Washington, DC April 10 — Today tens of thousands of workers and students from around the country rallied here to demand immigration reform.  Thousands more rallied in 14 other locations around the U.S. Many protesters went far beyond supporting the current plans of bosses for reform, calling for an end to deportations and discrimination against immigrants (undocumented or not).
A dozen PLPers from DC and PLPers from other cities greeted the DC demonstrators with a revolutionary call to action, urging them to join the upcoming communist May Day demonstrations. The revolutionaries said that only the abolition of all borders through global communist revolution can finally stop the racist and nationalist attacks on immigrants around the world.
Over 500 May Day leaflets along with over 400 copies of CHALLENGE were distributed to marchers and a dozen workers signed up to work with PLP.
Workers want an end to all deportations and detention centers, an open border, and no discrimination against any worker or student based on their official immigration status. But the U.S. bosses are proposing a reform that only helps them and actually intensifies exploitation of workers. It will take communist revolution to abolish borders on the basis of global working class unity and equality.
The U.S. Senate reform bill calls for more severe border “security”, requiring that 90% of all undocumented immigrants attempting to enter the U.S. be captured and deported before any of the provisions that provide a pathway to citizenship go into effect. The increasingly repressive border patrols and fences have already led to deaths of many workers attempting to cross the border in search of a job. 
Imperialism destroys the jobs and economy in their home country, driving them to seek employment anywhere they can—and then represses them for trying to find a job to support their families. Workers will continue to cross borders, legally or not, in search of jobs.  These workers will become the next wave of undocumented workers. They will lead increasingly vulnerable lives in the shadows, especially since the Senate bill requires that the E-verify employment surveillance system be beefed up before any path to citizenship is allowed.
The Senate bill requires that current undocumented workers register, pay $500, undergo a criminal background check right away and again in six years, and ultimately have to wait 13 years before they can achieve citizenship. These workers become vulnerable as soon as they register! Any past, current, or new misstep could prevent them from beginning or finishing the 13-year [probation] period. If a participant opposed the boss on a job, for example, through striking or other action, he/she might easily get arrested on a picket line and then deported. The bosses want to intimidate this section of the working class as much as possible to keep workers divided and scared and reduce class struggle against them.  But workers will fight back!
Despite this grim forecast, the idea of some “path to citizenship”, however difficult, appeals to millions suffering from ICE repression. The misleaders of the movement in the labor bureaucracy are fully supporting the bosses’ immigration reform, delivering workers into the hands of the Democrats and now even some Republican politicians. Their uncritical embrace of the bosses’ proposals fails to address the divisions in the working class and weakens the working classes’ understanding of how capitalism continues to exploit them severely even with this immigration reform.
Communists, on May Day (and every day!), call for the universal, global solidarity of workers, understanding that workers are all the same throughout the world and that distinctions based on race, nation, or immigration status are mere bosses ploys to make super-profits by keeping us divided and weak. It is time to move forward to building the international PLP to lead global revolution for communism and abolish the bosses’ phony, self-serving borders, forever.

 Chicago, IL, April 19 — Today, several nurses and doctors from the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Stroger Cook County Hospital showed up at a Governing Board meeting to challenge the administration’s plan to cap admissions and have us turn away transfers of premature babies. One highly respected night-shift nurse expressed the group’s outrage at the plan. She told the board that we do excellent work and bring in $10-14 million per year to the public system. “How can you justify restricting admissions?” she asked. Half of the premature babies in the Stroger NICU are born in smaller hospitals and transported in. With rich private hospitals itching to steal our referral hospitals, putting a cap on transfers and admissions could end up closing our doors permanently.
Before the meeting, we linked this latest attack on our unit to the bigger attacks happening today. When we reminded our co-workers that city rulers are doing the same thing to our public schools, many, especially CHALLENGE readers said, “Yeah, it’s the same thing.”
Many workers believe that the real plan is to privatize the public hospital, and they are right. This is the latest in a 10-year long campaign to end the County Health system that serves mostly black and Latino indigent workers. In fact, if you compare the number of beds and services the County provides today as opposed to a decade ago, they are already more closed than open! Given the assault by the Democrats and the cooperation of the union leaders, these attacks have met little resistance that wasn’t communist–led, and that hasn’t been enough to stop them. Despite hundreds of layoffs and the loss of even more beds, many workers are still surprised that the assault continues, or that they would threaten NICU. As we challenge these illusions, we create a small opening for real political struggle. To seriously challenge these illusions, we must bring communist ideas into the middle of the fight over the immediate demands.
Our presence at the board meeting, the review of the Stroger NICU’s good statistics compared to other units around the country, the drafting of a petition, the demand for meetings, all put pressure on the administration. As the cluster of NICU nurses and doctors got up to walk out of the board meeting after their public statement, one of the CEO’s staffers ran after them. “Dr. Raju wants to meet with the NICU staff. Please wait.” We were shocked. Every other time we had publicly protested hospital policies we were ignored, but this time our whole group was ushered into the big boss’s office suite. The head of the health system was defensive, claiming concerns over patient safety caused by short staffing. Eventually the CEO and System nursing chief promised to hire more nurses and raise the temporary census limit from 17 to 25.
Whether they do or not, remains to be seen. The real victory is that there was fight-back and everybody could see the Party’s leadership in making that happen. A bigger victory will be consolidating our political base with more County health care workers participating in May Day and joining PLP. During the meeting with NICU staff, the CEO said, “Whatever we’ve got to do from our side, we’ll do it…My door is always open to you.” We’ll see. We will meet and decide what is needed; adequate staffing, accommodations for parents to stay with their infants, free parking and vouchers for the cafeteria for lactating mothers, translator services and more. But our unit is one small front in a racist war against the whole working class. While we fight for our patient’s young lives, we fight for communist revolution and a society where health care will be free and available to all, based solely on need.
This story will be continued.

