The following report is from the Puerto Rico Brigade, where over 20 students and community college professors from the U.S. contributed their labor and their international solidarity to the working class devastated by Hurricane Maria. On their Brigade, the group met families occupying a school that was threatened with closure.

PUERTO RICO, July 22—“Who has the power? Grandmothers have the power!” So spoke one of the grandmothers occupying a public school in Toa Baja. Parents and teachers have been camping out at the school daily to ensure that equipment is not removed from the school at night by the school board. Parents have been calling press conferences and organizing rallies to keep their neighborhood schools open.
But while the capitalists have been exposed for closing schools and “reassigning” teachers (to nonteaching “special jobs”), working-class communities have learned to rely on each other to rebuild and fight back. The struggle to fight for education is the prime evidence of working-class unity—students, teachers and parents repairing schools and organizing protests across the island to protest the capitalist agenda to sell the island piece meal at the expense of its youth and working class.  
As the Brigade who volunteered this summer in Puerto Rico, we were able to participate and support the working-class fightback and occupations of local schools slated to be closed. Progressive Labor Party members brought the message of international solidarity and the need for revolution to teachers and families. Families were tremendously welcoming to PLP and its communist ideas.
School building rented for a dollar
The failure of capitalism to meet the needs of the working class is on full display here. The much-hated Secretary of Education Julia Keheler (annual salary $250,000) is calling for the closure of 400 schools in two years. She blames low student enrollment when in reality, Keheler is working hand in glove with developers to take over Puerto Rico.
The policy of privatization presents a golden egg for these capitalists who are able to feed off public funds in the name of “austerity” (read: cutbacks). Last year, 179 public schools were shuttered and 150 more were closed from 2010 to 2015 (Huffington Post, 4/6).
The public schools are often in attractive locations for developers, who have close ties to the government. Some schools have already been told they will be closed to create “offices.” Others are close to beach or tourist attractions. The Julia Burgos School in Carolina was shut down and then rented for $1/year to a financier who then reopened it as a private school. The mural dedicated to Puerto Rican writer Julia Burgos inside the school was immediately removed.
Finance capital bosses are descending on Puerto Rico like hawks.
There are big names among them: Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Perella Weinberg Partners and TPG Capital. What’s luring them is the opportunity to scoop up home loans and foreclosed properties for pennies on the dollar (Bloomberg, 7/14/17).
School closure (and home foreclosures) is one of the many ways the barbarous bosses use a crisis as an opportunity for business schemes and to slash and burn any benefits the working class has gained through past fightbacks.
Racist Disregard
The massive closure of schools that will affect Latin youth also paves the wave for charter schools, which receive public funds but are privately operated. Law 85, recently enacted, dictates that 10 percent of Puerto Rico’s schools should be charters. Charters here have high turnover, high segregation rates, and bad teaching conditions.
Education workers with the Federación de Maestras de Puerto Rico (FMPR) correctly blame the finance capital bosses. Billionaires like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Jonathan Sackler (family owner of big pharma Purdue Pharma) and the DeVos family foundation for pushing to cut any remaining benefits for the working class in favor of lining their own pockets. (Betsy DeVos is the current Secretary of Education).
We salute the fightback spirit of our working-class sisters and brothers in Puerto Rico, who have been leading massive fightbacks throughout the island. They exposed how the strategy of the school closings also aims to divide parents, by leaving some schools untouched and closing others.
Attack on disabled students
Many of the 400 schools up for closure have high percentages of students with disabilities. According to a U.S. Department of Education report, approximately 25 percent of students in Puerto Rico have one or more disabilities. Many of the schools targeted have excellent facilities for students with disabilities, according to their parents. Charter schools here are known for their refusal to accept students with disabilities
One example is an elementary school in the Toa Baja municipality, where eight people died in the flooding from last year’s hurricanes. The town suffered the onslaught of sea surges and torrential rain. Levies from a nearby lagoon were opened to prevent them from breaking. The school survived intact with little damage and the neighborhood united to clean and prepare it for returning students.
A few months ago, the same school received notice they were on the list of closure. Parents and teachers are outraged at the Department of Education. The government is forcing children, 56 percent of whom have a disability, to a distant facility with fewer resources and staff. The new school didn’t even have bathrooms for the preschool children. When parents protested, the department representative said children could use the floor mat as a bathroom. “Like an animal!” one parent angrily remarked. “This is how capitalists treat our children, like animals.”
Same Struggle, Same Fight
The militancy of the working class here is clear and the potential to get involved in the class struggle is great. Teachers and students from various community colleges had the honor of supporting these school struggles. From the South Bronx to Toa Boja, workers struggles have no borders.

