CHICAGO, December 4—“I attended high school here and the administration fired one of our favorite teachers so the student’s lead a protest in and outside of school to bring him back…that protest changed my life. I never had a voice before and after that protest I decided what I needed to do with my life and that is to use my voice to make change in the world that’s what brought me out to the picket line today to support the teachers.”
 This alumni Acero charter school student supported the first charter school strike in the country. Acero strike united students and parents on the picket lines for five of the unseasonal coldest days of the year. Parents and students brought coffee and doughnuts each day and joined the picket lines.
This student-parent-teacher unity is one of the pillars of an antiracist, communist culture. Progressive Labor Party supported the strike and brought the message of antiracism to the crowd. We fight for the idea that Acero schools’ working conditions are the 7,000 students’ learning conditions.
The education workers fought for pro-student and antiracist demands: smaller class sizes, meaningful sanctuary protections for the mostly immigrant students/ communities that Acero serves, and resources for students with language and special needs.
They also fought for better wages for the mainly Black and Latin paraprofessional and support staff workers. These workers have been deprived of salary increases since Acero unionized in May 2013. Teachers fought and won pay schedules that mirror the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). “Acero teachers earn, on average, $13,000 less than their peers in Chicago’s traditional public schools while also working around 20 percent more hours, the [CTU] union says” (NY Mag, 12/6).
Charter schools reinforce segregation and submission
This Acero win is only one part of a protracted fight that educators, students, parents, and the rest of the working class must unite around. Acero, like most charter schools, are organized to make money for wealthy backers and top administrators. However, that is not their main purpose. In addition to disciplining mainly Black and Latin students to take orders, the main purpose of charter schools is to divide our class. The bosses do this by dividing District teachers from Charter teachers; students from teachers; parents from teachers and students. Charter schools, because of their punitive discipline policies and their harsh rules they win teachers, students, and parents to a racist lie. Black and Latin youth are brainwashed into thinking that you’re weak if you can’t follow the rules or keep up with the piles of nightly homework. Many charters stress compliance among their primarily Black and Latin student body they service in working-class communities.
The growth of charter schools in Chicago, from 2005 to 2015, coincided with the destruction of public housing and the city’s loss of 250,000 Black people. Now the school district which was majority Black has shifted since 2010 to Latin students. Chicago district schools saw 83,000 fewer Black students in 2016 than it did in 2000, a loss of 36 percent (WBEZ).
In 2013, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) closed 50 schools in Black neighborhoods for “under-enrollment”. Many charter schools had opened in these same underpopulated neighborhoods, promising a better education but never delivering. In the early 2000s, when Chicago’s Latin population was growing, CPS made a decision to build new public schools rather than integrate Latin students into existing predominately Black schools. Later, the Acero charter network took advantage of Chicago’s growing Latin population by establishing 15 schools in Latin neighborhoods.
The only solution is communist revolution
Our job as communist is to win parents, students and teachers to see that all schools—charter, or otherwise—exist to educate our students for the ruling class. The U.S. is losing its hold as the number one imperialist in the world. That means world war is on the horizon, due to sharpening threats from rival imperialists in China and Russia. The same students that teachers like Acero’s fight for, will be cannon fodder for imperialist armies. The Progressive Labor Party, unlike other organizations involved in the Acero fight, consistently advocates for communist revolution as the solution to the horrors of capitalism. Struggles, such as the one waged by Acero workers, are important because of the lessons learned in the process.
Time and time again, when workers fight for better working and living conditions, we are given a few reforms and permission to vote for our next ruler. Workers keep voting, and Black and Latin working class communities still get attacked. Workers keep voting, yet the schools continue to be shut down. Immigrant workers still get deported and Black youth are still gunned down by kkkops. The countless politicians that played on workers’ cynicism to get votes are that many reasons why the ballot is a failed path to workers’ liberation.
Only overthrowing the racist, sexist and imperialist system called capitalism, and building a borderless communist world will ever give us the world the working class deserves. Join the international PLP to create a world where education is truly a right for the world’s workers!

New York City December 10,–About 400 members of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and other organizations marched tonight to the offices of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to protest ADL’s sponsorship of U.S. police training by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). There were simultaneous marches inTel Aviv, Israel, and several other U.S. cities. These actions along with the pressure mounted by JVP caused two police departments to cancel their trips to Israel, which has never happened before.
Soon after 9/11, police departments from many major U.S cities, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the New York City (NYC) Transit Authority and other security organizations made these trips to Israel to learn from the police, military and intelligence agencies there.
They are interested in Israel’s advanced techniques for controlling mass protests, collecting intelligence, recruiting informants, profiling at airports, and using drones for spying and investigations.
In 2009, the NYC police modeled their units for spying on Muslims and recruiting informants on Israeli practices. Some Israeli-trained units coordinated the attacks on Occupy encampments in many U.S. cities.
