Bissell workers fight for their jobs

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CHICAGO—Seventy warehouse workers near Joliet, Ill., are fighting for their jobs after being fired en masse after the workers filed for union representation. The workers are employed in a warehouse owned by giant vacuum cleaner company Bissell Homecare.

Workers were fed up with their employer’s violation of workers’ rights. On Oct, 29 the workers informed the employer that they had joined the United Electrical Workers (UE). The workers also filed legal complaints and charges regarding violations of federal and state labor law including the Fair Labor Standards Act which governs minimum wage laws; the Day Labor And Temporary Services Act, an Illinois state law that regulates temporary employment agencies’ the National Labor Relations Act, which includes workers right to union representation; and the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination.

On Nov. 6 all 70 employees were fired in retaliation. The warehouse is managed by Maersk Distribution, and the workers themselves are employed through a temp agency called Roadlink. Bissell warehouse workers and supporters, including workers from the successful Republic Windows and Doors factory occupation, held a rally outside the warehouse two days later, and UE and Warehouse Workers for Justice, a workers’ rights center initiated by UE, have organized a letter writing campaign to both Bissell and Maersk demanding that the workers be rehired.

Supporters of the workers held a rally outside of Bissell’s headquarters in Grand Rapids, Mich. These actions have already had an impact. Feeling the pressure of the movement, Roadlink decided to continue to pay workers in accordance with the WARN act.

Warehouse Workers for Justice has launched a campaign to educate and assist workers in the massive warehouse districts in Chicago’s suburbs. Like Bissell’s warehouse, most of these facilities employ workers through temp agencies. Pay and working conditions are appalling.

A victory for the Bissell warehouse workers would be a major step forward for all warehouse workers in the Chicago area. For more information on the campaign and how to help visit www.warehouseworker.org. n Socialist Action decemBER 2009 3

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... More troops to Afghanistan (continued from page 1: “UC students & workers protest fee hikes, layoffs”)

not forget it again, as it did after the end of the AfghanSoviet war.

Obama’s speech was carefully crafted to reassure the right wing, and for that it even drew praise from Republican heavy Karl Rove. But the president failed to mollify a lot of liberals and progressives. The outcries of betrayal of some of the liberal columnists on the Huffington Post are piteous to behold. Some of them complained that he chose West Point as the platform for his speech. But they were merely fooling themselves. To play to a right-wing audience, Obama needed to appeal specifically to the military chiefs.

One of the Huffington commentators, David Sirota, asked: “Where’s the antiwar movement and the marches and the organizing and the protesting? Where are all those well-funded groups that protested George W. Bush’s war policy? Or was all that really just about hating George Bush and embracing blind Partisan War Syndrome?”

The answer is that broad sections of the antiwar movement believed that Obama offered a change from the war policies of Bush and the neo-cons. He had such a different image and style from Bush. But then, lo and behold, he turned out to be just a bourgeois politician. Fooled again!

And like any of the second team of defenders of the capitalist system, liberals or Social Democrats, Obama, once in office, has to demonstrate to the ruling class that he is as devoted to their interests as their first team, the right wing. The liberals should really be angry at themselves for their gullibility, and not Obama.

One of the Huffington Post columnists, Robert Borsage, did point to the handwriting on the wall: “... his speech left me with a haunting foreboding. Surely this is the way that great imperial powers decline. Their soldiers police the ends of the earth. There is always another enemy, always a threat—sometimes imagined, often real—that must be faced. And meanwhile, the productive economy declines, the rich live increasingly off investments abroad, the poor depend on public sustenance, the middle declines. No battle is so costly that it cannot be afforded. ... The secret state expands. The country finds itself constantly at war.”

This is, in fact, the general pattern of the decline of every empire in history, the capitalist empires of England, the Netherlands, and Portugal—like the slave empire of Rome. The features are apparent in the now obvious decline of American capitalism. Inevitably, the dynamic of empire comes into conflict with the needs of the survival of the empire itself. The American ruling class is plummeting from one disaster to another, unable to withdraw from its adventures.

