Washington, D.C., September 22—The Howard University bosses felt pain from their ill-advised decision to invite former FBI Director James Comey to be the featured speaker at the University’s opening Convocation. Over 20 students organized as “HU Resist” inflicted that pain. They marched into the auditorium just before Comey was to speak singing the old protest song, “We Shall Not Be moved.”
The protesters then chanted, “Get out James Comey! You’re not our homie!” and  “No justice, no peace, no f***ing police!” They read a list of Black members of the working class killed by the police.
Comey tried to speak but could not be heard over the chanting and finally sat down. The protesters marched out to join a bigger rally outside the auditorium. They rallied on the Yard (the main campus), growing in numbers.
The…students issued a statement saying Comey “represents an institution diametrically opposed to the interests of black people domestically and abroad. While his tenure at the FBI has finished, his impact on our community remains.”
In particular, they faulted him with propagating what some officials have called “the Ferguson effect” — a theory that the rise in violent crime is due to police being fearful of facing public criticism for being too violent, and therefore avoiding confrontations with criminals (Washington Post, 9/22).
The Ferguson effect is racist, unproven, and coined by the recently retired chief of the St. Louis police department, Doyle Sam Dotson III. This racist theory was used by Rahm Emanuel, mayor of Chicago, Chuck Rosenberg, director of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and of course James Comey. The Ferguson effect more reflects the trepidation of kkkops following the Ferguson rebellion. That’s a good thing. It shows how threatened the rulers feel of the possibility of class-conscious Black workers armed in rebellion. That idea that this resulted in an increase of violent crimes is how the rulers’ way to warrant an increase of police in the neighborhoods, part fascism, and all racism. Progressive Labor Party (PLP) stands in solidarity with Howard students for calling out the system’s racism.
The students then marched to the administration building to confront the President Wayne A.I. Frederick. Cowering in his office, he ordered the building locked down, and finally re-opened it two hours later after the rally ended.
HU Resist first stepped into the spotlight last semester as they protested the secret, on-campus meeting of President Frederick with the racist billionaire Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education. Several of the antiracist fighters also traveled to Charlottesville in August to confront the Nazis who rallied there (see CHALLENGE, 9/13).
Fight Elitism, Build Working-Class Consciousness
HU Resist is fighting back against elitism at the University; one HU Resist member declared, “Howard is doing exactly what it was designed to do: to be an institution for the future of the black elite.” HU Resist wants to demolish this type of culture and replace it with one of responsibility and empathy with the surrounding community. Unifying with working class communities throughout the Washington area is a great idea as the next step in the struggle.
The PLP calls on HU Resist to link up with the Washington area transit workers, who have their own militant history and are under sharp attack from management bosses. The future of a worker-student alliance against racism and capitalism is bright. Such an alliance can intensify the class struggle in all its dimensions and move our struggle closer to revolution and victory!

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Who Is Comey?

James B. Comey is best known for his October Surprise, an October 28 letter to Congress, essentially reopening a closed investigation of Clinton and her aids, which allegedly damaged Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency (CHALLENGE, 1/11).
But, Comey’s entire career has been a part of the (in)justice system of the United States that is responsible both for mass incarceration and vicious imperialism abroad. He is part and parcel of the ruling class’s ongoing attack on the global working class, including racist and international aggression and torture—par for the course for capitalism.
As Deputy Attorney General in 2005, he signed a memo in 2005 approving 13 forms of CIA torture during interrogation including waterboarding, wall slams, sexual humiliation, confinement in small boxes, subjection to extreme temperatures and stress positions, extreme sleep deprivation, and other forms of torture.
As FBI Director, he justified mass incarceration in a speech given in 2015. He also doubled the reward to $2 million for the capture of Black nationalist Assata Shakur, who has political asylum in Cuba. He led the charge to get Apple Inc. to install a “back door” for U.S. surveillance agencies to use, declaring at a cybersecurity conference in 2016, “There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America; there is no place outside of judicial reach.” (CNN 3/9/16).
He left the Department of (in)Justice in 2005 to work as general counsel for Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor in the U.S. and a key part of the US imperialist infrastructure. Five years later, he joined senior management person at Bridgewater Associates, a major investment firm, and then in 2013 joined the board of HSBC Holding, a major finance company that was in big legal trouble over money laundering for drug dealers and alleged terrorists.
“Comey led FBI surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists and leaders while directing the agency. Comey is set to lead a lecture series at Howard University this year” (BET, 9/23).
Like the City University of New York students did to war criminal David Petraeus in 2013, the Howard students have an opportunity to make Comey’s visit a memorable one.
Why at Howard?
Why, did Howard University invite him to launch this academic year at Convocation? Probably to demonstrate HU’s commitment to the existing capitalist order including some of its most heinous aspects. But here is what racist university President Frederick wrote to the campus community prior to the event:
“I am pleased to welcome Mr. James Comey to deliver the 150th Opening Convocation address... He will enlighten us and share with us his experiences and his expertise. Formerly the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), appointed by President Barack Obama, Mr. Comey is a man steeped in his ethics.”
If Comey is “steeped in his ethics”, we are facing a poisonous cup of tea.

