MHI hails drive for freedom & democracy in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen

MHI supports the widespread aspirations of the masses throughout the Middle East for freedom from want as well as freedom from their rulers. It is no surprise to see the uprisings spread from country to country among people who suffer from lack of jobs, housing, and other basic necessities. We hope the ongoing rebellions will bring about real change rather than merely new faces in power or concessions to an expanded middle class that leave the capitalist and even feudal relations in place for the vast majority of people in the region.

We stand behind those workers, women, and youth who want a completely different way of life. We stand in opposition to the highjacking of their movements by either the CIA or political Islamists. And we do not minimize the possibility of widespread war in the region, even nuclear war, that could threaten the whole world.

We hope that, at the least, the forces for freedom in the current movements can secure improvements in the lives of the poor within secular states with full rights for women. And we urge Americans to prepare to fight to stop the U.S. and its allies from enforcing the status quo at the expense of the Middle Eastern people.

Women’s Diminished Right to Abortion May Soon be Gone

The start of 2011 is a dire time for civil rights and liberties, including the right of women to control their own bodies. On Jan. 22, the 38^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that nominally legalized women’s right to abortion, women’s access to abortion remains severely restricted. Read More

MHI Editorial: Public Employees Under Attack: Support Workers Fighting Austerity but Get Real About Capitalism

The recent economic crisis and continuing recession-like economy have rendered many U.S. states and cities broke. Their budget crises are fueling the growing drumbeat for a reduction in government workers’ pay and benefits, which the bourgeoisie terms “excessive.” The front page of the Jan. 2 New York Times, for example, features a story headlined “Public Workers Facing Outrage in Budget Crisis” which states, “Across the nation, a rising irritation with public employee unions is palpable, as  a wounded economy has blown gaping holes in state, city and town budgets….” The Times ran two more front-page stories about calls for busting public employee unions on the next two days. (For a fuller discussion of the assault on public sector workers see Barry Finger’s presentation, “Public Sector Workers and the Crisis,” at our conference on “The Economic Crisis and Left Responses.”)

Blaming the states’ economic problems on unions is ridiculous, since public employees are hardly highly paid. But the war against the working class is ideological as well as financial. Labeling their remuneration “excessive” makes ordinary workers sound like the millionaire Wall Street financial marketeers whom everybody loved to hate last year. The idea that government employees are too well-off seems especially perverse to people old enough to remember when those jobs paid less than private ones, and African-Americans, women, foreign-born, and disabled workers took them for lack of any choice due to discrimination in the private sector. Now these are suddenly “elite” jobs: clerk, teacher, letter-carrier? We don’t think so. Read More