Always needing more tools for terrorizing and controlling immigrants and black and Latin workers, U. S. police are increasingly eager to learn from their fascist counterparts.
Murderous allies
Israel has illegally occupied the West Bank and Gaza for 60 years and treats its own Palestinian citizens, dark-skinned Jews, and immigrant workers harshly.
Since independence in 1948, Israel has systematically driven most Palestinians off their land and into the occupied territories, where it continues to steal more land by building fortified settlements in the West Bank. Gaza, a 141 square mile area containing 1.85 million people, is completely surrounded by a wall and has been massively attacked by the Israeli army many times, killing at least 3,600 and wounding tens of thousands in the 2008 and 2014 attacks alone. Over the last 7 months, over 200 unarmed Gazan protesters have been killed and over 18,000 wounded.
The infrastructure of Gaza has been so destroyed, that there is barely any drinkable water, electricity only a few hours a day and a severe shortage of medicines.
  Nonetheless, Israel is one of the U.S.’s closest allies and receives over $3 billion in annual military aid. Israel’s nuclear-armed military, by far the most powerful in the region, is the main U.S. guarantor of control over the vast reserves of oil in the Middle East.
Just as with Saudi Arabia, which has killed over 80,000 in Yemen, mass murder doesn’t mean that the U.S will not support its allies when valuable resources are at stake.
So-called social justice organization
The ADL, which claims to be a civil rights organization, recently blamed murder of 12 Jews in Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania  on white supremacist anti-Semites, and JVP. Because JVP opposes the Israeli occupation, of the West Bank ADL and many other Zionist (pro-Israel as a Jewish state) organizations, accuse the organization, of causing anti-Semitism. In reality, the brutal and racist treatment of Palestinians has contributed to an increase in anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment in the world. The promotion of racism by right-wing forces like Trump and nationalists in Europe and South America is even more important.
In order to fight fascism, which is growing worldwide as economic, political and military conflicts sharpen,a multiracial international communist movement is needed, like we build in PLP. A weakness of the JVP actions was that they were nearly all Jewish, despite some attempts to build a broader coalition. The police who train in Israel are learning to repress workers of every stripe who dare to rebel, and we must build better ties with Arab, Black, Latin, immigrant and all workers to fight back .
Workers are taught to divide themselves along national or ethnic lines –identity politics. In reality, bosses are embedded in every such group. Instead, we must unite with all of our working class brothers and sisters throughout the world if we are to ever become strong enough to fight fascism or overthrow this racist capitalist system.

The first George Bush president from 1988–1992, died on November 30, 2018, and has since been lionized by the bosses’ media and politicians. But Bush’s vicious, racist legacy caused decades of death and suffering, for the working class around the world.
The U.S. ruling class wishes its murderous actors would carry out their roles with finesse, rather than bumbling ineptness like Trump. Bush committed mass murder in the name of spreading democracy, as have all U.S. rulers since this country’s inception. It matters not whether we assess liberal or conservative, Democratic or Republican presidents – they all kill and oppress the workers of the world in order to preserve power and resources. It is the capitalist/imperialist imperative, a system that must be overthrown with workers’ power.
The career of a killer
As a college student at Yale, Bush belonged to Skull and Bones, one of the secret societies for wealthy white Christian men, from which the CIA did much of its recruiting. After graduating in 1948, Bush went into the oil business in Texas and began his covert association with the CIA, using his business ventures as cover. His Zapata drilling company, ironically named after the Mexican freedom fighter, was involved in the U.S-backed overthrow of the elected left-leaning Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. It was also implicated in the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, where Bush family sugar holdings had been seized by Fidel Castro. (The Nation 12/4)
Bush became a Congressman in 1966 and soon afterwards traveled to Vietnam with a CIA official to examine the Phoenix Program, a massive U.S. terror and death squad operation that tortured and killed 25,000–50,000 insurgents. He also became involved in Operation Condor, a program enabling right wing dictators in Latin America, as in Chile and Argentina, to brutally kill tens of thousands of dissidents. Later, when Bush was running the CIA from 1976-1977, a CIA asset with the Chilean secret police fatally bombed Chilean diplomat, Orlando Letelier, and his aide in Washington, D.C . Bush deliberately misled the FBI investigation away from the killer(The Intercept 12/5).
Another mass murderer in the White House
In 1980, Bush became Ronald Reagan’s vice president. Jimmy Carter had lost his bid for re-election largely because 52 U.S citizens taken hostage in Iran after the overthrow of the U.S.-supported Shah in 1979, had not been freed. Since the hostages were released the day after Reagan’s inauguration, it is strongly suspected that Bush had made a secret deal with the Iranians to insure Reagan’s victory.
