Connecticut organizes for $15

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HARTFORD—In Connecticut, activists have been going out two and three times a weekend to meet low-wage workers and urge them to join the campaign for $15 and a union. Activists meet at a des­ ignated time and place and then fan out to the many fast-food joints situated in a certain shopping area, armed with talk­ ing points and pledge cards.

Chris, a Hartford Teamster who works at UPS, said that his experience at a McDon­ ald’s restaurant was very moving. “Work­ ers we met on their shift change looked tired but were eager to talk about what a pay raise would mean to them,” he said.

Some, sensing the watchful gaze of management, were a bit tentative, Chris reported, but others, he said, “showed no fear.” Most volunteer organizers decided that it was best to wait around and ap­ proach workers when they were outside taking their break or eating their lunch.

One of the talking points was that fastfood employees in Denmark were making the equivalent of $20 an hour. The folks behind the counter expressed surprise, of course, and once the volunteers had their attention, they went on to tell the story of the tough five-year campaign that was waged to get the union that won this wage.

All this union talk attracted the atten­ tion of some Walmart workers eating at McDonald’s on their break. Once they heard the talking points, they announced that they would bring coworkers to the April 15 Hartford action for $15.

Volunteers did not do all the talking. They also did a lot of listening and heard some powerful stories about the struggle to live on today’s minimum wage. Emily, a Connecticut state worker, spent some time hearing the story of a kind female Subway worker who had been employed there for 15 years, made $10.10 an hour, and had trouble making her rent pay­ ment.

A student volunteer, Kevin, was sur­ prised to meet a recent immigrant from Africa at Dunkin’ Donuts, who was moved to tears when he realized that someone really cared to hear his tale.

The restaurant canvassing has affected the volunteer organizers as deeply as the low-wage workers they have met. It is turning out to be an addictive and politi­ cally empowering experience and volun­ teers return again and again. n

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... Stop Obama’s new ‘war on terrorism’

(continued from page 1: “Stop Obama’s new ‘war on terrorism’!”) tah el-Sisi, and his coup government removed Egypt’s elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, and proceeded to slaughter an estimat­ ed 12,000 Muslim Brotherhood followers?

In the same vein, but earlier, the U.S.-NATO “humani­ tarian war” in Libya, which destroyed that nation’s in­ frastructure and murdered countless thousands, end­ ed in chaos with Libya degenerating into innumerable warring factions, secular and otherwise, backed by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and other predators vying for Libya’s significant oil reserves. President Obama cyni­ cally noted last year, “We made a mistake in Libya. We didn’t have a plan for the day after.”(!) Obama failed to mention that the U.S. and its allies had handpicked the entire Libyan Transitional National Council and assigned it to “govern” that stricken nation.

Similarly, following the U.S. invasion, destruction, and occupation of Iraq, U.S. diplomat Paul Bremer was appointed by President Bush as head of state—the su­ preme authority—to govern that conquered nation until the new Nouri al-Maliki regime [since deposed under U.S. pressure] could be installed in elections su­ pervised by the U.S. military. The Maliki regime pro­ ceeded to hound and persecute Iraq’s Sunni minority while stealing Iraq’s resources for its own business elite—with the largest cut to U.S. oil corporations to be sure.

Times are tough for the U.S. behemoth when its trusted allies, as with the Saudi monarchy, are im­ plicated in the infamous 2001 bombing of the World Trade Center. The Feb. 5, New York Times couldn’t re­ sist pointing to the still classified 28 pages of a 2002 Senate Intelligence Committee report on the 9/11 bombing that pointed to “high level Saudi government funding” of the al-Qaeda bombers, the large majority of whom were Saudi citizens.

Massachusetts House Democrat Stephen Lynch un­ successfully placed a motion on the Senate floor to declassify these 28 pages of the government’s 2002 9/11 bombing report. George Bush ordered this em­ barrassing material classified. President Obama today concurs. Senator Bob Graham of Florida, who then chaired the Senate intelligence Committee, observed recently that the classified material “pointed a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as being the principal financier of 9/11.”

