The Progressive Labor Party has always said that racism is an essential aspect of worldwide capitalism. A case in point is the murder of poor black young people in Brazil, which is such a common occurrence that it rarely gets reported. Last fall, however, there was sharp struggle in Sao Paulo after the “accidental” killing of 17-year-old Douglas Rodrigues by a cop responding to a noise complaint. Douglas was simply walking on the street with his 12-year-old brother.
Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff, admitted that the same violence that killed Douglas is suffered by “thousands of other black youth.” Human rights organizations, including the National Council for Equality, demanded urgent measures against “the genocide of Brazil’s black youth.”
There are more than 60,000 violent deaths each year in Brazil. According to the Institute of Applied Economic Investigations (IPEA), black or biracial victims account for two-thirds of them. The homicide rate in the black community is 36.5 per 100,000 residents, more than double the white homicide rate. According to the IPEA, this murder epidemic reduces the life expectancy for black youth and workers by more than 20 months.
Moreover, these victims keep getting younger. In the 1980s, the average homicide victim was 26; today, the average victim is 20. In 2010 alone, according to an investigator from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, 35,000 black people in Brazil died from violent acts. He wrote, “These numbers should be worrisome for a country that appears to not have ethnic, religious, border, social or political conflict. The number of violent deaths represents a much higher volume than those of many of the regions of the world that go through armed struggle.”
Criminalizing Black Youth
Raquel Villadino, coordinator for the Program for the Reduction of Lethal Violence among Teen and Youth in Rio de Janeiro, criticized the fact that only eight percent of the country’s violence prevention programs include racial data. “Racism is a structural element of the fatality of black youth,” Valladino said. “We are not only facing a process of criminalization of poverty, but, particularly of black youth.”
Over the last few years, violence against working-class youth there has intensified. Millions of black youth are out of school and unemployed. Since their lives are of little value to the exploitative capitalists, they are more vulnerable to becoming victims of violence. But racism towards black youth and workers in Brazil is not limited to physical violence. They are also victimized by structural poverty. According to federal government data, 68 percent of the 81 million Brazilians in poverty are black or biracial.
Racism also affects healthcare. According to Psychologist Crisfanny Souza, a member of the National Network of Social Health Control of the Black Population, “All the rates of health of black women are worse than those of whites. Black women are given fewer breast exams and receive less anesthesia during childbirth.”
A black child is 60 percent more likely than a white child to die before the age of 18 of infectious or parasitic disease, and 90 percent more likely to die of malnutrition. The public healthcare system is not prepared to deal with diseases faced by the black population, including hypertension, sickle cell anemia or type 2 diabetes.
While slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888, racism continues to oppress black workers and youth. Despite a 2012 affirmative action law to increase the number of poor and black students in public universities, the top universities are still monopolized by middle- and upper-class students from the prestigious private school system. Public primary and secondary schools continue to deteriorate.
Death and Inequality
Brazil’s indigenous communities are especially vulnerable to racist violence. According to the Missionary Indigenous Counsel, a group linked to the Catholic Church, violence against indigenous communities increased by 237 percent in 2012. These incidents include homicides, death threats, assassination attempts, assaults and sexual violence. In many cases, these attacks were instigated by landowners seeking control of land. In the last decade, 563 indigenous people reportedly have been assassinated — all of this in a society that glorifies itself as racially mixed.
In May 2013, the television network Globo commemorated the 125th anniversary of slavery’s abolition with a satirical skit poking fun at the abolitionist movement. Douglas Belchior, a history professor, attacked Globo TV’s racism, pointing out that more than seven million Africans and their descendants were kidnapped and killed during the 388 years of Brazil’s slavery.
The history of slavery in Brazil is one in a long list of crimes against humanity by the capitalist system worldwide:
The killings of hundreds of innocent men, women and children in Pakistan and Afghanistan by the U.S. imperialists’ drone attacks;
Wage and benefit cuts of up to 50 percent for workers in Detroit, while President Barack Obama gave millions to the auto bosses;
More deportations of U.S. immigrant workers than under any previous administration in U.S. history;
The most intense segregation in U.S. public schools since 1968, with Obama leading the charge for hyper-segregated charter schools;
Police killings of black youth, including Ramarley Graham, Shantel Davis, Kimani Gray, and Rekia Boyd — to name only a few.
Workers of the world must fight racism and the capitalist system that creates it. Justice for this system’s victims will only come with capitalism’s destruction. And capitalism will only be destroyed when the international working class join the revolutionary PLP. Only then will we smash racism and sexism, and the division and exploitation of the working class. Only then can we end inequality. This is PLP’s fight. Join us!