Obama has a proposal for the Democratic Party and for the imperialist wing of the U.S. ruling class. He laid it out in a “lecture” to a crowd of 15,000 supporters in Johannesburg, South Africa on the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth. Obama’s plan involves stopping Trumpism (though Trump is never named) and restoring the liberal world order dominated by the U. S. rulers.
Obama starts by observing that in 1918 when Mandela was born colonialism was alive and well, with the great powers mobilizing mass racist sentiment in service of imperial expansion and rivalry.  Of course, he overlooks the world-shaking Bolshevik Revolution where the communist-led working class took power in Russia and disrupted the imperialist world order. 
It was this anti-imperialist, socialist revolution in October 1917 that inspired Mandela and many other communist and nationalist liberation movements in Africa and throughout the world. The racist Jim-Crow segregation and murderous exploitation of Black workers in the southern United States inspired no one.
Obama mentions these liberation movements as though they represent the continuing progress of capitalism and liberal democracy toward a wonderful world for all. Actually these movements represent some reforms that were rather quickly taken away by capitalist rulers. These liberation movements failed the workers. They succeeded for some local capitalists.
Racist hypocrite
So what is Obama’s plan to improve life in Africa?  His foundation is mentoring 200 young people from journalists, to small entrepreneurs to educational leaders. He does mention China as a full-grown rival, but says nothing about China’s Silk Road plan that is transforming much of the infrastructure in Africa to align with China’s imperialist needs. Obama’s foundation stands little chance to stop China’s economic dominance in Africa.
Further Obama does not mention that China, Russia and the U. S. are increasing their military presence in Africa. He failed to mention his military imperialist expansion on the continent, including drone bombings and drone bases, in Libya, Nigeria, Somalia, and Tunisia.
In reality Obama is proposing a political plan to make U. S. imperialism look good around the world as it prepares for more wars with its imperialist rivals.
Obama moves on to commit the gross and foul distortion of equating the collapse of the already capitalist Soviet Union in 1989 with the collapse of apartheid that same year. Both systems, he claims, amounted to an assault on individual human dignity.  Yet apartheid, from the start, was dedicated to racial supremacy, while the collapse of the USSR ended the first attempt to building an egalitarian society in which hundreds of millions, if not billions worldwide, still yearn to live. It is precisely that society, communism that Obama is careful to reject in his effort to map out the road ahead. 
Inclusive capitalism
Instead, he calls for “inclusive capitalism”—progressive taxation, public education, universal health care, and a role for organized labor.
Obama then focuses on the U. S. ruling class. They are still far too unpatriotic and they are running away with society’s wealth. They have no sense of duty to their nation, no appetite for sacrifice.  Yet he willfully refuses to acknowledge any role whatsoever his eight years in power played in further concentrating wealth in fewer hands coming out of the 2008 crisis. Obama’s “inclusive capitalism” is a call for discipline of the bosses. He paints the rise of nationalism worldwide as a failure on the part of ruling classes to contain the alienation that runaway inequality has engendered. Divided societies cannot confront major adversaries. This is the great ruling class fear Obama articulates. This is a playbook for major war, war that mobilizes entire societies.
Obama’s “inclusive capitalism” includes national borders, massive deportations, and immigrants assimilating.  He quotes Mandela to promote all class unity: “[t]o make peace with an enemy, one must work with that enemy, and that enemy becomes one’s partner.”  
Yet life for Black workers in South Africa is worse than ever.
This one line sums up a major error of the old communist movement. Working with the enemy means more capitalist misery for workers and South Africa is a prime example of that. As Democrats and people on the “left” call for our votes, we must stick to our guns, the long, difficult road to workers power, communism.

San Francisco, CA—Capitalism cannot and will not provide adequate housing for the working class. In the ferociously gentrified San Francisco Bay Area, where the median price of a single-family home now exceeds $1.6 million (sf.curbed.com, 4/5), more than seven thousand people are homeless (San Francisco Chronicle, 6/28).  With an acute shortage of shelter beds, the number of homeless camps has exploded. Thousands—including families with children—are living in cars, tents, parks, abandoned buildings, outside bus stations, or in the streets.
Many homeless people, including both teachers and students, have jobs but cannot afford a lease in a city where the average one-bedroom apartment rents for $3,334 a month (rentjungle.com, June 2018). Thousands more are housing-insecure. They face impossible rent increases and are headed down the eviction-to-homelessness pipeline.  
Yet countless houses and apartments in and around San Francisco sit empty. And the technology exists to build thousands more. How is this catastrophe possible?