Once in office, the Reagan-Bush team began a long sequence of secret and vile actions in Central America. Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua installed by the U.S. in the 1930s, had been overthrown by the Sandinistas in 1979. Hoping to reverse this revolution, the U.S. trained death squads and torturers, the Contras, at the School of the Americas in Georgia and supplied them with arms.
After Congress passed an amendment in 1984 banning aid to the Contras, Bush, together with his National Security Advisor Donald Gregg from the Phoenix Program and CIA head William Casey, began a secret arms plan to supply them with weapons. It was financed by illegally selling arms to Iran and cocaine in the poor, mostly Black areas of U.S. cities (the Iran-Contra affair).
When running for President in 1987, Bush’s most successful tactic was a viciously racist ad that featured Willie Horto, a Black man convicted of  murder, who was on a weekend furlough from prison when he committed another crime. Bush used this rare event to smear his opponent as soft on crime and, by implication, not sufficiently wary of violent Black men.
But Bush was responsible for far more extensive death and deception when he became President in1988. Soon after, he invaded Panama, ostensibly to arrest the dictator Noreiga for drug trafficking, although Noriega had been a CIA asset for years and had allowed the Contras to ship drugs from Panama. Over 24,000 troops invaded this tiny country and killed at least 3,000 people, mostly civilians.
 This invasion was meant in part to overcome the embarrassment of the American failure in Vietnam, to re-establish U.S. supremacy in the hemisphere and to get rid of Noriega, whose drug-running had become too well publicized. It was, of course, touted as an exercise in “restoring democracy”(Greenleft 12/8).
But this was just a rehearsal for the horror that Bush was to unleash on Iraq, Operation Desert Storm, as well as setting the stage for his son’s wholesale invasion in 2003. The U.S. had soured on its former ally Saddam Hussein, who sat on the world’s second largest oil reserves, was threatening to begin selling it for euros instead of dollars and was a potential threat to Saudi Arabia.
Bush launched the forever war in Iraq
The Bush administration appeared to give Saddam permission to enter Kuwait via its ambassador April Glaspie, and then publicized a completely fake story about babies being murdered in a hospital nursery by Iraqi soldiers in order to justify the invasion. As the Iraqis retreated, Bush told his soldiers to “put some hate in your heart” and attacked the fleeing troops mercilessly on what became the Highway of Death, as well as bombing Baghdad, including targeting 400 people in an air raid shelter.  Yet the hope  for  a breezy overthrow of Saddam did not materialize, nor did the “short war” that was supposed to demonstrate the infallibility of new high-tech weaponry forestall further war (The Intercept 12/5).
In addition to the millions of lives destroyed by Bush’s drug fueled Iran–Contra secret war, Bush also left a legacy of death and discrimination against workers in the U.S. suffering from AIDS. The HIV epidemic was in full flower in the 90s, and 70,000 mostly gay men died during his presidency. Funding for AIDS research was cut, while Bush repeatedly urged people to change their behavior and criticized Act Up, the main organization advocating for AIDS victims, for using “excessive free speech” (The New Yorker 12/7).
The legacy of that great “statesman” Bush is a massive war in Iraq that is still unresolved that has caused over a million deaths, the rise of Islamic extremism, millions of workers dead or disabled by disease, drugs, or incarceration, and an increase in war and racism. Let us build Progressive Labor Party internationally to drive capitalism from the face of the earth and assure that no more “great politicians” are able to ruin our lives.

The sit-down strike and occupation of the General Motors’(GM) Fisher Body plant No. 1 in Flint, Michigan, for 44 days and nights —  from December 30, 1936 to February 11, 1937 — demonstrated the power of workers in the basic industries, a central outlook of the three-year-old Progressive Labor Movement, that later inspired the Progressive Labor Party.
 A sit-down strike occupies the means of production, preventing the bosses’ use of scabs to resume operations and is harder to attack than an outside picket line. Any company frontal assault would endanger millions of dollars’ worth of machinery. While not a revolutionary act, Flint sit-down was completely controlled by the rank-and-file, although the press and GM labeled it as “Soviet-style tyranny.” GM CEO Alfred Sloan called it “revolutionary in its dangers and implications,” possibly because communists played a central role in its organization and leadership.
The city of Flint was company-controlled — the mayor, city manager, police chief, and judges were GM stockholders, company officials or both. To combat union organizers, GM hired the infamous Pinkertons (a private police force bosses used to infiltrate unions, keep strikers out of plants,that  recruit goons, and protect scabs).They also had ties to the U.S. Justice Department and Navy Intelligence. It organized the Black Legion, a terrorist group that beat, tarred, feathered and murdered active unionists — all this to protect Flint, the nerve center of GM’s world auto empire.
