HARLEM—The Washington Post has documented that 903 of our brothers and sisters were killed by kkkops in 2016. That’s more than two times the number reported by the FBI. This furious statistic compares with a Berea College study that estimates that an average of 54 lynchings a year were committed between 1882 and 1968. The U.S. bosses now arm and train a much deadlier “Klan in Blue” under the cover of white sheets. This racist practice is designed to intimidate all from fighting with multiracial unity. But where they have failed, we will succeed as the working class join in mass struggle against this racist capitalist system.
According to the same Washington Post survey, 418 of those killed by cops were white; 205 Black; 163 Latin: A total of 368 were Black and Latin! These figures prove that no worker is safe under this system. Seventy percent of the U.S. population is white, while 30 percent is Black and Latin. This huge display of racial disproportion, as because Black and Latin workers are killed at a rate three times higher than their white counterpart.
The Post evaluated that one out of four of these killings involved people undergoing mental crisis. Typically, family, friends, or neighbors become aware of a person suffering an acute, psychotic episode. They call for help and too often the only number available is 911. Police arrive in uniform with visible weapons and command the person in crisis to surrender. A conflict ensues, and the person in need of help ultimately is shot dead, instead.
Deborah Danner
Over the past year, PLP comrades and friends in our congregation joined in many struggles for justice, first, on behalf of Deborah Danner who was killed in the Bronx on October 18, 2016 under the same circumstances. We rallied with many others in front of her building, and then marched to the precinct to demand prosecution of Sgt. Hugh Barry who claimed he feared for his life because this elderly woman approached him with a baseball bat.
Barry didn’t even thin of less violent tactics. Instead, with two shots to her torso, he murdered her life. After seven months delay Sgt. Barry was finally indicted for murder. Still, no trial date has been set: No doubt Police Benevolent Association lawyers are working around the clock to get the indictment thrown out, as was Richard Haste’s for the killing of Ramarley Graham in February of 2012.”Justice delayed is justice denied”!
The multiracial Justice and Peace Committee scoured the internet to find whatever response the cops’ officialdom had made to this telling evaluation. For months, nothing! Finally, we brought this travesty to the attention of our church’s governing board which, in July 2017, issued a firm request to the Police Commissioner and the Mayor asking for documentation of a response to the Inspector General’s report.
PLP understands this system depends on racism to thrive. Which is why we must continue to fight back. Erickson Brito, James Owens, Ariiel Galarza, Dwayne Jeune, Alexander Bonds, and Miguel Richards: All brothers in mental distress (Black or Latin) shot to death by NYPD from November 2016 in Brooklyn to September 2017 in the Bronx. And all killings were pronounces “justified” according to NYPD protocol. A police body camera chillingly documents Mr. Richard’s death on You Tube- a classic psychotic “suicide by cop “ case where the psychotic victim is goaded to expose his toy gun by belligerent military police orders before the fatal shots were fired. These racist killings will continue until the workers raise up and defeat the racist capitalist of the world!
PLP have repeatedly organized and demonstrated in solidarity with several victims, their families and friends. And, most importantly, we have reached out to a wide number of community organizations and congregations to develop a fighting platform to struggle to take away resources from the NYPD in order to fund civilian mental health-trained personnel who should be the first responders in all cases involving people in mental distress.
As members of PLP we understand that no reform is premiant and the only true way to free the working class from the horrors of this system is to over throw it with communist revolution! As the fighters against apartheid in South Africa powerfully sang “We have just begun to FIGHT, we have only started!”
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Brooklyn forum: environmental racism is part and parcel of capitalist system
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- 12 January 2018 29 hits
BROOKLYN—On a chilly winter night a Brooklyn church held a forum on the issue of environmental justice.
About 40 people debated the merits of a capitalist system which only cares about the working class for the cheap labor it provides. Can capitalism be reformed or does the whole rotten system have to go?
Three clergy and a reform activist described some of the problems and proposed policy changes while members of the Progressive Labor Party injected some communist consciousness into the conversation.
Environmental racism = capitalism as usual
The home minister explained how environmental racism uses “redlining” to confine poor Black workers to less desirable areas of a city that don’t have resources such as hospitals and fresh grocery stores. The majority of waste disposal sites are located in mostly Black and Latin working-class areas.
It was quite clear that working class people have little or no say in what ills are brought to their neighborhoods and are denied the opportunity to escape due to racist housing practices.
