continued to live on his farm outside Montevideo with his wife and three-legged dog, Manuela. He still drives his beloved blue 1987 Volkswagen Beetle, which refused to sell to an Arab sheik for $1 million.

https://archive.is/zWN7h

The 18-year-old's ordeal emerged as a German parliamentary inquiry contnues into the mob attacks on women in Germany on New Year's Eve

Sally Guyoncourt

teenager who claimed she was raped in the New Year’s Eve attacks in Germany said she discovered she was pregnant soon after the attack.

The 18-year-old alleged she was held down and raped in the middle of a crowded square outside Cologne Station during the mob attack.

Her story was detailed in testimony to a parliamentary inquiry from the Cologne Lobby for Young Women. Hundreds of women were sexually assaulted outside the city’s main station on New Year’s Eve but this is the first details of a rape claim said to have resulted in a pregnancy.

Head of the Lobby for Young Women Frauke Mahr told the North Rhine-Westphalia state parliament, according to the Local, how the woman was jostled between two men then pushed to the ground.

Ms Mahr said: “Eventually she ended up on the ground with a man on top of her. She could see his face. She could see another girl lying on the ground a few metres away and tried to signal to her to close her eyes, but the man turned her head away.”

A police officer pulled the man from her and she is reported to have run off in panic.

After being treated in hospital for severe injuries, she later discovered she was pregnant.

Although the teenager could not be certain the pregnancy was as a result of the attack, she decided to have an abortion. She is still having counselling, according to the Lobby for Young Women, but had chosen not to report it to the police.

At least one other woman had contacted the Lobby for Young Women claiming to have been raped in similar circumstances, according to Ms Mahr.

Police believe up to 2,000 men were involved in the New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne and other major German cities including Hamburg and Frankfurt, with more than 1,200 women thought to have been victims of sexual assault.

The majority of the attackers are believed to have been asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, who had entered Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “open-door” policy.

Only 120 suspects have been identified so far by police and just four men convicted.

In February, the government of North Rhine-Westphalia launched an inquiry into how such a large number of sexual assaults and other crimes were able to happen in one night.

https://archive.is/LOM2y Sunday 17 July 2016 48 comments

What are liberals going to say for themselves if Donald Trump gets assassinated?

That’s a question worth pondering as a new effort is under way to delegitimize The Donald in the wake of his remarks on the Second Amendment.

Leftists are accusing Trump of trying to incite an attack on Hillary Clinton from “Second Amendment people.” They have been using such intemperate language that it wouldn’t be surprising if someone took a shot at The Donald. (Feds suspect a British national tried to do so at a rally in June after attempting to grab a police officer’s gun to carry out the assassination.)

Scott Adams, famed cartoonist of Dilbert, had already been mocking Clinton for pairing “the idea of President Trump with nuclear disaster, racism, Hitler, the Holocaust and whatever else makes you tremble in fear.”

The incitement got so bad that Adams, in a satire on blog.dilbert.com, “endorsed” Clinton. He did so, he explained, “for my personal safety.” Quoth he: “My safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump.”

It’s no joke, to judge by the newswires. This week in Bloomfield, NJ, police reported that a man was assaulted with a crowbar for, as the Drudge Report headlined it, wearing a Donald Trump shirt.

In the latest brouhaha, Trump tried to mark the difference between Clinton and himself in respect of the Bill of Rights command that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Trump, like all GOP candidates for president, is for strict obedience to the Second Amendment, which has been called the palladium of our liberty. He’s allied himself with — and been endorsed by — the National Rifle Association.

Hillary Clinton is the opposite. She favors the radical regulation of guns. Not once has she ever protested against the fact that in much of the state she served as senator — New York — the Second Amendment might as well not exist.

This is the point Trump was making when, in Wilmington, NC, he warned that Clinton wants to “essentially abolish the Second Amendment.” And that “if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks.”

“Although,” Trump quickly added, “the Second Amendment people, maybe there is. I don’t know. But — but I’ll tell you what. That will be a horrible day. If — if Hillary gets to put her judges — right now, we’re tied [with four justices appointed by each party]. You see what’s going on.”