It’s barely three years since racist killer cop Darren Wilson murdered teenager Mike Brown in cold blood, in the streets of Ferguson. Now workers in the St. Louis area, and all over the world, have witnessed kkkop Jason Stockley get acquitted for the racist murder of 24-year-old unarmed Black father Anthony Lamar Smith. The international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP)stands in working-class solidarity with the anti-racist fighters of St Louis, with the revolutionary message that justice for victims of fascist police terror will only be gained by smashing this racist and sexist capitalist system worldwide.
The Working Class Will Always Fight Back
Prior to announcing the verdict on September 15, that cleared Stockley for the 2011 murder of Anthony Lamar Smith, the bosses were already preparing for a working-class rebellion. They built barricades around the courthouse and increased their police presence. They were determined not to let workers take the offensive as they had before in cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, and Minneapolis. The sight of mass multi-racial fightback terrifies the bosses everywhere, and rightfully so. Revolutionary working class unity threatens their very own parasitic existence.
But despite the bosses’ efforts, workers throughout the area have risen in rebellion to honor of their murdered working-class brother. Since Stockley’s acquittal, anti-racist fighters have taken to the streets day and night to condemn and fight back against this racist profit system. At least 100 fighters have been arrested so far, as the bosses’ attack dogs brutalize them with military-grade weapons, tear gas, and pepper spray.
Regardless of the violence that they face, workers in St. Louis continue fighting back, being a beacon of anti-racism for workers everywhere. They provide a glimpse of the potential for revolutionary change possible only when the working masses organize long-term in their class interests to fight for and build a better world.
Destroy Bosses’ Government – Fight For Working Class Power
Make no mistake: the institutions of the police and the courts exist, and have always existed, to protect and enforce the rights of private property of the capitalist class and their ability to continue making profit through the division, terrorization, and exploitation of the working-class. ‘Reform’ makes the kkkops and courts look nicer, but they continue to serve their capitalist masters. A world without racism and sexism means communism, when workers run all aspects of society.
The bosses’ need for increasing police state fascism in the streets is connected to their need to boost their military budget for their imperialist oil wars worldwide. The countless attacks on workers, from deportations to racist police murder, from sex trafficking to mass incarceration, all need to be recognized as problems of capitalism and destroyed through communist revolution.
Organizing the international working class into a mass Progressive Labor Party of millions remains the only way to permanently abolish the cops, courts, jails, or any other oppressive state institution. Only by organizing our class to destroy inequality, racism, and sexism at their capitalist root can we ever hope to achieve justice for Anthony Lamar Smith and countless others. Only by establishing a worker-run egalitarian communist society in which we make all decisions based on our needs not on making profits, can we ever expect racist police murders to be a nightmare of the past. Join the Progressive Labor Party and build this fight now.