The Bay Area housing crisis can be traced straight to the anarchy of capitalism. Silicon Valley mega-firms like Apple, Google, and Facebook build huge production facilities with no plan for housing and support services for their workers. Between 2012 and 2016, more than 373,000 new jobs have been created in the Bay Area—and only 58,000 new housing units permitted. Since 2011, the competition of high-salaried tech workers for scarce housing stock has doubled the median price of a home, squeezing out lower-paid workers. Empty lots and “tear-down” properties in Silicon Valley sell for over $1 million.
What the profit-crazy millionaires and billionaires cannot anticipate, for all their fancy technology, is that the working class—citizens and non-citizens alike—will fight back and unite in a multiracial force to confront their oppressors, and ultimately to smash the inhuman profit system.   
“American Dream,” R.I.P.  
For a very few generations, the American Dream of home ownership looked like an answer for many workers in the U.S. Ownership meant housing security and the accumulation of wealth.  Passing this wealth down to one’s children allowed for upward mobility. After World War II, U.S. capitalism was rapidly expanding around the world. Within the U.S., the real estate industry was making money hand over fist. Both suburbia and undeveloped areas in cities like Oakland saw massive development of single-family homes. In the 1950s and 1960s, supported by anti-racist struggles and unionized jobs, some Black workers who left the South in the Great Migration bought homes in the Bay Area’s flatlands. Immigrant workers bought homes in Fruitvale and Chinatown.   
But the American Dream was always color-coded. Banks, real estate interests, and the federal and state governments enforced racist redlining to segregate neighborhoods. The racist exploitation meant that Black, Latin, and immigrants workers were forced to pay higher interest rates for mortgages—or could not qualify to buy a home at all.
A recent article in the SF Business Times reported that HUD (the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) has now defined the minimum annual income for “affordable housing” for a family of four in the Bay Area at $117,400. Which means that the great majority of Latin, Black, immigrant, low-wage, and non-union workers need not apply!   
Why capitalism can’t build its way out of the housing crisis  
Capitalism invests in housing only when it generates an ever-increasing profit. Beginning in the late 1970s, sections of the working class started losing ground in wages and buying power. Concentrated among Black, Latin, Asian, single heads of households (predominantly women and new immigrant workers), the wealth gap has continued to widen. Since the 1970s, the “hourly inflation-adjusted wages grew only 0.2 percent per year. In other words, though the economy has been growing, the primary way most people benefit from that growth has almost completely stalled…Large wage gains have accrued to workers at the top…and wages have been declining or stagnant for the bottom half of the income distribution” (Harvard Business Review, 10/24/17). Meanwhile, the cost of housing (workers’ largest family expense) has risen by 73 percent for a two-bedroom home (rentjungle.com, June 2018).
After the U.S. subprime mortgage market collapsed in 2007, inequality reached new extremes. The resulting flood of foreclosures robbed the working class of billions of dollars of wealth. Oakland was among the hardest-hit cities, with more than 35,000 homes lost between 2007 and 2012. Evictions and displacement from rental properties soared as well.  The so-called American Dream was now a waking nightmare for the working class—and a new golden new dawn for the rapacious pigs of finance capital.  (See box on Blackstone.)
According to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), the shortage of affordable housing “is a primary driver of all our transportation problems.” At the current rate of new housing construction, an MTC study estimated that Oakland residents would have to wait until the year 2295 to house its projected population in 2040!
Because of racist gentrification and decades of “urban removal,” the Black population of San Francisco declined from 13 percent in 1970 to less than 6 percent today (Seattle Times, 5/11/15). Oakland is now following a similar trajectory. With 94 percent of new development now reserved for market-rate or luxury properties, Oakland has lost more than 30 percent of its Black population since 2000. Immigrant families are also leaving in droves, with landlords using the threat of ICE to evict them or raise their rents.
The working class fights back
Bay Area homeowners and renters are uniting in an anti-displacement chapter of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). Most of the organization’s struggles focus on keeping workers in existing housing and blocking the displacement-and-eviction-to-homelessness pipeline.
To stop evictions, ACCE members organize with direct action and phone blasts against individual landlords and big Wall Street investors. Recently, more than 30 members took over the Blackstone/Invitation Homes office (see box) in Sacramento and succeeded in getting a rent increase reduced from $250 to $60. One family avoided foreclosure, while three others remain in their homes at reasonable rents.
ACCE is building a mass movement to restore and expand rent control. It’s also organizing a campaign to push landlords to sell distressed properties to a collection of “socially conscious investors” or land trusts to enable affordable rentals or mortgages, with families owning their homes but not the land.
