SWP national secretary Jack Barnes opened the event by saluting the volunteers who helped put out a special issue of the Militant telling the truth about the social disaster unfolding along the Gulf Coast. He introduced Sam Manuel, the Militant’s Washington correspondent, who had spent a week with a reporting team in the Gulf Coast region.

Manuel described how thousands of lives were saved through the initiatives and collective activity by working people, who had been largely left to fend for themselves in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina and in its aftermath. “They had to organize to protect themselves from the cops and the gangs, some of which have connections with the cops,” Manuel said. He reported that Debra Posey, a cook for the New Orleans school system, explained that “more families were separated by the so-called government-organized rescue than by the flood waters.”

“All these experiences drove home a lesson Frederick Engels, a cofounder with Karl Marx of the communist movement, taught us 150 years ago,” said Manuel. “The working class is a fighting class that will free itself.”

The meeting was called some time ago to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11, Barnes said. Now it had to take up the two-week anniversary of Katrina. The entire set of events that produced the social catastrophe imposed on the people of the Gulf Coast was prepared beforehand on the federal, state, and local government level by Democrats and Republicans, said Barnes. Under the Bush administration Louisiana received nearly $2 billion over the past five years for Army Corps of Engineers civil works projects, more than any other state. Local government officials boasted about having the most ambitious flood-fighting plan, which included evacuation procedures for people with special needs—like those lacking cars and the elderly and ill—and pre-positioning food, water, and medicine at facilities like the Superdome.

These promises turned out to be lies, Barnes said. By 1998, Louisiana’s state government, run by Democrats, had a $2 billion construction budget. But less than one-tenth of 1 percent, or $1.98 million, was dedicated to New Orleans levee improvement. By contrast, $22 million was spent that year to renovate a home for the Louisiana Supreme Court and other projects that demonstrate the typical corruption of a bourgeois government. At the same time, it was widely known that the levee system was designed to withstand no stronger than a Category 3 hurricane, while Katrina was a Category 4.

Government officials from New Orleans City Hall to the White House are responsible for the slaughter that took place, Barnes said. Only the initiatives of working people prevented the deaths of thousands more people.

Barnes used several examples to illustrate how normal it is under the profit system for capitalists to use such catastrophes to further enrich themselves. In a recent TV interview billionaire Donald Trump said he would build a giant hotel and tower in New Orleans. When reporters asked him what else he was doing to help, he said he had begun buying up as much beachfront property as people felt they had to sell. Barnes said this is the “normal bourgeois reaction” of the wealthy, who always seek to take advantage of death and destruction to augment their wealth.

“There are many New Orleanses,” said Barnes. Better-off neighborhoods have some electricity and running water already, but this is not the case in many working-class areas.

However, the centerpiece of what’s unfolding there is the beginning of the transformation of the working class from a class that becomes aware of its oppression to a class that becomes conscious of itself and organized by itself, said Barnes. This is what was demonstrated by the initiatives of working people in their neighborhoods, who got food and water to distribute to those in need and who helped evacuate many of those stranded.

Working people stand up and fight because they have no choice. In the process they can become a politically conscious, mobilized, and united class that can fight to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a society organized to meet human needs, not profits. This comes only as a by-product of struggle, he said, in introducing the next speaker.

Alyson Kennedy, a coal miner involved in the fight by Co-Op miners in Utah to win representation by the United Mine Workers of America, spoke about the significance of this two-year-long labor battle. “We learned that it’s our own actions that are decisive,” she said, adding that the bosses have failed to break the fighting spirit of these miners, a number of whom are now working in other mines in the area. Kennedy also described other struggles by working people, like the successful union-organizing fights by garment workers at Point Blank Body Armor in Florida and meat packers at Dakota Premium Foods in Minnesota. She also pointed to the “important contribution that class-conscious workers can make in extending solidarity to those on strike against Northwest Airlines and Boeing.”  
 
Sharpening conflict in Americas
Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the Marxist magazine New International, took note of the editorial titled “Playing Doctors” that appeared in the September 9 Investor’s Business Daily. The editorial charged that the Cuban government’s offer to send nearly 1,600 doctors to the ravaged Gulf Coast region “has nothing to do with delivering aid,” and that “Castro offers ‘free’ doctors to confuse the poor.”

