U.N. Vote on Palestinian Recognition Blocked by U.S., Israel and Germany (tags)
The right wing government of Germany under Chancellor Angela Merkel has made the unfortunate choice to side with the U.S. and Israel in blocking Palestinian recognition in the upcoming United Nations vote. However France, Spain, U.K. and many other nations are going to act with ethics to support Palestinian statehood instead of caving in to the imperialist whims of U.S. and Israeli pressures to maintain their state sanctioned apartheid and discrimination against the Palestinian people.
2012 Presidential Election & Cal Props Results (tags)
All elections confirm the class struggle that has preceded them and the 2012 presidential general election confirms the fact that there has not been much class struggle in this country. There has been some effort to bring this backward country into the fold of civilization with the placing of a repeal of the California death penalty, Prop 34, on the ballot by the voters, but as of 5 a.m., 11/7/12, it has 47% of the vote. The presidential election, with the re-election of the latest fascist war criminal in the White House with a bare 50.3% of the vote is no mandate and this termed out president is now a lame duck president. The 2016 presidential election begins today.
The Left, Labor and Occupy (tags)
Barely half a year after it burst on the scene, the Occupy Wall Street movement is splintering left and right. This was inevitable in a movement that was united only in what it opposed and could never put forward a positive program, whether of reformist "demands" on the capitalist state or of revolutionary action against it. Liberals, who latched onto Occupy hoping it could pressure the Democratic Party in a more populist direction, want to expel "black bloc" anarchists. Reformist social democrats rail against "ultraleftists" in Occupy and cozy up to the labor tops. On the other side, many (but not all) anarchists oppose unions. Some are simply arrogant petty-bourgeois labor haters. Others are grappling with real problems, but with skewed analysis and dead wrong conclusions. Discussion of recent workers' struggles, from Wisconsin to West Coast longshore, underlines that the key question is leadership, but not just replacing one set of bureaucrats with another. Unions have always faced vicious anti-labor laws, but we have the power to defeat them. It is necessary to drive out the pro-capitalist bureaucracy, the labor lieutenants of capital, in order to turn the unions into instruments of revolutionary class struggle.