- Information
Bosses Will Start the Next War... Communists Will Finish It
- Information
- 13 February 2014 57 hits
The specter of economic doomsday makes war between China and the United States... unthinkable..... Or does it? In fact, Chinese and U.S. military planners are thinking in exquisite detail..., about how to win such a conflict. — David Gompert, former Acting Director of National Intelligence under Barack Obama, Los Angeles Times, 8/26/13.
Imperialist war is inevitable under capitalism. Only war can resolve the imperialist powers’ competition for resources and exploitable labor, the lifeblood of their brutal profit system. History shows that the capitalists will sacrifice millions of workers to defend those profits.
But history also shows that the greatest danger to capitalism — the international working class — can transform world war into communist revolution. It happened in the Soviet Union after World War I. It happened in China after World War II. And it can happen again if a mass communist movement is organized under the revolutionary Progressive Labor Party. With communist leadership, we can turn a quantitative 
capitalist crisis into qualitative change — into a society run by workers to meet workers’ needs.
In his description of the tensions between the United States and China, David Gompert, a ruling-class insider, challenges the myth that financial ties between capitalist nations ensure everlasting peace. He recognizes what Vladimir Lenin, the great Soviet leader and thinker, concluded a century ago: Imperialist competition is inescapably violent. But while capitalist policy analysts are in general accord over the looming conflict with China, they have deep divisions when it comes to strategies and tactics.
Bosses’ Strategic Split
At the moment, the bosses are split between two diametrically opposed concepts: “AirSea Battle” and “Offshore Control.” This strategic dispute involves inter-service rivalry and likely explains the recent test-cheating scandals in the Air Force and Navy. These scandals that disgrace Air Force and Navy brass probably aim at cutting the influence of these services back to size amid tortuous strategizing for war on China. It also exposes the spending constraints imposed by the Great Recession on even the biggest, most globally engaged U.S. capitalists.
AirSea Battle envisions a quick, cheap U.S. first strike — conducted largely by the Air Force — at command and control sites deep in China’s mainland. Offshore Control stands for a longer-term U.S. naval blockade that would choke off the overseas commerce that China’s rulers depend upon.
The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, created in 2000, has a Congressional mandate to “monitor the national security implications of the economic relationship.” Last month it heard conflicting testimony from a number of conflicted testifiers — notably Roger Cliff, an East Asian security expert newly appointed to the Atlantic Council, an imperialist think tank with a long range outlook. (Before Chuck Hagel gave up the Council’s chairmanship last year to become Obama’s Secretary of Defense, he proposed forging a U.S.-led coalition — including India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey — for the next world war.)
To counter a Chinese buildup for the seizure of Taiwan, Cliff proposed a limited, near-term U.S. strike on China’s command center. This attack would need to be executed before 2020, he noted, when China will have “significant numbers of medium-range ballistic missiles and land-attack cruise missiles capable of reaching any of the U.S. facilities in Japan, which are the closest to Taiwan.”
Cliff told the Council that an AirSea Battle could be effective in defense of Taiwan and “would probably entail large-scale force commitments and high, but not unlimited, levels of escalation.” But he also acknowledged that Chinese bosses, thus provoked, might unleash an army in the hundreds of millions, along with their formidable nuclear arsenal: “Conflict over issues that threatened China’s national survival could potentially entail the commitment of all of China’s military forces and unlimited levels of escalation.”
Contradictions and Constraints
The contradictions in Cliff’s testimony reflect his personal career path but also the state of indecision within the dominant, finance capital faction of the U.S. ruling class. Before joining the Atlantic Council, Cliff worked for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), a war-on-the-cheap think tank. (The Center is bankrolled by Pete DuPont IV, the former Congressman and Delaware governor who has championed the fight for income tax cuts.) But the Atlantic Council, backed by ExxonMobil, Rockefeller Financial and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, sits squarely in the finance capital camp. These forces normally bang the drum for an expensive, long-term war with China. Cliff’s remarks suggest that the finance capital wing, currently strapped for cash, may be entertaining a cheaper and quicker way to defend Taiwan as well.
But five days before Cliff’s startling speech, David Gompert — a trusted Obama advisor — spoke to the same China war planning board. He warned against sole reliance on AirSea Battle, which “implies a U.S. threat of early strikes on Chinese territory” and “would be perceived as – indeed, would be — escalatory.” As an alternative, Gompert urged an Offshore Control blockade option and “multilateral maritime-security cooperation in the Western Pacific.”
None of these capitalist experts are acknowledging the elephant in the room. Neither AirSea Battle nor Offshore Control take into account the potential for the costly and lethal repercussions of a clash between two imperialist empires: massive territorial invasion and/or multiple nuclear holocausts. Both strategies ignore the real prospect of a land war in China, a country that could mobilize over one hundred million fighting men and women. (The U.S. mustered a tenth of its population in World War II.) And neither strategy outlines a role for the Army, the U.S. military’s largest branch.
