DETROIT, July 26 — There are many lessons to be learned from the city of Detroit being forced into bankruptcy. The bosses and the media they own would have us believe that good wages, health care and pensions are the cause of every financial crisis. But the Detroit bankruptcy is an attempted “Smash and Grab” by the bosses to steal $3.5 billion in city workers’ pensions and $5.7 billion in retiree health care. The bankruptcy will enable a federal bankruptcy judge to impose further cuts to city services and to void union contracts.
If they pull it off here, there is an estimated $3.5 trillion in city and state pensions around the U.S., $134 billion in New York City alone. With union leaders committed to their bosses’ success and politically wedded to the profit system, the bosses have driven down wages, destroyed private-sector pensions, doubled the “normal” unemployment rate, attacked the pensions and healthcare of retired auto and steel workers, and are out for more. Every attack can be “doubled” when applying it to black, Latino and immigrant workers. Which brings us to Detroit, with an 80% black population.
Charlei LeDuff of the Detroit Free Press wrote in the New York Times (7/25), “Of Detroit’s debt of at least $18 billion, about $7 billion is secured by collateral like casino revenues and utility taxes. That means creditors — read: big banks — will get paid. Of the remaining $11 billion or so in unsecured debt, about $9 billion is owed to retirees and current municipal workers…These debts come in the form of promised pension checks and health care benefits, all backed by a false, unsecured promise. These are the people who are likely to lose out.”
Thanks to the Bush and Obama bailouts and billions in UAW concessions, the auto bosses and bankers are once again making billions in profits. Yet Detroit is a hollowed-out shell. Banks and auto companies make profits, cities don’t. The latter provide services, and that costs tax money. Soaring racist unemployment, half the population it had in 1970 and lower wages all add up to reduced income tax revenue. The bosses and Obama are not about to bail out Detroit.
Chrysler’s Jefferson North plant on Detroit’s east side, in the midst of mass poverty and surrounded by barbed wire, is producing $2 billion in annual profits (NYTimes, 7/15). Most workers in the plant make $12/hr. and have no pension, reduced health care, and the union is in the midst of a 5-year no-strike contract. These workers cannot afford the $50,000 Grand Cherokees they build. When they go home, many have no street lights. If anyone in their family should have a medical emergency, they cannot count on an ambulance showing up.
The racist profit system can never guarantee a future for the international working class. For decades, Detroit and its auto workers led the whole working class in winning a higher standard of living, from decent wages to home ownership, from retirements you could live on to some of the best health care coverage for U.S. workers. These hard-won advances often required violent mass struggle, from the 1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike to the 1967 armed rebellion against racist police terror. These victories have been wiped out. As long as the bosses hold power we will be fighting for crumbs and that can never be guaranteed. Only a PLP of millions leading tens of millions more can crush the bosses and build a communist society to meet the needs of the international working class.

Hammond, IN, July 20 — In front of the federal court house, over 100 angry workers protested the racist verdict from the trial of George Zimmerman, murderer of Trayvon Martin.  The demonstration was sponsored by the Rainbow/Push coalition, but much of the contingent were community residents and friends. The misleaders of the protest offered workers no real solutions to the callous and racist murder of black youth under capitalism.  
Instead, one organizer offered the repealing of the “Stand Your Ground” law in Indiana as a means to keep black youth safe from racist vigilantes in their neighborhood.  However, Zimmerman’s lawyers didn’t even have to invoke “Stand Your Ground” in a trial that clearly demonstrated how the racist kkkourts see black youth as expendable.  Zimmerman’s lawyers said that he was using self-defense when he approached an unarmed black teenager with a gun and shot him down in cold blood.  Additionally, repealing “Stand Your Ground” wouldn’t address the racist police murders of black youth that is enabled and protected by the same kkkourts.
Another organizer requested that everyone in attendance pressure the U.S. Department of Justice to file a civil lawsuit against Zimmerman on behalf of Trayvon Martin’s parents.  Why should workers believe that justice can be found in any of the bosses’ courts?  Even in the best-case scenario, Martin’s parents get paid off while their son, and hundreds of others like him, are refused true justice.  Regardless of what the bosses tell us on a daily basis, a worker’s life has no price tag.
