In mid-February, two international meetings cast a dark shadow over the future. First, at the NATO defense ministers meeting European countries agreed to increase their military spending, make it easier to move soldiers and military equipment across borders, further militarize the Atlantic Ocean, setup a NATO training base in Iraq, and other such war-preparations. Then the Munich Security Conference, where all the capitalist world powers were represented by their diplomats and heads of state, put forward a bleak image for the near-future that can be summed up in two words: military buildup (including nuclear weapons). Far from coming up with solutions or reaching agreements about the many conflicts and tensions in our world, the major capitalist powers are only preparing for the worst: a world war where we the workers would pay the ultimate price.
Syrian Conflict Continues as External Forces Continue Interference
The bloody war in Syria is continuing to drag along, mainly because of the actions of external forces. The main factors that have prolonged the war in recent months are the U.S. and Turkish occupation of Syria and revitalization of their respective terrorist proxies. The U.S. reignited its bombing campaign of pro-government forces, while Turkey and its proxies are fighting their way deeper into Syrian territory in their extermination campaign against Kurdish people. Meanwhile, the corporate media has reignited its propaganda campaign to obstruct the Syrian government’s military operations against terrorists and whip up support for U.S. warmongering against Syria and its allies.
U.S. Signals Aggression Against Venezuela
At the beginning of 2018, there were hopeful signs that Venezuela could be moving towards peace and stability. The socialist government and the counter-revolutionary opposition were making progress in negotiations that may have fulfilled the Venezuelan peoples’ desires for an end to violence and economic warfare. That is, until the U.S. stepped in with its puppets in Colombia to force the opposition, which they fund, to pull out of the negotiations. Since halt of the negotiations, the U.S. military and the Trump regime has made several statements that signal a move towards invasion. Venezuela is already surrounded by U.S. military bases and hostile governments like Colombia and Brazil, which has been increasing its military budget. Workers and progressives must prepare to fight the military industrial complex in the event of an invasion of one of the few independent governments in South America.
Major Victory for German Workers
In Baden-Wurtemberg, a southern region of Germany, the IG Metall Union won a huge victory for the German working class: the right to temporarily shorten your work week to 28 hours to care for family, with lost pay being partially covered by the company. And as a cherry on top, they won a 4.3% wage increase for all employees! IG Metall is the largest union in Europe, with 2.3 million members. Germany has recently had a growing economy, but workers hadn’t seen anything to show for it, still working the same hours for the same wages (not too different from here in New Orleans). Under constant stress trying to balance work and family life with wages that won’t budge, the workers decided to take control into their own hands. They started with mass walkouts on the job, which they escalated to 24-hour strikes, until their employers (industrial giants like BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Siemens) caved into their demands for more pay and flexible hours.
Korean Unity at the Winter Olympics
The Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang took a special political significance for the Korean people. The games opened up space for dialogue between the governments of North and South Korea on the topic of peace, space that would be hard to imagine a year ago. They even went as far as having their respective athletes march under a unified flag at the opening ceremony. This represents the deep desire of Koreans across the peninsula for peace and reunification. The U.S. government, however, made it clear that they were actively sabotaging the dialogue. They want to keep the South Korean government on a very short leash and disapprove of any independent moves on their part. And as long as the South Korean government refuses to act independently of the U.S. war-machine, which only wants to increase tensions, there will not be peace in Korea.
Conditions are Dismal for Louisiana Women
By Gavrielle Gemma
In New Orleans, tourists can hop between fancy restaurants, concerts, conventions and giant drinks in the French Quarter. Rarely do they ever see that women here and throughout the state are suffering.
According to a report on the “Status of Women in the States” issued by Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Louisiana’s score for employment & earnings and health & well-being was ‘F’. Poverty, reproductive rights and elected representation earned ‘D-‘.
Black women earn only 49% of white men’s earnings. It’s 68% for white women and 52% for Latinas. Black women are only 28% of managerial or professional jobs, yet have the highest percentage of women working.
Infant mortality and women’s mortality rate during childbirth are about the worst in the country. Louisiana ranks 49 out of 50 states for women’s health and well-being and 46th for reproductive rights.
Neither the state nor New Orleans has any laws giving workers paid sick leave or vacation. Most women have no pensions. Only one women was elected to a state executive office and women had no seats in Congress.
The good news is that women in unions earn $252 a week more than those who have no union.
Women in the city and state have potential power that has not yet been organized or exerted. We make up a large percentage of the work force and the bosses make billions in profits from our labor. We will soon make our power known.
Mayor Elect Latoya Cantrell: No Friend of the Working Class People of New Orleans
By Malcolm Suber
There’s an old saying that you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep. If we use this as a measure of our mayor-elect, LaToya Cantrell, we can safely predict that New Orleans workers have four years of hard struggle ahead. Cantrell styled herself as the people’s candidate during her mayoral campaign. She was widely embraced by a number of self-proclaimed progressives like Step-Up Louisiana as being on the side of the workers. Her campaign even issued a statement about forming a people’s transition team that would include residents from all walks of life and social classes.
