WASHINGTON, DC, September 12 — Today 60 anti-racists, transit workers from Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689, community residents and others, picketed the transit authority’s monthly board meeting to protest its racist hiring and firing policies. Some challenged the transit authority’s board directly in the public comment time. We demanded they hire and retain workers who’ve been jailed in the past and “done their time.”
We explained that many former inmates have already worked successfully for years at Metro. Now that opportunity is gone. Communists, lawyers, civil rights activists, returning citizens and public health workers demand the policy be reversed!
Metro workers are also under attack. The DC region officials are gradually breaking up the unified transportation system to create multiple non-union systems. Privatization in transit, as in schools and hospitals, is aimed at making profit at the expense of the workers by driving down wages and benefits in a “race to the bottom.” Signs calling for “One System, One Union” signaled the transit-worker fightback.
Power of Multiracial Unity
The rally’s multi-racial alliance of workers and other anti-racists exemplified the power we can exert to win this demand, build our strength and eventually create a communist system where the working class actually controls transit systems, along with all aspects of society.
 The Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association’s Health Disparities Committee (MWPHAP) organized the rally along with Progressive Labor Party, Metro workers, returnee organizations, community residents, civil rights groups, and workers’ rights coalitions. For months, we’ve had community meetings on the issue of jobs for returning citizens (former prisoners returning to the community). Workers have eagerly signed petitions in Wards 7 and 8, at health outreach efforts, Metro garages and on-line.
We’ve met several workers who’ve been fired or refused hiring under this policy. Some spoke to the Board and joined the rally. In a growing movement, others are working with progressive lawyers to challenge the policy as well as their individual firings.    
Metro workers have the power to overturn this current hiring ban and to stop Metro’s plans to sell bus lines to a for-profit company that will lower wages and break the union. To build for this rally, we struggled with our co-workers at Metro to see these battles as everyone’s fight. This is an important step in raising broader issues and class consciousness among Metro workers. In the recent contract the policy was not even debated by the union leadership, which still does not want to defend its members or fight for jobs for all. In fact, the union president attacked the rally against racism as a diversion from their focus on opposing privatization. If they were serious, they would instead see how the issues and struggles are interrelated and can strengthen each other. But bascially they defend the bosses’ system.
The New Jim Crow
Our discussions at the garages exposed many contradictions besetting workers. Some thought it was okay to have harsher hiring practices, even though they themselves might have a criminal record. As we spoke more about the “New Jim Crow” criminal injustice system, many workers changed their minds and agreed that people in our communities shouldn’t be shut out of a decent job because of a criminal record.
People agree that the jail system is inherently racist, but it is still a struggle to win current Metro workers to care about those who might be hired after them. One co-worker at the rally said people must see that this struggle affects all of us, even if it doesn’t seem so right now. He had a true class outlook and took a CHALLENGE and a handful of flyers to take back to his garage. Another co-worker spoke about the bravery of the civil rights marchers, which we need to emulate.
The mass imprisonment of black and Latino workers since Nixon and Reagan instituted the war on drugs results in millions of people with records for minor drug possession. The police arrest black and Latino workers at much higher rates than whites. White residents in DC use drugs at the same rate as black people, but 8 out of 10 people arrested for drug violations are black.
Metro’s refusal to hire people with convictions makes this racist inequality in criminal justice much worse since returnees are prevented from getting relatively high-paying jobs when released. A Metro speaker said that Trayvon Martin’s killer walked away free while black people are locked up on a daily basis for much less!.
MWPHA will continue to pressure Metro to overturn this policy. PLP members invite our friends to our study/action groups to organize to overthrow the entire capitalist system, which only enriches the top 1% while driving down our wages and living standards to the lowest possible levels.

Tel Aviv, August 31— A multi-ethnic group of 1,500 protesters marched in central Tel Aviv today to demand the cancellation of the racist Prawer Law. The essence of this law is the theft of the land of tens of thousands of Bedouin workers for the sake of U.S. real estate tycoons and their allies in the Israeli ruling class. The demonstrators called for the recognition of all Bedouin villages and for the abolition of the government’s plans of demolition, removal and land theft. Several protesters raised the workers’ red flag to challenge the fascist Israeli regime.