A Baptist minister spoke clearly and passionately about how a decaying capitalist system uses racism and sexism to oppress workers. It is environmental racism that allows people to live in an area without access to clean-lead free water. Working class people are at the whims of the developers and bankers as to what goes into their neighborhoods.
In Greenpoint, influx of new residents has caused rents to rise and is pushing out longtime residents with no concern to where they can afford to live. This is racist displacement. Environmental racism is pervasive destroying all working class communities with toxic waste placement, lousy services, high food prices, leaded water, etc.
Puerto Rico
Another minister spoke about the debacle in Puerto Rico, and how the working class people are struggling to maintain their dignity in the face of devastation and humiliation by U.S. imperialism.
The minister also spoke passionately about the beautiful bays filled with bioluminescent life that is getting dimmer as the restrictions on dumping waste have been lifted in the wake of the hurricanes. The “logic” of capitalism was called out as the $300 million contract to rebuild the electric grid was awarded to a small company with three employees in the home state of the Interior Secretary.
The last panelist proposed a reform strategy to get businesses to pledge to lower their carbon footprint through cleaner energy, by installing green roofs and solar panels.
After hearing how environmental racism destroys worker’s lives and seeing how workers face even more devastating conditions around the world, green roofs and solar panels seem like a capitalist pipe dream.
We need to address the root cause, rather than just the symptoms. A world run by the working class, communism, is the only solution. The profit motive for environmental racism will be eliminated. Our value for working-class safety and health will guide our collective decision-making and work. It will require countless years of profound unity, creative thinking and actions of the world’s working class to make our environment safe again.
Call for mass actions
During the floor discussion some of the panelists promoted voting and advocating public officials for change. Others questioned what kind of system would allow people to live in such terrible conditions.
Several people, including one of the ministers, proposed mass actions by a united working class. Although this forum was very reform oriented, we were able to bring the idea of struggle into the room. We raised the issue of fighting racism with multiracial unity.
Now we must win more friends to fight against the whole damn capitalist system.
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Trump’s Jerusalem Decision Undermines U.S. Imperialism
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- 22 December 2017 29 hits
U.S. President Trump’s recent move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was a holiday gift to the Israeli ruling class, a big-power blessing of the country’s anti-Arab racism and apartheid. It is also a reflection of the embattled U.S. bosses’ growing isolation in the region and the world. This would lead to even more instability in the Middle East, collateral damage to U.S. allies, and a rise in mass anger and fight-back against the U.S.
In reversing decades of U.S. foreign policy against the advice of his Secretaries of State and Defense, the imperialist-in-chief was transparently playing to his evangelical and Zionist bases, including megabucks campaign donor Sheldon Adelson and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has invested heavily in Israeli settlements (New York Times, 12/6). Trump showed yet again that he has spun out of the control of the main wing, finance capital bosses, who have tried to preserve a charade of evenhandedness in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
With the other 14 members of the United Nations Security Council voting in favor, the U.S. was forced to veto an Egyptian-drafted resolution expressing “deep regret at recent decisions concerning the status of Jerusalem.” Trump threatened to cut off aid to any country that crossed him. UN Ambassador Nikki Haley vowed to “take names” of any countries backing the resolution at a December 21 emergency meeting of the UN General Assembly. According to a Reuters report, “Several senior diplomats said Haley’s warning was unlikely to change many votes in the General Assembly, where such direct, public threats are rare” (12/10). With the U.S. in relative decline against its imperialist rivalry with China and Russia, Trump’s bluster has less and less impact.
Imperialism Creates Israeli Killing Machine
All national borders are drawn to protect ruling-class interests. In 1947, the UN adopted a partition plan to succeed the British colonial mandate over Palestine. This was the original “two-state solution,” which led to the violent ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Arab workers from Israel, the new “Jewish state”; an adjacent “Arab state” that united with neighboring Jordan; and placement of the city of Jerusalem under UN trusteeship.
Although Jewish settlers had owned less than seven percent of Palestine’s territory, the partition gave them 56 percent of Palestine’s land. As Itzhak Galnoor noted in The Partition of Palestine: Decision Crossroads in the Zionist Movement, much of the Jewish state was in the Negev desert, a “vital land bridge protecting British interests from the Suez Canal to Iraq.”