What we find of course is a transition team made up of the usual suspects, members of rich white ruling class and their most loyal lackeys. The transition team is co-chaired by Walter Issacson, former head of the Aspen Institute; Norman Francis, former President of Xavier University; and Gayle Benson, wife of Saints owner Tom Benson, Louisiana’s favorite charity who became a billionaire on our tax subsidies to his empire. A few community people were thrown in as window dressing.
This ruling class transition team will help mayor-elect Cantrell develop policies for her administration. The make-up of this committee tells us that New Orleans workers cannot put any faith into Cantrell’s mantra that “we’re moving forward together” and that she is a “bottom up organizer”. Hardly. Workers will discover that Cantrell, as all the mayors before her, are solidly in the hands of the developers and local capitalist class that stand for low wages, racism, police terror, mass incarceration, sexism and gentrification. Cantrell will be new wine in an old bottle.
On top of all the above, Cantrell is requiring those who join her transition team to sign “disclosure agreement” which forbids them to discuss transition team proceedings. So much for being transparent and welcoming all points of view.
We in the New Orleans Workers Group are not swayed by sloganeering and empty promises. We will continue to organize and prepare New Orleans workers for a fight against the bosses and their newest servant-mayor LaToya Cantrell.
The State Can’t Tax the Rich, But It Can Suffocate Our Colleges?
By Nathalie Clarke and Dylane Borne
In spite of his 2015 campaign promises to reallocate savings to health services and education, Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat who supposedly has the workers’ best interests at heart, showed himself willing to slash education before anything else: to compensate for a $1 billion deficit, he declared on January 22nd that he would cut the Louisiana state budget by $994 million. On January 31st his office announced that he had cut the budget by $672 million since being elected, cutting $11.9 million from higher education–a success in “fiscal responsibility” according to them. Since Bobby Jindal was elected governor in 2008, funding for public colleges has been cut, and tuition has persistently increased, going from 39% of universities’ revenue to 71% in 2015.
This new cut is just the continuation of capitalist politics: these cuts will disproportionately affect working families that cannot afford out-of-state or private universities, ridiculous fees at private hospitals, or private healthcare. In 2016, when Edwards threatened the Louisiana Legislature with a $131 million budget cut, SUNO declared that 50% of adjunct faculty would be released, eliminating certain course sections. In 2010 UNO faced $13 million in cutbacks. As a result, multiple programs including Women and Gender Studies and other liberal arts majors were completely eliminated.
(Source: the advocate)
The cuts will destroy TOPS, a scholarship that covers tuition for hundreds of thousands of students. Although TOPS has its own problems (it’s based on ACT scores, and because of how expensive ACT training is, rich whites almost always do better), it’s better than nothing, and the new budget cuts will probably cut it by 80%. The last shred of hope for working families to send their children to college is pretty much gone. Costs of attendance have continuously been increasing; LSU tuition and fees now total almost $30,000.
The seven-figure-income-wealthy rake in the bulk of tax credits by far. (Source: Revenue Study Commission)
Comparison of total percent taxes paid by each income bracket. The lowest 20% of workers pay almost twice as much as the very wealthiest. (Source: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy)
We call these cuts “capitalist” because they never fail to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of the working class. When the government of Louisiana decides to cut the budget, it never affects the military, the prison-slavery complex, or the NOPD and their fancy new surveillance cameras, because those are “mandatory spending.” Schools, mental health services, Medicaid, youth programs, and day care are all “discretionary,” or optional, spending. And while the rich contribute only 4.2% of their income in taxes to these programs, the working class pays a full 10%. So not only do workers see their programs cut, but because of the regressive tax code that steals wealth from the poor and redistributes it to the rich, we may not be able to afford private services to replace them. In 2012, a study by the Revenue Study Commission found that the top 2.3% of taxpayers raked in 55% of tax credits. These tax credits alone could refund TOPS– film industry tax credits totaled at $231 million according to the study.
In the past, students and faculty from public universities around New Orleans have fought back against the budget cuts. In 2010 and 2015 at UNO, SUNO, McNeese, and LSU alike, students and professors have rallied, chanted, and marched to defend the right to a decent education. While the government is slow to respond, the 2015 protests led to a partial renewal of TOPS funding. And international movements give us hope: only 50 years ago, in May 1968, students around Paris created a mass movement that, combined with other protests and strikes, profoundly impacted the face of French politics. The state doesn’t have our interests at heart, but it gives us what we deserve when we hold its feet to the fire. Only a powerful student movement will solve our education crisis.
Protest against budget cuts at the University of New Orleans in 2010. Cuts and tuition hikes have only gotten worse since. (Source: gambit)
Local Workers Strike Back Against Sexual Harassment
On February 23, 2018, the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Committee (NOHWC) held a March to End Sexual Harassment and Discrimination in the Workplace. Starting at Congo Square, the NOHWC along with 50 workers marched down Decatur, taking over the street all the way to Bamboula’s. This action was organized on behalf of a committee member who used to work at Bamboula’s, where a manager sexually assaulted her on several occasions. When she confided in her General Manager about the continued harassment, no action was taken and the harasser was allowed to remain employed at Bamboula’s.