Obama presented the Iraq war as a victory, although admittedly a costly one. In fact, after the expenditure of a trillion dollars, more than 4000 American lives, and the ruin of a country, the U.S. has scored no lasting political or economic gains and is likely to have worked against its own geopolitical ends by dumping Iraq into the lap of Iran. U.S. businesses and private armies like Blackwater (now “Xe”) netted huge profits, but at the expense of the system on which they depend.

While the liberal and progressive commentators did not take up Obama’s claims of U.S. “achievement” in Iraq, some of them did point out the obvious reasons why the escalation is not likely lead to any “achievement.” The Afghan government in whose defense the U.S. is supposedly pouring out its treasure and the blood of its young adults is even more ineffectual than the U.S. client government in Iraq. It has virtually no political authority. Even the base it did have when the 4 Socialist Action decemBER 2009 Ishtiag Mehsud / AP U.S. intervention put it in office, the Northern Alliance, may now be crumbling.

The Taliban have been able to extend their operations to the north, threatening a new U.S. supply line (The New York Times, Nov. 27). Of course, the northern area to which the Taliban has expanded, Kunduz, is about half Pushtun, the ethnic base of the Taliban.

There is no indication yet that the ethnic groups that have been hostile to the Taliban—the Tadzhiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Dari-speaking people—are now going over to the Taliban. But there are indications that the insurgency is becoming generally nationalist, anti-foreign. A series of interviews that Newsweek did with Taliban supporters showed that it was the U.S. occupation and the military means supporting it, air power, that revived the Taliban, after it had suffered a disastrous defeat when the U.S. first intervened.

A number of commentators pointed out that there is no reason to think that the Karzai government and its security forces will ever be self-sustaining. A case-hardened counter-revolutionary politician with East European sophistication, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was cited in a Dec. 3 article in the Huffington Post as saying: “To talk of an Afghan national army is to talk of something that is ultimately not possible.” Brzezinski, a Polish anti-Communist émigré, was one of the strongest advocates of waging a covert war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

An article in the Dec. 3 British Guardian also noted doubts about the prospects of building an effective Afghan national army: “Sceptics point to desertion rates among army recruits of about 16%—one US estimate puts it as high as 25%—as evidence that the new Afghan army will not hold together. Defections by police recruits are said to be even higher...” The author, Simon Tisdall, noted that the Taliban has managed to infiltrate the police and that a Taliban mole killed five British soldiers.

Obama and the U.S. commanders are in fact talking about deals with local strongmen that will not go through the so-called Afghan national government. But the British military that fought in Afghanistan in the 19th century capsulized its experience with the nostrum that it is possible “to rent” but not to “buy” Afghan tribal leaders—that is, they shift their deals depending on their convenience. Moreover, Afghanistan has a tradition of corrupt warlordism that makes deals with tribal leaders and local gangs more complicated and politically disruptive than it was in Iraq.

Also, such practices undermine the argument against the Taliban. For all its ruthlessness and theocratic dogmatism, the Taliban did offer a respite from factionalism and chronic civil war in most of the country.

Although Brzezinski expressed a lack of confidence in the effectiveness of the Afghan government, he expressed an Old World realism in responding to accusations of its corruption: “’Who are we to seriously be preaching [such] a crusade?” he asked. “We have a financial sector that is voraciously greedy and exploitative, to put it mildly. We have a Congress which is not immune to special interests. And we have an electoral system that is based largely on private donations which precipitate expectations of rewards. The notion of us going to the Afghans and preaching purity is comical. ... I think we should just quit that stuff.”

Such frankness inadvertently points up the problem. The U.S. Afghan war is thieves dealing with thieves, and as the richest of thieves the U.S. and its private enterprise parasites are not necessarily the cleverest.

In the Nov. 30 issue of The Nation, Aran Roston revealed how the U.S. government transfers funds through a tangled network of private intermediar(Photo) Pakistani Talaban head Hakimullah Mehsud (left) at meeting with media in South Waziristan tribal area, Oct. 4. Mehsud vowed retaliation for increasing U.S. drone attacks in the region.

ies to the Taliban: “In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. … In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts—hundreds of millions of dollars—consists of payments to insurgents.”

But the complications of this privatization go far beyond filling the enemy’s coffers. The practice has also led the U.S. into a deep covert involvement in Pakistan, which could ultimately be a much bigger powder keg than Afghanistan. In its Nov. 23 issue, The Nation revealed that Blackwater, now “Xe Services” is carrying out an extensive covert operation within Pakistan that includes targeted assassinations and kidnappings.