The UN plan enabled British and U.S. imperialists to divide and control workers in the region. Pitting Arab and Jewish workers against one another has served the capitalist bosses by preventing workers from uniting and fighting their common oppressors. Ever since its creation, Israel’s racist Zionist regime has been of strategic significance for U.S. imperialism. It has waged several murderous wars to conquer more and more of Palestine.
As a holy city for three religions, Jerusalem has long been fought over by various murderous empires. Though the Israelis took full control of Jerusalem during the Six-Day War in 1967, the city remains a point of intense contention between the ruling classes of Israel and Palestine. All of this plunder and murder has been funded by the U.S. to the tune of $80 billion in military aid. In 2016, another $39 billion was guaranteed to the Israeli killing machine by President Barack Obama.
A few examples of Israeli state terrorism:
- The forced displacement of more than a million Palestinians and the seizure of workers’ homes and land;
- 70 percent of Palestinian families have had one or more family members sentenced to jail in Israeli prisons for resisting the occupation;
- Torture has been institutionalized in Israeli prisons, and has victimized Arab children as well as adults.
Since Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, thousands of Arab workers have taken to the streets in protest, from Amman to Istanbul. With the Israelis emboldened to expand their racist occupation into Palestine, more death for Arab and Muslim workers is in store. On December 15, the day after Trump’s announcement, the Israeli military fired on protesters in Gaza and the West Bank, killing four workers and wounding hundreds more (NYT, 12/15).
One Workers’ State
The Progressive Labor Party rejects the bosses’ narrative that Muslims and Jews have always existed in antagonism. We also reject their phony two-state “solution,” which Israeli settler land grabs have made unattainable. Multiple major uprisings, including two Intifadas have shown the bravery and willingness of Palestinian workers to rise up, but all have ended in defeat. The local, nationalist ruling classes offer no hope for workers. The cynical Hamas resorts to terror tactics, while Fatah has sold out.
Only building a mass, international working-class army and smashing religious and nationalist borders will end the suffering of the working class. PLP is organizing to create a world free of borders and racist and sexist exploitation. Join PLP!
U.S. Bosses’ Loss is Russian Bosses’ Gain
The need for the U.S. ruling class to regain lost ground is tied to the successes in the past year of the Russian ruling class in projecting their imperialist influence. The Russian bosses militarily backed Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad in the seven-year proxy war that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions more.
With the U.S. missing in action, Russia has demonstrated its growing influence in the region by recruiting Turkey and Iran to begin peace negotiations. With U.S. credibility at an all-time low, exacerbated by Trump’s unstable decision-making over the Paris Accord, North Korea, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, it is likely that this signals a trend for the U.S. to be shut out of more and more negotiations as rival bosses seek new allies and cut new deals.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has also been successful in drawing traditional U.S. allies Turkey and Egypt into their orbit. Turkey is expected to sign a $2 billion dollar deal this week to purchase Russian S-400 air defense systems, in addition to the country’s announcement to create an embassy in East Jerusalem in support of a Palestinian state (Los Angeles Times, 12/14). Russia has negotiated a nuclear deal with Egypt to use its airspace and bases, and has also collaborated on various military training exercises (NYT, 11/30).
Workers Must Reject Nationalism and Religion
We take inspiration from thousands of workers around the world outraged by Trump’s decision. But much of it has a nationalist character. The bosses use nationalism and their construction of borders to convince us that other workers cause their suffering. The root of suffering is capitalism, which is reinforced by both the Jewish and Arab bosses.
The racist, Zionist bosses and the racist, Palestinian bosses will never build a world that serve the needs of the working class. Under capitalism, the only future workers in the Middle East can expect is low wages, checkpoints, collapsing education and healthcare systems, and violent crackdowns to control them from rebelling against those conditions.
Smash Borders with Communist Revolution
Workers on either side of the Israeli/Palestinian walls have more in common with each other than they do with the respective bosses. Worker on both sides face labor exploitation and budget cuts of social programs that are needed for their very existence. Palestinian and Black African workers are attacked most of all because of capitalism’s need for racist super-exploitation.
Palestinian and Black workers in the region have always risen up against racist terrorism, and Israeli workers must follow their lead to smash this profit system. The only hope for eventual peace is for workers to build one world without borders through a communist revolution.
