Are cops across the U.S. trained to shoot innocent Black men but not whites who go on a shooting spree? Read the following excerpt from the January 5th New York Times and see if cops’ racist profiling kills Black males for no reason while refusing to arrest a white woman, wearing body armor, who flaunted a gun, shot at people multiple times and at a cop and led police in a chase through the streets.

There’s absolutely no doubt that racism is a killer, which the bosses use to win white workers to capitalist goals.
The day after Christmas, a shooter terrorized the streets of…Chattanooga, Tenn. According to the local newspaper, the shooter was “wearing body armor” and “firing multiple shots out her window at people and cars.” One witness told the paper that the shooter was “holding a gun out of the window as if it were a cigarette.”
“Officers found two people who said they were at a stop sign when a woman pulled up…and fired shots into their vehicle, hitting and disabling the radiator….More calls reported a woman pointing a firearm at people as she passed them in her car and…fired at another vehicle in the same area.”
When police officers came upon the shooter…[she] led them on a chase,….even point[ing] the gun at a police officer….
…Surely…officers would have been justified in using whatever force they saw fit. Right?
According to the paper, the shooter was “taken into custody without incident or injury.”
Who was this shooter anyway? Julia Shields, a 45-year-old white woman….
Would this episode have ended this way if the shooter had been…black….?
…The American mind has been poisoned from this country’s birth against…particularly African-American men….
It’s hard to read stories like this and not believe that there is a double standard in the use of force by the police…..
Michael Brown was unarmed….in Ferguson, Mo….
Eric Garner was unarmed on a Staten Island [N.Y.] street.
Tamir Rice was a 12-year-old, walking around a Cleveland park and holding a toy gun….
John Crawford was in an Ohio Walmart, holding, but not shooting, an air rifle he had picked up from a store shelf….
And last Tuesday, the police say, a hand gun was “revealed” during a New Jersey traffic stop of a car Jerome Reid was in.
None were “arrested without incident or injury.” They were all Black, killed by police officers. Brown was shot through the head. Garner was grabbed around the neck in a chokehold, tossed to the ground and held there, even as he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe….Rice was shot within two seconds of the police officers’ arrival on the scene. Crawford…and Reid were also cut down by police bullets.
In the cases…heard so far,…grand juries have refused to indict the officers.
It seems walking, selling, playing, shopping or driving while Black is a death sentence. Racism produces super-profits for the bosses. The only answer is a death sentence for capitalism.

Much of the class struggle engaged in by workers and much of the deadly injustices U.S. bosses inflict on them is missing from high school and college textbooks. In a communist society, all workers would be taught the real history of this capitalist system.
Recently I was walking through the St. Bridget Cemetery in Lilly, Pa, located in the heart of Western Pennsylvania’s coalfields when I stumbled upon a large monument marking the burial site of 35 immigrant railroad workers from Italy and countless others whose names, according to the stone, “are known only by god.” These workers died in a massacre in 1903.
I researched it and found that the railroad bosses had constructed wooden buildings for the workers to sleep in. In some cases, nearly 150 workers were jammed into buildings containing only one door and a few small windows. Needless to say, they were fire traps.
One night a building burst into flames. The workers struggled desperately to escape, but many became entangled at the solitary exit and died. Their remains were placed in 12 coffins and buried in one large grave. This is just one example in U.S. history of bosses’ crimes committed against workers.
The Lilly miners have a militant and anti-racist history. In the early 1920s, the Klan rode into Lilly and marched to a nearby hillside where they burned a KKK cross to protest the exclusion of Klansmen from the miners’ union. On their return to the railway station, local workers sprayed them with water hoses. Shots rang out and two people lay dead.
In 1970, union miners burned a coal tipple (vehicle) to the ground at a non-union mine near Lilly. The union was later fined, but this did not dampen their militancy.
These are examples of the sort of injustices suffered by workers here and their fightback against them over the years. It’s important for workers to learn all this as we continue to struggle against this decadent death-dealing capitalist system. I look forward to the day when all of this is included in history books.

Cancer is epidemic, rapidly gaining on cardiovascular disease as the leading cause of death in the U.S. A United Nations research agency tells us that cancer incidence worldwide is expected to rise by 70 percent over the next twenty years. The disease is growing at “an alarming pace,” according to a 2014 report by the World Health Organization.
