LOS ANGELES, October 17—What was supposed to be a peaceful, orchestrated town hall meeting with the Black District Attorney of Los Angeles, Jackie Lacey, was quickly taken over by hundreds of angry multiracial protestors, with chants that shook the room. “Shut it down, shut it down!”  This action emphasized the vital importance of fighting racism in any reform struggle and several friends moved closer to the revolutionary communist ideas of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). As the Ferguson rebels have said, “It’s the whole damn system.”
Los Angeles boasts the most diverse police department in the country while also leading the nation with the most racist murders by cops!  Since 2000, nearly 1,000 people have been killed in LA County and since 2004 over 2,000 people have been killed in six Southern California counties.  Even with all of this bloodshed, only one cop has ever been indicted and he was later acquitted.
The fight against racist police murders has been the main struggle PLP has waged in the Unitarian church over the last two years since the antiracist rebellion in Ferguson. Locally, the focus was mainly on the murders of Ezell Ford and Brendon Glenn. Due to the struggle by a comrade, a group of church members have broadened this to make racist police terror in general the focus of our call to action.  It was in this vein that 16 Party members and friends from our church attended the town hall meeting to confront the district attorney.
Workers Frighten Racist DA
Scripted questions were presented to attendees as they entered the building.  Within the first two minutes of the start time, before DA Lacey could walk up the hallway to the stage, a participant jumped to the microphone calling the whole meeting a sham.  It was suggested that we take over the meeting and that the community run the meeting instead of the DA.
Cheers rang through the hall for this suggestion. DA Lacey hid behind security as Lisa Simpson, the mother of murdered 18-year-old Richard Risher Jr., took the stage. Ms. Simpson charged the DA and her goons with murder and demanded a response from Lacey. The DA cowered in fear and could only claim to not know about the case, but promised to call Ms. Simpson after the event. Others spoke about how they were wrongly incarcerated, including one man incarcerated for 29 years for a crime he didn’t commit.  A comrade spoke on the systematic nature of the police state, compared mass incarceration to slavery, and called out DA Lacey as complicit.
Speaker after speaker took aim at Lacey and the whole racist system. Participants were not fooled by the fact that DA Lacey is Black; this did nothing to quell the anger and hatred directed at her role as part of the system. It was really clear how the fight against racism unleashes the potential for workers’ power. We made several contacts who want to join the struggle. Friends in our church want to be more active. Others are moving closer to the Party. The struggle continues.

BALTIMORE, October 19—Powerful “West Wednesday” rallies continue to demand justice for Tyrone West and for all working-class victims of systematic capitalist police terror. Such rallies have been held every single week since the vicious, racist police murder of Tyrone in July 2013. Among fighters who participate in the weekly West Wednesday rallies, there is a growing understanding, due to PLP’s continual presence and influence, that the root of the problem is the system of capitalism.
Black Bosses, Enemy of Workers
The police—along with City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, both Black women and both of whom have refused to prosecute the killer cops that took Tyrone’s life—are part of capitalist state power. Along with the military, courts, prisons and federal government, this state power is, in reality, an apparatus that exists for the purpose of violently suppressing the working class. And, since Black workers are the most oppressed and the boldest in fighting back against injustice, state power terrorizes Black workers and students most violently of all.
Recently, Tyrone’s family has asked that many of us send letters to the national Attorney General, Loretta Lynch (fitting name) – another Black woman, who heads the Department of Justice (DOJ) – demanding that the case be reopened, and that the guilty cops be prosecuted and incarcerated.
But the national Department of Justice (DOJ), as part of that state apparatus, is guilty, on a nationwide level, of mass incarceration of largely (but not only) Black workers. Activists that regularly participate in West Wednesday know that Loretta Lynch will likely ignore our demand to prosecute Tyrone’s murderers. Nevertheless, as Tyrone’s family has requested, we’re giving the effort our best shot! If Lynch fails to respond, it will only further illustrate the way the entire capitalist system is stacked against the working class.
