BROOKLYN, NY February 14 — Long Island College Hospital (LICH) is at risk of closing. LICH employs about 2,500 workers and serves the Red Hook Houses, the largest public housing project in Brooklyn, with over 10,000 black and Latino workers and youth. LICH is a 300-bed hospital that delivers more than 2,500 babies and sees more than 55,000 patients in its emergency room every year.

The State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate Medical Center had been poised to take over LICH, which would have been bad enough, threatening the entire emergency services department. But last Wednesday, Democratic Governor Cuomo put that on hold when he announced a $2.84 billion cut in Medicaid, freezing the $62 million for the Downstate take-over and threatening to close LICH. As we go to press, a deal may be in the works to release some or all of the take-over money. Either way, there will be less health care for the workers and youth who need it.

Whether LICH closes or not, capitalism can never meet the needs of the working class because it puts profits over healthcare. Goldman Sachs gave out executive bonuses totaling $15.3 billion in 2010 and Mayor Bloomberg’s personal fortune hit $18 billion, while 30 million are unemployed and over $1 trillion goes to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that closing LICH is even being considered illustrates capitalism’s inherent racism.

Ten other hospitals are also on the chopping block in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. In Brooklyn alone 16,000 hospital jobs are at risk at five hospitals that treated over 250,000 patients in 2010 and serve nearly a million. Eight hospitals have closed since 2007, including St. Vincent’s in lower Manhattan and North General in Harlem last year.

PLP supports the growing unity of workers and patients to fight these attacks at both LICH and SUNY Downstate. Last week, some LICH EMS workers went to the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) over the lack of visible addresses in the Red Hook Houses.  Ambulances respond to 911 calls there, but due to the lack of visibile building numbers, Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) are often forced to jump out of the ambulance and run to the building to find the address. No doubt, some patients have died before the ambulance could locate them.

The EMTs brought written statements from coworkers and photos of the buildings and asked to speak to an NYCHA official. They were not allowed to speak to anyone about this easily correctable health hazard, so the EMTs and Red Hook residents will paint the addresses themselves!

We don’t have the hundreds of thousands demonstrating like in Cairo’s Tahrir Square…yet. But Egypt shows that things can change quickly. Fighting against racist health cuts and building unity between workers and patients; expanding the circulation of CHALLENGE; deepening our personal/political relationships is the only way to guarantee that when things do change, we will be able to determine the direction and outcome of that struggle with a mass revolutionary communist PLP. 

The devastation from last year’s floods in Pakistan — 2,300 mostly poor, working-class farmers dead, 24 million displaced and 2.3 million houses and 4,655 villages destroyed — was blamed on unprecedented monsoon rains, but the real cause was the ruling class’s refusal to protect the working class.

Six months after the floods, large areas, especially in the South, are still underwater, and over 7,000,000 people lack adequate shelter. Millions of flood survivors with immune systems weakened by stress, lack of food and cold weather are at risk of pneumonia and other respiratory and water-borne diseases.

Friends of PLP have been playing a key role in organizing nation-wide protest demonstrations which began last year over the government’s failed flood relief. (Pakistan is a federation of four provinces, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab and Sindh, and four federal territories, altogether totaling over 170 million people.)

Our friends pointed out that while the floods were a natural event, the homelessness of millions and the massive destruction were a disaster produced by Pakistan’s capitalist class and U.S. imperialism, placing profits before workers’ lives. As our friends join in grass-roots struggles to provide basic necessities for flood victims, communist ideas are being spread promoting a society based on the interests of the working class where careful planning would prevent such devastation.

This included exposure of the corruption of national and local officials, and their tactic of citing “security issues” to keep relief agencies away from poor areas while taking food and supplies intended for flood victims for themselves.  Big landowners, many also being members of Parliament, fled before the waters rose, using state resources to divert the water’s path in order to save their homes and crops. They often re-routed it to poor areas, thereby destroying millions of homes.

Even though the government had known since last June that flash floodings would occur from July to September, the government had no evacuation plan. Poor workers, who could not pay the high cost of transportation away from the floods, watched as rising waters destroyed their homes and livelihoods.