One congressional observer noted, “Proponents of releasing [the 28 page] Part 4, titled, ‘Findings, Dis­ cussion and Narrative Regarding Certain National Se­ curity Matters,’ suggested that “the Bush and Obama administrations have held it back for fear of alienating an influential military and economic partner rather than for any national security considerations.”

This astonishing statement and the emerging evi­ dence that the Saudis were key funders of the 9/11 bombing blows a gaping hole in the entire U.S. ratio­ nale for waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq—a war that has taken the lives of more than a million inno­ cents and a war that was launched under a mountain of lies! Yet in the twisted logic of U.S. imperialism and its loyal media, the truth is subordinate to the needs of the .0001 percent—the unbridled and real leaders of the U.S. “Empire.”

Saudi Arabia, with the world’s largest oil reserves and a dominant player in setting the world price of oil, is no newcomer to political intrigue. Its elite and top-level business moguls, if not the government it­ self, were central to the organization, financing, and political orientation of ISIS. The Sunni-based Saudis, with their own policy objectives driving their actions, saw ISIS as critical to their efforts to remove the Assad government of Syria and simultaneously weaken Syr­ ia’s Iranian ally.

U.S. intelligence agencies originally calculated that Syria’s government could be brought down with the small group of defecting Syrian officers coupled with “moderate rebels” consisting of secular and “reliable” sectarian forces that the U.S. organized into the so-called Free Syrian Army—today greatly reduced in its role as a participant in the civil war.

As with Libya, the Obama administration openly orchestrated through a series of meetings in Turkey, with Secretary of State John Kerry present, a coalition of these forces to serve as Syria’s post-Assad govern­ ment. In the end, a combination of both ISIS and its rival al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra or the the alNusra Front, combined to fight Assad, only to later turn their attention, at least in part, to fighting the U.S.-installed Iraqi government.

Such are the exigencies of imperialist war. No alli­ ance is permanent, and minor players, like the Saudis and their monarchial allies in the Middle East, and as with Zionist Israel, at times and within limits, pursue their own interests separate and apart from the U.S.

To buttress a further escalation of U.S. war moves, the Feb. 15 New York Times headlined information received from U.S. intelligence sources regarding the scope of ISIS operations. The Times headline and sub­ heads read: “Islamic State Sprouting Limbs; Groups Form in Africa; With New Assessment Some in U.S. Fear Unending War.”

The article estimated that ISIS forces in Iraq and Syr­ ia numbered some “20,000 to 31,500.” With this data in mind and accompanied by the daily demonization of ISIS, imperialism’s solution aimed at intensifying the bombings of Iraq by its “coalition partners” while once again sending unknown numbers of “advisers” to lead and direct ground operations by the Iraqi Army and associated Iraqi Kurdish forces for a ground assault on Tikrit and then on to Iraq’s second largest city—ISIS-occupied Mosul.

The engagement of U.S. imperialist allies is seen as a critical element in this effort. Last week, for exam­ ple, an unusual report prepared by a sub-committee of the House of Lords scored the British government for flying only a paltry 3-4 percent of the air strikes launched against ISIS. The French, in contrast, sent an aircraft carrier to Iraq a few months ago to carry out its “duty” to its coalition partners.

Referring to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s declaration last year that ISIS sought to become a ca­ liphate (religious state) formed in the tradition of the prophet Mohammed, who died in 632, one blustering U.S. Congressman retorted, “If they want a caliphate we’ll bomb them back to the stone age.”

Those who demonize ISIS always fail to mention the present-day religious-based Middle Eastern monar­ chies that are allied with the U.S., including the Saudi billionaire monarchs, whose record of beheadings— between 79 and 82 a year for the last five years— make ISIS’s beheadings seem inconsequential by comparison. Like ISIS, Saudi Arabia imposes the pen­ alty beheading for “crimes” such as homosexuality or religious blasphemy.

Indeed, if one considers the hundreds of thou­ sands—or better, millions—slaughtered with the world’s most sophisticated weapons of mass destruc­ tion under the direction of the U.S. and its allies, ISIS’s actions amount to the proverbial drop in the bucket.

