STATEN ISLAND, NY, April 16— On May 13, a phony NYPD departmental “disciplinary” trial will be held for Daniel Pantaleo, the racist cop who murdered Eric Garner on July 17, 2014, using a banned chokehold. While Eric was being murdered, Ramsey Orta, a neighborhood resident, turned on his cell phone and took a video of the murder of his friend. Ramsey filmed the killing while seven other callous cops and Emergency Medical Techincians watched and did nothing as Eric said, “I can’t breathe” eleven times.
These criminals with badges have not been  charged with any crimes yet, and they certainly have not been fired. Mayor Bill de Blasio allowed current and former police commissioners to permit  Pantaleo to continue to working (and even make an excessive amount of overtime). The trial is phony because it only makes a recommendation to the Police Commissioner.
SiaraPB (Staten Island Against Racism and Police Brutality), formed after Eric’s murder, will demonstrate for justice for Eric Garner and demand criminal charges against Pantaleo at the NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza at 9am on Monday, May 13.
Ramsey Orta’s journey through prison system is not over
Because Ramsey Orta made sure the video was made public, workers all over the world became aware of the racist brutality of the New York Police Department. This created an international firestorm and made Ramsey a target of the police. We won’t forget that if it were not for Ramsey’s courage, we would not clearly and vividly know the truth about Eric Garner’s death. There are many other cop murders of unarmed Black and Latin people, but their details are not known because they are covered up by the police and the media—there is no video.
Yet, Ramsey was released and arrested many times after the video went public. Two of the charges led to his imprisonment and he is now serving a harsh sentence of close to four years. As an essentially political prisoner, Ramsey has been treated very badly during his time in prison: he has been transferred six times to different prisons very far from New York City, where his family and friends live;he is frequently harassed, given violations for minor infractions, and even put in solitary for very minor infractions.Siara PB and the Progressive Labor Party have organized to help people visit Ramsey. We continue to support him. He will be in prison serving until July, 2020 and will likely face police harassment when he is released.
Anti-racist struggles help build communism
 One of the things we’ve learned participating in anti-racist, anti-killer cop movements in the last few years is that many, many workers and students talk about the fact that we must change the whole system, usually meaning reforming the police and judicial system.  Our job as communists is to help them understand that the capitalist system needs racism to divide the working class and make more profits and that the cops and the courts are part of the state apparatus that keeps the capitalists in power. Only by destroying capitalism and by the working class taking power under a mass communist party will we be able to abolish the capitalist injustice system. Bringing workers and students to that level of understanding is our job as members and friends of the Progressive Labor Party. Join us on MAY DAY!

In 2010 a terrible earthquake killed 3,000 workers in Haiti. After years of U.S.,Canadian, French and other foreign corporations exploit Haiti’s resources, the workers of Haiti were left vulnerable to this capitalist-made disaster. Every year since then the Haitian non-profit FEDASE, along with members of our church, have been organizing an annual fundraising dinner to support the efforts of grassroots organizers in Haiti.
Planting the seeds of communism through class struggle
The money collected during this multiracial evening will go towards planting trees in Haiti. A decision was made to plant fruit trees because there is less incentive for workers to cut them down to make charcoal, which is a source of income for the them. If the trees bear fruit, the fruit can be sold and/or eaten. As these trees grow and bear fruit, let’s make sure that revolutionary communist ideas also grow.
We need the workers in Haiti who are organizing collectively without any government aid to become the future organizers of a communist world.Our ties with the Haitian organizers are strong and the evening is always one of music, food, and good feeling. Everyone participates in the singing of songs in Kreyol and English. Photos from the work on the ground in Haiti are shown in a slide show while music from Haiti and other places is enjoyed.
This year a poem was read in two languages, Kreyol and English,by a member of the church and a member of FEDASE. A member of the Haitian group wrote the poem, which talks of struggle and comradeship against imperialism and exploitation.
The evening was followed by an after church discussion on reforestation in Haiti. The discussion opened with a history of the exploitative reparations imposed on the workers of Haiti by the French after the first successful revolution against slavery and imperialism in the world in 1804.
The French demanded payment for the Haitian people’s freedom, because they were now deprived of the lucrative profits of slavery. Ever since then corrupt governments dominated by imperialist powers have worked to keep the workers of Haiti without resources while super-exploiting their labor. One such exploiter is the Clinton Foundation, which built a low-wage garment factory, which by 2016 produced only 8,000 of the 100,000 jobs they promised.
Bosses destroy, workers create
As one example of the vicious exploitation of Haiti’s natural resources, multinational corporations have cut down most of the natural hardwood forests. As a result of this theft,there is now only two percent of the tree coverage that existed previously. Lack of trees and plants exacerbate the mountainous terrain and leads to soil loss and mudslides endangering all residents.
FEDASE is working with students to plant trees and fund their schooling in an effort to combat this problem. Working together with these workers and their students we must build a communist world through collectivity and multi-racial unity, without corrupt governments that serve the capitalists. Power to the workers!

