NEW YORK CITY— “They got 250,000 vacant apartments in the city, man…Why am I homeless?” That’s what Johnny Grima yelled as NYC police pulled him out of his tent and dragged him toward a police van. “Why are my friends homeless?!” he demanded. The answer is, “because of capitalism.” Grima is a homeless worker who is part of a movement demanding permanent housing for every homeless person in New York City. Housing based on need is a commnist idea, and can only be realized under a society run by workers themselves.
The scene unfolded as dozens of cops, a sanitation truck and one outreach worker arrived at Tompkins Square Park on NYC's Lower East Side, to “sweep away” (read: destroy) the homeless encampment as if they were collecting trash, not dealing with people. The racist profit system that can spend billions on weapons for a proxy war with Russia can’t provide housing for millions of workers. A Democratic Party President, Governor, Mayor, City Council and State Legislature, “can’t afford '' free healthcare or a public college education but has untold billions for prisons and war.  
Eight people were arrested for blocking the police. They included organizers from anti-eviction organizations and groups fighting the violent expuslsion of homeless workers’ encampments that have become Mayor Eric Adams’ calling card to say that New York is “Open for Business.”
From March 18 to May 1, there were more than 700 racist expulsions , often returning to the same sites (New York Times, May 5). At the same time, only 39 people got placed in city shelters, which house more than 60,000 people, 90 percent of them Black and Latin families. City-run shelters are so overcrowded and dangerous, especially with Covid-19 again on the rise, that people who agree to go to shelters often leave within weeks and return to the streets.
When Adams was running for office last summer, he promised to turn vacant hotels into permanent housing with on-site services for displaced workers. He has hired more cops to police the subways, where there are 120 encampments in subway tunnels and platforms but has not converted a single hotel to permanent housing for displaced workers, especially those living on the streets of NYC.
What he did do was direct the Rent Guidelines Board to allow the biggest rent increases in nearly a decade for millions of workers and their families. The panel approved increases of 2 to 4 percent on one-year leases and 4 to 6 percent on two-year leases for rent-stabilized units (New York Times, May 5). This racist attack will severely impact Black and Latin families who have had the hardest time surviving the pandemic and will intensify the violence of displacement.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) is building a base for communist revolution among all workers and youth, including homeless workers, who more than most,  grasp the call of the Communist Manifesto, “You have nothing to lose but your chains.