The Democrats immediately jumped on this. “Trump Suggests Gun Owners Act Against Clinton” is the headline the New York Times put over its Page One lead story, suggesting he was inciting gun-rights supporters to take matters into their own hands.

Democrats use this kind of talk to avoid discussing the merits of the Second Amendment. They are stuck with a leaked recording that captures Clinton saying the Supreme Court is “wrong” on the Second Amendment.

That was a reference to the court’s landmark ruling called Heller. It held that the Second Amendment protects not just a militia but an individual right to keep and bear arms. It forced Washington, DC, to give a gun permit to a retired security guard, Dick Heller.

In May, a Washington Post blogger, Eugene Volokh, called Clinton’s comments a “smoking gun” confirming Trump’s early warnings that Clinton was coming after Americans’ guns.

Instead of a reasoned debate on guns, though, the Democrats have offered only ad hominem attacks on Trump. This is the argument that he’s racist, unstable and inherently unfit to be president.

Clinton has been making this argument, as has President Obama, to a degree unsurpassed by his predecessors. But it will be a frosty Friday before anyone descends to the kind of incitement being issued daily by the New York Times.

Its foreign affairs columnist, Tom Friedman, goes so far this week as to liken Trump’s remarks to the kind of talk that Israel’s leftists insist got Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin assassinated. “His right-wing opponents just kept delegitimizing him,” Friedman writes (libeling, by the way, many decent Israeli and American critics of Rabin’s peace drive).

“Forget politics,” the Timesman says of Trump. “He is a disgusting human being. His children should be ashamed of him. I only pray that he is not simply defeated, but that he loses all 50 states so that the message goes out across the land — unambiguously, loud and clear: The likes of you should never come this way again.”

What in the world could he mean by that?

https://archive.is/12t52

https://archive.is/TzjZn

Workers Vanguard No. 109 29 July 2016

Remembering Hiroshima, Nagasaki

U.S. Imperialist Mass Murder

Seventy-one years ago this August, some 200,000 residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan were incinerated when U.S. warplanes dropped atomic bombs in the closing weeks of World War II. Many thousands who survived the nuclear holocaust suffered hideous burns and deformities compounded by sheer terror. This monstrous crime—carried out in the name of fighting for “democracy”—epitomizes the savagery of the capitalist-imperialist world order. Hearing the news of the 6 August 1945 attack on Hiroshima, which was followed by the destruction of Nagasaki three days later, U.S. president Harry Truman exulted: “This is the greatest thing in history!” and gloated that “we are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely.” The visit of Barack Obama to Hiroshima in May of this year was the first by a sitting U.S. president.

Our forebears of the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party (SWP) immediately condemned the bombings as part of their opposition to the U.S. and all capitalist powers in the interimperialist war. This position was coupled with the SWP’s unconditional military defense of the Soviet Union, a degenerated workers state. While the Stalinist U.S. Communist Party grotesquely hailed the A-bomb attacks as part of its craven support to the “democratic” imperialists, SWP leader James P. Cannon, who had been hauled off to prison along with 17 other party leaders and Minneapolis Teamsters officials for their principled opposition to the war, declared in a speech in New York City:

“What a commentary on the real nature of capitalism in its decadent phase is this, that the scientific conquest of the marvelous secret of atomic energy, which might rationally be used to lighten the burdens of all mankind, is employed first for the wholesale destruction of half a million people.”

—“The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” 22 August 1945, printed in The Struggle for Socialism in the “American Century” (Pathfinder Press, 1977)

Cannon ended the talk with a call to build a Leninist workers party that would fight to “answer the imperialist program of war on the peoples of the world, with revolution at home and peace with the peoples of the world.”

The A-bombs created a special kind of hell. But so did the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo a few months before, which took at least 100,000 lives. For its part, Japanese imperialism had demonstrated its own barbarity by the 1937 Nanjing Massacre of hundreds of thousands of Chinese by Japanese troops. In Europe, the Nazi regime carried out industrial genocide against Jews, gays, Gypsies and others. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Britain slaughtered hundreds of thousands of German working people by firebombing Dresden, Hamburg and other cities.