As if things couldn’t get worse, another organizer said, “If you don’t vote, you can’t complain.”  This comes just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court removed the veil of voter equality by gutting the Voting Rights Act, not to mention the mass killing of black youth by racist police that has happened under Obama’s watch.  In addition, a point that all of these misleaders fail to mention is that black workers didn’t vote to gain the right to vote. A multi-racial  group of workers fought against the kkkops, the kkkourts, and the Ku Klux Klan to win the right for black workers to vote.  And even after all of the blood, sweat, and tears, voting has never helped the working class.  Instead, it has provided false hopes that workers have a say in a system that’s designed to exploit and oppress them.  Don’t vote, revolt!
Despite what all of these misleaders say, workers won’t find justice through the bosses’ laws or by fighting one or two laws! Workers won’t find justice through the bosses’ kkkourts or payoffs! Workers must not vote for their exploiters and oppressors!  To end racist murder, workers need a revolution!  Workers need state power!  Workers need communism!  Join PLP!

LOS ANGELES, July 20 ­— For the last week thousands of workers from all over LA have protested the racist verdict allowing lynchman Zimmerman to go free. Multiracial protests, led in large part by militant black working-class youth, took to the streets, stopping traffic along both sides of Crenshaw Boulevard, stopping the train system along the way and taking over parts of the highway for a time. Some expressed their anger by attacking police cars and destroying fences and storefronts. The Party participated in all of these demonstrations, distributing CHALLENGE with lead articles connecting the Trayvon Martin case with the racist killer cops in New York. We led anti-racist, anti-capitalist chants and carried signs that said “Racist Murders Mean Fight Back!” and “Trayvon Means Fight Kourts, Kops, Kapitalism.”
The first few marches, while large, were relatively leaderless. We attempted to give more political leadership during one of the marches in confronting the police but were limited by the size of our forces and base among the masses.  
This exemplifies how being more immersed within mass organizations and within the community is essential to us being able to lead our sisters and brothers in the class struggle. We are attempting to be more involved in community groups here and will continue to attend the marches, which show no sign of stopping at the moment. Obama’s recent speech indicates that he is attempting to harness this anti-racist anger of millions of workers, particularly black workers, to the illusion that they “have a stake” in this country. No doubt this is an attempt to transform this anti-racist militancy into patriotism in hopes of increasing military recruitment as much larger wars loom in the future.
One highlight is that a young black worker and leader of the Party has been giving bold leadership and brought two friends to different events and is doing more on his job to organize against the speed up and cuts in proper equipment. However, we all have to do more on the job and in our mass organizations to bring more of our friends out to these demonstrations to turn them into schools for communism which build our organization, the PLP.

BROOKLYN, NY, July 28 — “They are trying to turn back the clock, but we are not going back to the cotton fields!” declared a nurse from Interfaith Hospital.
She was referring to the racist nature of the planned cuts in healthcare and jobs as bosses move forward with plans to close two major hospitals in Brooklyn. Workers continue to come out in the hundreds in rally after rally to fight these racist, sexist closings.  But as we go to press, Long Island College Hospital (LICH) is down to a handful of patients and workers have been put on “administrative leave” until the courts can sort out how to close the hospital and Interfaith bosses have submitted a closure plan to the Department of Health and Hospitals.
Workers at a third hospital, State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate, are also fighting for our lives. Our administration took over LICH and now plans to close it. Many think this has to do with the fact that real estate moguls will pay $500-800 million to build condos where LICH stands. Unfortunately SUNY bosses, with the active and tacit support of the union misleadership, have succeeded in dividing LICH and Downstate workers. On July 15, when LICH and Interfaith workers picketed the sexist bosses’ meeting at SUNY Downstate campus, the unions at Downstate did not support them and in spite of the efforts of some of us who work inside, only a handful of Downstate workers attended.
Many LICH workers think closing Downstate campus will save them and Downstate workers think closing LICH will save us. Not so! In fact Downstate workers have a lot to learn from LICH workers’ day-in-and-day-out struggles to save their hospital and we had better learn quickly, because the bosses and politicians will be turning their attention to cutbacks at Downstate as soon as they finish with LICH. And you can bet Downstate workers and patients will not see much of any real estate money, either!
