2020 vote shows ongoing crisis of rulers’ two-party system – The Militant

2020 vote shows ongoing crisis of rulers’ two-party system

BY SETH GALINSKY

Vol. 84/No. 48

December 7, 2020

LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER/RYAN C. HERMENSHundreds wait to file for unemployment benefits in Frankfort, Kentucky, June 17. Only solutions both Democrats and Republicans advance to solve jobs, health crisis attack working class.

“The U.S. rulers and their government have begun to fear the working class.” That’s because “working people are beginning to see that the bosses and their political parties have no ‘solutions’ that don’t further load the costs — monetary and human — of the crisis of their system on us.”

That’s what Steve Clark wrote about the 2016 elections in his introduction to The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People by Socialist Worker Party National Secretary Jack Barnes.

“Never before have the presidential candidates of both major capitalist parties evoked such political distrust, disgust and aversion among working people, youth and broad layers of the lower middle class.”

The 2020 election shows that this is more true today as working people face mounting job losses, with neither the Democratic nor Republican parties offering any protection from the impact of today’s capitalist economic, social and health crisis. Whichever way they voted, millions of working people increasingly distrust the bosses and their two main parties.

The Joe Biden campaign outspent the Donald Trump campaign by some 2 to 1 — one sign that the majority of ruling-class families preferred a Trump defeat. Facebook and Twitter censored pro-Trump postings and all liberal and many not-so-liberal news outlets portrayed him as the most despicable person to ever hold the presidency and a threat to democracy.

Their real target was the workers who voted for him, who — as Hillary Clinton infamously said in 2016 — are “deplorables” and “irredeemable.”

Lack of ‘blue wave’

The liberals hoped their anti-Trump hyperbole would lead to Democratic Party victories across the board. But there was no Democratic Party “blue wave.” They lost seats in the House and likely will fail to win the Senate. This worries editors at the New York Times. They have published a slew of opinion articles to debate what went “wrong.”

The left and liberal caricatures of Trump supporters as “bigoted, greedy and somewhat stupid white people” displayed “moral condescension,” noted Times columnist Bret Stephens, himself an anti-Trump conservative.

According to the media, Stephens wrote, “Trump is the most anti-Black, anti-Hispanic and anti-woman president in modern memory. Yet the CNN exit poll found that Trump won a majority of the vote of white women against both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden,” and “improved his vote share over 2016 with both Latino and Black voters.”

Stephens argues against those in the Democratic Party who say race and gender are much more important than class. He says the media underestimated the appeal of Trump’s claim he would bring back jobs.

In fact, according to the Miami Herald, “Congressional Republicans in 2021 will have the smallest percentage of white males in modern history,” as a result of the election of a number of Black, Asian, Hispanic and women candidates.

The Biden “victory” is accelerating the factional warfare in the Democratic Party between the socialist wing personified by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and more mainstream Democrats. Times columnist Michelle Goldberg urged both wings of the party to stop “sniping” at each other and come together.

Instead, democratic socialist Bernie Sanders, who lost to Biden in the primaries and then backed his campaign, said Nov. 20 it would be “enormously insulting” if Biden included Republicans and conservative Democrats in his cabinet but “ignored the progressive community.”

Patrisse Cullors, a self-appointed leader of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, sent a letter to Biden demanding to be part of his “Transition Team’s planning and policy work.” So far, Biden hasn’t got back to her.

The Republican Party has its own divisions, one wing led by Trump and the other by “Never Trumpers,” who yearn for a return to the days before 2016. Real estate mogul Trump presented himself as a champion of the working person, and called for “draining the swamp” in Washington.

While the pro-Trump New York Sun hailed him for forging a “Republican Workers Party,” others fear this will stir workers up. The election results ratcheted up these tensions.

“The former stability of the two-party shell game will not be restored,” Clark noted in his 2016 introduction.

The fact is neither the Democrats nor Republicans are capable of advancing a course in the interest of working people in the face of the massive unemployment that is a persistent feature of today’s capitalist crisis.

US ‘left’ blinds itself to class

Virtually the entire left called for a Biden victory. Typical is Workers World, the newspaper of the party of the same name, which is shocked that “even among white union members, a significant number backed Trump.” Why? Echoing the stance of liberals, their answer “simply put, is racism.” To make that case, they ignore the fact that nearly one in five Black men and one in three Latinos voted for Trump. They see everything through the lens of gender and race, as opposed to the class divisions that underlie all oppression and exploitation.

“An honest assessment of the consciousness of white workers can be demoralizing, to put it lightly,” the paper said. The accusation that working people who are Caucasian are “white supremacists” can only be made by a party that holds workers and farmers in contempt and has little connection with them.