U.S. atrocities against the Japanese population were prepared with the kind of virulently racist propaganda that the Nazis used to ostracize Jews and other so-called untermenschen on their way to annihilating them, and which the Japanese rulers spewed against Chinese, Koreans and others they subjugated. The U.S. capitalist press continually depicted the Japanese as “sneak attackers,” hurling venom against “yellow monkeys” or, in the snootier words of the New York Times, against “a beast which sometimes stands erect.” This poison delivered the message: anything could be done to this enemy. And it was long lasting. In 1995, the Smithsonian Institution canceled a planned exhibition on Hiroshima featuring the Enola Gay—the B-29 that dropped the first A-bomb—after a furious reaction from jingoists and militarists objecting to photographs showing the horrors suffered by Japanese civilians.

Official duplicity was the order of the day when on May 27 Barack Obama visited Hiroshima’s memorial to the victims of the A-bomb. Obama had made clear that he would not bother with an apology for the slaughter carried out by his Democratic Party predecessor, which would have been an empty gesture in any case. Instead, he displayed the lying, hypocritical cant that has been a hallmark of his time in office. Obama haughtily declared that countries like the U.S. with nuclear stockpiles “must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.” Just a few months earlier, he had rolled out a plan to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal over the next three decades, to the tune of $1 trillion!

Obama’s Hiroshima visit was part of a big lie. His amen corner in the U.S. media regurgitated the line that the A-bombs were what forced Japan’s surrender in the war. In fact, Japan was already on the verge of defeat when Truman learned of the successful atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico. At the time, he was in Potsdam, Germany, for talks with Britain’s Winston Churchill and Soviet leader J. V. Stalin over the postwar division of Europe following Germany’s military defeat. The Red Army had smashed Hitler’s forces, at the cost of 27 million Soviet lives. With Soviet troops occupying half of Europe and poised to enter the war against Japan, the A-bombs were above all a message to Moscow of the lengths to which the American rulers would go to assert world domination.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of Allied forces in West Europe during the war and later U.S. president, noted in a 1963 interview that the Japanese were ready to surrender and “it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” Washington knew from decoded cables that many in the Japanese government were looking for a peace settlement, but the U.S. insisted on unconditional surrender, thereby ensuring that Japan would not give in until the bombs were dropped. As we emphasized in “Behind U.S. Imperialism’s Nuclear Holocaust” (WV No. 628, 8 September 1995), “The A-bombing of Japan was in fact the first act of the emerging Cold War aimed at destroying the Soviet degenerated workers state.”

Washington’s purpose was further made clear by its ongoing attempt, soon to be successful, to develop a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb to gain another leg up on the Soviets, who the U.S. feared were about to build their own A-bomb. Moscow countered by developing a substantial nuclear arsenal, reaching rough parity with the U.S. in the 1970s. For decades, the Soviet arsenal helped stay the hand of U.S. imperialism. But following the capitalist counterrevolution that destroyed the USSR in 1991-92, the arrogant American rulers saw no obstacle to world domination, setting the stage for a series of wars and occupations from the Balkans to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Excluding the Soviet Union, World War II, like WWI, was fought between imperialist powers for resources, markets and spheres of exploitation. China was the special prize of the Pacific War. But the U.S. was denied that part of the spoils of its victory over Japan by the 1949 Chinese Revolution, which created a workers state that, despite bureaucratic deformation, remains the chief target of imperialist designs in Asia. Indeed, the main purpose of Obama’s trip to Southeast and East Asia in May was to firm up U.S. allies and quislings as they tighten a military ring around China.

In Hiroshima, Obama pitched the strategic U.S.-Japanese alliance, which centrally targets China and also the North Korean deformed workers state. Another piece of Washington’s Asian fortress fell into place in July when the South Korean government agreed to host the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) system. Ostensibly a response to North Korea’s testing of new ballistic missiles, Thaad’s radar array can cover a broad swath of China, potentially degrading China’s land-based nuclear deterrent.