Although Bedouins make up 30 percent of the population of the Negev, the desert of southern Israel-Palestine, their villages contain only three percent of the region’s land area. Under the Prawer Law, which was passed by the Israeli Knesset in July, the capitalist government’s “solution” to the “problem” of spontaneous Bedouin settlements is a mass eviction of 40,000 Bedouin workers and peasants. They would be resettled to “recognized” ghettos where unemployment stands at 50 percent and where 60 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.
The confiscated land, meanwhile, will be used for towns for the rich. The Israel Land Administration ignores the fact that many Bedouins hold title to their land. So much for the capitalists’ sacred principle of “private property”!
Zionism = Theft
This is a war of attrition, with the forces of the regime pitted against the working class. It also reflects the same colonialist policy that dates from the birth of modern Zionism in 1882. The Zionists made their move in the Nakba of 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were deported from what is now the State of Israel. They consolidated their control in the violent confiscations of “Land Day” in 1976, and in the murder of 13 Palestinian Arabs by cops in October 2000.
The essence of Zionism may be summed up in one sentence: As many Jews on as much land as possible, as few Arabs on as little land as possible. Since the days of the Rothschilds, the Zionists have deported and robbed native Palestinians for the sake of the Zionist colonial project and the profits of Zionism’s patrons: U.S. and Western European capitalists. Even as the regime sheds tears over the alleged “robbery of open lands” by the Bedouins, it hands out property to private farms owned by the capitalists. After the establishment of the State of Israel, the Jewish settlements known as kibbutzim and moshavim benefited from their strong ties to the Israeli Labor party, which was in power until 1977. But residents of the Development Towns, the state-built industrial slums where Jews of Middle Eastern origin were sent to live, received minimal land and resources. The Palestinians, including the Bedouins, were simply robbed.
Billionaires Profit, Peasants Starve
Among the beneficiaries of the theft of Bedouin land is Ronald Lauder of New York, the billionaire heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics empire and president of the World Jewish (read: Zionist) Congress, as well as Irving Moskowitz, the Miami casino tycoon who is behind the robbery of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the rest of the country. Lauder sits on a $3.3 billion fortune while his servants at the Jewish National Fund evict workers and peasants from their lands to plant the “Forest of Ambassadors” in the Negev. Lauder and his ilk are following in the footsteps of the U.S. ruling class, which deported Native Americans from their lands in a genocide that took millions of lives.
Jewish workers in Israel-Palestine, now suffering from a severe housing crisis, will gain nothing from this land grab. In fact, they will only lose from it. The racist ideas pushed by the government divide Jewish and Arab workers, allowing the capitalist bosses to rule us all. The same government that robs Bedouin workers of the right to live on their ancestors’ land also robs Jewish workers of the right to roofs over their heads. The struggle to recognize Bedouin “unrecognized” villages, and to give the land to its tillers, is the same as the struggle for public housing and for housing for all.
The time is ripe for Arabs, Jews, and Christians, for workers and peasants who live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, to take charge of our destiny and put an end to the deadly profit system that serves only the big bosses. We fight for bread on every worker’s table, for collective ownership of resources, for multiracial unity, and for uncompromising class war against the capitalists.

COLOMBIA, September 16 — For the past two weeks, thousands of farmers, truckers, miners and students have been on strike to protest sharp drops in their living conditions due to the “free trade” agreement between the U.S. and Colombia. The agreement, an extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), was signed a year ago. It forces small farmers in Colombia to compete with huge U.S. agro-conglomerates.
The government is trying to end the strike, which has blocked 30 roads around the country, by promising negotiations and millions in investments — promises they have repeatedly broken in the past. No one should be surprised by the crisis the trade agreement has caused. For years, both farmers and social organizations predicted the effects it would have on the impoverished rural majority in Colombia. Farm family incomes, already the lowest in the country, are down 70 percent. That amounts to a death penalty for peasants.
When the agreement was signed, former Vice President Francisco Santos acknowledged there would be “losers,” but that didn’t concern him. With visible excitement, he stated there would also be “winners.” He must have been referring to the big agribusiness companies and the local capitalists who work with them! One year later, they have increased subsidized rice imports to Colombia by an astronomical 2,000 percent. The small local farmers cannot compete with the artificially low price of imported rice.