Student’s Uncle Lynched by KKKops
One teacher-fighter had discussions with her sixth-grade students about the death of Tyrone West, in preparation for letter-writing. During one of those discussions, it came out that a member of her class is a nephew of Anthony Anderson who, like Tyrone, was also murdered by Baltimore cops, both while unarmed. The cops deliberately held Anthony upside down and dropped him on his head, killing him right in front of his mother!  Even the Medical Examiner’s office labeled Anthony’s death a homicide (by the police), but the cops were never charged, and those racist killers remain on the force. During the class discussion Anthony’s nephew broke down in tears, causing also the teacher to cry in front of her class.
Students at Johns Hopkins University aim to get 300 signatures on a letter to Loretta Lynch. Other fighters, including a PL’er, have begun canvassing door to door in Sandtown/Winchester, the neighborhood where Freddie Gray was killed by the police, giving all 3,000 residents an opportunity to sign one of the letters. After just two days, there has been a mighty response.
No Such Thing as a Good Cop
Meanwhile, the federal Department of Justice, City officials, and the Police Department are negotiating an agreement, while admitting no past guilt, pretending that the cops are now going to all be “Officer Friendly.”
Last August a 163-page DOJ report admitted that the Baltimore Police Department is guilty of widespread racism, brutality, and general disregard for women complaining of sexual abuse. The last five pages argue that the solution is “community policing.” They claim that racism, brutality and sexism on the part of police will thus be rectified. They claim that now cops will instead attend neighborhood meetings and help solve problems.
However, past experience shows that “community policing,” at best, is a way for the police to gather intelligence on target communities, even in the absence of any crime. They then use this intelligence to disrupt activities of those they fear might pose a threat to the capitalist order.
No matter how long it takes, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) intends to lead the working class to smash the bosses’ cops and courts. We will establish a worker-led communist society worthy of Tyrone, Anthony, and the other countless victims of police murder—Black, white, and all other workers. Join us.

The cholera epidemic is spreading in Haiti following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Matthew. While the hurricane was a natural disaster, the cholera is not. It is a disaster caused by capitalist profit and the United Nations. Pharmaceutical companies were “unable” to produce enough vaccine and still make a profit. So they didn’t. Also not profitable were the building of clean water and sanitation systems to prevent the epidemic. So they weren’t built.
Six years later “… cholera is stalking the areas gutted by the hurricane, …where clean water was already hard to find, long before the storm...Without clean water or disinfectant, the people are defenseless...The toll from cholera is unknowable” (NYT, 10/15).
Despite overwhelming scientific evidence and international outrage, it was not until this past summer that the UN admitted that its troops (MINUSTAH) brought cholera to Haiti in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. It is a crime against humanity that neither the UN nor its public health arm, the World Health Organization (WHO), have taken decisive action for six years to bring relief to Haitian workers suffering and dying from this very treatable disease. Since 2010, there have been over 800,000 cases and over 10,000 deaths. Haiti now has one of the highest rates of cholera infection in the world. Before the hurricane, the WHO was reporting 770 new cases of cholera each week and now their website is reporting an even faster increase.
From 1794 to 1804 the enslaved people of Haiti rose up and succeeded in smashing the chains of slavery, thereby becoming the beacon of hope for oppressed people around the world. Ever since then, the imperialist nations have acted to punish them. The occupation of Haiti by the U.S. from 1915–1934 was particularly brutal and racist, putting the banks into receivership to the Rockefeller (now) Citibank and changing the Constitution to allow foreign ownership of property, while killing, raping, and instituting forced labor.
After the workers rose up once again to overthrow the Duvalier puppet regimes in 1986 that the U.S. had installed and supported, the imperialist powers initiated the modern era of the UN occupation. The MINUSTAH “peacekeepers” have unleashed their own terror on the Haitian working class, ensuring continued racist exploitation, and further plundering of the island’s natural resources.
Healthcare, a Profit Industry
Since 2010, the global health community demanded that the UN/WHO initiate a vaccination program in Haiti. The big pharmaceutical manufacturers were unwilling to comply. That it was not profitable to produce the vaccine stands in sharp contrast to a communist society that will exist explicitly to serve working people. Seeking profit will be a relic of the past. In its drive to serve the needs of the working class and our allies, a worker-led communist world will use science and technology to eradicate disease and its causes.