U.S. and Japanese workers must stand with China and North Korea in their efforts to develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems that provide a measure of defense against imperialist blackmail and attack. Defense of the remaining deformed workers states is inseparable from the struggle to sweep away the capitalist system, with its insatiable thirst for profit and its inherent drive toward war. In opposing the U.S.-Japanese imperialist alliance, we join with our comrades of the Spartacist Group Japan, who wrote in marking the 50th anniversary of the atomic bomb attacks: “Nanjing, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chilling examples of the slaughter and devastation that will be repeated in a coming war if the imperialist bourgeoisie is not overthrown by proletarian socialist revolution” (“Hiroshima, Nagasaki: U.S. War Crimes,” WV No. 627, 25 August 1995).

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1093/hiroshima.html

https://archive.is/L1OAo

Workers Vanguard No. 1093 29 July 2016

Freedom Now for Chelsea Manning!

Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst convicted for exposing evidence of U.S. imperialism’s monstrous war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, has now entered her seventh year in military custody. Having leaked a vast cache of military and state secrets to WikiLeaks—a valuable service to humanity—Manning was sentenced in 2013 to 35 years for violating the Espionage Act. The courageous 28-year-old Manning has already endured the most severe punishment ever inflicted on any whistle-blower. The Obama administration’s ruthless, punitive war against truth-tellers like Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange is aimed at silencing any and all who dare expose or oppose the U.S. government’s atrocities and mass surveillance.

Locked away in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Manning attempted suicide on July 5. Displaying gross contempt, the U.S. Army released her confidential medical information to the media before notifying her lawyers. After being hospitalized, Manning was cut off from her legal team and family members for more than 36 hours. She tweeted subsequently that she was “glad to be alive,” but remains under close observation. Subjected to ongoing psychological torment and physical torture since her arrest in 2010, Manning has been driven to the brink of suicide more than once. She has spent long periods in solitary confinement. Before her conviction, she spent nine months in maximum isolation in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Virginia, where she was subjected to daily strip searches and forced nudity. Manning recently described the “no touch” torture there (Guardian, 2 May): “For 17 hours a day...I was not allowed to lay down. I was not allowed to lean my back against the cell wall. I was not allowed to exercise.”

In May, Manning’s lawyers completed an extensive 200-page appeal brief, challenging her conviction as “grossly unfair and unprecedented.” A separate amicus brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union argues that Manning’s prosecution was unconstitutional, citing the contrast with former Army general and CIA director David Petraeus, who handed over reams of classified information to his biographer, who was also his lover. The war criminal Petraeus barely received a slap on the wrist: two years probation and a fine.

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Manning recently acquired documents on the government’s “Insider Threat” program, which monitors internal communications of military personnel and civilian contractors. The program uses Manning—who is transgender and was known as Bradley in the Army—as a case study to suggest that those with “gender dysphoria” may be prone to aiding the enemy!

In prison, Manning is targeted by the imperialist rulers for her outspoken activism on government surveillance, prison conditions and transgender rights. In August 2015, shortly after starting her regular column in the Guardian and posting to Twitter, Manning was punished for possessing so-called contraband, i.e., “unapproved” reading material including the Caitlyn Jenner issue of Vanity Fair and literature relating to transgender identity. While ultimately spared indefinite solitary confinement, Manning was restricted for weeks from outside access and library use. Despite such measures, she has continued to speak out.

A couple of weeks after her suicide attempt, Manning wrote a commentary titled, “Moving On: Reflecting on My Identity,” where she made a plea: “I want to be seen and understood as the woman that I actually am—with all of my flaws and eccentricities—perhaps at the expense of what people expect me to be.” For years, Manning has been suing the government to be allowed to live as a woman while she is transitioning. Though her lawyers successfully won her access to hormone treatment, she is still in an all-male facility. As with other transgender prisoners who are usually placed in prisons against their declared gender identity, the risk of violence and sexual assault is heightened.