Many breaches were made to intentionally divert floodwaters away from military garrisons, (including the Shahbaz Airbase in Sindh), which flooded Baluchistan, displacing 800,000 Baluchis. The airbase, under U.S. Air Force control since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, is the source of continued lethal raids into Afghanistan and drone attacks on Taliban insurgents, while refusing to help in desperately-needed relief work.

Although the Pakistani Supreme Court is examining cases of floodwater diversion — seeking reports from provincial officials who turned a blind eye to it — they will likely shift blame onto other exploiters and whip up national-ethnic rivalries to hide their crimes against the working class.

The destruction of crops by the floods, and farmers’ inability to plant in still water-logged fields, means another 500,000 people will need food this year. In Sindh province, home base to some of the country’s largest landowners, including the notorious Bhutto clan — the current president, Asif Ali Zardar, is the husband of ex-president Benazir Bhutto, assassinated in 2009) — an estimated 25% of children under five are malnourished and 6% severely underfed. But such figures result not only from the devastation caused by the floods but also from the long-time inequality inherent in capitalist society. (A 2002 study found a national malnutrition rate of 13.2%, and rates of 23.1% in northern Sindh and 21.2% in its southern part.)

Pakistan’s economy has been severely harmed by extensive damage to crops and infrastructure intensifying a profound economic crisis. The total impact from the floods approaches $US45 billion. The ruling class and international capitalists are determined to place the cost of this crisis on the backs of Pakistan’s working class.

Brutal austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have led to sharper increases in food and energy prices and more cuts in social spending. The government intends to rebuild the infrastructure through public and private “partnerships,” meaning more corruption, as big business is given state funds for reconstruction. 

There are daily protests and strikes over the lack of flood relief, rising prices and unemployment. More than two million energy-industry workers have been laid off, as well as massive job losses in the agricultural sector.

As in the recent earthquake in Haiti, the floods in Pakistan demonstrate that capitalism cannot provide for the needs of the working class. We call on all workers to unite across borders and fight for a communist society. 

NEW YORK CITY, Feb. 4 — “Haiti, Egypt, USA: Workers’ Power Will Win the Day!”  At the moment Haiti marked the anniversary of its earthquake with hardly anything yet “reconstructed” for ordinary people, the working class in Egypt — youth and women workers joined by students and professionals — were taking a stand against the fascist regime of Hosni Mubarak in Cairo.  Fifty picketers at the Haitian consulate in Manhattan took note of this moment, both condemning the Haitian ruling class and its imperialist overlords for their neglect, and cheering the power and resolve shown by the Egyptian demonstrators. 

Among our pickets were high school students embroiled in the struggles against school closings, against racist preferential treatment for charter and special middle-class schools, and against administration harassment of militant teachers who organize together with their students.  They vowed to join their own struggles internationally with those of other young people:  “Haitian students are under attack: what do we do?  Stand up, fight back!” 

One Brooklyn student led a chant for various demands for workers in Haiti, teaching us how to respond to each one in Haitian Kreyòl “Mwen dakò!” (“I agree!”).  We also taught ourselves Kreyòl versions of the great chants “The workers, united, will never be defeated!” (“Ouvriye ini pa pral jamè venki!”) and “Workers’ struggles have no borders!” (“Lit ouvriye pa gen fwontyè!”).

A recent CUNY graduate said it was the most spirited and powerful rally he’d been to in a while. A worker who has spent much of the year in Haiti spoke about her experiences working with friends there, teaching classes and organizing a conference together.  She drew inspiration from the understanding and solidarity with U.S. struggles shown by students, teachers, and other union workers in Haiti. 

Another speaker outlined some answers to the question “Who rules Haiti?”  He said that in addition to the Haitian consulate, we should picket Bill Clinton’s office in Harlem, since Clinton is at the heart of U.S. imperialist rule in Haiti.

Friends in Haiti asked us to include in our picket the demand for justice for the thousands of victims of the fascist Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier, who had the gall to return to Haiti last month, apparently in a bid to clear his position with the Haitian courts so as to access millions in a blocked Swiss bank account. We added his name to the chant “Clinton, Préval, Duvalier, you can’t hide: we charge you with genocide!”

Members of PLP on the picket line stressed that “workers’ power” meant turning the guns around, winning soldiers in Haiti, Egypt, and the imperialist armies to join in a communist working-class revolution to smash capitalism everywhere.