Rigged elections

In the introduction to the Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record, Clark points out that the 2016 election exposed the fact that the “bourgeois electoral system in the United States is rigged … on behalf of the propertied owners and their large rent-collecting meritocracy.” The 2020 election was no different.

The liberal media and the middle-class left ran a semi-hysterical campaign to try and oust Trump by any means possible from the day he took office.

The Socialist Workers Party— on the ballot this year in six states — knows more than a little about rigged elections.

Election laws aim to preserve both capitalist parties’  monopoly and make it as difficult as possible for a workers party to get its candidates on the ballot in most states.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo rammed through changes in New York State last year that made it even harder, increasing the number of signatures needed for third parties to get on the ballot from 15,000 to 45,000.

Much of the bourgeois press refuses to cover SWP campaigns.

Despite this the Socialist Workers Party presidential slate of Alyson Kennedy and Malcolm Jarrett, along with a couple dozen local candidates, ran a bold campaign, finding widespread interest in the party’s action platform from working people around the country — in large cities, small towns and farming regions. They exchanged views with thousands about what working people can do together to defend ourselves, regardless of who those workers planned to vote for, or if they planned to vote at all.

Starting with the interests of the working class, SWP campaigners raised demands that workers and our unions can fight for today. This includes a government-funded public works program to put millions to work building and repairing needed infrastructure, cutting the workweek with no cut in take-home pay to prevent layoffs, and workers control of production.

Workers need to forge our own party, a labor party, based on fighting unions, to fight for political power and a workers and farmers government.

2020 vote shows ongoing crisis of rulers’ two-party system – The Militant

Bloody war in Ethiopia rages over control of nation’s riches – The Militant

Legacy of class struggles in Ethiopia 

....Under Emperor Haile Selassie, the government in Ethiopia was one of U.S. imperialism’s closest regional allies. In 1974 an uprising by peasants and workers, headed by junior military officers, toppled the Selassie regime. A deep-going social revolution unfolded, aimed at ridding the country of the semifeudal social relations that had long hampered its development. 

Nearly 20 years later, in 1991, popular protests led to the ousting of the military regime of Lt. Col. Mengitsu Haile Mariam that had ruled since 1974, bringing a coalition of different ethnic-based fronts to power. The TPLF dominated this coalition, going on to extend that control over the state and the country’s economy. 

Abiy came into office in 2018 promising to govern for all Ethiopians and develop the country. He is the first Oromo, the country’s largest ethnic group, to become prime minister. 

He ended the state of emergency, freed political prisoners and lifted the ban on three opposition groups. He also normalized relations with the government of Eritrea, ending two decades of bloody war between the rulers of the two neighboring countries — a move widely welcomed by working people. 

He set about dismantling the TPLF control of the military by arresting security officials. He undercut their practice of enriching themselves through control of state-owned companies, turning over sugar plants, industrial parks and railways to private ownership. 

In a country of about 100 language groupings, local capitalists and landlords for decades appealed for political support along ethnic lines. Abiy moved to dissolve the ruling coalition and imposed a single party, the Prosperity Party, not based on any one ethnic group. The TPLF refused to join it. 

Beijing, Washington rivalry

Abiy has encouraged competition between rival foreign investors, pitting renewed interest by capitalists from the U.S. and Western Europe against the growing influence of Chinese capital, which backed the former TPLF-led government. 

Chinese capitalists have invested in large-scale infrastructure projects in Ethiopia aimed at extending their access to trade and sources of raw materials across the African continent. 

They have been central to building hydroelectric infrastructure, part of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, on the Blue Nile. This project controls the supply of more than 85% of the water flowing into the lower Nile, on which tens of millions of people living downstream in Sudan and Egypt are dependent. The rulers in Sudan and Egypt oppose the project. Washington urges talks between the governments of Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan to settle the dispute. 

Bloody war in Ethiopia rages over control of nation’s riches – The Militant

Cuban Revolution sets an example for working people – The Militant

EDITORIAL

Cuban Revolution sets an example for working people

Vol. 84/No. 48

December 7, 2020

Millions of working people in the U.S. and worldwide face an economic, social and health crisis caused by the ruling capitalist families who exploit and oppress us in their greed for profits. They run a for-profit private health industry that denies care to working people. In contrast, the Cuban Revolution provides an inspiring example of what working people can accomplish when we take political power into our own hands.

That example is one the U.S. rulers have fought to overturn for 60 years, fearing the more workers learn about the Cuban Revolution, the more they will be won to emulate its example.

Since the pandemic struck, Cuba’s revolutionary government has acted as it has for decades, mobilizing working people to tackle whatever challenges they confront. As a result, Cuba has the highest success rate treating those stricken with COVID-19 and the lowest death rate from it in the world.

Thousands of volunteers — medical students and members of Cuba’s mass organizations — have mobilized to visit millions in their homes daily to see if they need help or have gotten sick, and organize rapid and free medical care. Everyone gets the best treatment available.