While ISIS’s reactionary views and practices can never serve as a model for any serious challenge to imperialist arrogance and mass murder, serious activ­ ists must understand that its origins stem from the policies and practices of U.S. imperialism and allied reactionary capitalist forces in the Middle East. We heard no objections to ISIS’s methods when its Saudiprovided weapons were aimed at the Syrian govern­ ment, with U.S. knowledge, if not consent. Similarly, there were no voices raised when the “terrorist” alQaeda-associated forces aimed to bring down the Assad government.

Undoubtedly, the U.S. government knows no ideo­ logical limitations when it comes to allies, including its support for the fascist-led coup in Ukraine that aimed to ally that nation with the European Union and U.S. imperialism. Need we mention the bloody dicta­ tors around the world who were and continue to be armed and financed by the U.S. under every adminis­ tration for over a century?

ISIS’s appeal today can best be explained by the fail­ ure of previous mass movements that headed nation­ al liberation struggles in a distorted and inadequate manner. These included the struggles of decades past across Africa and the Middle East, where victorious bourgeois nationalist parties, while ending overt co­ (Above) Protest against U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan. Syria is the latest victim of drone war.

lonial rule, continued to uphold capitalist states that defended capitalist property and power as against the interests of the masses who had served as the motor force fighting foreign rule.

ISIS today, as well as a growing number of reaction­ ary forces around the world—including far-right par­ ties across Europe, India, and elsewhere—is the prod­ uct of previous efforts to reform capitalism rather than to struggle for its abolition.

In times of great economic and social stress, as with the present super-austerity conditions attendant to the world capitalist economic crisis, revolutionary forces are presented with new opportunities to co­ alesce the growing discontent into significant revo­ lutionary parties and associated formations. But the same holds true, as history tragically demonstrates, for reactionary elements to gain a hearing by employ­ ing populist-sounding rhetoric or appeals to religious fundamentalist conceptions that promise salvation from oppression but always in the framework of con­ tinued capitalist exploitation.

Today U.S. imperialism is planning a major military offensive to reverse ISIS’s territorial gains in Iraq and Syria. Few suffer under any illusions that this will not be followed by renewed efforts to bring down the Syrian government and install a more U.S.-complicit regime. Thus, the new and extended “war on terror” is today seem by the U.S. ruling class as a long-term effort to rid the Middle East of any and all forces that might challenge its hegemony, that it, its freedom to exploit and plunder at will.

For the past 14 years—since the 9/11 bombing pro­ vided the pretext for the Afghan War—the entire Mid­ dle East region has experienced a state of perpetual war and associated chaos. “Stability,” or better, the un­ impeded freedom to extract resources and exert total control through imposed client regimes by U.S. war­ makers, remains out of reach, perhaps forever.

Yet the endless quagmire remains sufficient for im­ perialism, even for the longer term. Never-ending wars bring on associated and welcome massive in­ creases in war spending that bloat the banks of the war profiteers with endless trillions while the lion’s share of the region’s oil, albeit limited in extraction to one degree or another by the restrictive conditions of war, remains under the control of the world’s largely monopolized oil corporations, for whom all such wars are fought.

Today’s new U.S. global “war on terrorism” is insepa­ rable from its war on working people everywhere. The systematic building of revolutionary socialist organizations, however limited the immediate oppor­ tunities might seem, will prove central to providing a lasting and effective alternative to imperialist war and exploitation. This task remains on the order of the day.

A top priority at the same time is the building of united coalitions to mobilize massive protests in the U.S. and around the world against all U.S. imperialist wars and interventions.

The March 18-21 mobilization in Washington, D.C., marking the 12th year of the war against Iraq and called by a broad range of antiwar and social justice groups, is an important contribution to this effort. The events will culminate in a march, beginning at Lafay­ ette Park at noon on March 21, and proceeding to the Capitol. Contact the United National Antiwar Coalition at unacpeace.org for more information. n SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 2015 5