The ability of a society to respond to natural disasters is primarily a political question. Communism is the exact opposite of the hopeless self-serving mantras of modern capitalism. While Cuba has long ago given up socialism in favor of becoming the next vacation hot spot, the ideology and practices have hung on to some degree, both in the state’s priorities and the outlook of the people.
Cuba’s reaction to Hurricane Irma gives us a fading look at what has been lost as the communist movement has declined over the last 50 years as well as a small glimmer at what is possible in a society fully dedicated to serving the needs of the great masses of people.
Hurricane Response After the Socialist Revolution
Shortly after the socialist revolution in 1960, Cuba developed a sophisticated hurricane response system in the wake of Hurricane Flora, a 1963 storm that killed 1,750 people in Cuba. The system included standing evacuation plans for every household and frequent drills. The whole preparation and response to hurricanes was organized under a civil defense system that organized people throughout the island to participate in the readiness, evacuations and immediate response. The Civil defense system has hung on, at least for now, even as socialism has been abandoned by the Cuban rulers.
[T]hey save enormous numbers of lives by massive evacuations. … this time they evacuated a million people. And even though the infrastructure is poor and many of the houses are very poor, [the state’s] focus is on saving lives.
…[the civil defense organizations] have all the neighborhoods mapped. They know exactly who lives where. They know who the vulnerable people are, and they know who the elderly people are and where they live. And a couple of days before the hurricane hits, they evacuate them all. They start with those people. Pregnant women get put in hospitals. People with infirmities get also put in hospitals. Others get taken to either shelters or with family or friends who are living in more secure houses. But everybody in Cuba knows what they’re going to do if a hurricane hits.” (Democracy Now, 9/22).
Compare what happened in Cuba, where 10 lives were lost in one of the places hardest hit by Irma to the situation in Florida where 11 people died at a single site as a result of the failure of the nursing home administration and State authorities to evacuate the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills. After Hurricane Irma knocked out their power “residents …spent three days sweltering in stiflingly hot rooms despite the fact that a fully functioning and air-conditioned hospital is right across the street”(NBC 9/21).
Perhaps even more sickening than the complete abdication of responsibility by those in-charge of the care of the nursing home patients is how the profit system makes an honest evaluation of what went wrong in Hollywood Hills impossible to assess as the finger pointing has begun.
A critical issue—whether administrators from the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills in Broward County made distress calls for help to Gov. Rick Scott’s private cellphone — will probably not be cleared up soon. On Sunday, the Florida governor’s office revealed the four key voice mails from the center have been deleted…
The center’s administrators maintain the calls to Scott were seeking “immediate assistance.” Scott’s office, however, says the calls never indicated an emergency, and that the information was passed on to the appropriate state agencies. But now the voice mails are gone (Washington Post 9/25).

Imperialism and Capitalist Exploitation at Heart of Myanmar’s Destruction of Rohingya Community

MARCH TO MYANMAR EMBASSY

SEPTEMBER 30, 4PM, 1747 Columbia Rd NW, WASHINGTON, DC.

The imperialist rivalry among China, India, and the US is embedded in the destruction of Rohingya villages, the murder of Rohingya people by the military and racist vigilantes, and the forced migration of at least 400,000 refugees into neighboring Bangladesh. These attacks are mainly portrayed as an attack on Muslims who have been denied citizenship in Myanmar, and labelled in the mass media as a religious issue. But is religious persecution at the root of this human crisis?  Or is it a storyline meant to mask the true cause: displacement of peasant farmers by capitalist and imperialist interests in order to exploit a strategic, resource-rich region?

For the last 20 years, groups such as Human Rights Watch have documented land grabs by Myanmar’s military regime that have displaced the rural poor indiscriminately across all of the country’s 135 ethnic groups. For example, in Keren province on the border with Thailand--viewed as a prime spot for tourism, industrial expansion and agricultural development—rural populations have had their homes and farmland confiscated without compensation, and been arrested for trespassing when they continue to work the land.

Western sanctions against Myanmar’s military government were in place throughout its rule, up until the 2015 elections, when Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) prevailed. But despite the election victory, Myanmar remains largely under military control. Current aggressive military actions against the Rohingya and other ethnic groups in the area may lead to a reinstatement of sanctions. The brutal response to the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA)’s attack on local police stations is being labelled by Myanmar’s government as a “security issue”, while the UN and Western nations portray it as “ethnic cleansing” of a large section of Rakhine province. The value of the territory now being cleared of Rohingya villages and others derives from China’s interest in building a $7.3 billion deep sea port at Kyaukpyu on the Rakhine coast and developing a $3.2 billion industrial park nearby. This is part of China’s $900 billion Belt and Road Initiative in Asia and would give China a foothold in the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean.  India also seeks to strengthen its role in the Bay of Bengal through its deep water port at Sittwe.

With so much at stake, it is clear that the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Aung San Suu Kyi is as meaningless as that given to Obama—or Henry Kissinger, for that matter. Human rights are easily overlooked in the blinding glare of profits from pipelines and industrial development. Some of the country’s Buddhists, who are impoverished themselves, nevertheless have been won over to carry out ethnic and religious persecution and are helping the military, similar to the way some poor white workers in the U.S. blame their poverty on immigrants and Black people. The only solution to this problem, which is emblematic of others taking place worldwide, lies in class struggle and multiracial, multiethnic unity. The fight against anti-Muslin prejudice in the US and worldwide is part of the antiracist struggles necessary to build the unity needed to destroy the capitalist system worldwide.

The Progressive Labor Party is an international revolutionary communist party with organizers in 27 countries. We support the struggles of Myanmar’s workers and farmers against the government’s efforts to drive people off the land and impoverish them in slave-labor industrial development. We condemn the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya and call upon the many oppressed Buddhists and others to join in demanding that the military cease and desist their attacks on the Muslim population and other groups in the area.  We need to build a world where workers run the society, not the military and fake Nobel laureates.  Fight for communism!

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