WASHINGTON, DC, April 10 — Today Senator Rand Paul launched a Republican offensive to recruit black students into its ranks at Howard, a historically black university. Paul invited himself to the campus and the administration bent over backwards to get students and faculty to attend this event. No academic department or student organization sponsored it. Paul’s speech was an offensive, lying, and racist rewrite of the history of the U.S. and was opposed by many students.
Students challenged his racist re-writing of the history of black workers in the United States. Two students raised a banner declaring “Howard University Doesn’t Support White Supremacy,” correctly labeling Paul for what he is — a racist. The audience erupted in applauses in support of the students’ bold action.
Belying their pretense of academic freedom, the University administrators had the campus police swarm the two students, roughly shoving them out of the auditorium. The students continued to protest outside the building, declaring that capitalism promoted racism, and that neither the Democratic not the Republican Party had anything of value for black students.
The racist Republican Party that the Democratic Party is slicker at winning black and Latino votes in overwhelming numbers (although most potential voters don’t bother to even participate in the bosses’ electoral shell game). Since the share of these groups in the population is growing, Republicans realize that they must figure out a way to appeal to them if they are to remain relevant.
Rand Paul also wants to position himself as the bold new Republican leader willing to take on the task of cutting into Democratic support among black students. This is a tough road, given that for 50 years, Republican leaders have appealed to gutter racists in their campaigns. Richard Nixon launched the famous “Southern Strategy” to get racist white southerners to leave the Democratic Party and join the Republicans. Then, Ronald Reagan used a blatantly racist tale about black welfare Cadillac mothers to help win the election in the 1980s. George H. W. Bush similarly used the Willie Horton racist falsehood in his campaign in the 1990s. And Rand Paul wonders why black people don’t vote Republican, even though it’s the party of Lincoln?
Students and faculty are outraged at this administration-sanctioned racist lecture and repressive action against students.  We should not be surprised, but instead understand that U.S. universities are not wide-open forums for a free flow of ideas. They are corporations controlled by boards made up of bosses and their politicians. Universities encourage curricula that support the status quo and discredit revolutionary alternatives. The Rand Paul event, as absurd as it was, is simply another rightwing effort to keep students tied to the capitalist system, and may well be followed by further efforts to move the university discussion further to the right. The University is an arena of class struggle. It is up to us to wage the ideological and practical battle to expose and defeat racists and capitalists on the campus.

WASHINGTON, DC, April 13 — Today 30 workers from Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 689 gathered at the union hall for a meeting called by the local leadership to organize a campaign against privatization of parts of the city’s transit system. For two decades, several lines in surrounding counties have been separated by local jurisdictions from the unified rail and bus system. This has shrunk workers’ wage and benefit packages in these separate and privatized sectors as well as cut into the ATU membership, weakening the union.
The DC government — run by liberal Democrats, most of whom have been endorsed by the local unions — has decided to investigate the cost savings from further privatization, this time for lines inside Washington, DC itself. This would cost another 175 union jobs and workers hired for those lines would end up worse off. This is just another bosses’ tactic to roll back workers’ standard of living to boost their own profitability.
Two approaches on the issue quickly developed. The union leadership and the organizer from Jobs with Justice advocated educating the membership about the danger of privatization and the possibility of layoffs if this occurred. They advocated that ATU workers and their allies circulate a petition to the Mayor demanding privatization be stopped.
 In contrast, PLP’ers and other militant workers advocated a strategy based on political analysis showing how the bosses’ privatization tactic is part of a general racist attack on unions the bosses are using to solve their current economic problems. (A huge majority of the transit workers are black and Latino.) These workers felt that we needed to urgently educate workers about how this privatization attack and many more similar assaults on workers’ well-being will continue as long as capitalism continues because of its need to maximize profits. Winning workers to see the need to eliminate capitalism has to be part of any strategy to fight privatization.
On a tactical level, both approaches are similar. Both want to have meetings and rallies against privatization, build a worker-rider alliance and eventually carry out work actions to drive the point home. The difference is in the message. Only revolution can win the fight against privatization. Any other “victory” will be short-lived, or the gains we make will be taken from some other workers. Moreover, if workers understand that this attack is just one arrow in the quiver of the capitalists, with more attacks to come, they will become more active and aggressive now in the current fight.
Our approach requires us to fight as hard as we can to preserve jobs, but also to organize for May Day around the goal of destroying capitalism, with its racist practices, and fighting for communism.
At the meeting several workers were skeptical about their co-workers joining in the fight, whether simply for the fight against privatization or the broader fight against capitalism. But blaming the workers won’t get us very far. An organizer must figure out why our brothers and sisters are not fighting back vigorously and convince them to change. This often requires patience and perseverance, including clear education about the urgency of the need to resist the capitalists’ systematic attack on our well-being. We are not going to win every battle, but by fighting together we can build a stronger movement against capitalism, and this will create the basis for our eventual victory.
At the end of the meeting several workers took May Day leaflets and posters, a step in the right direction.