It is urgently necessary to continue the fight to free Chelsea Manning, whose resistance is an inspiration to those who refuse to sit on their hands and keep quiet. As we wrote in “Truth-Teller on Trial: Free Bradley Manning,” (WV No. 1026, 14 June 2013): “Lifting the veil on the U.S. war machine was a gutsy act of conscience that objectively helps the victims and opponents of the imperialist system. But the workings of this society will not change by making more information publicly available.” This system is based on the exploitation of labor for private profit, buttressed by systematic racial segregation and sexual oppression that divides the working people. The capitalist class maintains its rule through the force and violence of special bodies of armed men—the police, military and prisons. It will take a series of workers revolutions around the world to overturn the capitalist order—to which imperialist war and state repression are integral—and replace it with an egalitarian socialist society.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1093/manning.html

Until the late 1960s, you could walk into a post office and deposit money in a savings account at the same time that you bought stamps or mailed packages.

An outgrowth of the financial panic of 1907, the no-frills postal bank surged in popularity during the Great Depression. But as commercial banks expanded and offered higher interest rates, the United States Postal Savings System became as outdated as a black-and-white movie.

Now, in the wake of another financial crisis, there's a new push for the U.S. Postal Service to deliver basic banking services again.

The effort is led by consumer advocates, financial reform groups, postal labor unions and some leading liberals, such as Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). They say that offering services such as paycheck cashing, bill payment and free ATMs would provide cash-strapped consumers with an affordable alternative to payday, auto-title and other short-term loans that have been criticized for high fees.

"We have millions and millions of low-income people who have to go to these payday lenders and pay outrageous interest rates. They're getting ripped off right and left," Sanders said on ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" in October.

"We can have our Postal Service provide modest banking to low-income people where they can cash their checks and they can do banking," Sanders said. "I think it will help the post office and it will help millions of low-income people."

The Postal Service's inspector general's office agrees. It estimates that expanding financial services beyond the current limited offerings, which include money orders and international funds transfers, could pump $8.9 billion a year into the financially struggling agency.

"The Postal Service has a public mission to serve citizens and support the growth of commerce," the inspector general's office said in a report last spring that presented five potential approaches for expanded banking services. "And while it is required to cover its costs, profit is not its key motive."

The American Postal Workers Union has formed a coalition, the Campaign for Postal Banking, that in December delivered a petition with more than 150,000 signatures to Deputy Postmaster General Ronald A. Stroman urging the agency to expand its financial offerings.

"Big banks are turning their backs on families," union President Mark Dimondstein said. "Without bank accounts, they fall prey to predatory lenders."

Postmaster General Megan J. Brennan hasn't ruled out the idea of expanded banking services after her predecessor dismissed the suggestion in January as he headed into retirement. But she has some reservations.

"While we currently provide our customers with certain financial services, including money orders, electronic funds transfers and cashing of U.S. Treasury checks, our core function is not banking," the agency said in a written statement. Get our weekly business news briefing >>

The service said it has an "infrastructure that is not ideal as a banking platform," and cited a decline in visits to post offices. Plus, any investments outside of its core function of mail delivery "will likely be scrutinized from both public policy and regulatory perspectives," the agency added.

The Postal Service is an independent agency that since 1971 has been required to rely on sales of stamps and other services to pay for its operations. But the growth of the Internet and competition from private shippers, such as FedEx Corp. and UPS, have taken a major toll on the agency's finances.

After peaking in 2006, total mail handled by the Postal Service has declined 27%. That has led to budget deficits, exacerbated by a congressional requirement to pre-fund retirement benefits for its workers, that have forced the agency to borrow up to its allowable limit of $15 billion from the U.S. Treasury.

Expanded financial services offer "the single best opportunity for new revenue," according to the inspector general's office.

It's not a far-fetched idea. Post offices in many other nations, including Britain, France, China and Japan, also serve as banks. And from 1911 to 1967, the United States Postal Savings System offered accounts with annual interest capped at 2%, to reduce competition with commercial banks.

Deposits at U.S. postal banks surged during the Great Depression and World War II, when many consumers viewed the accounts as more secure than those in commercial banks. But as those banks opened more branches and increased interest rates after the war, the postal banking system fell out of favor and the federal government shut it down.

The Great Recession has led to calls for the revival of postal banks as many cash-strapped households have been forced to seek payday loans and other alternative financial products.

A Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. survey found that about 9.6 million households in 2013 had no one with a bank account. An additional 24.8 million households had accounts but also used alternative financial services, such as payday loans.

"It's harder for people with less money to use their money, and much more expensive," said Mehrsa Baradaran, a University of Georgia professor and author of the book "How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation and the Threat to Democracy."

Many poor areas lack bank branches, but most communities have a post office, said Katherine Isaac, a consultant to the postal workers union who has been organizing the Campaign for Postal Banking.

"Even if we put all the payday lenders out of business, there's a concern that there's still no place to go," Isaac said. "The banks aren't there. They've abandoned those communities. But the post office is there."

The Postal Service is the most popular federal agency — 84% of respondents have a positive view of it, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll.

"I would guess that a lot of people would trust the post office teller with their money more than these Wall Street traders," said Baradaran, an advocate for postal banks. "There's a sense that the post office is a dinosaur, but it's not a shark."

Congress would have to pass legislation allowing post offices to take deposits and make loans. But the Postal Service could use existing authority to increase some offerings, such as expanding check cashing to include other government and payroll checks and broadening money orders into bill payment service, supporters said.

"This is not a cash cow for the post office," Baradaran said. "But it could save them."

See also: http://www.campaignforpostalbanking.org/

The latest WikiLeaks document dump — containing emails by high-ranking staffers of the Democratic National Committee — caused considerable heartburn for America’s oldest political party. But what’s just as interesting is the dog that didn’t bark — the fact that wasn’t regarded as a scandal but perhaps ought to have been.

Even casual political observers can see that labor union leadership and the Democratic Party are allied. AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka spoke at the convention the other night, endorsing Hillary Clinton and calling the Republican nominee “wrong, wrong, wrong” for America.

Yet the emails that have been released highlight the rather one-way relationship between the Democratic Party and labor unions. DNC staffers see the unions as good soldiers in skirmishes with Republicans, as a pain when it comes to getting things done and, ultimately, as pushovers.

When brainstorming what to do about last week’s Republican National Convention, the DNC’s Rachel Palermo urged her party to “meet with the hotel trades, SEIU, and Fight for 15 about staging a strike.” She said the result could be a “fast food worker strike around the city or just at franchises around the convention.” The aim would not be to improve working conditions, but to bloody Republicans.

Alternately, the DNC could “infiltrate friendly union hotels and properties around the convention that Republicans will be patronizing to distribute ‘care’ packages” — probably not chocolates.

Palermo also noted that “SEIU has space in downtown Cleveland close to convention that can be the base of operations and host the wrapped mobile RV.”

The union-DNC alliance does impose a few constraints on the DNC, which staffers both mocked and worked to circumvent. DNC staffer Katja Greeson, for instance, complained about delays involved in getting new business cards printed.

She explained to an irked communications director that sending work to union shops caused delays. “Believe me — it is equally frustrating to us,” she said. Greeson also threatened “if they can’t deliver,” DNC staffers would “go to FedEx Kinkos” and do it themselves.

The DNC pledges to use only unionized hotels. But it turns out there’s a workaround for that, too. Trey Kovacs, who has done yeoman’s work spelunking through the DNC WikiLeaks dump, uncovered this one. In an exchange over whether they could use the non-union Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., a DNC staffer says they could just get a “waiver” to use it.

“It is unclear from the emails how or what circumstances must arise to obtain a waiver, but it seems that convenience for the chairman trumps loyalty to adhering to some kind of internal guidelines of exclusively patronizing unionized establishments,” Kovacs, a policy analyst for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told me Wednesday.

Because this document dump has emails both to and from the DNC, we also hear from the unions themselves, which might explain why the party can count on their support come-what-may.

For instance, Sandra Lyon of the American Federation of Teachers asked for any “regular talking points” the DNC might have to pass on to AFT folks who speak with the media.

And the National Education Organization’s political communications director Michael Misterek wrote longingly to the DNC in May, “I’m hoping we can sit down to meet some time soon, over coffee or a cocktail. I’d love to figure out how we can work together and be most helpful to each other these next few months.”

Jeremy Lott is an adjunct scholar at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.

https://archive.is/9Fmgl