New Website for The Communist Party of Oklahoma

www.oklahomacommunistparty.wordpress.com/

After a brief hiatus, we have re-established a web presence! After the old website expired and was replaced by a Chinese pop blog (www.communistpartyok.org/), a new website was created for the Oklahoma district, and though it remains a work in progress, it will be the new home on the internet for the CPOK.

Boycott the Elections! - Leaflet of the Communist Party of America, 1920

WORKERS:
It is the duty of every class-conscious worker in America to boycott the coming elections. A worker’s vote cast for any of the parties or their candidates standing for election — is a vote for reaction or reform! Whether it be the Republican Party and Harding or the Democratic Party and Cox — whether it be the Farm Labor Party and Christensen, the Socialist Party and Debs, or the Socialist Labor and Cox — a worker’s vote cast for any of these parties or their candidates IS A VOTE TO PERPETUATE THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM BASED UPON WAGE SLAVERY and the ROBBERY OF YOUR CLASS. IT IS A VOTE TO STRENGTHEN THE CAPITALIST GOVERNMENT — BY MEANS OF WHICH THE WORKING CLASS IS KEPT IN SUBJECTION BY LIES, FRAUD, DECEPTION, FORCE, AND VIOLENCE.

Do you workers want to perpetuate your own class slavery? Do you want to maintain and strengthen the capitalist government which has shown by its every act that it is nothing but the tool of the capitalist class and acts against the working class every time?
Then cast your vote in the coming elections! If you believe in capitalist wars in which the workers are called upon to lay down their lives for the profit of the master class — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in the high cost of living — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in being LOCKED OUT BY the BOSS — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in being clubbed and shot by the police and soldiers of the capitalist government — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in lynching — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in deportation of radical workers — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in NATIONWIDE RAIDS UPON REVOLUTIONARY WORKING CLASS ORGANIZATION — vote in the coming elections!

If you believe in DESTROYING SOVIET RUSSIA — vote in the coming elections!

If you believe in supporting REACTIONARY POLAND against the free workers and peasants’ government of Russia — vote in the coming elections! If you believe in sending arms, ammunition, and supplies to the enemies of Soviet Russia — vote in the coming elections!

If you believe in perpetuating prostitution, crime, child labor, and the thousand-and-one economic evils from which the masses in this country are suffering — vote in the coming elections!

A vote cast in the coming elections for any political party now in the field — is a vote in favor of the capitalist class and against the working class! The Republican and Democratic parties stand openly for the capitalist class — whose economic interests they represent. The Farm Labor Party stands for Government Ownership and Reform — which leads to State Capitalism — strengthens the capitalist system and keeps the working class chained in wage-slavery. The Socialist Party and the Socialist Labor Party pretend they are for the abolition of capitalism and the emancipation of the workers from wage-slavery, but actually, by adopting wrong tactics support the lies and deception of capitalist “democracy” and help to fasten these lies upon the workers — thus aiding the capitalist class in preventing the workers from taking independent class action for their own emancipation. These reform parties fool the workers by telling them that the capitalist system can be abolished PEACEFULLY. This is a lie! AN OUTRAGEOUS, DAMNABLE LIE! The capitalist system cannot be abolished peacefully — whether by the ballot box or any other method.

The present capitalist government is nothing but the concealed dictatorship of the capitalist class. Its army, navy, courts, police, bureaucracy, schools, press, church, etc. are the instruments through which the capitalist class perpetuate the lies of capitalist “democracy” and club and shoot you into submission when you wake up and attempt to resist their domination!
Every intelligent worker knows that so long as the capitalist class owns and controls the organs of publicity, of teaching and moulding the minds of the workers — the workers cannot free themselves.

Every intelligent worker also knows that no capitalist class ever gave up its power without a violent struggle. Look across at Europe and see how the ruling classes are striving by every possible means to keep the workers down! See how the German capitalist class combines with “yellow” Socialist to crush every uprising of the German workers! See how the Hungarian capitalist class, with the assistance of the “yellow” Socialist, destroys the workers organization, throws them into jails, places them against the wall to face firing squads, shoots, hangs, and slays without mercy!