Preventative measures have been organized at workplaces, including spreading out work stations, something unthinkable for profit-hungry bosses here.

Staffing for elderly residents in care homes has been expanded, the opposite of what happened in the U.S., where the capitalists discard the elderly as expendable, as they’re no longer a source of profit.

Simultaneously, Cuba’s revolutionary government has sent thousands of medical volunteers to any country that requested help to combat coronavirus.

The mobilization of Cuban working people today cannot simply be grafted onto other countries where working people have yet to replace capitalist rule. These feats were accomplished not because Cuba had a better plan. They are the result of the mighty revolution Cuba’s working people made in 1959 and the way they were themselves transformed, then and over decades of advancing and defending the revolution from U.S. imperialist assault. So when coronavirus struck, they were prepared to respond in their millions.

We are determined to organize here in the U.S. to get out the truth about Cuba’s revolution and to build actions demanding that the U.S. rulers end their economic war against Cuba’s people!

Working people in the U.S. have the same capacities. The long history of courageous and disciplined mass struggles by workers and farmers here is proof of that, a history the capitalist rulers try to keep hidden from us. Struggles like the fight that built powerful industrial unions in the 1930s and the Black-led working-class movement that brought down Jim Crow segregation and changed forever working people’s views of each other.

Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara told medical students in 1960 that before he met Fidel Castro and joined the Cuban revolutionary movement, he had “wanted to help people through my personal efforts” and become “a revolutionary doctor.”

But his experiences in the Cuban Revolution taught him “a fundamental thing: to be a revolutionary doctor, or to be a revolutionary, there must first be a revolution.” Through the fight to make, defend and advance their socialist revolution, Guevara said, new men and women were forged.

That is the road forward. As our experiences in struggle grow, it will become increasingly clear we need to follow the Cuban people’s example. We will break from the twin parties of the capitalist rulers, the Democrats and Republicans, form our own party, a labor party, and set a course to lead working people here to take political power.

Cuban Revolution sets an example for working people – The Militant

Workers fight boss attacks on jobs, wages, conditions – The Militant

....Working people are increasingly finding ways to act together to stand up to the attacks of the bosses and their government as they press to make us pay for the economic and social crisis of their capitalist system. We face both surging coronavirus infections and the scourge of widespread unemployment. 

Workers fight boss attacks on jobs, wages, conditions – The Militant

Gag orders by ‘social media’ bosses attack political rights – The Militant

Gag orders by ‘social media’ bosses attack political rights

BY BRIAN WILLIAMS

Vol. 84/No. 47

November 30, 2020

Growing restrictions and monitoring of political views by censorship officials at Facebook, Twitter and other “social media” are a danger to political rights. Liberal thought-control overseers have interfered with or blocked comments and sites that run the gamut from tweets by President Donald Trump to a Facebook page about a conference on solidarity with the Cuban Revolution.

“Social media,” which is supposed to be a neutral location where anyone can express an opinion or start a conversation group, already poses a serious threat to working people. It facilitates police and government spying on individuals and groups. As the class struggle heats up, workers fighting to build and strengthen unions and for Black and women’s rights can be targeted.

Under the pressure of liberal and middle-class radical organizations, the bosses at Twitter, Facebook and other sites — who make millions from running them — have put political censors and “fact checkers” to work deciding what’s politically correct and what should be flagged or shut down.

What Facebook administrators did to the “Stop the Steal” Facebook group is a good example of how the right to freedom of speech is being attacked. The “Stop the Steal” Facebook page was created at 3 p.m. Nov. 4 by 30-year-old Kylie Jane Kremer, who runs an organization called Women for America First. The presidential election had taken place the day before in a very tight race between Trump and Joe Biden with inconclusive results in several states.

The group uploaded a video showing a crowd outside a polling station in Detroit, charging that “Biden is stealing the vote.” Within 22 hours, the group had amassed over 320,000 users, making it “one of the fastest-growing groups in Facebook’s history,” according to the New York Times.

Facebook then promptly deleted the group from its system, just 23 hours after it had begun. This group was organized around “delegitimization of the election process,” charged Facebook spokesman Tom Reynolds, attempting to explain its disappearance.

“They were flagging our posts,” Kremer told the Times. “This is what they do, they censor.”

These self-appointed online political censors have joined in the four-years-long effort to oust the Trump administration, something they hope the election has accomplished. Biden himself said he favored Facebook censoring Trump’s “threatening behavior and lies.”

Both Facebook and Twitter officials have begun “fact checking” and placing disclaimers on comments they don’t agree with. They did so for Trump’s tweets where he called mail-in ballots “fraudulent.”

Twitter banned all political advertising leading up to the election. In August, Facebook bosses announced the removal of 14,200 online groups, claiming they were “militarized social movements.”