The Nation offered some convincing testimony: “The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater’s involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so ‘compartmentalized’ that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.”

Or maybe they don’t want to know. The article continued: “’This is a parallel operation to the CIA,’ said the source. ‘They are two separate beasts.’ The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war—knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan.”

Blackwater operatives are generally former military specialists trained in the most sophisticated forms of murder, who collect huge bounties and live the lives of adventurers. It is hard for them to be invisible. And sooner or later, some of them are going to be caught, as four were in Falluja, where they were lynched by the local population. That incident led the U.S. forces to destroy the city, and the population is still suffering from the pollution caused by the weapons used.

If the U.S. Murder Inc. operations make messes in Pakistan, that will overshadow the worst that happened in Iraq. The Pakistani government is notoriously unstable and disrespected and there is abundant evidence of complicity with jihadists in the military and intelligence services.

At the moment, the big business press claims that a majority of Pakistanis support military operations against the Taliban. But that is a recent development, apparently owing to the Taliban’s overreaching itself. Past polls showed that a majority of Pakistanis blamed the U.S. for the jihadist violence. And all observers attest to a high level of anti-Americanism in Pakistan.

Overall, the Huffington Post columnist’s dire view of the writing on the wall looks credible. And when empires reach this stage of decay, it’s difficult for the rulers to change course. In the American war effort there are just too many irresponsible private interests involved for the national administration to be able to defend the interests of the system as a whole effectively.

Moreover, the right-wing offensive that reached its peak under Bush has created a rabidly reactionary public opinion, the crazy one fourth of the U.S. population who will stand in the way of any intelligent maneuvering by the top leadership of U.S. capitalism.

The real rulers, unlike their right-wing fan club, are not ignorant or deluded. You cannot make huge fortunes without a certain grasp of reality. But maneuvers by the real rulers often create bitterness among the right. Look at the many statements by ex-military that the U.S. was not really defeated in Vietnam but that “weak-kneed politicians sold us out.” There were similar statements in right-wing blogs and Tea-Party rallies that Obama would prove himself a traitor if he withdrew from Afghanistan short of “victory.”

This out-of-control plunge into military adventures generates poisons that flow back into the American body politic itself. The only way that this process can be stopped is for the American people to take control of their country’s future by mobilizing against the war intoxication. And they can do that only if they organize independently of the political parties controlled by capitalism and which serve capitalism.

The delusion that it was possible to turn the U.S. toward humane social values by supporting an apparently more liberal capitalist candidate for president has now been dramatically exposed. Hopefully, the lesson will sink in for those who genuinely want to stop the slaughter of the innocent and the waste of American lives—and those of soldiers from allied nations— and to pull the U.S. out of its slide into ruin. n

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U.S. antiwar movement protests Obama plan to escalate Afghan war Socialist Action decemBER 2009 5 President Barack Obama’s nationally televised speech on Dec. 1 at the West Point Military Academy announcing that 30,000 more U.S. combat troops would be sent to Afghanistan served to open a small crack in the wall of deference to the president that has to date prevailed in the antiwar movement and limited its power. Obama’s assertion that his troop surge, as with President Bush’s Iraq surge before him, would be followed 18 months later with the “beginning” of a withdrawal of all U.S. troops, has been met with nearly unanimous opposition from antiwar activists.

“Surge” has become the polite codeword for mass slaughter—for the world’s most powerful nation destroying one of the world’s poorest. It is code for the use of super-technology and now 100,000 troops and additional mercenaries to continue an eight-year war against a few al-Qaida forces and a rag-tag group of Taliban fighters, whose growing support and control over large swaths of the country, despite their regressive social views, is directly proportional to the hatred of the Afghan people for the U.S. occupiers. Eighty-five percent of Afghanis oppose the U.S. war and occupation.

Despite a gesture to his liberal supporters in rejecting an “opened-ended” commitment to Afghanistan and the corrupt Hamid Karzai government, Obama made clear that “conditions on the ground” would be the determining factor as to when or if the U.S. would withdraw.