BROOKLYN—More than 500 workers rallied on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall to demand that federal immigration storm troopers be banned from state courthouses. The demonstrators represented dozens of unions and immigrant rights and community groups, including the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys-UAW Local 2325. Members of Progressive Labor Party are active in a number of these organizations, where they have sharpened the political struggle against the capitalist injustice system and its escalating persecution of undocumented workers.
Nine days earlier, hundreds of Legal Aid and Brooklyn Defender attorneys walked out after a client at a scheduled court appearance was seized and detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. They marched to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office and demanded that the Office of Court Administration and Chief Judge Janet DiFiore prohibit ICE from entering court property. As one speaker at today’s protest said, “We have seen first-hand the effects of ICE’s presence in and around the courts, and we refuse to see the lives of the people that we love continue to be destroyed by it.”
Beyond terrorizing immigrant defendants, ICE’s presence discourages immigrant victims and witnesses from appearing in court. This exposes the sham of the rulers’ “due process” and adds to the devastating effects of Trump’s racist policies.
Bipartisan Racism
Under capitalism, the so-called legal system functions like every other part of the capitalist state apparatus—as the bosses’ weapon to attack, intimidate, and control the working class. While racist-in-chief Donald Trump has intensified anti-immigrant rhetoric and unleashed the mad dogs of ICE to escalate worksite raids, Democrats and Republicans alike share a despicable history for scapegoating immigrants for the failings of the profit system.
In the 1990s, the Bill Clinton administration deported a record 12.3 million immigrants, most of them “voluntary” returns. It also pushed for laws that established “new grounds for deportation, penalties for the crimes of illegal entry and re-entry, mandates for detention of deportable noncitizens, and a framework for cooperative arrangements on immigration enforcement between the federal government and state and local law enforcement agencies” (Migration Policy Institute, 1/26/17).
Returns decreased significantly under Barack Obama, due primarily to a drop in net migration from Mexico into negative numbers. But Obama also systematically implemented a George W. Bush-era deterrent strategy to remove a record 3.1 million undocumented immigrants through formal deportation proceedings. As a result, a much higher percentage was subjected to criminal charges; re-entry became a felony offense. By 2013, the Obama administration had weaponized another Bush program, “Secure Communities,” to allow the fingerprints of all those arrested by local cops to be matched against FBI and Department of Homeland Security databases (MPI, 1/26/17). The recent courthouse, workplace, and neighborhood sweeps under Trump are a direct extension of the racist, anti-immigrant policies of the Clinton-Bush-Obama era.
End Anti-Immigrant Terror by Smashing Capitalism
The rulers need to demonize immigrants to make super-profits through super-exploitation—and to keep documented and undocumented workers from uniting to fight for communism and smash the capitalist system. The job of the liberal bosses, and the Democratic Party in particular, is to keep a lid on any struggle and steer it back into electoral politics. Our job as communists is to help workers see through the Democrats’ misleadership. When New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito spoke at today’s rally, a number of demonstrators heckled her.
Anti-immigrant racism and terror are hallmarks of periods of accelerating inter-imperialist rivalry. Attacks on immigrants and refugees are growing as the bosses inch closer to yet another world war. PLP is organizing to smash all borders by building an international revolutionary communist movement. One way we advance is to be active in struggles like this one, and by showing our coworkers that the only way to end racist terror is by ending the system that created it.
On the one hand 2017 was another year of rising imperialist rivalry between the Chinese, U.S., and Russian capitalist bosses, leading to more and more devastating attacks on the world’s workers. It was also the year Donald Trump was inaugurated and carried on many Barack Obama policies, while adding his more openly vicious brand of racism, nationalism, sexism and warmongering.
As the imperialist powers prepare for more wars and eventually world war, the rulers are trying to get their houses in order. While Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia lead somewhat disciplined ruling classes, Trump presides over a U.S. ruling class in disarray. Moreover, Trump’s chaotic “America First” foreign policy has alienated many of the U.S.’s allies.
At the same time, the world’s workers are fighting the attacks of capitalism, but they need communist leadership more than ever. The fightbacks are often based on nationalism, religion or identity politics.
It is the job of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to build working-class unity. PLP has participated in many of these struggles and we have been able to raise revolutionary communist ideas, helping to unite the working class and bring us a little closer to a society run by the working class of the world.