NEW YORK CITY, May 25—Almost three years into a pandemic where the city’s bosses left workers for dead, cutting services and jobs, their solutions to working class desperation are racist crackdowns targeting the homeless and lower income workers, largely Black and Latin.
The bosses know they are responsible for increases in workers attacking workers. It's the bosses who create the conditions leaving workers with mental illness, drug addictions, and homelessness by putting profit before their lives, the real crime. But rather than fix the underlying issues, they know blaming certain workers, sowing divisions among all, is best to protect their profits.
Under communism no worker would be abandoned. We build a society around workers’ needs: food, clothes, shelter and medical care without a profit motive. That is the only way out of this crisis.
Liberal mayor further displaces workers
Since taking office, Mayor Eric Adams has worked to please his cryptocurrency overlords (NY1, 12/3/21) and real estate developers who financed his election campaign (The City, 4/18/21), announcing plans to evict homeless encampments around the city. Adams enlisted his paid thugs in the New York Police Department and the Department of Sanitation to not only destroy these campsites, but arrest those who refused to comply with his racist displacement agenda. These attacks have even included the police department’s Strategic Response Group, a counterterrorism unit!
Racist shelter plans
Paying lip service to critics, the mayor has sent representatives from the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) with the cops, to try convincing the homeless workers to accept placement in dangerous shelters and supposedly safe haven spaces.
During one recent eviction in the East Village, homeless workers denounced both options. (Vice News, 4/6).
But though there are more than enough vacant apartments to house every worker, the ruling class’s bureaucratic incompetence means most sit unoccupied (New York Daily News, 4/11).
Bosses strike underground
Many displaced workers will find themselves riding the subways for shelter. Even there, they aren’t safe from the city’s fascist and racist removals. In February, Adams announced his plans to rout displaced people from the trains, calling them a “cancer” (Independent, 2/18).
These attacks on workers have already backfired dangerously. Frank James, the suspect in April’s mass shooting at a Brooklyn subway station, was in and out of shelters; he also had online videos attacking Adams for his homeless plan, saying it was “doomed to fail,” and describing his own bad experiences with city outreach workers in previous decades (ABC 7 News, 4/13).
Crackdown ensnares immigrants in racist hold
The crackdown’s fervor has predictably included others as well. Recent viral video showed the kkkops arresting an immigrant Latin woman worker for selling mangoes on a subway platform. This racist, sexist attack further shows that the crackdown isn't about “public safety,” but rather making things more palatable for the finance capital and real estate development bosses Adams answers to.
Adams’ response to the outrage over this incident? Claiming that if the pigs didn't arrest this woman, then “next day, it’s propane tanks being on the subway system. The next day, it’s barbecuing” (amNew York, 5/9).
‘Farebeaters’ included
In January, after an MTA board member claimed, without any evidence, that 99 percent of people commiting subway crimes evade paying the fare (Fox 5, 1/18,)  the ruling class mobilized to include “farebeaters” in their racist crosshairs. Adams has deployed even more useless cops to terrorize workers during this initative (Curbed, 4/11).
MTA bosses are now telling bus operators to keep their rear doors closed to prevent free rides (Curbed, 5/9). In April, MTA Chairman Janno Lieber announced a plan to save New York’s “spirit” by creating new ways to stop fare evasion, claiming it costs the agency $500 million annually (Gothamist, 4/26). Racist Lieber neglected to mention that figure is nothing compared to the billions the agency owes Wall Street.
Adams’ racist attacks on workers shows that no matter who is in office, be it a fascist Republican or wolf in sheep’s clothing liberal Democrat, we know they will never have our interests at heart. For a world where nobody will be homeless, or deal with the brutal conditions that cause it, we will continue our fight for a world run by workers.

Capitalism kills in more ways than one
JACC Heart Failure, 5/2022–The aim of this study was to assess trends in heart failure (HF) hospitalizations among young adults. The National Inpatient Sample database was analyzed to identify adults aged 18 to 45 years who were hospitalized for HF between 2004 and 2018.
Black adults (50.1 percent) had a significantly higher proportion of HF hospitalizations compared with White (31.9 percent) and Hispanic adults (12.2 percent) throughout the study period. Nearly half of patients (45.8 percent) lived in zip codes in the lowest quartile of national household income.
German Green Party joins the war train
Der Spiegel, 5/6–The Greens have long been regarded as peace-loving idealists. They are now among the loudest voices calling for heavy weapons to be delivered to Ukraine and have placed considerable pressure on German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to do so. The pacifists of yore have gone quiet and now the talk is of tanks and howitzers.
With his long hair, most Germans had until now viewed…[Green Party Parliamentarian Anton] Hofreiter as the epitome of the incorrigible hippy. Such is the situation this spring: Hofreiter, the Ph.D. botanist who can name all the plants and flowers while walking through Berlin's Tiergarten park, is now Hofreiter the weapons expert, who lectures on munitions calibers and crews of infantry fighting vehicles.
Instead of playing the pacifists and slamming on the brakes when it comes to delivering heavy weaponry to Ukraine, the Greens are the ones who are calling for more, upping the pressure on their partners, particularly the SPD, in the process.
Squad votes for New Green War
Unherd.com, 5/13–The $40 billion foreign aid package to Ukraine — the second and largest aid package proposed by the Biden administration — nearly shuttled through Congress at a speed not seen since the New Deal era…members of The Squad, the Democrats’ most prominent progressive group in Congress, have been curiously silent on the issue. …no members of the Squad (or any Democrat) voted against [the bill]...only Cori Bush…chose to speak out about the bill. There has been a Ukraine-shaped blind spot for most of The Squad since war broke out…Indeed, it was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who first commented on the war in February 23 when she tweeted:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is indefensible...any military action must take place with Congressional approval.
Capitalists will starve millions this year
Economist, 5/19–Ukraine’s exports of grain and oilseeds have mostly stopped and Russia’s are threatened. Together, the two countries supply 12% of traded calories. Wheat prices, up 53% since the start of the year, jumped a further 6% on May 16th, after India said it would suspend exports because of an alarming heatwave.
The high cost of staple foods has already raised the number of people who cannot be sure of getting enough to eat by 440m, to 1.6bn. Nearly 250m are on the brink of famine. If, as is likely, the war drags on and supplies from Russia and Ukraine are limited, hundreds of millions more people could fall into poverty. Political unrest will spread, children will be stunted and people will starve.
Nuclear war coming our way
Foreign Affairs, 5/20–Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has raised the specter of nuclear war…But if China attempted to forcibly invade Taiwan and the United States came to Taipei’s aid, the threat of escalation could outstrip even the current nerve-wracking situation in Europe.
A recent war game, conducted by the Center for a New American Security…demonstrated just how quickly such a conflict could escalate…The game demonstrated that China’s military modernization and expansion of its nuclear arsenal—not to mention the importance Beijing places on unification with Taiwan—mean that, in the real world, a fight between China and the United States could very well go nuclear.
China has historically possessed only a few hundred ground-based nuclear weapons. But last year, nuclear scholars…identified three missile silo fields under construction in the Xinjiang region…The U.S. Department of Defense projects that by 2030, China will have around 1,000 deliverable warheads…Based on these projections, Chinese leaders may believe that as early as five years from now the PLA will have made enough conventional and nuclear gains that it could fight and win a war to unify with Taiwan.