Yoel Roth, who has been designated as “head of site integrity” at Twitter, said in a blog that his goal is “to limit the spread of potentially harmful and misleading content.” But he doesn’t say a word about his own political record of railing against Trump’s presidency.

Twitter officials went so far as to shut down the New York Post ’s account Oct. 14 for a story the paper ran on business dealings in Ukraine by Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son. Also closed were the accounts of White House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany, the “Team Trump” campaign account, and that of Politico journalist Jake Sherman. This attack on freedom of the press was reversed two weeks later when, under pressure, Twitter restored the Post’s account.

The point here is not whether Trump, his supporters, or anyone else is right or wrong. The Constitution gives everyone the right to express their opinion, and this is important for the working class. Instead, liberal “do-gooders” like those on social media have anointed themselves to determine what is “politically correct.”

But, as the experiences of the Socialist Workers Party and other proletarian fighters has proven, whenever censorship like this starts up, it inevitably ends up being aimed at the working class. It is the working class that needs free expression to discuss and debate a fighting way forward.

Just like pro-Trump forces, Cheryl LaBash, who writes for Struggle for Socialism  and is a national co-chair of the National Network on Cuba, had her personal Facebook page deactivated Oct. 28. Unlike “Stop the Steal” groups, LaBash had joined in calls for liberals and radicals to “Occupy the streets” if it looks like Trump is trying to steal the election. “This is no idle threat,” Struggle for Socialism  wrote, “Trump has his own paramilitary police, Homeland Security, the support of the most virulent and reactionary police departments, and a myriad of violent, racist, vigilante-type groups.”

LaBash said other groups that had joined with her to call for a protest on Nov. 4 in Baltimore along these lines had been shut down as well.

Censoring Cuba solidarity event

Facebook political censorship has also been extended to include supporters of the Cuban Revolution. On Oct. 29 Facebook deleted the National Network on Cuba’s events page for a Nov. 14-15 online solidarity with Cuba conference. The page reported on panels being held on “After the U.S. Elections: For Normalization! Why We Must End the Blockade on Cuba!” and “Saving Lives Campaign — Bringing Cuba’s Example to the U.S. and Canada During the Global Pandemic.”

And it listed speakers, including José Ramón Cabañas and Josefina Vidal, Cuba’s ambassadors to the U.S. and Canada; Fernando González, president of the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples; and doctors, elected officials, and labor and religious figures.

To justify this decision, Facebook censors said, “We don’t allow symbols, praise or support of dangerous individuals or organizations on Facebook.”

The idea that public forums that extend a platform to Cuba’s ambassador to the U.S. should be arbitrarily shut down is a dagger in the heart of freedom of speech.

Gag orders by ‘social media’ bosses attack political rights – The Militant

Election 2020

Excerpt:

....For well over a century, the great weakness of the working class in the U.S. — workers of all skin colors, religious beliefs and national origins, both men and women — is the fact that the parties the big majority of working people look to for political leadership are instruments of the capitalist class whose wealth and power stem from exploiting us. Trade unions, churches, organizations claiming to speak for the interests of debt-laden farmers, shopkeepers and contract laborers, African Americans, women, Hispanics, immigrants, Indigenous peoples and more — all, almost without exception, are integrated into the political machinery of the capitalist state and its political parties.

The working class has no political instrument of our own, through which we can debate and make our own decisions, independent of the bosses and their Democratic, Republican, or various “third” capitalist parties. To the degree workers and our unions are drawn into political activity, it’s to try to engage us in capitalist electoral politics. Is he worse or is she worse? Throw the current “bad” guys out and bring the “good” guys in, then repeat the cycle with the same results, year after year, decade after decade … until world capitalism does us all in, in one or another manner.

That profound miseducation will only begin to be bypassed as class battles unfold in factories and other workplaces over wages and working conditions, and struggles for Black rights, women’s equality and other burning social issues become more working class in composition and leadership. The course of those struggles and growth of working-class consciousness will at the same time be accelerated by advances in revolutionary struggles in other regions of the world, in the same way the Cuban Revolution educated and helped transform earlier generations of workers and youth in the United States and elsewhere. Today’s deepening world capitalist crisis brings those days closer.

That’s why the most important aid we can bring to our embattled brothers and sisters in Cuba or anywhere else in the world is to do everything in our power to advance those struggles as we tirelessly educate about the example set by Cuban working people that socialist revolution is not only necessary — it can be made.

Above all, as SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes wrote in Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, we are confident in our knowledge that in the U.S. “the political capacities and revolutionary potential of workers and farmers are today as utterly discounted by the ruling powers as were those of the Cuban toilers. And just as wrongly.”