In reality, these doctrines commit the Air Force and Navy far beyond their capabilities in all-out warfare. In the current issue of Air Force Magazine, the CSBA’s Benjamin Lambeth boasted:
Airpower has eclipsed land power as the primary means of destroying enemy forces. Since the Cold War’s end, the classic roles of airpower and land power have changed places in major combat against modern
mechanized opponents. In this role reversal, ground forces have come to do most of the shaping and fixing of enemy forces, while airpower now does most of the actual killing.
But killing from 40,000 feet or dominating the seas is not the same as occupying or controlling a country, let alone conquering one. The futile U.S. adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, nations with a tiny fraction of China’s military resources, make that much clear.
War and Revolution
Most of all, the capitalists continue to overlook the most important repercussion of a broader inter-imperialist conflict: the rise of an international, revolutionary working class. As the rulers resort to more naked fascism — racism, sexism, mass unemployment and wage cuts — workers will inevitably fight back. Once armed with the bosses’ weapons and with communist ideas, they will turn the guns around — as they did in Russia in 1917 and in China in 1949.
The Progressive Labor Party cannot prevent World War III. We can’t control how or when the bosses start their next conflict. But if we build a mass revolutionary movement, we can determine how that war ends and what comes out of it. We can finish the bosses and their profit system and create a communist world in their place. Join us!
BROOKLYN, February 12 — “I am happy: they fired my boss!” That’s what you hear all over Downstate Hospital in Central Brooklyn. A bunch of bosses were fired as part of N.Y. Governor Cuomo’s design to downsize, privatize, and/or close our hospital. But don’t forget: A handful of administrators have been fired, but hundreds of workers have been laid off in the past year and a half, with more to come.
That’s why workers have been fighting back, with numerous demonstrations but much more needs to be done. What’s holding workers back is that many of them believe our hospital won’t be closed and that the system can work for them.
The workers’ anger was apparent in the celebrations of the firing of their bosses, some who have offered women positions for sexual acts, stolen money, and
given lush contracts to private companies with no results. Some of the petty bosses have been bull-rushed out the door, but some have been able to use favoritism to save their skins; one that the workers would have liked to see fired got a top academic job based on a resumé packed with lies. One department held a victory party, only to find the next day their boss was being kept.
PLP is having many discussions with workers. We’ve been warning that there is no honor among thieves, and that the new administration, the private company Pitts, hired by Cuomo, is even more anti-worker than the old one. The company is known as a hospital closer, with a track record from Washington D.C. to St. Vincent’s in Manhattan.
We are working to build momentum to call the bosses out on their lies, and to point out how this system works, and that no politician will help unless large numbers of workers stand physically in their way.
That is what happened at Interfaith Hospital a few weeks ago. When the CEO said that ambulances would no longer be allowed to bring emergency patients to Interfaith, dozens of workers marched to his office to protest. The order was rescinded and the CEO left through the back door under guard. The money was found, and the hospital is still open — for now.
When Cuomo blames the Federal budget for lack of health care money, we point out that his administration has slashed support to Downstate by 25 percent, and funds Medicaid in Brooklyn hospitals at half the rate it pays in Manhattan. But they’ve given hundreds of millions to their favored buddies in the form of assuming their debts.
This favoritism was exposed recently when the new mayor, Di Blasio appointed Stanley Brezenoff to a top spot in his administration. Di Blasio’s 70% of the vote came in part because he took a stand against New York State’s threatened closing of Long Island College Hospital (LICH). He even orchestrated his own publicity arrest. But it was Brezenoff, with his health management company Continuum, who bankrupted LICH and whose company continues to receive millions in bailout money from the State of New York (see box).
We will continue to point out that under communism, the working class would run the hospitals to provide health care to our brothers and sisters, not to pile up profits. We will continue to expose how their system destroys our jobs and health care, and that the money for health care is being funneled into the U.S. imperialist war machine, killing workers across the globe to protect the bosses’ profit system.
Washington, DC, February 6 — Today, Metro workers led a protest against the transit system’s plan to raise fares and against its policy of refusing to hire formerly incarcerated workers. Protesters included public health workers, government workers, public housing residents, and students. They ignored attempts by transit police to move the pickets away from the entrance to the evening’s scheduled public hearings, chanting boldly against the racist policies of Metro.
The protesters then joined the hearings, and several spoke out, condemning Metro’s board for always going after working people at the fare box rather than getting money from the big developers. They make big money from the increased value in real estate that’s located near Metro stations — and it’s virtually tax-free!
Other protesting speakers condemned the policy of excluding ex-prisoners from the opportunity to even apply for jobs at Metro. Some returning ex-prisoners who had been previously hired and have had reliable work records for many years are now being fired because of their previous incarceration.