The U.S. ruling class is imploding. The leaked draft of a Supreme Court ruling to destroy a fundamental part of women’s healthcare—access to abortion—reveals a deeply divided ruling class. In the desperate battle between the Big Fascists of multinational finance capital and the domestically oriented Small Fascists, the U.S. bosses are ready and willing to destroy trust in their most sacred institution.
The Big Fascist media typically describe the fight over abortion as one between compassionate “pro-choice” liberals and heartless “pro-life” reactionaries. But this framing ignores the longstanding sexism and racism that bars working-class women from life-saving access to healthcare. It also minimizes the threat posed by the dominant Big Fascist bosses as they move toward a bloody global conflict and the vicious destruction of working-class lives around the world.
Antisexists, let’s not fall into the trap of voting for the liberal rulers who oppress us. They are the greatest danger. The international Progressive Labor Party seeks to win our class to understand that the capitalist profit system is fundamentally incompatible with our health and development as working people. Working women’s access to decent healthcare can be won only when a mass party destroys the profit system with communist revolution.

Supreme Court rooted in slavery, in interest of exploiters

Before we can talk about the intensification of sexism in an already oppressive system, let’s dispel the myth that the Supreme Court—and all the lower courts that follow it--were ever neutral bodies. Far from it! The courts are where the ruling class can resolve its differences and create a legal justification for its racist and sexist oppression—all of it justified by having “the national interest” at heart.
The U.S. Constitution, the bedrock for every Supreme Court ruling, was written by enslavers to protect slavery (news.Berkeley.edu, 9/17/19). Built on the blood and mass murder of our class sisters and brothers, slavery generated huge accumulations of wealth. It was the foundation for U.S. capitalism and, eventually, the U.S. empire. The Constitution was essential in legalizing the exploitation and dehumanization of our class. Consider the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which ruled that Black people were “beings of an inferior order,” or Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which upheld racist Jim Crow laws as “separate but equal.” In the 1900s, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the forced sterilization of disabled workers, the imprisonment of ethnic Japanese families in concentration camps, and the criminalization of same-sex relationships. Under capitalism, there is only one absolute law: the law of profit. (For a look at how the bosses have used their legal apparatus to control reproduction, see page 5.)

