WASHINGTON, DC, April 5 — Today over 400 workers and students marched over three miles from D.C.’s Mt. Pleasant neighborhood to the White House, condemning President Barack Obama as the “Deporter-in-Chief.” Demonstrators called for a halt to all deportations. Several individuals whose families had been separated by deportations pledged to camp out on Obama’s doorstep until deportation orders for family members were reversed.
A local planning committee led by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network included students from area universities, immigrants’ rights organizations, and a PLP member. Several PL’ers participated in the march, distributing 400 May Day leaflets as well as copies of the 2013 May Day issue of CHALLENGE containing some sharp articles on immigration. They called on marchers to join the upcoming May Day march on April 26 in New York. PL’ers made many new contacts. Afterwards several marchers came to a dinner at the PL’ers’ home to discuss continuing the struggle.
The march was inspiring. It created a spirit of solidarity and power that determined fightbacks can build. It overcame the fear and isolation that we often experience. But the march also reflected the ongoing challenge of divisions within the working class over racism. The march included mainly Latinos with a few whites and fewer blacks. Despite an effort to reach out to black workers and youth, the march failed to include a significant group outside the Latino community, a weakness that must be overcome.
Fortunately, there is also a surging multi-racial, anti-racist movement led by PLP that clearly points out that all forms of racism hurt all groups of workers by destroying the solidarity needed to fight and defeat the capitalist class. Racist divisions in the working class also give capitalists the maneuvering room afforded by super-profits reaped from the super-exploitation of black and Latino sections of the working class.
The strategic insight that racism hurts all workers has not yet penetrated the mass movement adequately in the U.S. or elsewhere. Consequently, the bosses still hold the trump cards in the class struggle. But this can be reversed!
PLP will bring ALL workers together on May Day to fight back as a class against racism and the capitalist system as a whole. This approach must be reflected in all organizing efforts. Bring black and white people to immigration rights events; bring Latinos and whites to fights against racist murders by the police, and unify the working class to topple capitalism, the root of all modern oppressions.

WASHINGTON, DC, March 26 — Metro bosses were stopped in their tracks today in the face of determined workers sticking up for one of their own. Metro workers, community activists in the returning citizens movement, public health workers in the Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association, PLP members and many others have been sharpening the struggle against racist background checks for months.
Metro bosses and union leaders are nervous because of our bold, open offensive. We took it to another level with a planned confrontation at the monthly Metro board meeting, armed with an open letter to the board signed by outraged workers, many of whom we had never even met before.
We exposed the lies of General Manager Sarles, who had testified in public that a Metro employee who was out sick would not have to undergo a criminal background check when he/she returned to work. But behind closed doors Sarles’ agents were firing a bus driver returning to work after a year-long struggle with cancer. When his background check turned up two previous convictions, he was told he was terminated. Both convictions occurred more than ten years before he was employed by Metro.
Afraid of the workers and continued public criticism, the bosses called him in at the last minute and rehired him on the spot. One of the driver’s friends texted us: “how grateful he is to have u guys jump to his corner and did not even know him. Shows that u guys just don’t talk the talk. You guys make it happen.”
Now is the time to press our offensive against racist mass incarceration, the New Jim Crow. We must force Metro to stop its racist policies. Metro must create new personnel policies that don’t discriminate and stop reinforcing the systematic racist injustice that characterizes all of capitalism.
This struggle is challenging because racism is a key part of capitalism’s effort to stigmatize and divide groups of workers. The capitalists want to divide ex-offenders from workers who have escaped being arrested in the drug wars, pay everyone less and make off with the profits.
This small victory today came because all workers said NO to injustice.  We can’t stop now. We have to fight for the big victory of overthrowing bosses like Sarles and having our own system that relies on unity and equality of workers — communism.