Meanwhile, plans are underway to beef up CIA funding for covert actions in Pakistan and Afghanistan to locate “enemy” encampments and pass on the information to Nevada facilities that direct lethal Predator drone aircraft flying two miles above the earth to attack and destroy any target.

Obama’s special diplomat for the region, Richard Holbrooke, similarly announced that the previously secret negotiations with the Taliban would now be placed on the front burner as part of the U.S. strategy to simultaneously negotiate and murder. From the beginning, the issue for U.S. imperialism has never been whether the Taliban—who the U.S. supported, financed, and armed in the past—must go but rather whether they would accede to U.S. demands for increased control and influence in Afghanistan.

The antiwar movement’s response to Obama’s escalation was immediate and angry, but far from what is needed to offer a decisive challenge to the U.S. warmakers. “Day After” protests were organized across the country, but their size and scope differed little from the Oct. 17 nationally coordinated protests that totaled 5000 in 54 cities—which had been initiated by the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occu... Student protest (continued from page 1: “UC students & workers protest fee hikes, layoffs”)

education, from K-12 through university level, from students to teachers to workers. The conference voted to build for the Nov. 18-20 actions as well as to unify with all sectors of public education on March 4 for a unified statewide strike/day of action.

The actions were a combination strike and student mobilization. On Nov. 18-19, UC Berkeley University Professional and Technical Employees Local 9119 went on strike, with locals from the AFT and Coalition of University Employees joining them.

On Nov. 18, UC Berkeley pickets arrived at 5 a.m., and 50 construction workers refused to cross the picket lines. A rally of 2500 was held at noon, and an energetic march proceeded through the city to Berkeley High School and Berkeley City College. In the evening, some protesters occupied an administrative building but were quickly removed by police.

On the 19th, pickets began at 5 a.m. again, but apparently management or union bureaucrats had intimidated the construction workers and they went to work. At noon the unions led a march around campus to various administrators’ offices to demand meetings.

Teach-ins had been organized that day by faculty and students, but the police shut down one of the spaces in which they were planned, thus blocking many of the pations. In San Francisco and Los Angeles some 300 mobilized on Dec. 2, the day after Obama’s speech. Two New York City protests each drew some 150 activists; 200 took to the streets in Boston, with smaller numbers in most other cities.

A number of antiwar groups and activists have been shaken by Obama’s Bushlike saber rattling. Some 34 of them were joined by major Out Now! coalitions and networks in drafting an effective open letter to Obama demanding an “end to the U.S. wars now” and expressing strong opposition to the U.S. escalation.

Similarly, some 100 activist groups and individuals set Dec. 12 as a protest in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Park. Their new coalition, End US Wars, states on its website, “It’s high time Obama, Pelosi, and Reid heard a clear message from a resurgent antiwar movement demanding no escalation and an immediate pullout of all US forces from Afghanistan and Iraq, including an immediate halt to Predator drone attacks and CIA operations in the region. Come to the rally and let our voices be heard!” [emphasis in original].

The antiwar movement still has some ground to cover in order to close the gap between the mass majority antiwar sentiment and its expression in the streets. For the time being, lingering illusions in Obama combine with the hammer blows of the economic crisis to retard the movement’s progress.

The same must be said for virtually evVery social movement. The economic crisis has momentarily stunned large numbers of workers, who have yet to conclude that trillion-dollar war budgets and multi-trillion-dollar bank bailouts have been made at their expense, and must be challenged in the workplaces and streets of the nation. The present crop of labor misleaders, which is unmatched in its subservience to the boss class in the modern era, has contributed to the delay in class-struggle challenges to capital’s deepening assault.

But even here important cracks are appearing that bode well for future mobilizations. “We need to stop the war in Afghanistan and focus the nation’s attention on the fight for jobs, education, health care and pensions,” said a November resolution approved by the Wisconsin AFL-CIO. Another, calling for a March on Washington for “Peace, Jobs and Health Care Justice,” not war, was unanimously approved by the Troy, N.Y., Labor Council.

The San Francisco Labor Council similarly called for a Solidarity Day III national labor mobilization linking the billions wasted on war to the need for a massive program for jobs, education, and health care.