See how the French capitalist class tried to destroy the workers organizations! How they suppress the revolts of their soldiers who are called upon to fight in Russia, Siberia, and Africa and who refuse — see how they shoot the workers down in strikes or demonstrations! Look at bloody England! One hundred thousand troops, fully armed, are sent into Ireland to suppress the Irish revolt. Thousands of soldiers are busy shooting defenseless Indian natives whose only crime is that they desire freedom from the rule of Britain. In Arabia, Turkey, wherever English colonies are rising up against the merciless rule of England — the English capitalist class uses FORCE to crush them!
And when the English workers themselves, who are beginning to think, act, make up their minds to destroy the capitalist government, the English capitalist class will use its troops and machine guns against them no less readily than it uses them against the natives of the colonies.
In Japan, Italy, Finland, everywhere the same thing occurs. Do you American workers believe that the American capitalist class is more tenderhearted than the European capitalist class?
Forget it! The American capitalist class is the richest, most powerful and reactionary class in the world. Just look at the history of the class struggle in the United States. At every step in the struggle of the workers to better their conditions the capitalist class and its government met them with persecution, repression, and oppression unequaled in all history. Homestead — Ludlow — Calumet — West Virginia — Paterson — Lawrence — McKees Rock — Seattle — Butte — these are only a few of the tragic milestones that mark the struggle of the American working class for BREAD — JUST BREAD! Or take the Longshoremen Strike — the Coal Strike — the Steel Strike — with its injunction, martial law, raids, deportations, and arrests — does this look as if the American capitalist class will ever give up its power without a bitter and violent struggle?

FORGET THIS FOOLISH AND CRIMINAL IDEA OF A PEACEFUL CHANGE! AWAY WITH THESE REFORM PARTIES THAT PREACH SUCH RIDICULOUS IDEAS TO THE WORKERS!
IT IS TIME THAT YOU AMERICAN WORKERS WAKE UP TO THE REAL FACTS!

THE WORKERS AND PEASANTS OF RUSSIA ARE SHOWING THE WAY! THE EUROPEAN WORKERS ARE LEARNING FAST FROM SOVIET RUSSIA AND WILL SOON THROW THE WHOLE GANG OF ROBBERS WITH THEIR “YELLOW” Socialist apologists and their capitalist governments into the garbage-heap!

Learn from your Russian and European brothers! The Communist Party of America — the only revolutionary working class political party — is the only party that stands for the emancipation for the working class from wage slavery! The Communist Party advocates mass action of the armed workers in an armed insurrection and civil war as the ONLY means of conquering political power for the workers, destroying the capitalist government, and establishing a Workers’ Government — A Soviet Government — the dictatorship of the Proletariat — as the ONLY MEANS OF ABOLISHING the capitalist system and emancipating the working class from WAGE SLAVERY. In order to bring this message before the masses of the American working class the Communist Party will utilize every weapon at its disposal for propaganda and agitation. It accepts participation in election campaigns and parliamentary activity as one of these weapons — but for revolutionary propaganda and agitation only. The Communist Party, however, will abstain from parliamentary activity whenever conditions make such a course necessary.

The Communist Party will have to boycott the coming elections, for reasons which are familiar to every informed worker. The Communist Party has been outlawed by the capitalist government and declared illegal in capitalist courts. Its leaders are all under indictment or in jail. Thousands of its members are held for deportation or trial. Under such conditions the Communist Party could not participate in the coming election and carry its revolutionary propaganda and agitation directly to the workers at shop meetings and hall meetings or debates with the “yellow” Socialists before the workers and show them up as a bunch of vote-seeking reformers.

The Communist Party will have to carry on its propaganda through its underground leaflets, literature, and press until the workers of America become class-conscious and compel the capitalist government to keep its hands off it. Therefore, because the Communist Party is the only revolutionary political working class party — and because this party has boycotted the coming elections — WE, YOUR FELLOW WORKERS AND COMRADES of the COMMUNIST PARTY OF AMERICA CALL UPON YOU THE WORKERS OF AMERICA to boycott THE COMING ELECTIONS!
- The Communist Party of America.

Obama or Romney?

Obama 2012 = More Murdered Children
Romney 2012 = More Murdered Children
REJECT US IMPERIALISM!!! REJECT THE RULING CLASS PUPPETS!

 

 

 

Boycott the 2012 Election!

Monopoly 2012

They Don't Care About Us...

TULSA MAYOR BRANDS PUBLIC WORKERS “UNSAFE”:

Tulsa World acts as management’s mouthpiece

By Daniel Lee

Mayor Dewey Bartlett continued his war against Public workers last week, using the local newspaper as his platform to slander city workers. Bartlett is quoted in a Tulsa World article (July 30, “City of Tulsa's 'weak safety culture' costs millions in employee injuries, claims” by Randy Krehbiel) as stating that public employees have a “weak safety culture”, after city management ordered a $71,000 safety report from DuPont “Sustainable Solutions” which gave the city a score of .9 on a 0-5 safety scale. The article also contains numerous graphs and statistics with such statements as “Eighty-four percent of those surveyed said they ‘have had no involvement at all with any safety activities.’” It certainly paints a bleak picture, offering staggering figures of injuries and Workers’ Compensation claims, lack of accountability and unsafe work practices.