 Three-fourths of GM’s cars were dependent on the chassis produced in Flint. 80 percent of the city’s population was directly dependent on GM for a living. The workers suffered the most intense speed-up on GM’s assembly lines, often unable to climb the stairs when they got home. The workers were determined to slow down the line and smash the open shop. During the Great Depression, with millions unemployed, the company using the threat of layoffs to enforce its speed-up. Flint became a driving force to establish an industrial union called the United Auto Workers (UAW) that included thousands of unskilled and skilled workers, a rarity in unions at that time.
What did the strike demonstrate?
 It was against this backdrop that workers  bravely fought for union recognition, a 30-hour work-week, time and one-half for overtime, abolition of piece work and slowing down the line. They organized the most effective strike apparatus ever seen, completely controlled by the rank-and-file. A mass meeting elected a stewards committee and a strike strategy committee of seven, six of whom were communists.
The strike not only demonstrated the ablity of workers to halt and seize production, it exhibited many instances of working class leadership militancy through organizing, that included:

The creation of rank-and-file committees that governed food distribution, security, information, sanitation and health, a “kangaroo court,” entertainment, education and athletics.
Two mass meetings of 1,200 — the supreme body — were held daily. Every worker served six hours duty — on three, off nine in every 24 hours.
A Special Patrol of 65  workers that formed part of a security committee carried out 35-minute inspection everyday and every hour, to check on any problems, “rumors,” and disruptions.
  Daily cleanup’s occurred as dozens of workers moved through the plant in waves, leaving it spic and span.
Strikers’ children were hoisted through the windows to visit their fathers.
     Labor history and writing classes were organized.
     Charlie Chaplin donated his film “Modern Times” for workers’ viewing.
     A “Living Newspaper” was established for workers to act out the events of the day.
     Women workers and strikers’ wives constituted Brigades armed with 2x4clubs to guard the plant from the outside against police attacks and potential assault by the National Guard.       
‘We have only one life’  
   To capture Chevy Plant No. 4 (which assembled 1,000,000 Chevrolets a year), workers planned brilliant military maneuvers, where they feint attacks on two other Chevy Plant’s (Plant’s No. 9  No. 6), drawing company guards scrambling there, which left Chevy Plant No.4 unprotected, and free to capture by strikers. Soon after the 14,000 workers from the newly seized plant joined the sit-down. After the victorious takeover it was not long before the National Guard surrounded the plants, and waged war on workers attacking  them with tear gas. Amid the chaos and blinding clouds of tear gas one worker, a UAW leader, named Joe Sayen addressed a crowd of equally courageous workers:
We want the whole world to understand what we are fighting for. We are fighting for freedom and life and liberty...What if we should be defeated? What if we should be killed? We have only one life.That’s all we can lose and we might as well die like heroes than like slaves.
The effect on the working class
Nevertheless the workers fightback proved too costly for the bosses. After a decisive battle, GM–fearing destruction of its machinery– surrendered, especially when 40,000 workers from four nearby states marched into Flint and surrounded the struck plants, ready to defend the sit-downers. This inspiring feat which was once deemed “impossible” by the leader of GM’s security thugs (a Hitler-sympathizer), shook the bosses, and their goons to the core.
Despite the bosses railings and weak attempts to undermine worker’s power. The workers won union recognition for the CIO’s United Auto Workers, for the 40-hour work week (which led to weekends off for tens of millions of U.S. workers), overtime pay and a slowing-down of the assembly-line speed-up. In its wake the strike had an electrifying effect on the working class. In less than two weeks, 30,000 workers staged sit-in’s  in a variety of industries. U.S. Steel, the world’s largest steelmaker, and General Electric saw the handwriting on the wall and signed up with CIO unions — without a strike. Women in the million-dollar Woolworth chain were sitting in. Within the next four years, five million industrial workers had joined the CIO. Industrial unions were born.
   The role of communists
Communists in the Communist Party  U.S.A played a fundamental role. As historians noted, “Had it not been for the Communists, there is serious doubt that the forces of industrial unionism would have lived through this period.” However, the CP failed to link this huge reform struggle to the need to win workers to the real solution: revolution. It did not expose the relationship of state power to the ruling class and fostered illusions about government being some “neutral” institution in the battle between classes. It did not explain the class nature of the law. The CP essentially backed Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election, even though it ran its own candidate.
   While trade unions are a defensive weapon for workers. Historically, any reforms workers win are eventually taken away by the rulers’ state power and government control.Capitalism is a worldwide phenomenon. Reform victories like these are undercut by capitalists moving their plants to low-wage areas. Today GM produces more cars in China than in the U.S., not to mention the U.S. auto industry’s presence in South Africa, Vietnam and Eastern Europe.
The only answer to this contradiction is overthrowing capitalism — along with its government — a profit system which always exploits workers wherever it can, pitting one group against another.As one striker remarked as he left the Flint plant, “The first victory is ours. But the war is not over.”