The demand to vaccinate was a small part of the more comprehensive and unfulfilled demand that the UN build adequate healthcare treatment facilities throughout the country, and most critically, install a nationwide clean water and sewage system. This would be the only effective means to stop the cholera epidemic.
Following the latest devastation by Hurricane Matthew, the WHO announced it would send 1 million vaccines to Haiti. This is much too little, much too late. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC):
Cholera vaccines...are of limited usefulness. In field trials conducted in areas with endemic cholera, vaccines have been only about 50% effective in reducing the incidence of clinical illness for 3–6 months. They do not prevent transmission of infection.
Depending on the type of vaccine used, any protection from infection, in addition to lasting only three-six months, would not be realized for 2–3 weeks. Inevitably, many more would contract the disease and die before vaccines were actually administered. Even those who get the vaccine will be exposed to risk of infection when the immunity wears off.
In the words of a man from Port Salut, desperately trying to pitch in and help feed and shelter the surviving members of his neighbor’s family, “If we survive, they will survive. If we have only one loaf of bread to eat, we will share it with them” (NYT 10/8).
PLP believes this to be the inherent communist thinking that many working class brothers and sisters aspire to around the world. It is in this spirit that we are building one mass international party that will eventually smash this global capitalist system and break the chains that bind us, once and for all. Join us.

NEW YORK CIY, October 11—A local rally denounced the racist displacement of working-class families.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are active in a community organization that is confronting evictions and dislocation. Members of the community organization were frustrated and angry. A community coalition led by evangelical pastors organized a march supposedly against gentrification. In reality the purpose of the march was to win the community to religion and to their churches. They actually discouraged any kind of fightback, as a sound truck blared out religious music and people distributed church cards.
They boldly chanted, “Tenants, yes. Evictions, no,” and distributed 800 flyers calling on tenants to fight back. The contradiction was obvious to all. The working class in the area grabbed the PLP flyers, saying, “This is what we need.”
The financial system and the real estate industry, which are directly tied to the New York City government, are attacking working-class neighborhoods across the city. The result is dislocation of largely Black and Latin tenants from the South Bronx, Harlem, East New York, Bushwick and elsewhere.
two PLP comrades distributed 160 copies of the revolutionary communist newspaper, CHALLENGE. Some of the Party’s friends told a comrade that the “real political march” they had gone to was PLP’s May Day march last spring. When the pastors stopped at the local precinct to pray for the police a comrade shouted, “We should be fighting police violence and supporting the families of the two black men killed by police in Oklahoma and North Carolina.” People cheered.
The rulers’ strategy, based on profiteering and racism, is to build “mixed income neighborhoods” where working-class families are reduced to 10 percent low income, 30 percent medium income and the rest high income. In some new rezoned buildings the minimum income to even apply for a new apartment is $48,000 a year, even though more than 30 percent of the current residents earn $25,000 and less.
The rulers want to break up long-term Black and Latin neighborhoods to divide the working class. They pack in three or four mainly white students into small “renovated” apartments, while middle income families end up paying huge rents between $2,500 and $3,500 a month. We need to unite and fight back!
A World without Landlords
PLP members are committed to continue our work in the community organization. We are exposing capitalism, racism and calling for sharper struggle. We expose the dead end of reform struggle led by the politicians. We call for an egalitarian communist society where the working class will organize housing for our class; no landlords! As we get to know people we are building our PLP study group and expanding readers and networks of CHALLENGE distributors, who also give donations to support our paper. The working class is open to the ideas in CHALLENGE and slowly and steadily we are building a solid group of friends and supporters. Our friends have many questions about the successes and failures of the old communist movement. As the capitalist ruling class is trying to bury us in racism, sexism and anti-communism, PLP is boldly answering workers’ questions and raising working class consciousness as we fight back. Our Party has confidence in the working class because our class is smart and strong. What we do now counts on the long road to communist revolution and workers’ liberation.