Fascist dogs tear down their own myths

As liberal capitalist mouthpiece Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times (5/6), the Supreme Court is “acting on behalf of the Republican Party and its allies. Whatever legitimacy it had retained was sacrificed in the drive to…overturn Roe v. Wade.” But why would the Big Fascists call the Supreme Court an “instrument of oppression” (New York Times, 5/8)? It’s because they need more unity from both bosses and workers as they move toward World War III—and they can’t get it without intensifying their attack on the isolationist Small Fascists. But regardless of which side disclosed the Court’s intention to eliminate Roe v. Wade and abandon nearly 50 years of precedent, it’s a clear sign of weakness for the Big Fascist liberals. When rulers expose their naked infighting, it can only alienate the people they must enlist for the next patriotic war.
The Small Fascists have already destroyed the U.S. Congress by ignoring the “rules” to keep differences within limits. Now the Big Fascists are taking down the Supreme Court. Without trusted institutions that can manage the two factions’ disagreements, the situation becomes increasingly volatile--which spells more attacks on workers. The move to outlaw abortion could be a precursor for attacks on other sections of the working class, from undocumented workers hoping to be legalized to LGBTQ workers planning to get married. Clearly, any reforms won under capitalism can be revoked.  

Racist, sexist healthcare kills

Of course, sexist attacks on our class are nothing new. The U.S., which markets itself as a beacon of freedom and civil rights, has no guaranteed paid parental leave or universal childcare or healthcare. But it does have:

• an outrageously racist maternal death rate! Black women are three times more likely to die in pregnancy and postpartum than their white counterparts (PRB, 12/6/21)
• a racist, sexist prototype for medical research: the single white male (The Hastings Center Report)
• women in the U.S. are more likely to die from preventable causes than in other industrialized countries(Axios, 4/5)
• OB/GYNs in only half of all counties, a fraction that is projected to decline (Medicine.net, 5/8)
• doctors, regardless of gender, who refuse to
• believe women’s pain symptoms (Medical News Today, 10/25/21)

In reality, capitalism is the main obstacle to healthy childrearing—and the primary driver of abortion. Most women getting abortions already have at least one child. About 75 percent of abortion patients are “poor or low income” (Romper, 5/3), a big problem in a country where raising just one child costs over a quarter-million dollars (USDA, 2/18). Worldwide, these are the same women who most often get shortchanged on prenatal care and quality maternity and neonatal care (Pubmed, 7/17/19). Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, this racist, sexist inequality has only grown worse.
For working-class women, capitalism makes pregnancy undesirable by turning a wonderful thing, a new life, into an impoverishing or even fatal development.

Big Fascists are big dangers

During his election campaign, U.S. President Jim Crow Biden tweeted that “as president, I will codify Roe into law” (10/5/19 at 11:35 AM). What Biden failed to mention is that he and his vice president, Top KKKop Kamala Harris. and the rest of the Democrats did nothing to protect working-class women’s access to abortion when they controlled both houses of Congress and the executive branch during the Barack  Obama administration. It would be a grave mistake to let the liberal bosses turn abortion into a “vote or die”campaign where they force our class to choose among our exploiters.
Here is how much the Big Fascist liberals care about our health: As they seek to spend $40 billion more on the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine (abcnews, 5/9), they are cutting the measly $3,000 child tax credit to help working-class families withstand Covid-19, which still rages. Workers must reject these rulers who smile in your face and stab you in your back, again and again.

What must be done?

If we want to win the fight for the working class to have access to abortions and other healthcare, we must learn the lessons of the George Floyd movement. Any reform fightback can be co-opted by the bosses and steered toward the dead end of the voting booth. Everymember of the working class needs to make revolution primary over reform and join PLP to burn this capitalist system down. What does that mean today?
We must free class struggles from the grips of the fascists, Big or Small. We must build a large base of fightback where we are deepening relationships with workers, sharing CHALLENGE, and recruiting to PLP.  That is how we will lay the foundation for a communist revolution and a new and healthier world for every child who’s brought into it.