Storm College Senate Meeting

NEW YORK CITY, December 2 — Nearly 100 students and faculty members at the City University of NY (CUNY) held an indoor rally to protest next term’s threatened tuition increases and then invaded a College Senate meeting to denounce the hikes.

A student leader gave an impassioned, detailed speech explaining the racist nature of the hikes. Thirty-five years ago CUNY tuition was free. Now the majority of CUNY students are black, Latino and Asian, and because of long-standing racism in employment and wages are in an even worse position to pay this exorbitant tuition.

The speaker called on his fellow students to give more leadership in fighting the many problems that the working class faced.

A faculty member told the crowd that the PSC union (Professional Staff Congress of CUNY) was 100% behind the students’ struggle and related their struggle to students’ fight-back worldwide. He asked those present to say what they felt. At first it was quiet, but then it was like a dam bursting.

Student after student angrily condemned the injustice of ever-increasing tuition and of the deteriorating physical conditions on campus.

Plans were made for another meeting next week. When the student leader explained that the administration made it difficult for him to e-mail announcements to the entire student body, the crowd shouted “let’s go talk to him now!” We were told that at that very moment a “College Senate” was being held upstairs. As we surged towards the stairs, the chief of campus security said we couldn’t go up to the meeting. But 50 angry students went around him as he called on his walkie-talkie for back-up.

Upstairs inside the Senate meeting the student leader blasted the planned tuition hikes — which are city-wide — as well as protesting the increase in local campus fees. While some had told him to “take it easy” and “be quiet,” he said he would never be silent in the face of injustice. A veteran faculty member rose to report that the faculty council on campus had voted against the hikes. The administrators remained silent.

 Confront Board of Trustees

NYC, November 15th – Outside, students and faculty were chanting, “Let us in!” and “Education is a right! Fight! Fight! Fight!; inside, the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York (CUNY) began a “public” hearing on the proposed CUNY budget which included increases in tuition.

This is the undeniable reality of our society: CEOs, bankers and politicians, none of whom feel the crushing reality of this racist capitalist system, make decisions that consign thousands or millions of workers to more and more racism and suffering. We don’t need these blood-sucking parasites! The Board of Trustees meeting was the latest opportunity for the revolutionary vision of PLP to stand as an antidote to capitalism and its never-ending crises, war and racism.

A left-wing professor sharply attacked the trustees as being sneaky and underhanded. Why did they announce the planned hikes just a few days before the hearing?  Why was the hearing in such a small room?  If they wanted to maximize participation, why didn’t they have the hearing in a large venue on one of the campuses?

He explained that Greece, England, Ireland, France, and the U.S. were all capitalist countries facing economic crises where the bosses were trying to make the working people pay and where students and workers were fighting back. “When you call for taxing the super rich, some people say, ‘Oh, he’s advocating class war!’

“Well yes, that’s what I am talking about — class war. Because right now, class war is being waged against us — the working class. But merely taxing the rich will not end the fundamental exploitation of capitalism. CUNY will still be underfunded, our students will still live in a racist, sexist society and the bosses will still get to decide how we live. These aspects of capitalism are un-reformable. We have seen the shattered promises of capitalist reform. Workers need revolution instead.”

After his testimony, chants of  “No tuition hikes, Free CUNY” broke out. Other speakers rose and attacked the trustees. A student asked Chancellor Goldstein, “Didn’t you receive a free education when you went to CUNY?  All we are asking for is what you got already — a free quality education. Other speakers attacked Goldstein for getting a $45,000 salary increase.

While all this was going on, copies of CHALLENGE and a Party leaflet were being distributed outside and inside the hearing. The Party leaflet explained how the Trustees were businessmen appointed by politicians, and while we must fight hard against tuition increases or any attack against the working class, revolution was the only solution for working-class people. The racist parasites who feed on the mostly black and Latino CUNY students and the anger that is rising in the blood of the students are tremendous opportunities to raise this revolutionary possibility. Next semester and onward we will work to expand these possibilities. J



Workers can’t count on ruler-orchestrated “exposés” like Wikileaks to somehow reform the profit system that creates wars without end. Wikileaks is trying to deceive people into believing that “independent” or “alternative” media can expose the capitalist class and somehow organize against it.