This picket was one small step in a long march.  Like the demonstrators in Cairo we know that, in the words of a nineteenth-century Illinois coal miners’ anthem, “Step by step the longest march/Can be won, can be won,”  in Haiti, in Egypt, in the USA.  As we were leaving we crossed paths with the tail end of a march of more than a thousand people targeting the Egyptian Mission to the UN. Something is stirring in the international working class and revolutionary communists are in the mix. 

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, January 19 — “Integration, Yes! Segregation, No!” The chant rang out across the auditorium, as students, teachers and parents stood to challenge NYC schools chancellor Cathy Black. The event was the Panel on Educational Policy (PEP) meeting to vote on putting a new selective school in the John Jay campus building. While the building currently houses four schools serving mainly black and Latino students, the new school is being added to meet the needs of middle-class, mainly white families in the Park Slope neighborhood.

The PEP meeting was the final, formal Department of Education (DOE) step in approving the new school. It was also the first public meeting of new schools chancellor Black. The crowd of about 200 people was angry about attacks on working-class students across the city.

The whole meeting was filled with chanting, singing and speakers interrupting the DOE and demanding the system serve all students. Angry teachers, parents and students represented many schools threatened with closing or with the co-location of other schools in their buildings. About 40 people from the John Jay campus came to continue the fight against the racist conditions students there are facing.

Challenge Racist Chancellor

The Chancellor — who recently made a racist, genocidal “joke” about “solving” overcrowding by birth control — was continually interrupted during the opening remarks by chants and catcalls denouncing the DOE and Mayor Bloomberg’s racism. Students and speakers went to the microphones during the public comments portion of the meeting to expose the racism of inserting the Millennium school in the building and to demand that the DOE provide a decent education for all students. Several students spoke about how the entire system is racist, with one young man telling the crowd that the liberal racism of the DOE is worse than the KKK because it tries to be slicker.

While the principal of one of the schools in the building was speaking about the racism of a system where 56 years after Brown vs. Board of Education the schools are more segregated and unequal than ever, the DOE shut off her microphone before her allotted time was up. She raised her voice to be heard across the massive auditorium and finished her speech as the crowd rose with her and chanted “Integration, Yes! Racism, No! Integration, Yes! Racism, No!”

The PEP is a sham group appointed by the mayor and the borough presidents to rubber stamp Bloomberg’s and the city ruling class’s plans for the schools. While everyone knew the vote was a foregone conclusion, attending the meeting was another important step in the fight against the bosses’ attacks on working-class students. It will also help more people see the need for communist revolution as the only way to create a society that looks out for the needs of all young people.

One speaker from PLP spoke to the whole audience about how the racism the DOE builds is used to divide the working class and justify the inequality of capitalism. She said that she and her students were not facing closing or co-location, but that they understood that an attack on one group of students and teachers was an attack on all. They shut off her microphone also, but she continued anyway and held up CHALLENGE newspaper and offered it to the crowd as a tool to help defeat the ruling class.

The fight at the John Jay campus has started to spread beyond the school building. At the PEP meeting our chant from last week’s public hearing — “How do we spell racist? D-O-E!” — was started by several speakers. On the blogs and online newspapers, comments have started to more frequently take on the gutter racists and blame the DOE for the horrendous conditions of the school building and the lack of funding for the students in the four schools. Some are saying that the schools already there should be supported, and the Park Slope students should join the working-class students in them.

This struggle has been an opportunity for many people to see both the true nature of the ruling class and the potential of students and teachers to be a force to change society. Each meeting and confrontation with the DOE has seen working-class students stand up to the bosses and skillfully give leadership to the class struggle. Many teachers have come forward and united with their students against the DOE’s racism. This has been particularly inspirational.

The communist study groups that have developed out of the struggle in the schools have grown over the last several weeks. Many CHALLENGES are being distributed. This fight has a long way to go.

The PEP decision only moves things on to the next level. PLP is in it for the long haul, as it seems are many of the students, teachers and parents already involved. Whatever else happens through the rest of this year and into next when the new school arrives, there are two things we will guarantee: the battle against DOE racism will continue, and we will keep building PLP and the fight for communism.