NOHWC marched on the establishment. At Bamboula’s, committee members went inside to deliver a set of demands that will be continuously delivered until they are met. Bamboula’s responded to the action by closing their own door. Almost all guests left the bar. However, management did not accept the demands.
This is only the beginning of a campaign to end sexual harassment and racism in all New Orleans workplaces. Please keep in touch with NOHWC and upcoming actions either on Facebook at NOHWC or online at www.nowhc.org. United and organized, the 88,000+ hospitality workers of this city have the power to demand our rights.
Here are our Demands:
- Bamboula’s will no longer foster a culture of sexist or racist harassment.
- Terminate the manager, Jim, in a timely fashion for the sexual assault of workers.
- Terminate the General Manager, Jen, in a timely fashion for supporting sexual harassment in the workplace.
- Post the Rules and Regulations provided by NOHWC where customers and employees can easily read.
As the march went through the Quarter, many workers came out of their workplaces to applaud, raise a fist of solidarity, and show support for their fellow workers.
In Honor of Black History Month: The Struggle Continues to Remove All Undemocratic Monuments & Symbols of Oppression
By Leon Waters
“Bourgeois democracy, although a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism, always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor.”
– V. I. LENIN, THE PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION AND THE RENEGADE KAUTSKY
Following the counter-revolutionary overthrow of the Louisiana Black Reconstruction government and its white radical allies (1870-1890’s), the former oppressor class was brought back to power; to political power, which is state power. The restoration of the oppressor class, which could no longer maintain chattel slavery, could now, in alliance with the former Northern adversary, jointly move forward in rebuilding Louisiana with ‘free labor’ or ‘wage labor’. The former Northern ally, the Republican Party, with its growing millionaire industrial class, would now betray the newly freed African people and conciliate to the new form of political rule, or state rule: Jim Crow. With its vicious ideology of white supremacy, the erection and proliferation of white chauvinist, white supremacist monuments, statues, markers, tombstones, fleur de lis, and other racist symbols would rise. These symbols represent the restoration of white supremacy rule, or the white supremacist dictatorship of the rich over the laboring masses, especially the Black masses who suffer from a double burden of oppression.
Like the whole United States, New Orleans society is divided into classes: the class of the rich millionaires and billionaires and the class of the poor workers, unemployed and incarcerated. The rich live a fine luxury life by paying low wages, piecemeal wages, poverty wages or, in some cases, no wages to the thousands of laboring masses. In order to maintain their system of thievery, the rich exercise their rule through control of the state and control of the state machinery-an organ of force, an organ of coercive rule, unrestricted by any law. The Tom Bensons, Marriotts, Entergy, etc. call this form of rule ‘democracy’.
The media flunkeys of the rich, i.e., the Times Picayune, WDSU television, Essence magazine, and all the intellectual flunkeys of the rich, Harvard, Tulane, LSU, etc. insist that our ‘democracy’ is the greatest expression of liberty, equality and freedom in the world.
The struggle to establish the democracy of the people, for the people and by the people, socialism, is really a struggle to establish a democracy of the majority, a struggle that must be waged to defeat the sham democracy of the rich, the democracy of the numerical few. What would Genuine Democracy look like? Once the class of millionaires and billionaires has been overthrown, once their resistance has been crushed, and once the bureaucratic machine of bourgeois state power has been smashed, the laboring masses can then erect a new state machinery to govern society. This new state, this new form of rule that represents the rule of the laboring people, will begin to reorganize a new economy by seizing the means of production, (factories, docks, hotels,) and capital (banks, financial institutions) and transforming them into the public property of the state, and hence, the laboring masses. These steps will end the exploitation of the laboring masses because the rich will no longer have control and a new economy can be organized and planned based on the needs of the laboring masses. The masses can then be drawn into the administration of the whole new state, trained and educated in the management of their new state power.
The New Orleans City Council would cease to be a ‘talking body’ and actually become a ‘working body’ for the genuine benefit of the laboring masses.
Institutions, including the schools, legislative bodies, courts, jails, and all other governing bodies would be converted into institutions of the laboring masses that suppress the rule of the rich millionaires and billionaires and their lackeys. The laboring masses would, obviously, establish a new legal framework, a new constitution that outlaws exploitation, all forms of oppression, including all forms and symbols of white supremacy.
New monuments, statues, markers, etc. that reflect the victory of the formerly oppressed over the oppressors would be erected widely to replace the current shameful reactionary monuments and street names today. The fight for democracy, true democracy, real democracy for the majority is part of the fight to defeat the rule of the rich today. Let us learn the lessons from the past. When George Washington and company got rid of English domination in 1783, they rightly made a clean sweep of all symbols of British oppression. They knew that if such symbols remained, the hand of reaction would be strengthened and oppression would not be eliminated. They tore down all statues of King George. The same should be done today!
FOR GENUINE DEMOCRACY!
SELF-DETERMINATION FOR THE AFRICAN AMERICAN NATION!
DOWN WITH WHITE SUPREMACY!
Leon A. Waters is a well known Black history expert. Born and raised in New Orleans, he has been a shipyard worker, a steel worker, a chemical worker, a custodian, a postal worker, a textile worker, a delivery man and a salesman during his life.