Reform and Revolution
 “Housing is a human right.”  “Housing for people, not for profit.” These are common chants when ACCE members and friends turn out to confront landlords, the politicians who protect them, or real estate bosses like Blackstone\Invitation Homes. The chants follow the communist principle that all workers deserve decent housing. These actions are limited, however, because they focus on the needs of individual tenants, not on system change or the destruction of capitalism. Battles around evictions and rent control don’t solve an essential capitalist contradiction:  Shrinking workers’ wages can no longer purchase what the working class produces, the basis of capitalist profit.
Getting involved in these struggles has given Progressive Labor Party members the opportunity to raise our communist politics about the limits of capitalism. Some ACCE members joined us on May Day, while others came to a demonstration against the separation of immigrant children from their parents at the Richmond Detention Center.  
While celebrating our reform victories, members of PLP point out that the many battles over the years have yet to guarantee housing as a working-class right. To accomplish that, we must destroy capitalism and replace it with communism: no money, no buying or selling of commodities like housing. Instead of running the economy for profit for a few, we will organize and distribute collective production based upon the needs of the entire working class.

*****

Blackstone Equity Group: Housing Racketeers 

Blackstone Group\Invitation Homes is the world’s largest private equity firm. Based on proprietary logarithms, the company calculated that areas like Oakland, with high job growth and a shortage of housing, had the greatest profit potential.  After the crash of 2007, it made wholesale bids on auctions of “distressed loans” and amassed a portfolio of 82,000 homes. As a result, Blackstone captured the wealth lost by individual homeowners in foreclosure.  The filthy rich got richer; the working class was devastated.     
In 2017, Blackstone became the dominant player in the rental market in Alameda, an island city in the San Francisco Bay that connects to Oakland with bridges and a tunnel.  Blackstone bought the 615-unit Summer House apartment complex, the largest in Alameda, for $231 million.  Now its management company is initiating mass rent increases and evictions.
In the 1940s, in another part of Alameda, public funds built housing for military and shipyard personnel, most of them lower-income Black, Latin, or immigrant workers. In 1958, the Alameda Housing Department demolished the 760-unit Chipmen housing project and sold off the publicly owned parcels to private speculators, who subsequently developed the Summer Homes. Some owners gamed the federal government to obtain low-interest loans.  Some deliberately allowed the housing to deteriorate and then tried to evict their tenants. Finally, in 2005, Kennedy Wilson bought the complex for $87 million and spent $30 million in renovations. Between 2006 and 2016, they also filed the highest number of unlawful detainers in Alameda, the first step to eviction. In 2017, they finally sold the complex to Blackstone for $231 million, a tidy profit (East Bay Express).
This process is labeled “gentrification.” We can see it for what it is: capitalist maximization of profit off the backs of a working class that is desperate for housing and stratified and divided by wage differentials.

Mexico’s President-Elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (a.k.a. “AMLO”) represents a significant step toward fascism. His July 1 landslide victory was forged by a capitalist coalition seeking to impose greater discipline on a famously corrupt ruling class. His fake-leftist campaign misled millions into an electoral process that justifies massive inequality and daily attacks on workers and students.
Lopez Obrador’s reforms will sacrifice workers in the name of deadly all-class unity. Since his election he has championed a national “reconciliation”: “I call on all Mexicans…to put above their personal interests, however legitimate, the greater interest, the general interest. The state…will represent all Mexicans, rich and poor….” (New York Times, 7/1). Populist rhetoric aside, nationalism always serves the needs of the bosses’ state. Only communism can serve the needs of the working class.
Industry and inequality
Today’s political crisis in Mexico has been building for decades. From 1929 to 2000, the Mexican bosses controlled the country through a decaying single-party system, the cynically named Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. The brazen theft and infighting by PRI politicians culminated in the deeply unpopular regime of President Enrique Pena Nieto: “[V]iolence has surged, the economy has stagnated, and corruption has dominated the headlines” (North American Congress on Latin America, 7/4). While half the Mexican population lives in poverty, Mexico has 30 billionaires (Forbes, 4/17/17) and at least 145,000 millionaires (WealthInsight, 2015).