Defending the Cuban Revolution, strengthening US working people – The Militant

Anger at lack of charges filed in Taylor killing fuels debate – The Militant

....in the absence of working-class leadership from unions, churches and other mass organizations, many protests here have targeted Caucasians, restaurant owners and others, as opposed to demanding the cops be held accountable. The actions have been organized in ways that encouraged indisciplined and violent acts. Groups carrying arms have been allowed to participate, opening the door to retaliation by cops and right-wing groups. 

Vandalism, looting, and attacks on police by protesters have occurred. Downtown Louisville, once a thriving center of restaurants, stores and museums, is a boarded-up, graffiti-scarred ghost town.

There was the potential here to build broad, disciplined protests to involve tens of thousands of working-class people of all races and nationalities who oppose the police killing of Taylor and others. Examples of what was possible started to happen early on, before these actions were hijacked by petty-bourgeois violence mongers and race-baiters who have contempt for working people. But the opening to mobilize the broad social pressure needed to hold the cops and city officials accountable has been badly damaged and squandered.

Middle-class radicals in and around organizations like Black Lives Matter have encouraged race-baiting, confrontations with police, and provocative armed bravado. And they have presented this as revolutionary. 

This narrows the space for increasing an understanding that police brutality is an essential component of the continued rule of the capitalist class and its government. 

The rulers here recognize that the cop killing of Breonna Taylor aroused the attention of tens of thousands. This is reflected in the decision of the city government to settle a civil case brought by Taylor’s family and pay them $12 million and agree to some police-related reforms.

Charges against the cops and other authorities remain possible. A federal investigation continues, including the possibility of charges based on the cops’ violation of Taylor’s constitutional rights. There are many questions about the killing that remain unanswered. The discussion of police brutality and the killing of Breonna Taylor is not over, and the need for the working class to put its stamp on whatever comes next isn’t either.

Anger at lack of charges filed in Taylor killing fuels debate – The Militant

What do the new accords in the Mideast mean for working people? – The Militant

Three years ago Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes released a statement pointing to the “necessity for the Israeli and Arab governments and leaderships of Palestinian organizations to begin immediate talks to recognize both Israel and an independent Palestinian state.”

The establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kosova, along with Tel Aviv’s agreement to freeze settlements in the West Bank, confirms the necessity for working people to champion that course.

The accords register the exhaustion of policies pursued for decades by Arab governments that refused publicly to have relations of any kind with Israel and have treated it as a pariah since its founding. These agreements also increase pressure on the Israeli rulers to recognize a contiguous Palestinian state. As the SWP statement says, “It is along this road that working people of all national backgrounds, religious beliefs and political allegiances in Israel and Palestine can use and defend their space to speak, organize and begin redressing the blood-drenched legacy of imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation.”

Israel was founded in 1948 in the wake of World War II and the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis, 40% of the world’s 16.6 million Jews. Imperialist governments, including in Washington, had turned away boatloads of Jews fleeing the Nazis, who then had little choice but to look to Palestine as a refuge.

In the face of the global rise in acts of Jew-hatred today, talks are needed that “must recognize the right of Jews everywhere to take refuge in Israel,” the SWP statement said, “as well as the unconditional right of the dispossessed Palestinian people to a contiguous, sovereign homeland,” including East Jerusalem.

The establishment of Israel was met by war. The Arab armies that attacked the nascent state were led by reactionary semifeudal and capitalist forces that whipped up Jew-hatred, while Israel’s capitalist rulers sought to terrorize and expel as many Arabs as possible.

The new state emerged victorious at a tremendous cost — with massacres committed by both sides. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven from the land and left without a homeland. But there was no peace.

In 1967 the Israeli army seized the Sinai Peninsula, including the Gaza Strip, from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan, and Golan Heights from Syria in the Six-Day War. The bloodshed continued, including the 1973 Yom Kippur War; the Israeli invasions of Lebanon in 1982 and 2006 and fierce battles between the Israeli army and Hamas in Gaza in 2012 and 2014. Skirmishes there continue today.

The occupation of the West Bank and Gaza sparked resistance from Palestinian youth during two uprisings in 1987 and 2000, winning solidarity inside Israel.

Arab governments across the Middle East refused to accept the existence of the Jewish state and won support from within the United Nations and the European Union for their boycott of Israel.

Even in Jordan and Egypt, after governments there signed peace treaties with Tel Aviv, unions and academic and cultural groups refused to have anything to do with their Israeli counterparts.

The agreements brokered by the Donald Trump administration have deepened a behind-the-scenes shift begun over the last 15 years, with unofficial trade, security and diplomatic collaboration between the Israeli government and the Sunni-led capitalist regimes in the UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Those ties were driven by their rulers’ seeking room amid the deepening world capitalist economic crisis and by their common opposition to the rise of the Iranian rulers’ military and political power.