Wikileaks’ hackers and their now jailed, phony rebel chief Julian Assange have no intention of attacking U.S. imperialism. If they had:

• They would never have chosen the ultra-Establishment New York Times — and its European equivalents — to edit and publish their huge number of 250,000 “sensitive” State Department cables.

• And this gives the Times and its allies the opening to use the leaks to urge stepped-up U.S. military measures against growing — especially nuclear — threats to U.S. imperialism.

• The leaks also help Obama and the imperialists he serves to shift the spotlight from the disastrous economy onto foreign policy.

Here are some Wiki warnings:

   • “A batch of leaked U.S. diplomatic cables released this week lend details to long-suspected nuclear cooperation between [Chinese protectorates] North Korea and Burma, suggesting that hundreds of North Koreans were…working at a covert military site deep in the Burmese jungle.”(Washington Post, 12/11)

   • “One of the leaked cables…said the 19 North Korean BM-25 missiles, based on a Russian design known as the R-27, might give Iran the ‘building blocks’ for producing long-range missiles.” (Bloomberg 11/29)

   • “Britain’s Guardian newspaper, citing U.S. diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks, reported…a decision to draft contingency plans to defend the ex-Soviet NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania [from invasion by Russia] had been taken secretly this year at the urging of the United States and Germany.” (Reuters, 12/09)

   • “The United States tried to stop delivery of Russian anti-aircraft missiles to Venezuela in 2009 amid concerns it could pass them on to Marxist guerrillas in Colombia or Mexican drug gangs, The Washington Post said on Sunday, citing diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks.” (Reuters, 12/12)

Ruling-class publishers are also spinning the cables to blame U.S. genocide in Iraq on an evil Bush-Cheney-Halliburton cabal instead of the increasing profit needs of the biggest U.S. capitalists. Germany’s Spiegel Online is the English-language affiliate of Der Spiegel, a favored Assange outlet.

Spiegel has close ties to liberal U.S. imperialists. Speigel Online boasts that it’s “valued by policy-makers in…Washington, D.C.” And Spiegel publishes Harvard Business School’s magazine in German.

On December 6, its article…“A Lot of Blood for Little Oil,” [said]: “Contrary to what many people believe, the Iraq war provided few advantages for the U.S. oil industry…. Diplomatic cables show…competitors to the Americans…often did better in the country. Only one U.S. company truly profited: Halliburton.”

Wiki Accuses Bushites, Absolves Exxon of Iraq Carnage

But the actions of Exxon Mobil, the chief beneficiary of the U.S. war machine’s slaughter of millions of Iraqis, prove Spiegel’s “little oil” line a deliberate lie: “U.S. major ExxonMobil and its partners [mainly Anglo-Dutch Shell] raised their production plateau target from Iraq’s West Qurna oilfield to 2.825 million barrels per day (mbd) after adding new reserves to the area covered by their original development contract, an Iraqi oil official said.” (Reuters, 11/28) Those 2,825,000 barrels are more than oil-rich Kuwait or Venezuela or Nigeria pump daily.

U.S. war-makers used hundreds of thousands of GIs (who never enlisted to save Big Oil) and high-paid mercenaries to help Exxon win and hold the largest of Iraq’s six giant fields. The country’s projected total output stands at 12mbd, greater than Saudi Arabia’s current production. (This officially-proclaimed total is perhaps unreachable.)Exxon’s contract, signed in January, runs for 20 years. And Obama will keep the troops there to carry out that mission.

What Did Wikileaks Omit?

Besides distorted Wikileaks and outright Wiki-lies, there are glaring Wiki-omissions. Since at least since 2005, the State Department, supposedly under Assange’s microscope, has held extensive negotiations with Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India about U.S.-funded construction of the gas pipeline TAPI, named for these countries it will traverse. But Wikileaks never mentions TAPI, although the four Asian nations inked the deal for it on December 11.