The Nov. 21-22 San Francisco meeting of the Coordinating Committee of the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations was optimistic about prospects for a reversal of the present malaise. It approved an alleducational activities.

During the afternoon, word was received that the Board of Regents had voted to increase student fees. Anger and frustration spread rapidly. At an evening mass meeting, the majority of students voted to occupy campus buildings the next day—as had occurred in Los Angeles and Santa Cruz. A mass rally and march to the police station to denounce their violations of free speech was also planned.

On Friday, Nov. 20, militancy exploded. Some students began to occupy Wheeler Hall, one of the central buildings on campus. The cops were there at 6 a.m. and blocked off the vicinity with yellow tape. Three of the occupiers were arrested in the early morning, and two were beaten by the cops.

By 11 a.m., about 1000 angry students had massed around Wheeler Hall, effectively shutting down a whole section of the campus with their picket line. By noon, it was raining hard, but that didn’t scare people away. Police from the cities of Berkeley and Oakland were brought in, as were Alameda County Sheriff deputies, all suited in riot gear and armed with batons, rubber bullets, plastic handcuffs, and tear gas.

Chants were spirited, including a very funny one directed at the riot cops: “You’re sexy, you’re cute, take off that riot suit!” as well as “No cuts, no fees, education should be free!” “Lay off Yudof [president of the UC]!” “UC regents, I see tyrants!” “Whose university? Our university!” S.F. Chronicle (Left) San Francisco protest was part of nationwide actions initiated by the National Assembly for Oct. 17.

out effort to build the bi-coastal Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles antiwar protests called for March 20, the seventh anniversary of the Iraq War. The National Assembly will mobilize to demand “Close All Military Bases and Bring the Troops Home Now from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan! as well as for its traditional demands opposing U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine and for massive funds for jobs, human needs and the environment.

In an effort to bring new forces into the movement, the National Assembly is organizing a campaign to win the broadest possible labor and student endorsement and support for March 20. The recent student strike at Berkeley and other University of California campuses makes it clear that many students understand the distorted priorities of a government that cuts billions from education while spending billions on war.

The National Assembly’s “Call to Action,” entitled “For a United Antiwar Movement to End the Wars Now,” states, “We urge support [to March 20] for these critical demands: “Increase Spending by Hundreds of Billions for Jobs, Health Care, Education, Housing and the Environment! End U.S. Wars, Occupations and Corporate Bailouts Now and Use the Money to Meet Human Needs!” This sharp focus and linkage of the economic crisis to the government’s obscene military spending is aimed at engaging labor and its allies as active participants in the March 20 mobilizations.

The March 20 actions were initiated by the ANSWER Coalition, which has urged other groups to issue their own mobilization calls. The National Assembly voted to use the opportunity to deepen its efforts to forge a democratic, united, mass action, “Out Now!” and independent movement, in which diverse antiwar components come together in periodic open conferences to decide the movement’s strategy and tactics. As with the labor movement, the democratic participation of the antiwar movement’s activist ranks is critical to their empowerment and to the emergence of a new generation of militant and experienced fighters.

For further information, contact the National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations at: natassembly.org, [email protected], (216) 736-4704. n The 40 Wheeler Hall occupiers came up with four demands that were not the demands of the movement but ones they felt could be fulfilled by the Berkeley administration: Rehire the 38 laid-off AFSCME janitors, amnesty for the occupiers and others who were arrested during the protest, maintain the low-income housing in the Roachdale cooperative, and renew a storefront lease to immigrant-owned food venders at the previous rate. The first demand illustrates the main strength of the movement right now: the strong unity forged between workers and students.

The police and the administration eventually realized that instead of dissipating, the crowd was actually growing. Throughout the day, thousands of students joined in the rally and denounced the administration and their police lackeys.

At about 8 p.m., the 40 occupiers began to be released, the police chief agreeing not to arrest them but “only” to issue misdemeanor trespassing citations for occupying a public building at their own school. None of the demands the occupiers had raised were met. However, as they exited the building in groups of three, they were greeted by huge cheers.

The demonstrations and strike are a direct challenge to the UC administration’s privatization schemes (promising future fee hikes as collateral), as well as to the state of California’s antisocial priorities in the face of the economic crisis. Students, workers, and teachers are determinedly fighting back. n