Palestinian misleaderships’ course

But the Palestinian misleaderships’ course of refusing to recognize the existence of Israel, while enriching themselves with funds from international aid, is a dead end for the Palestinian people. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are more discredited then ever.

A “Day of Rage,” backed by the Palestinian Authority to protest the accords between the governments of the UAE, Bahrain and Israel, fell flat, Haaretz reported Sept. 16.

Some 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs. While facing discrimination in jobs, housing and education, they work side by side with Jewish citizens and join together in battles for unions and better wages and work conditions. Speaking both Hebrew and Arabic, many Palestinian citizens of Israel are positioned to play key roles as trade expands with the UAE, Bahrain and other Arab countries.

In myriad small but significant ways, Palestinians in the West Bank and in Gaza have been showing their desire for a course different from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank have been crossing into Israel, bypassing checkpoints through holes in the border fence — with the tacit approval of Israeli officials. They’re picked up by relatives or friends who are Israeli citizens to go to the beaches near Tel Aviv or visit the zoo and other attractions.

Currently thousands of Gaza residents have permits that allow them to travel to work in Israel every week. Despite calling for the destruction of Israel, the Islamist group Hamas, seeking to quell discontent in Gaza, is trying to convince the Israeli government to grant 100,000 more permits.

“It is incumbent on the Palestinian Authority leadership to transcend whatever feelings and to see if an opportunity has risen,” Sari Nusseibeh, a professor who once served as the Palestine Liberation Organization’s representative in Jerusalem, said. “Why not ask, for instance, the UAE to push for the kind of solution that the Palestinians have always asked for.”

The starting point for working people, the Socialist Workers Party 2017 statement noted, must be “the class interests and solidarity of workers and toiling farmers across the Middle East — be they Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, Kurdish, Turkish, Persian or otherwise, and whatever their religious or other beliefs — as well as working people in the United States and around the world.”

That’s even more true today as “working people organize and act together to advance our demands and struggles against capitalist governments and ruling classes that exploit and oppress us.”

What do the new accords in the Mideast mean for working people? – The Militant

Ginsburg: U.S. Constitution passé

....The anti-Trump frenzy is also reflected in press coverage of the composition and character of the U.S. Supreme Court. Liberal commentators flew into a panic when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was diagnosed with cancer, sparking speculation that the 85-year-old would have to leave the  court. They fear this would open the door for "arch-reactionary" Trump to nominate yet another justice in his image. Liberals view the court, and Ginsburg, as the agent for adopting political policies they favor but are unable to get through Congress, not as a court that makes rulings based on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

https://themilitant.com/2019/01/26/liberal-fbi-anti-trump-resistance-is-a-threat-to-working-peoples-rights/

*   *   *

Supreme Court justice:

U.S. Constitution passé

Workers should defend protections won in struggle

 

BY SETH GALINSKY  

The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights is passé, so says U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, considered the most senior member of the court's liberal wing. According to this view, a constitution that gives the capitalists' government more power and "flexibility" to bestow numerous promises of rights and entitlements is better than the current Constitution and Bill of Rights, which are built around protections against the capitalist state.

"I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012," Ginsburg told a local television station when she was in Egypt at the end of January. "I might look at the constitution of South Africa. That was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights."

The liberal justice, also pointed to Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedom and the European Convention on Human Rights as better models than the U.S. Bill of Rights.

Amendments won in struggle

The Bill of Rights of 1791 along with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution—which abolished slavery, recognized "equal protection of the laws," and voting rights—were won as a result of massive, bloody struggles by and in the interests of workers and farmers, including the revolutionary war for independence, Shay's rebellion in 1786, the 1861-65 Civil War and related struggles that followed it.

South Africa's Bill of Rights, which is four times longer than the U.S. Bill of Rights, begins by saying it "affirms the democratic values of human dignity, equality and freedom" and guarantees the "full and equal enjoyment of all rights and freedoms."

Among the more than 35 categories containing scores of highly detailed rights, so highly lauded by Justice Ginsburg, are the rights to "life," "freedom of artistic creativity," "fair labour practices," "sufficient food and water" and "access to adequate housing."

These rights, the South African law says, may be limited "to the extent that the limitation is reasonable and justifiable in an open and democratic society" or if a state of emergency is declared.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees rights subject "to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."

Compare those descriptions to the preamble to the Bill of Rights, which notes that the amendments to the Constitution were made "in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers."

Succinct, clear and to the point. No worthless promises from the capitalist rulers to ensure "human dignity," much less caveats about "reasonable limits."

The last thing working people need is to depend on the capitalist state to "give us rights." We need it to leave us alone so we can organize independently and with as little interference as possible, until the working class and our allies are strong enough to wrest power and establish a new social order based on solidarity and the needs of the great majority of toiling humanity.

