On February 14, Eddie Healey, a long-time member of the Progressive Labor Party, passed away. He and a co-worker stopped to help a motorist who was stuck in the snow. Eddie collapsed helping. He was rushed to the hospital, but could not be revived. Eddie will be sorely missed.
Eddie came around the Progressive Labor Party when he was a student at Prince George’s County Community College in 1972. He joined the Progressive Labor Party at that time and for the next 40 years helped build the fight against the capitalist system. He drove the sound truck for May Day in DC for over 20 years and he also joined the military to organize soldiers for communism.
He was a dedicated fighter in the struggle against racism. From fighting the Nazis in Arlington, VA to stopping the KKK from marching in Washington D.C., to defending Terrance Johnson (who, at the age of 15 killed a cop who was beating him inside a police station) and fighting police brutality in Prince George’s County, Eddie never wavered from his commitment to the anti-racist struggle.  
He worked for 37 years as a cable splicer in the underground at PEPCO, the electric utility in D.C. Eddie, as a member of IBEW Local 1900, militantly led picket lines during strikes, shared CHALLENGE with his co-workers, and fought hard to sharpen the battle against racism at PEPCO. Many of his co-workers spoke at his wake and funeral of his overwhelming commitment to help his fellow workers every day, as well as anyone else in need.
Comrade Eddie, we salute you for a well-lived life, dedicated unswervingly to our multi-racial class. We will do our best to support your widow Angela and son EJ, and commit ourselves to emulating your dedication to fellow workers.

Much has been written about the hundreds of billions in profits made from commercialism, real estate deals and security costs created by the Sochi Olympics. However, its real function is to convince the suffering working class that they are all winners under capitalism. The games are designed to foster a fierce nationalist corporate spirit and hero worship that propels workers to identify with their bosses’ profit agendas and wars against competitor countries, much as the 1936 Olympics in Hitler’s Germany preceded World War II.
Olympics and Oil Wars Destroy Workers’ Lives
The background to the Sochi Olympics is the oil war between Russia, the number one producer, and the U.S., number three. The U.S. combined with number six, Canada, leads oil production. The nearly completed Keystone oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast is mainly for export to energy-poor countries like China and India, to make them dependent on the U.S. instead of Russia. The U.S. is supporting the struggle against Russia in the Ukraine, whose oil and gas pipelines supply much of Europe. Russia’s continuing imperialist war for Chechnya’s oil resources, that killed over 160,000 rebels, is costing the Russians billions in security because Sochi is near Chechnya.
There are also high-security costs for the U.S. because of its Mideast oil wars and Special Forces killer operations in over 120 countries, along with missile drone attacks. U.S. ships were anchored off Sochi for evacuation purposes, and their athletes were ordered not to wear any nationalist uniforms for fear of retaliation from millions of victims of U.S. imperialism.
Impoverished Russians have been taxed $51 billion for the Sochi facilities which displaced thousands of workers from public housing, private homes and farms. Other Olympics have also given corporate real estate developers the power to evict millions worldwide in many countries like Brazil and China while encouraging other capitalists like the U.S., which recently displaced thousands of workers in Brooklyn, NY for the Barclays Center and a high-priced apartment complex. In Russia 25 workers were killed building the Sochi complex because of speed-up and unsafe conditions. Many thousands of workers have not even been paid because the project is $40 billion over budget.
Hunger Olympics
Many criticize the Olympic athletes’ recruiting process which makes them virtual slaves to corporate and military sponsors for funding and training, linking that process to a Hunger Games scenario. Child athletes are separated from their families and schools for years and become the property of corporate sponsors like Verizon, who control their lives, and require constant endorsements of their sponsors. Olympic designers demand increasingly dangerous conditions be built into the events to produce new records and thrills, resulting in deaths and injuries among the athletes.
All Workers Win with Communism
Capitalism produces mass poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and imperialist wars, along with an unequal economy that allows the world’s richest 85 people to have more wealth than half the world’s population (3.5 billion). Communism is the only system where no workers are losers and everyone is special. With communism, cooperation replaces competition, devotion to serving others replaces serving oneself and pursuit of socially useful goals replaces profits and dangerous entertainment for a handful of lucrative careers. PLP fights for communism, a social system that needs everyone to rise to the heights of their ability and to produce and share equally according to need. Join us.

Inter-imperialist rivalry is shaping events in Venezuela. The capitalists’ main fight is over oil. Venezuela is the United States’ third largest oil supplier and the leading exporter to Latin America. It has the world’s second biggest oil reserves. This is a huge bonanza for the imperialists.
The fight within the country pits president Nicolás Maduro (following Cesar Chaves’ pseudo-leftist politics) on one side, backed by the Chinese and Russian imperialists. Gustaro Cisneros, one of the richest men on the planet, supports Maduro’s regime.
On the right-wing side are Henrique Capriles and Leopoldo Lopez. The latter was one of the leaders of the 2002 coup against Chavez, which was supported by the United States. These two represent U.S. imperialism.
Neither gang represents workers’ interests. Workers in Venezuela are victims of capitalism’s world crisis, suffering high unemployment, mass poverty, slum housing and miserable health care. The capitalists are taking advantage of workers’ discontent, similar to what’s happening in Ukraine or Africa: to divert workers’ anger the bosses are pushing workers to fight each other by siding with one or another bosses’ camp.
The working class in Venezuela has a rich history of struggle against the capitalists but unfortunately they’ve never had a party fighting for a communist society. Progressive Labor Party is appealing to workers to join our revolutionary communist party and fight shoulder to shoulder, internationally, to break the chains of the imperialists’ puppet governments. Let’s build a world free of misery and oppression, a world where the riches of nature are enjoyed according to workers’ needs and commitment, not controlled by a profit-hungry bunch of capitalists.

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!