What the article fails to mention is that AFSCME International, and Tulsa Local 1180, have repeatedly offered to conduct safety training classes for the past 5 years, but the proposals have been rejected each time by city management. In fact, the city has been stonewalling all safety requests made by the union submitted in the City Safety and Health Management Committee, which was originally designed to be a forum for workers and management to come together in a non-adversarial atmosphere to work out issues related to such matters. Union local president Mike Rider told the Oklahoma Workers Monthly that the union has been repeatedly requesting OSHA-rated safety eyewear for the workers, which would cost approximately $60 per pair, but has been turned down each time for over a year by the management on the committee.  Yet, despite claims of “budget shortfalls”, the mayor spent $71,000 on the DuPont report. This is the same DuPont, incidentally, which has been repeatedly fined by the EPA for toxic waste dumping - endangering over 7 million people’s lives in the areas around their chemical plants – and has a well-documented history of union busting, health and safety violations, and created an industrial disaster in India, using local police to suppress protesters and murder a 25 year-old activist. 

The reporting by the Tulsa World was clearly-one sided and designed to paint public workers in the worst light possible. When contacted by the Oklahoma Worker’s Monthly about the article, Tulsa World writer Randy Krehbiel admitted that he had not even bothered to contact the union about the issue, and had approached the article believing the underlying issue to be the falsification of workers’ compensation reports and fraud by city workers. Krehbiel was urged to contact the union’s president and get both sides of the story. The next day, an editorial was published by Tulsa World staff editors, restating the need for safety issues to be addressed, citing the lack of accountability as the problem. There was no mention of AFSCME’s attempts to set up safety training or the most basic of safety equipment requests being denied by city management.

Bartlett’s attack on union workers comes as no surprise. In 2010, Bartlett commissioned an efficiency review by KPMG, an auditing and efficiency consulting firm, to study and recommend areas to cut costs and “increase efficiency” in city government and services. KPMG, it may be noted, is a multi-national corporation whose influence reaches into the upper levels of US, British, and European government, and was indicted in 2005 for creating fraudulent tax shelters for wealthy clients. The report was used by Bartlett to create a push to cut city services and base an argument for privatization of city contracts, one of the points suggested by the KPMG report. With the jobs of hundreds of workers in the crosshairs, Tulsa city employee union members worked together to create a plan which both cut costs and increase efficiency, and successfully had their contract renewed. Even Mayor Bartlett at the time (as of March, 2012) thanked the city workers on their saving the city $224,000 since last year. However, he had not given up on his war against public workers.

In June, Bartlett presented a city budget which he pretentiously called “The Budget of Collaboration” to the Tulsa City Council, which among other things, included spending over $800,000 on “consultants” such as DuPont, but cut raises for city union workers, many of whom are forced to rely on public assistance to make ends meet. When city workers showed up at a city council meeting on June 14th to speak out against the betrayal of their interests and the forced hardship on their families, Bartlett stood up in the middle of their message and walked out. This of course was not reported in the Tulsa World. The newspaper’s headline four days later about the meeting: “Tulsa City Council goes to work on mayor's budget proposal”. No mention about city workers holding up their food stamp cards and pleading to be given enough money to feed their families, or the dismissive and autocratic mayor getting up and walking out during one impassioned worker’s speech. 

This latest stunt with the DuPont report is merely an attempt by Bartlett and his union-busting cronies to portray public workers as dangerous, costly, and criminally negligent. And it has worked. Online comments to the story already clamor for privatization and speculate wildly about workers compensation fraud with ridiculous anecdotes which slander the work and sacrifice of our public servants that build our roads, keep our water clean, fight our fires and protect our streets; the city workers who are the backbone of our cities. The Tulsa World has given Mayor Bartlett the soapbox he craves, acting as his personal PR team and refusing to report anything which contradicts the narrative he is pushing. Their reporting resembles something more like propaganda than independent media. One wonders whatever happened to “freedom of the press.” And while they fete his accomplishments, another public worker’s family checks how much money is left on their food card to try to make it to the end of the month, wondering how much longer they might have a job.

Party members and Labor supporters are urged  to Call Tulsa AFSCME 1180 and show your support! 918.584.0334

Then call the Mayor's action line (918) 596-2100 to protest his attempt to CRUSH WORKERS RIGHTS.

UPDATE: To Tulsa World writer Randy Krehbiel's credit, a followup story was run Sunday August 5th, featuring an interview with AFSCME Local 1180 President Mike Rider, commenting on the situation, and giving the union's side of the story. Mr. Krehbiel should be commended for his pursuing journalistic integrity, despite the Tulsa World's track record of report first, ask questions later.