The collapse of the PRI and the rise of Lopez Obrador and his populist MORENA party reflect a split between the biggest thieves—the industrial bosses who rely on Mexico’s export trade versus small-time capitalists who steal and skim local resources. When Mexico’s economy was mainly agrarian, the big capitalists were content to plunder from the nation’s oil reserves and the early telecommunications industry. But over the last 20 years, under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexico has developed a huge manufacturing economy. They did this on the backs of the industrial working class, a source of cheap labor and high profits:
With a daily minimum wage of only $4, Mexican labor has a significant cost advantage over the US and Canada. Mexico has become the world’s largest exporter of flat-screen televisions; it’s also home to the world’s seventh-largest automotive industry, and it has a $6 billion aviation sector (JPMorgan Chase, 10/10/2016).
As they seek to build a national highway system and other critical infrastructure for their factories, the big rulers can no longer tolerate local police, politicians, and drug bosses siphoning off billions of pesos. At the same time, they need to enlist the patriotic loyalty of a working class that regularly takes to the streets “to protest impunity and economic mismanagement” (NACLA, 7/4). For all his attacks on “the mafia of power,” Lopez Obrador persuaded the big bosses that he is ready to serve them. He has promised to contain the national debt, maintain close relations with U.S. finance capitalists, and promote “a border economic zone that would encourage more foreign investment” (Washington Post 6/29).
False promises and fascism
As a firebrand mayor of Mexico City from 2000 to 2005, Lopez Obrador gained a reputation for progressive reform. But he also hired Rudolph Guiliani, the arch-racist ex-New York City mayor and now a shill for U.S. President Donald Trump. He partnered with Carlos Slim, the richest person in Mexico, to gentrify center-city neighborhoods recovering from the 1985 earthquake, pushing out workers to usher in the wealthy (Brookings Institute, 7/3). Now he is promising universal pensions, a national scholarship fund, and a revived healthcare system, with no plan to fund them aside from a vague promise to end corruption. But a number of AMLO’s “high-profile political allies have in the past been linked to corruption and electoral fraud” (LAT, 7/10).
“Today AMLO is a much more moderate, centrist politician who will govern the business community with the right hand, and the social sectors and programs with the left,” said Antonio Sola, who created the effective fear campaign that branded Mr. López Obrador as a danger to Mexico in the 2006 election he lost” (NYT, 7/1). Notably, AMLO has backed down from earlier opposition to a 2013 reform to open up Mexico’s national oil company, PEMEX, to private and foreign investment (Washington Post, 7/2).
In short, Lopez Obrador’s populist appeal lays the basis for a mass fascist movement. MORENA offers the biggest capitalists a potentially powerful force to attack smaller bosses and any workers who fail to fall in line with the rulers’ program.
AMLO and inter-imperialist rivalry
As the U.S. declines relative to China, its main rival imperialist superpower, Lopez Obrador is hedging his bets. He is expected to roll back exports of crude petroleum for refining in the U.S. and to build PEMEX’s processing capacity. According to Rocio Nahle, AMLO’s top energy adviser, Mexico needs “to consume our own fuels and not depend on foreign gasoline”—a clear threat to U.S. oil profits, for which Mexico is the  leading foreign market (Reuters, 2/22).B
Both Lopez Obrador and Trump sould be loath to destroy NAFTA, a source of super-profits to bosses on both sides of the border. Still, any weakening of Mexico-U.S. trade relations could open the door to further Chinese economic inroads in North America, a huge problem for the main section of the U.S. ruling class. In October 2016, China promised to “elevate military ties to [a] new high and described the possibility of joint operations, training, and logistical support” for Mexico. Since then, Mexico has sold China access to large deep-water oil fields off the coast. Meanwhile Carlos Slim partnered with a Chinese car company to make SUVs in Mexico (The Atlantic, May 2017).
López Obrador and other MORENA leaders “have been vocal about expanding their trade partnerships with countries like China” (Politico, 1/7). After Lopez Obrador’s election, China congratulated the victor and pledged “to work with Mexico to build up mutual trust, deepen cooperation, bring benefits to both peoples and contribute positive energy to the international community” (Xinhua, 7/2). With Mexico’s oil reserves potentially up for the highest bidder, the bosses’ economic competition will inevitably lead to armed confrontation and global war. This fight will likely center upon control of oil and gas, the raw materials essential to the capitalists’ militaries and industries.
Workers can win
Whenever the bosses fight over profits and resources, the working class gets caught in the crossfire. But we can take inspiration to fight back against this deadly system from the workers of Valle de Chalco, Mexico. In early 2017, when gas and electricity prices skyrocketed, they organized occupations, marches, and road blockades. They broke the bosses’ rules to make their own connections to the electrical grid and guarantee power for the masses.
These workers gave us a glimpse of how the working class can organize and run the world for its own needs. When workers around the world organize across borders, smashing the bosses’ nationalism, we can win the communist world we need. Join Progressive Labor Party.