There are useful examples from the early history of the United States. The words "equal rights to life, liberty and property" were popular among bourgeois opponents of monarchial tyranny and feudal reaction in the late 18th century and were included in the constitution of the antislavery New York Manumission Society. In drafting the Declaration of Independence, however, these words were altered by slaveholder Thomas Jefferson to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The exploitation of wage and slave labor is predicated on dispossession and denial of property for the toiling majority.

We don't need any government involved in our "pursuit of happiness." We have as much use for that as so-called rights to "artistic freedom" or "adequate food and water" championed in Ginsburg's model constitution, while in the real world people go hungry. No, we'll work to take care of those things ourselves despite their rule—and we find "happiness" in fighting to replace it.

The fact is, the U.S. capitalist rulers are constantly working to undermine the Bill of Rights. The right to a "speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury" has become the right to plea bargain and go to jail—unless you want to risk a 10-fold harsher sentence. The right "against unreasonable searches and seizures" has become "stop and frisk" anywhere, anytime. "Equal protection of the laws" is today further from reality than at any time in nearly half a century. And President Barack Obama now asserts the Constitution does not protect citizens accused of being "terrorists" from being assassinated on his orders.

New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak put forward views similar to Ginsburg in a Jan. 6 article that reports on a study soon to be published in the New York University Law Review.

Liptak says the U.S. Constitution is "out of step with the rest of the world" is "terse and old" and "guarantees relatively few rights." He calls the "right to bear arms" an idiosyncrasy and favorably quotes University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson bemoaning that "the U.S. Constitution is the most difficult to amend of any constitution currently existing in the world today."

That difficulty, including the separation of powers and restrictive rules for approving amendments, was built into the Constitution as a result of the heterogeneous alliance of merchants and slave owners that made up the first U.S. governments, their suspicions of each other and their fears of the laboring classes.

"Our Founders designed a system that makes it more difficult to bring about change than I would like sometimes," Obama complained in a Feb. 6 interview with NBC's Today Show.

As long as we're under capitalist rule, we'll stick with the current Constitution—especially the Bill of Rights and 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. Anything that helps to provide some protection from the state and slows down the ability of the rulers to impose their will is better than any dependency on the repressive state and false promises of the enemy class.

https://www.themilitant.com/2012/7615/761536.html

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Scalia's death prompts debate on

Supreme Court, Bill of Rights

 

BY MAGGIE TROWE

The Feb. 13 death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia sparked a partisan debate on nominating his replacement and a broader debate about the role of the court and the place of the Bill of Rights and other amendments to the Constitution that defend equal protection under the law.

Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders urged President Barack Obama to nominate a liberal replacement rapidly. Republicans demanded Obama decline to make a nomination, leaving it to the next president in 2017.

Scalia was hated by most liberals and leftists for his socially conservative views, but more importantly because he argued the court should base its rulings strictly on the Constitution, rejecting "outcome-driven" decisions that amount to decreeing laws from the bench.

But it's in the interest of the working class that the court uphold the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments won in struggle that are protections of the people against the government.

In his dissent on last year's ruling legalizing gay marriage, Scalia pointed to the narrowness of the class background of the justices, writing they are "only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School."

The justices are all Catholic or Jewish, he pointed out. "Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination. … Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States."

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a long-serving liberal Supreme Court justice, has raised other concerns about what is called judicial activism concerning the court's 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that decriminalized abortion. "It's not that the judgment was wrong, but it moved too far too fast," cutting short the political fight needed, she told a Columbia Law School symposium in 2012. She has also criticized the court for not basing the decision on the 14th Amendment's guarantee to every person of equal protection of the laws, a conquest of the revolutionary struggle that ended slavery.

Liberal supporters of judicial activism and the "living Constitution" say the court should prioritize achieving an outcome they view as positive and progressive, and then find some justification.

Scalia took the opposite approach, insisting on applying the Constitution and its amendments strictly, as limits on government abuse.

For example, in Kyllo v. U.S. in 2001, he wrote that the government violated the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure when it used thermal imaging technology without a warrant to detect marijuana cultivation inside a suspect's house.

When the court struck down a St. Paul, Minnesota, "hate-crime" law against racist speech in 1992, Scalia wrote, "Burning a cross in someone's front yard is reprehensible. But St. Paul has sufficient means at its disposal to prevent such behavior without adding the First Amendment to the fire."

https://www.themilitant.com/2016/8008/800858.html

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What is the political road forward for workers in 2020 – The Militant

Excerpt:

Biden refuses to say ‘antifa’

In an Aug. 31 speech in Pittsburgh, Biden finally said something about wanton destruction in Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere, saying, “Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting.”

But he blamed the violence on Trump, never mentioning antifa and similar middle-class radicals who have hijacked what started as mass political protests against police brutality and turned them into small forays of anti-political destruction.