The U.S. bosses are succeeding, at the moment, with enamoring young antiracists, Muslim workers, and pro-Palestinian activists with one of the recently elected U.S. congresswomen: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. Omar recently critiqued the powerful American-Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), a racist pro-Israel lobbyist group which steers large donations to U.S. politicians. Now, Omar and her recently elected “democratic socialist” colleagues are accused by pro-Israeli Zionists and racist pro-cop tabloids like the New York Post of anti-Semitism, in response to suggesting that Israel’s disproportionate influence in U.S. politics is due to money.However, their analysis of AIPAC’s role is fundamentally flawed–because it’s backwards. Omar and her “socialist” colleagues say Israel is controlling U.S. foreign policy through financial contributions.However, as history teaches us over and over, politics are primary over economics. No matter how many “Benjamins” may change hands through AIPAC, it’s U.S. imperialism that uses on the Israeli state to project power through the Middle East, and it’s Progressive Labor Party that’s building the only solution to end this imperialist nightmare once and for all: communist revolution!
U.S. Israeli bosses: no friend of Jewish workers
The U.S. bosses’ strong ties with Israel are not born out of any love for Jewish workers. This certainly was proven before and during World War II, when the U.S. did little to protest the racist, fascist anti-Jewish policies of the Nazis, nor did they welcome Jewish immigrants -unlike the Soviet Union. Nor, once the truth of the holocaust, the murder of six million Jewish workers, was exposed during the war, did the U.S. intervene to stop the slaughter.
Following World War II, the U.S. saw the need to counter Soviet interests in the oil- rich Middle East, which also had mass communist parties building among both Arab and Jewish sectors of the working class. Thus grew the support for the formation of the state of Israel, and its ongoing support today. Today, the U.S. needs to counter the interests of imperialist rivals like Iran and China.
Israel’s vicious bosses dependent on U.S.
When Israel’s wishes have run counter to those of the U.S., such as when the Barack Obama’s administration wished to make a treaty with Iran, the U.S. proceeded with its own preferred policy. Most U.S. administrations have hoped that Israel would come to a settlement with the Palestinians so that the issue did not continue to inflame anti-Israeli sentiment around the world, although this is not a strong enough desire, to threaten and aid Israel seriously. Ilhan Omar and her fellow “democratic socialist” politicians’ analysis denies the reality that U.S. imperialism encompasses the entire world and is universally aimed at maintaining dominance. In a Washington Post op-ed (3/17), Omar stated that: “I believe in an inclusive foreign policy – one that centers on human rights, justice and peace as the pillars of America’s engagement in the world.”At no time in U.S. history have the bosses been driven by “human rights” concerns over imperialist power. The capitalist class uses vague terms like “human rights” as punchlines in speeches and as a cover for mass slaughter of workers all over the world.
Arab, Jewish, Black, white: Workers unite
Politicians like Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio - Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and others are celebrated in the bosses’ media because they sucker workers into the capitalists’ electoral system. These politicians –whether they actually believe it or not is–claim that capitalism can provide healthcare and wealth to all workers, by electing a few more Democrats and making a few more tweaks.
They say that the U.S. military can be used for good, rather than for imperialism’s goals of conquering resources, markets, and cheap labor around the world. Capitalism cannot give up its profits, racism, fascist terror, or its imperialist wars. And we cannot elect away the evils of capitalism. To get rid of exploitation, racism, and imperialist war, you have to get rid of capitalism. You have to join PLP, march with us on May Day, and FIGHT BACK!
 

The political sideshow of Brexit, Britain’s chaotic divorce from the European Union, reflects the international crisis of capitalism. In Britain, as elsewhere, masses of workers have lost all confidence in the institutions that have sustained the bosses’ profit system since World War II. Prime Minister Theresa May is a dead woman walking. In the latest poll, only 7 percent thought the government had handled the Brexit negotiations well (Guardian, 3/26). Upon resigning last November, the British transport minister called the Brexit mess “a failure of British statecraft on a scale unseen since the [1956] Suez crisis” (Reuters, 11/9/18). That was when the fading British Empire was forced to withdraw its troops from Egypt by a newly dominant U.S. imperialism.
Now the tables have turned. Rising Russian and Chinese capitalists are expanding their influence in Europe at the expense of a U.S. ruling class in decline—a trend that will accelerate if and when Britain, the most reliable U.S. ally, actually leaves the EU. Throughout Europe, ultra-nationalist and outright fascist parties are gaining strength at the expense of mainstream rulers. Post-World War II alliances are breaking down. As capitalism worldwide struggles with a lower rate of growth, sharper competition for markets and resources, and growing social unrest, the collapse of the U.S.-led liberal world order is accelerating.
Leave or stay, workers lose under capitalism
For the working class, the bosses’ split over Brexit is a lose-lose proposition. If the “leave” faction prevails, up to 750,000 workers in Britain will lose their jobs (Forbes, 12/11/18). The British auto and aerospace industries could be decimated as foreign companies pull their factories out of the UK. Diabetics are stocking up on insulin out of fear that pharmaceutical imports from Europe will be disrupted. The UK’s economy is contracting as the British pound loses value against the U.S. dollar, which makes almost everything—including fruits and vegetables—more expensive (New York Times, 4/1).
On the other hand, the “remain” faction, led by the finance capitalists centered in London, has already proven it has nothing to offer workers but a life of misery. These Big Fascists created the anti-working-class austerity program that fueled Brexit:

[T]he protracted campaign of budget cutting, started in 2010 by a government led by the Conservative Party, has delivered a monumental shift in British life. … crime rates, opioid addiction, infant mortality, childhood poverty and homelessness point to a deteriorating quality of life. … By 2020, reductions already set in motion will produce cuts to British social welfare programs exceeding $36 billion a year compared with a decade earlier, or more than $900 annually for every working-age person in the country (NYT, 5/28/2018).
Meanwhile, a competing group of bosses—the Little Fascists—used racism to shift the blame from themselves to the EU and its relatively open immigration policies: “The number of EU migrants in the UK nearly tripled between 2004 and 2015, from about one million to over three million, almost totally due to an influx of citizens from newer members including Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania” (Council on Foreign Relations, 1/16).

As a result, the UK’s foreign-born population has doubled over the last 15 years, to nearly 15 percent of the population. As British capitalists took full advantage of the cheap labor of white immigrants from Eastern Europe, they promoted the racist myth of African and Middle Eastern “terrorists” immigrating to the UK and taking workers’ jobs. In fact, refugees and asylum seekers represent less than one-quarter of one percent of Britain’s population, and barely 12,000 refugees from war-devastated Syria had been resettled there as of early 2018 (BBC, 4/24/18). These lies were promoted by mainstream liberal and conservative politicians, as well as more open fascist elements like British billionaire Aaron Banks, a close associate of Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer, two of President Donald Trump’s most influential supporters. Banks worked with Little Fascist Nigel Farage in a dirty tricks campaign that helped the pro-Brexit campaign win a narrow electoral victory in 2016.
Brexit weakens U.S. in Europe
The post-World War II liberal world order was based on the U.S. funneling cheap Middle East oil to Western Europe while discouraging Soviet expansion with a “nuclear umbrella.” Within the European Union, the UK, a major player in the oil industry and the largest foreign investor in the U.S., could always be counted on to defend the U.S. bosses’ interests. Once the UK exits, German and French capitalist bosses, among others, will be freer to pursue their own interests. The EU will become less an ally and more a competitor for U.S. imperialism.
Today’s EU is split on local economic issues as well as international policy issues. Germany backed the Nordstream-2 gas pipeline from Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany, despite opposition by France and Denmark. When the U.S. fought hard against Nordstream-2, the German bosses made it clear they weren’t willing to pay a big premium for natural gas piped in by the U.S. versus cheaper Russian gas.
On the military front, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania want U.S. bases on their soil to deter Russian expansion. But other EU countries, including Greece, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands, are less enthusiastic about an expanded U.S. military presence. Turkey, a NATO member outside the EU, recently bought Russia’s S400 anti-missile defense system despite U.S. threats not to sell Turkey its costly (and unproven) F35 fighter jets.
Under Donald Trump, the U.S. is using economic sanctions as a hammer to stop EU companies and countries from trading with Iran and China. This bullying tactic doesn’t seem to be working, however. Italy has agreed to join China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative to facilitate trade with Eurasia, Africa, and South America. At a March 26 meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Germany and France appeared to be less hostile to OBOR than in the past. China just bought 300 jets from the pan-European Airbus, “a huge blow” to U.S. Boeing (abcnews.go.com, 3/26). And the EU continues to resist U.S. demands to ban China’s Huawei equipment from its next-generation, 5G telecommunications network (CNN.com, 3/2).
Assuming Britain does indeed leave the EU, more of these military and economic moves will go against the U.S. According to the “Thucydides Trap,” war often ensues when a dominant power is threatened by a rising one. The probability of global war between a weakening U.S., a rising China, and a resurgent Russia is growing by the day. It is up to Progressive Labor Party to build our international communist movement to smash capitalism and turn imperialist war into a class war for communist revolution.