BROOKLYN, NY, March 21 — Today was the second speak-out and eighth event commemorating the death of Kyam Livingston, who was killed due to the cops’ deliberate racist medical neglect at Brooklyn Central Bookings. It’s now nine months since she died last July 21 when her agonized cries for medical attention were ignored. So far the authorities have answered none of the questions people have been asking.
The struggle for Justice for Kyam, and in all the recent struggles on behalf of those who have been killed by the racist criminal injustice system, have occurred amid a growing desperation for the working class. Unemployment is at unimagined levels. Wages have been falling for 40 years. Racism is on the rise as shown by these killings by the cops of mostly young black and Latino youth and workers.
Capitalism is, indeed, in crisis. The system has shown its intransigence and its culture of indifference towards the working class, as a relative of Kyam pointed out, by not even giving information on what happened, refusing to answer demands that the killings be stopped and the killer cops punished.
A member of the City Councilman Hakeem Jeffries’ staff attended the event. He said, “Just call our office. We’ll see how we can help.” This resembles what the office of the newly elected District Attorney said at our January speak-out.  The new mayor has been in power now for three months. This is a short time for them, but for people waiting for answers it’s long and anger-driven.
“Democratic” capitalism maintains that all the people in this society have a fair chance. Over the past nine months it’s clear to the Justice for Kyam Committee that this is a bald-faced lie. And in fact, it has become increasingly obvious that the profit system simply does not care what happens to working-class people, especially black and Latino. As one speaker said at this speak-out, “A system that creates these problems doesn’t deserve to exist.”
This second speak-out in our Justice for Kyam campaign occurred on a very nice day and drew more participants than during the January snowstorm. More people spoke up about personal grievances against the court system, jails and other aspects of the criminal injustice system.
Some of the stories made us angry, such as the black woman worker’s whose son was severely beaten by police at Riker’s Island while waiting to be charged. This happened many months ago and he’s still at Riker’s and has not been charged. No one has ever investigated this beating.
Another speaker described the death of James Parrish, an unarmed black man with cerebral palsy who was shot and killed by Brooklyn cops.  No charges were ever brought  against them.
But, what can we expect from a racist criminal injustice system? We don’t need politicians to fight for us. If we rely on them, they will turn our struggles into passivity and reliance on elections.
The Kyam Livingston Committee has grown closer over the course of this campaign. PLP members who are active in it have consistently raised with individuals how capitalism will never care about the working class because we are merely there as producers of wealth for those in power. We, the working class, must recognize that only we can speak for ourselves. The Progressive Labor Party points workers towards the ideas of communism as the solution to our problems.

NEW YORK CITY, April 6 — Thirty-five thousand education workers have been laid off in NY State since the economic crisis of 2008. Furthermore, millions of dollars in Governor Cuomo’s new budget is slated for Charter Schools, leading to even more layoffs. And the response from our statewide union leadership? Silence.
At a statewide convention this weekend of 2,400 representatives of union locals in the NY State United Teachers (NYSUT), the mis-leadership settled for meaningless resolutions calling for the removal of NYS education commissioner John King and only critiqued the timing, but not the essence, of Common Core implementation. Under the guise of “raising standards for all,” the Common Core will further legitimize the main function of capitalist education: to sort future workers into the few slots at the high end of the labor market, the many slots at the low end, along with unemployment, incarceration and military enlistment.
Unions which facilitate implementation of such regimes, while keeping workers from fighting back, are useful to the ruling class. NYSUT, though composed of workers, is an arm of the bosses’ state apparatus as it tries to pacify workers whom the ruling class is directly attacking.
It was also useful for the rulers to have Randi Weingarten — head of the national American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — visit the Ukraine to offer “solidarity” and “encouragement” to its distinctly fascist-led “democratic” movement which is aimed at undermining one of the U.S. bosses’ main imperialist rivals, Russia.
A willing puppet of U.S. bosses, Weingarten has been at the helm of major unions for over 17 years and has midwifed the birth of every major attack on education workers — as well as their students and families — that today’s misleaders pretend to oppose: merit pay, Common Core, charter schools, and more. Signs that these mis-leaders’ thin veneer of legitimacy is wearing off were on display this weekend. Opposition rank-and-file forces exposed the fascist-style repression of dissent the UFT’s ruling Unity caucus imposes within its ranks in order to effectively fulfill its role as junior partner to the ruling class in controlling teacher labor.  
Education workers responded well to PL literature with its communist analysis of education under capitalism, in general, and the current union elections at the convention in particular. Rotten union leadership can’t prevent workers from wanting a better system, though that’s the major role these mis-leaders play as the “labor lieutenants of capital.”
As we head to May Day and the next school year, communist educators must be bolder and more determined to win the many teachers closer to PLP and the fight for communism.