Why is this happening? The capitalists’ mass media would have us believe that cancer — along with obesity and diabetes — is a “genetic disease,” an unstoppable killer. A mass mailing by the American Medical Association (8/22/14) bore the headline: “New research suggests cancer can’t be eradicated.” It quoted an evolutionary biologist who maintained, “[O]ur cells’ ability to develop cancer is an intrinsic property.” Meanwhile, the media does its best to ignore or minimize the role played by carcinogens in the environment. As Scientific American (5/21/10) stated: “But scientists most likely will never be able to tease out the true role of environmental contaminants because environmental exposures, genetics and lifestyle seem to all intertwine.”
This is a gross distortion of scientific reality. In fact, the rising cancer rate is directly linked to the increase of toxic chemicals and racism in our environment. This in turn reflects the bosses’ drive for short-term profit and their utter disregard for the health of the working class. To attribute cancer — and other contemporary epidemics, like diabetes — to our genes is to blame the victims for their “deficient” genetic code.
The truth is that workers are being sickened by capitalist need for profit.
On the matter of obesity, a 2008 article in Nutrition Reviews, a peer-reviewed journal of the International Life Sciences Institute, noted:
Genetic changes are unlikely to explain the rapid spread of obesity around the globe. That’s because the “gene pool”—the frequency of different genes across a population—remains fairly stable for many generations. It takes a long time for new mutations or polymorphisms to spread. So if our genes have stayed largely the same, what has changed over the past 40 years of rising obesity rates? Our environment: the physical, social, political, and economic surroundings that influence how much we eat and how active we are. Environmental changes that make it easier for people to overeat, and harder for people to get enough physical activity, have played a key role in triggering the recent surge of overweight and obesity.
No Constraint on Capitalist Poisons
The link between environmental contaminants and cancer dates back to 1775, when Percival Pott published a study of English chimney sweeps who developed cancer of the scrotum due to soot and coal tar. Since World War II, our environment has grown increasingly contaminated with carcinogens. In his 1998 book, The Politics of Cancer Revisited, Dr. Samuel S. Epstein notes that production of synthetic organic chemicals, petroleum, and natural gas all skyrocketed in the 1940s. Plasticizers and the pesticides were introduced from 1945 through 1955.
Today the globe is awash in toxic chemicals: arsenic, asbestos, benzene, formaldehyde, ionizing radiation, soot, radon, and hair dyes. Industrial and agricultural chemicals have been polluting ground water in California for at least 50 years. Millions of tons of cancer-causing pesticides have been poured onto agricultural land around the world, contaminating food supplies. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the Allied Signal Company produced the insecticide Kepone, a chemical cousin to DDT that persists for hundreds of years, and dumped it into the James River Estuary in Virginia. In 2003, the French West Indian island of Guadalupe restricted crop-growing areas due to Kepone contamination; Guadalupe has one of the highest prostate cancer rates in the world. As recently as March 2014, the Duke Energy Company was cited for dumping devastating, toxic coal ash sludge into the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, in a pattern that goes back at least four decades.
While the Centers for Disease Control currently lists 135 substances as “potential occupational carcinogens,” or cancer-causing agents, very few of the 80,000 chemicals now in use have ever been tested for safety. According to Scientific American (July 2014), “The Toxic Substances Control Act, last updated in 1976, allows industry to use new chemicals without first demonstrating that they are safe. Instead it places the burden of proof on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Yet of the more than 50,000 chemicals used commercially, the EPA has tested just 300.”
In 2010, the President’s Cancer Panel reported that “the true burden of environmentally induced cancers has been grossly underestimated.” Women who give birth with high levels of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) or DDT in their blood show an increased risk of developing breast cancer (Nature, 5/29/14). Further, environmental contaminants have been shown to permanently affect gene function. Epigenetic studies have revealed that harmful chemicals can permanently alter which genes are activated, or “turned on,” without changing the genes’ DNA coding. (The term epigenetics refers to heritable changes, influenced by the factors such as the environment, in gene expression that does not involve changes to the underlying DNA sequences). DDT can cause negative effects in animals’ offspring: “Today, no one doubts that epigenetic effects play a crucial role in development, aging and even cancer” (Scientific American, August 2014).