Masses Rebel vs. Rising Fascism
The year started with a bang of mass protests following the inauguration of racist Trump. PLP members and friends energized those around them in a passive crowd of 60,000 at the National Women’s March in Oakland, with militant anti-capitalist chants and speeches. Just hours after the inauguration, 175,000 people gathered in Boston to stand against Trump’s racism and sexism. The following weekend, thousands across the U.S. poured into the streets and airports to protest Trump’s racist travel ban against Muslims. One of many moving moments came when a multi-generational Latin family enthusiastically joined the internationalist chant, “Working people have no nation, smash racist deportation.”
Clap Back vs. Racism on Campus
In addition to the mass organizing against racist segregation and redbaiting in the Brooklyn high school Park Slope Collegiate, the working class shut down fascist, racist speakers throughout the year.
- At the University of California at Davis several hundred students and workers shut down fascist Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart News.
- The fascist, anti-Muslim hate group Act for America was confronted in 25 cities and towns across the U.S. PL’ers joined hundreds of anti-racists in the Bay Area to shut down Nazi demonstrations two days in a row.
- Yiannopoulos was again shut down at the University of California at Berkeley.
- Students at Bethune-Cookman University, a Historically Black College and University, turned their backs and booed their graduation speaker, Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
- Over 300 Columbia University students militantly protested against Tommy Robinson who violently opposes all immigrants and calls them criminals.
- At Stanford another 300 protested anti-Muslim racist Robert Spencer.
- And racist and sexist eugenicist Charles Murray was shut down by an integrated group of students at Middlebury College. The list goes on.
Building International Workers’ Movement
Meanwhile in Mexico, 2017 started with occupations, demonstrations, marches, and road blockades throughout the entire country. This was the working class response to the government’s 20 percent price increase on gas and diesel fuel. PLP has been involved in the reform fightback while organizing for communist revolution.
In Colombia, PLP is organizing with construction workers who went on strike demanding back pay that was stolen from them. During the summer, 350,000 public school teachers went on a 37-day strike demanding better health care, higher pay and more school funding. Many teachers discussed revolutionary ideas and helped distribute PLP literature.
At airports in Chicago and Indiana militant protests tried to stop the deportations of our immigrant brothers and sisters. In Chicago, protesters almost got onto the tarmac to stop the planes, but were misguided by liberal misleaders. In Indiana they were confronted by fascist cops in military gear. In both places PL’ers raised revolutionary communist ideas in the heat of these battles.
The summer also saw thousands of multiracial anti-racists confronting and attacking hundreds of Nazis, KKK, and white supremacists in Charlottesville, VA. PL’ers were there to confront these racist scum and call for revolution.
The call for communist revolution also went out in Haiti as several thousand workers and students demonstrated for three straight days for an increase in the minimum wage. Later in the year there were more demonstrations and a call for a general strike as up to 10,000 angrily took to the streets against the government’s anti-working class budget. The Party in Haiti pledged to fight to build “a new society, communism, based on equality, where workers rule in our own interest.”
All these fightbacks and the Party’s struggle to make revolution primary are important. But the imperialists’ drive toward world war is relentless and the devastation on the world’s working class is beyond horrendous. These imperialist butchers only expose these atrocities when they can attack their competitors.
he U.S. bosses say little about Yemen that would reveal that their Saudi ally is bombing Yemen into oblivion. They want Saudi oil. But they criticize the Venezuela bosses who are allying with China and Russia. China doesn’t criticize the North Korean butchers because they are “allies.” Russia loves butcher Assad because Syria houses Russian military bases and the U.S. attacks him for the very same reason. Neither set of bosses gives a damn about the working class in Syria.
Year of Capitalist Disasters
With hurricanes, earthquakes and other disasters, the bosses have a similar spin. But instead of blaming another imperialist rival, they blame nature. Whether it is famines and droughts in Africa, massive flooding in South Asia, earthquakes in Mexico, or hurricanes in the Caribbean and U.S., it is never the fault of their capitalist, profiteering system. They ignore the fact that the capitalists survive these ‘natural disasters’ quite easily, while workers suffer greatly.
And now added to this worldwide, capitalist disaster, we have Trump. The capitalist propaganda says that world war with nuclear weapons is unthinkable. They tell us they can control themselves, compete gracefully, and divide the world among themselves peacefully. That was always bull, and with Trump, the world is more volatile than ever.
Another Year of Workers’ Unity
Our job as communists is more vital than ever. Let’s rise to the task and build our revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party so we can lead the world’s working class to turn the bosses’ imperialist war into a war for workers power—communism!