Because the ruling class control the press, the courts, the politicians and the police, they may succeed in taking healthcare and jobs from us. What they cannot take from us is what we learn from the struggle. We learn how to organize and unite men and women, black, white Latino and Asian, professional and noprofessional. We learn who our friends and enemies are. We should not be fooled by the politicians who speak at every rally. They are mainly beholden to the wealthy donors who fund their campaigns. Part of their value to these bosses is that they tend to keep our struggles within narrow confines that don’t include things like striking or taking over the hospital.
In fact, hospital workers and patients across New York and across the country need to unite to fight the bosses’ plans to cut healthcare to divert funds for war plans with Iran and later on down the road with imperialist rivals China and Russia.  PLP members at these hospitals are working to develop and recruit new members so that we can have greater impact on turning these fights into a struggle for workers’ power, egalitarian communism, a society where workers collectively rule and share the wealth we produce to meet our needs.

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BROOKLYN, NY July 27 — “When I was a young woman in the Philippines, I sympathized with the communists and they were the only ones fighting back. Many of us did secretly but you never talked about it. We were afraid of being disappeared, which happened all the time under the [U.S.-supported] dictatorship there. Now at this age I see. I moved to this country decades ago for a better life for my family but now look what’s happening around us. Those who fought were right.”
That’s the conclusion drawn by a veteran worker at Long Island College Hospital (LICH). She and her co-workers are fighting to keep the 150-year-old community hospital open. The hospital’s scenic waterfront location overlooking the Manhattan skyline is valued at over $800 million. SUNY Downstate, which owns LICH, and Governor Cuomo hope to sell it off to the highest bidder to build luxury condos.
LICH serves the black and Latino residents of the giant Red Hook housing project and many more. There are demonstrations almost every day as the hospital has been turned into an armed camp. Despite winning every court battle and numerous injunctions to keep LICH open and staffed, Downstate abruptly removed every medical resident at LICH and declared the hospital at “unsafe” staffing levels. EMS 911 calls are banned from bringing patients to the LICH Emergency Room, and patients have been illegally transferred to other hospitals. Hundreds of staff are on paid leave and entire floors, including the Intensive Care Unit and Operating Room, are padlocked. In one incident, the Director of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit fought the ER Director to have an infant admitted.
To terrorize workers and patients out of fighting back, the bosses hired three different private security agencies, at least one of them carrying concealed weapons and no visible ID. This is in addition to hospital security and the state troopers posted here. Nurses have reported being followed to the bathroom. In one well-publicized incident, an elderly man with dementia was given a one-way bus ticket to Florida, even though he has no family there. When the Attorney General’s staff arrived to investigate, the man had mysteriously “disappeared,” and none of the five types of security surrounding the hospital ever saw him.
Some patients are refusing to be transferred elsewhere. Others will clutch at your arm and share their fear at where they will end up. Methodist Hospital, located in upscale, mostly-white Park Slope, has received many of the EMS runs rerouted from LICH. Last week, their morgue was filled to capacity with no place to put the corpses. That same day, the ER was overflowing with over 120 patients and the hospital didn’t have enough meals to feed them.
Union Leaders, Politicans =
Dead End for Workers
Local 1199 SEIU and the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) have been staging rallies to bolster a strictly legal effort to save LICH. At the same time, they have undermined any attempts to build unity with the Red Hook residents or stage direct actions like a sit-in in the ER with staff and patients or blocking the removal of equipment. They have hitched their wagon to Mayoral hopeful Bill DeBlasio, who turns every action into a campaign appearance and “civil disobedience” photo-op.
PLP is in the thick of this struggle, trying to expand the readership of CHALLENGE while participating in meetings, rallies and endless discussions with our co-workers about the need for unity with Red Hook residents, fighting racism, and for communist revolution. There’s a good chance that LICH will be added to the list of St. Vincent’s, Peninsula, North General, and the dozen hospitals that have closed in as many years in New York City. The bosses have announced that Interfaith is next and SUNY Downstate has already laid off about 1,000 workers even as they sell off LICH. And for all the union’s campaign contributions and providing foot soldiers, Obamacare will not restore any of these racist, murderous healthcare cuts.
LICH may likely close, but like the woman quoted above, many workers and patients can be won to see that “the communists are right.”  We need to expose the double-edged racist and sexist nature of these attacks on workers. PLP can grow with new friends and new fighters and the revolutionary communist movement can be strengthened.