The violence is spearheaded by mostly Caucasian, middle-class radicals and antifa. They are aided by meritocratic Black Lives Matter leaders, who think the violence will force the rulers to give them a seat at their table.

Black Lives Matter leaders organize predominantly Caucasian marchers to target Caucasian neighborhoods, shouting “Wake up motherf—-ers,” demanding that the “white privileged” renounce their privilege and fork over cash.

Trump wins a hearing when he says that the antifa-type violence is most rampant in cities run by the Democratic Party. He points to Portland, where the Democratic mayor — who had made excuses for the antifa violence — fled his own home, after so-called protesters set fire to the complex where he lived.

Biden’s supporters are nervous about how he’ll do in debates with Trump, with some calling for him to refuse to participate.

The liberal media runs articles claiming Trump will refuse to leave the White House, regardless of the outcome of the vote. David Brooks’ piece in the Sept. 4 New York Times was headlined, “What Will You Do If Trump Doesn’t Leave?” He says there’ll  have to be a uprising.

The article could have been titled, “What Will You Do If the Democrats Lose, but Refuse to Recognize the Results?”

What is the political road forward for workers in 2020 – The Militant

Violent course of antifa, Black Lives Matter threat to working class – The Militant

....As protests against cop brutality exploded earlier this year, Black Lives Matter became a widespread sentiment that millions of working people identified with this fight. But increasingly actions organized by Black Lives Matter leaders have targeted working people. This includes actions marked by silencing, shaming and intimidating passersby — one sure sign they have nothing in common with anyone building a the broadest possible working-class movement.

An Aug. 24 march in Washington, D.C., called to protest the police shooting of Blake degenerated as some participants surrounded diners at restaurants, accusing them of enjoying “white privilege.” A video shows dozens chanting, “White silence is violence” as they crowded around one diner, Lauren Victor, showering her with abuse when she declined to raise her fist as they demanded. In fact, Victor had previously joined protests against cop brutality.

During the same action, marchers chanted, “Fire, fire, gentrifier — Black people used to live here,” as they have done in New York and elsewhere. Such calls have nothing to do with solving the chronic housing crisis and everything to do with fueling violent and poisonous resentment.

From St. Louis to Chicago, Portland and Washington, D.C., the homes of mayors and other public officials have become the targets of the violence these forces carry out. In the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, more than 100 people gathered outside the home of Mayor Anan Abu-Taleb during an online village board meeting Aug. 25. They pounded on the windows, tore up the mayor’s yard and vandalized his house.

As they glorify violence, the embittered middle-class forces of antifa rail against “the elite,” elevate small group action above political struggle and remain deeply alienated from the working class. They have much in common with fascist groups they claim to oppose. Others have traveled this road previously, like Italian Socialist Party leader Benito Mussolini who went on to lead fascist forces to power in 1922....

Violent course of antifa, Black Lives Matter threat to working class – The Militant

Was ‘Militant’ wrong on Israel-UAE pact? – The Militant

....Pacts between different ruling classes can start things in motion that will alter the terrain on which working people organize and fight.

This pact further opens the breach in what had been a common front of Arab regimes that held Israel up to be a pariah nation. It reflects developments in the region that do make it more likely other Arab governments will follow suit.

This was furthered Aug. 29 when UAE rulers scrapped their longstanding economic and trade boycott of Israel.

Days after the deal was signed, the Sudanese government refused to deny holding talks over normalizing its relations with Jerusalem. Talks between Israel and the governments of Bahrain and Oman are on the agenda, Israeli officials said.

As Galinsky explains, one of the pressures pushing these developments is that these governments and the rulers in Israel “share an interest in defending themselves against the expanding military and political influence” of the Iranian rulers in the region.

Bourgeois Arab regimes are among the main financial and political patrons of the Palestinian National Authority that rules in the West Bank and of Hamas in Gaza. These new developments can help draw both these organizations and the Israeli government into discussions over mutual recognition.

The continuing refusal of the PNA and Hamas to enter talks with the Israeli government sets back the dispossessed Palestinian people’s aspirations for a sovereign homeland. Such talks can lead to mutual recognition of Israel and a Palestinian state. This can bring an end to the deadly cycle of terror attacks and bloody reprisals. It will open the door to Palestinian efforts to fight for a contiguous country.

And, most importantly, it will open the door to struggles for “the class interests and solidarity of workers and toiling farmers across the Middle East — be they Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, Kurdish, Turkish, Persian or otherwise,” as Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes said in a 2017 statement quoted by Galinsky.

That statement says the SWP is “for whatever helps working people organize and act together to advance our demands and struggles against the capitalist governments and ruling classes that exploit and oppress us.”

Was ‘Militant’ wrong on Israel-UAE pact? – The Militant