Protesting speakers noted that these new personnel policies deepen the racist oppression of black workers, since they suffer from racist arrest policies. This has been documented in great detail by the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs in a report that is available at http://tinyurl.com/l6lwwam. Once arrested and “in the system”, these workers are excluded from job opportunities. With 7,000 people returning from incarceration every year in Washington, D.C., it is vital that they have opportunities to work at decent jobs.
Along with PLP members, the Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association (MWPHA) and DC Jobs with Justice organized people to petition and testify in favor of hiring workers with criminal records. MWPHA fights for jobs and housing to improve people’s health and prevent HIV.
The growing movement to change this racist hiring policy encouraged the transit union local to present testimony at the hearing. In fact, the union’s current president, who has vigorously resisted taking up the issue, was shamed into calling for a change in the background check policy, although she carefully avoided calling it what it is: A racist attack on workers throughout the region.
Several rank-and-file workers and students who had never spoken before stepped forward to testify, demonstrating the growing strength of this movement against Metro’s policies. As the effort to reverse these policies develops, these emerging leaders will strengthen the anti-racist movement.
Local politicians, sensing a groundswell of concern over the issue, have begun to claim that they support changing Metro’s employment policy. But their role in the struggle will be to mislead. Only mass action from the grassroots will keep the pressure on Metro.
Thinking more broadly, the bosses’ use of more intensely racist policies to intimidate and coerce African American workers reflects the ongoing crisis of capitalism. This greedy profit system has led to budget crises and layoffs everywhere. The bosses are desperate to reduce wages and benefits and speed up workers everywhere to shore up their failing system. The struggle at Metro is simply another aspect of the fightback against the unjust capitalist system. Until we are able to overthrow it, we will continue to face these attacks. All the more reason to build a revolutionary communist movement against the bosses!
WASHINGTON, DC, February 5 — The president of Haiti, Michel Martelly, was in Washington, DC, this week to meet with his U.S. imperialist masters. He met President Obama in the White House and groveled before him, thanking him for assistance after the earthquake. What assistance? U.S. “aid” to Haiti has been minimal. Thousands still live in tents, five years after the earthquake. The cholera epidemic continues to take hundreds of lives. No significant progress has been made in fighting cholera through sanitation systems and vaccinations.
In fact, beginning with the U.S. naval occupation of Port-au-Prince after the earthquake, the U.S. has put its main emphasis on strengthening the UN’s occupation army (the MINUSTAH), hated by the masses in Haiti, and with Bill Clinton’s foundation’s help, building the Caracol sweatshop zone in the north of the country. What is Martelly thanking Obama for? In fact, Obama offered nothing more for Haiti at the meeting, only lecturing Martelly on the need to fight crime and improve the electoral process. Such is the way imperialist masters address their comprador tools in poor neo-colonial countries.
The U.S. State Department arranged for Martelly to visit Howard University. No academic program or unit invited him. Top university administrators introduced him at the School of Business auditorium, just as they had done last spring when the criminal Senator Rand Paul appeared on campus to peddle his racist lies about civil rights being a Republican Party priority. Most of the people who attended Martelly’s speech on his universal public-school agenda were older, conservative Haitians, university administrators and a small number of students and faculty.
We wanted to reach them with the truth: Martelly is attacking students in Haiti. At the Faculte d’Ethnologie, Martelly personally led his pink-shirted thugs to the campus, where they beat up students and trashed their classrooms. More recently, Martelly’s police blew off the hand of one student with a stun grenade and shot students with rubber bullets.
Students in Haiti have protested Martelly’s vicious attacks on them and on the working class. Their organization, GREPS, recently sent a letter to U.S. students, calling for solidarity against the criminal Martelly. PLP members circulated this letter (along with buttons from the group “End Cholera in Haiti Organization”) to over 100 people who attended Martelly’s speech and as well as in classes. The leaflet had the headline, “President Martelly, Enemy of Haitian Students!”
Several people commented that it was terrible for Howard University to host this criminal. A group of students from a course in International Development, who were required to attend the speech, were particularly interested in the outrageous attacks by Martelly on students at the Faculte d’Ethnologie. Even a dean commented that Martelly’s conduct towards the students was outrageous.
During the brief question-and-answer period after Martelly’s talk, one student confronted Martelly, saying, “The people of Haiti elected you as president, but who do you really serve, the people of Haiti or the United Nations’ occupation?”
He said that he only served the Haitian people, but that the UN was a very big help. Two lies in one sentence! He serves the U.S. and UN masters, and they help only the bosses, not the masses!
The struggle of workers and students in Haiti is the struggle of every worker and student in the world. Long live the global struggle against racism and imperialism!