Far from being confused, Waters said, most people in New Orleans would be grateful if Washington accepted Cuba’s offer to send doctors to the most difficult, isolated, and dangerous places.

This offer is part of Cuba’s internationalist record that shows what’s possible when working people have state power and a revolutionary leadership, she said. There are 18,000 Cuban doctors and other medical personnel in Venezuela today. In addition, 100,000 Venezuelans will be traveling to Cuba this year for medical treatment to improve their eyesight.

The Investor’s Business Daily charges that Cuba’s “free doctors” are driving out Venezuela’s “real doctors.” “But the so-called real doctors won’t go near places where working people need real medical care,” said Waters.

In a recent tour in Latin America, U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused Cuba and Venezuela of “subversion” in the continent. Waters noted that a second defense official described Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez as “a guy who seemed like a comical figure a year ago [but] is turning into a real strategic menace.”

The stakes are high in the sharpening conflict in the Americas. Cuba and Venezuela are preparing to defend themselves from a military attack by the U.S. ruling class. While the political, economic, and military power of the capitalists in Venezuela has not been broken, she said, “the privileges and prerogatives of capital are being encroached upon as both sides prepare for class confrontations.”

Both Venezuela and Cuba are preparing for such a military conflict, first and foremost politically to prevent a war, by making it clear the cost of an attack by U.S. imperialism would be too high, she said. This was reflected at the world youth festival recently held in Caracas, said Waters, where the Cuban delegation led in rallying youth to fight imperialism, exemplified in its slogan “Cuba, Venezuela, one single flag.”

Annalucia Vermunt, a meat packer and Communist League candidate for a seat of Christchurch Central in New Zealand, and Jacob Perasso, a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789 and SWP candidate for mayor of St. Paul, Minnesota, described further the political success of the world youth festival.

Perasso said the Cuban and Venezuelan delegates were at the center of giving the festival an anti-imperialist focus. Prior to the festival, the Young Socialists sent a letter to festival organizers answering a challenge to this perspective by Stalinist forces in Europe, who proposed dedicating the last day of festival seminars to a celebration of the 60th anniversary of the “anti-fascist peoples’ victory” at the end of World War II (see May 23, 2005, Militant), which would have blunted the gathering’s focus on solidarity with Venezuela and Cuba. This event on World War II became a sideline, attended by a few hundred people, while some 12,000 were gathered elsewhere to hear Chávez speak on Venezuela’s fight against imperialism.

Vermunt pointed to the importance of the decision by festival organizers to facilitate participation of 2,000 delegates from Colombia by lowering their entry fee to $1 per person. The move was part of efforts to make it harder for Washington to use Colombia as a staging ground for any attack on Venezuela.

Barnes said the transformation of the U.S. military will be accelerated in the Mideast and at home in response to the Gulf Coast crisis, and that the U.S. rulers’ plans to fight the “war on terror” within U.S. borders are aimed at countering consistent and determined resistance by working people in the United States. U.S. troops on the Gulf Coast are now under the control of the Northern Command, the branch of the U.S. military responsible for conducting military operations on U.S. soil. The Pentagon will now seek to establish greater authority for the use of troops under federal command in times of domestic crisis, said Barnes.

The SWP leader urged all those present to take advantage of the opportunities presented by this unique moment, reflected in the increased interest in the Militant’s coverage and editorial stance on labor struggles like the mechanics’ strike and the social disaster in the Gulf Coast. He encouraged everyone present to join in helping to extend the reach of the Militant and asked those who went to Caracas and other youth present to join the Young Socialists and the SWP and be part of the unfolding working-class struggles from within.

The event ended with an appeal for contributions to a party-building fund.
 
 
Related articles:
Democrats, Republicans cover up responsibility for Gulf Coast disaster
Working people take own initiatives to confront social catastrophe
New Orleans: workers explain their resistance to evacuation by cops, troops
U.S. gov’t snubs Cuba’s offer to send doctors to Gulf Coast
Hurricane evacuees in Houston reject being shipped out to sea
How cops obstructed evacuation
Shelters: shoddy conditions for evacuees
Workers displaced by Katrina seek union jobs
Strikers resist Northwest ‘offer’ of deeper concessions
Strikers at Boeing brace for long fight
Labor support expands for Militant Fighting Fund
‘Militant’ launches subscription drive
SWP launches $90,000 party-building fund  
 
 
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