Business As Usual
Capitalists and their state apparatus have a long history of obscuring the cancer-environment connection, despite overwhelming scientific evidence. One glaring example: “After decades of denials, the government is conceding that since the dawn of the atomic age, workers making nuclear weapons have been exposed to radiation and chemicals that have produced cancer and early death” (New York Times, 1/29/2000).
The bosses’ indifference to our health is also exposed by the collusion between the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which promotes nuclear power worldwide. As a result, “the WHO has steadfastly resisted conducting studies on the health effects of exposure to uranium 238 following Desert Storm, Bosnia, and Kosovo” (Helen Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger, 2002).
The capitalists’ sporadic attempts to curb pollution have little impact. The Environmental Protection Agency is chronically underfunded; the Clean Air Act is perpetually under-enforced, following the needs and urgings of industry. As stated in Occupational and Environmental Health (2011), edited by Levy and Wegman, “…the workers’ desire for comfort, income, safety, and leisure is continually counterbalanced by the employer’s need for profit.” This is an iron rule of capitalism, even more so in a period of rising inter-imperialist competition.
Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank in the early 1990s, summed up the bosses’ murderous business-as-usual in a famous memo:  “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.”
Rx for Cancer: Communist Revolution
The medical establishment’s response to the cancer epidemic is mostly limited to encouraging screening and lifestyle changes. But while mammograms and colonoscopies may detect early cancer or precancerous changes, they do nothing to prevent the development of cancer in the population in general. And while the health system urges us to stop smoking and eat a healthy diet, it generally ignores the saturation of our food with corn syrup, the fact that fast foods are all that many can afford, and the easy access of the young to highly addictive cigarettes. In 2009, the government’s public health activities received only 3 percent of the more than $2 trillion spent by the U.S. on health care.
Because of racism, Black, Latin, and immigrant workers receive the worst medical care, and are forced to live and work in areas that are the most toxic to their health.
Children are the canaries in the coal mine (  a warning of adverse conditions and greater danger), especially vulnerable to the ravages of environment-induced cancer. By 2003, according to the New York Times, the incidence of cancer in children had increased 20 percent in the preceding 20 years. For infants under one, the increase was 36 percent!  The recent vogue of movies (like The Fault in Our Stars), TV shows, and books about children with cancer is a ruling-class tool to get us to accept this atrocity as the new normal.     
Capitalism is “a system that fouls its own nest, both the human-social conditions and the wider natural environment on which it depends” (Monthly Review, December 2011). This is the very nature of the beast.
The cancer epidemic will be defeated only when this profit-driven society is replaced by one ruled by and for workers — by communism.

These racist cops kill with impunity! A kkkop murdered 18-year-old Black teen Antonio Martin on the night of December 23. The incident took place at Berkeley, Missouri, just a few miles from Ferguson. Over 300 people rallied, setting off fireworks and throwing bricks and rocks at the police.
Bosses are now spreading their racist slander against this Black teen murdered by cops, but they paint their kkkops as heroes. In New York City, the mayor banned protests in “respect to mourn” the two cops killed. These racist bosses have nothing to offer our class, not even sympathy. That’s because these bankers and politicians make money off the terrorization and genocide of the working class. Capitalism is the real criminal. Cops and bosses can get away with murder while the working class gets terrorized, deported, disappeared, starved, and killed — all legal under capitalism.  
This is war against our class. The bosses preach peace and shoot bullets. Missouri has spent over $12.5 million since Ferguson to quell protests. Missouri will continue to rebel and will have the backing of the international working class.  Justice for Mike and Antonio will come from the working-class burying this murderous system once and for all. This means a violent communist revolution.
The revolutionary communist PLP rejects all acts of individual terror or anarchist street theater. We are organizing on our jobs and in our schools, churches, unions, military and many other places where workers are present. We are building a mass movement to combat police terror, imperialist wars and their root cause, capitalism, with strikes, rebellions and walkouts. In the process, we are winning workers and youth to see that racist terror will end only when the working class takes power with communist revolution. Our strategy is to build a Party of millions leading millions more, across all borders.