It was no exaggeration when the archbishop of Tunja, Luis Augusto Castro, called the trade agreement a “betrayal.” As Karl Marx said, the state is the office from which the capitalist class runs its business. In Colombia, the state is a transnational office run by people who despise Colombian workers and are closer to New York than to Ciudad Bolivar.
In reaction to workers’ anger, the bosses have committed huge violations of human rights. They have used the Safety Act to criminalize social protest and the military to repress “the internal enemy” — protesting workers and farmers. These arrogant bosses want passive workers who will just vote and support the rulers’ parties.
Arbitrary arrests have led to the imprisonment of more than 300 leaders on charges of “rebellion.” They have also exposed the vaunted Colombian democracy as a class dictatorship, which we in Progressive Labor Party know we must destroy.
Militant friends and readers of CHALLENGE have been at these demonstrations with our literature and slogans. They bring our message of internationalist struggle against nationalism.  While participating in immediate reform struggles, they also make it clear that only communist revolution can fundamentally change the system we live under. Only communism can end imperialism, nationalism, racism, sexism and the lethal profit system.

ROME, September 3 — As the war in Syria spreads, those who have the financial means to leave are escaping. Many have fled to Turkey, while others risk their lives and many die — just as do migrants from Latin America to the U.S. — boarding small boats heading to Italy. Almost 3,000 have drowned or died of dehydration since 2011. On August 31, more than 300 migrants, including many from Syria, landed in three different places in Italy. The Italian government reports that 24,277 migrants have landed in the last twelve months, 8,932 of whom arrived from July 1 to August 10 of this year.
In June, 95 people were rescued, but seven drowned, while clinging to the floats of a tuna net. Their deaths prompted a politician of the racist Northern League to comment that it would have been “better to save the tuna than the foreigners” and “here is one more reason not to eat tuna.”
Not all Italians agree. On August 16, the President of Italy tried to sound noble by praising those in Sicily who swam out to sea to help Syrian refugees reach Sicily safely. “The television broadcasts of dozens of swimmers generously assisting refugees coming from Syria, many of whom were children, to reach the shore and safety, make Italy proud,” adding that, “humanity is stronger than prejudice.”
What the proud President failed to mention, however, is that Italy’s rulers made aiding and abetting undocumented immigrants “illegal,” ever since Italy criminalized undocumented migrants in 2002. He also neglected to mention that the Italian Coast Guard escorted all of these migrants to the detention centers that undercover reporters have denounced as concentration camps staffed by fascist police. Hundreds of migrant men and women from a center in Sardinia, for example, blocked traffic with a sit-down strike in the street in September to protest their conditions. The President’s “humanitarian” language hides the ugly political and economic reality.
 The Pope of the Catholic Church plans to visit a refugee center in Rome. This follows his earlier publicity stunt of visiting a detention center for migrants on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, where he celebrated mass and prayed for the migrants who cross the Mediterranean from North Africa each year. He threw a wreath into the sea for the thousands who have died during those voyages. Such public performances of humanitarian sorrow hide imperialist geopolitical strategies behind prayers and handwringing.
The Catholic Church’s NGOs actively recruit immigrants to fill low-paying jobs in wealthier countries. Monsignor Giancarlo Peregeo, the director of the Church’s Migrants Foundation, has recently called for the creation of “humanitarian channels for those fleeing the situations in North Africa and the Middle East,” but he noted “patrols are needed to help these migrants reach their destination.” What this means is armies and charitable organizations will help to swell the ranks of the reserve army of the unemployed, needed by capitalism to keep wages low and profits high.
This is not new. The Catholic Church has worshiped at the shrine of capitalism since 1891 when Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum (“The Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor”) condemning Socialism, which continues to be the Catholic Church’s fundamental social doctrine.  Pope Pius XII later reinforced this teaching by excommunicating anyone who so much as read a communist newspaper at the end of the Second World War.
U.S. imperialist war, proclaimed as “humanitarian intervention,” is anything but that. Obama’s hypocritical words about bombing Syrians to save them from poison gas is more imperialist violence to control resources and to guarantee the subservience of North Africa and the Middle East. The “War on Terror” is a war on workers everywhere in the world. Join PLP and fight for communist revolution to free all workers.