Meanwhile bloodshed is worsening along its Afghan  route through Kandahar and Helmand, always the focus of U.S.-U.K.-led operations. Protecting TAPI will require permanent, massive U.S. and allied military presence there. Nor did Assange’s crew criticize U.S. gunpoint diplomacy with Turkmen bosses regarding the pipeline last month. It led TAPI’s gas suppliers to openly reject Russian Gazprom’s offer to participate in TAPI, while they celebrated the re-opening of Exxon’s office in their capital, Ashgabat.

Now the same U.S. and U.K. governments that practice mass murder in Iraq and Afghanistan — aiding the media barons — are trying to make a martyr of Assange, thereby assuring him a wider public following. Assange sits in London’s Wandsworth Prison, accused of rape charges his increasingly numerous supporters call false.

Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder threatens to try Assange for espionage. But his lawyer, Mark Stephens, who sports impeccable liberal imperialist credentials (see below), is saying Assange went to jail willingly.

According to Stephen’s firm’s website, Stephens “has run and taught courses for” the World Bank and the Open Society Institute. This same U.S.-dominated World Bank imposes worker-impoverishing “austerity budgets” on developing countries to ensure repayment to lenders like J.P. Morgan Chase. And it’s billionaire currency swindler George Soros’s Open Society that tries to buy the election of pro-U.S. politicians, from Belarus to Burma.

Only Working Class’s Communist Revolution Can Destroy War-Making Profit System

The Progressive Labor Party rejects the deadly political error that says our class can have capitalist allies like Assange and his pals. PLP’s goal is to spread our ideas throughout, and participate in, the mass movement — in effect, making the unions, factories, schools, churches, communities and the military “schools for communism,” linking their class struggles to the need to bury the capitalists through communist revolution.

Yes, the war-makers must be exposed, but from a purely working-class point of view, with the ultimate goal of destroying capitalism itself and establishing a society without bosses and profits, run by and for the working class. J



BROOKLYN, NY — “They [the Department of Education — DoE] are segregating kids again. Just like the Jim Crow laws. Blacks and whites were separated: different schools and different water fountains. There’s barely a difference.”

One student wrote this in response to reading the last issue of CHALLENGE, highlighting the sharp struggle in our school. The truth is that under capitalism, the school system will only serve the needs of the racist bosses. The only way that we can truly serve our students and community is by getting rid of the bosses and their schools. Then, under a communist society, we will have true education for our students.

The DoE has released an “Educational Impact Statement” which lays out its plans to put in a new selective school in our building. While they claim they want to provide “all students” with a “high quality education,” the academic requirements of the new school will leave behind most low-income black and Latino students, especially special education students and English-language learners.

They contradict themselves by saying that the building is under-utilized while eliminating two of the middle schools in the building to make room for the new Brooklyn Millenium School.

The DoE told us there will be $3-5 million in capital improvements made to the building, but only if the new school comes in. That sum seems like a lot, but the building is in such disrepair that it would take much more money than that to make the building clean and safe.

Some parents and teachers are skeptical that the new school will attract enough white students, since middle-class parents have been made to fear sending their students through metal detectors to  a majority black and Latino building.

There is talk about taking out the metal detectors to attract more students to the new school. One student wrote, “Why take out the metal detectors now that the new school is coming? We have been asking for this for years. I find that really racist. They treat us like criminals with the metal detectors.”

Since last issue, we have had a combined union meeting with all the schools in our building and one parent meeting. As we go to press, we are preparing for a follow-up parent meeting and a debate panel presentation and rally.

At our parent meeting, we had a slightly larger turnout than last meeting. We definitely need to work harder on building a deeper base with parents and students. We have many things to do before the public hearing — write to the media, get as many facts as possible, but mostly organize, organize, organize!

At our combined union meeting, we discussed different issues in the struggle, and why we need to fight back. One comrade rightly pointed out the historical example of how communists fought evictions by moving those evicted back into their apartments during the 1930s U.S. Depression.

The union meeting brought out more teachers than our regular fight-back meetings, and we heard from more people. The union district representative called himself a union flunkie, and in the doublespeak that union hacks and bosses know how to use so well, described in the same breath why we should vote for politicians and why politicians do nothing for us.

Many teachers have said our campus might not win this fight to keep out the new school. One teacher said it best: “We might not win this, but we have learned much through struggle. The silver lining is that fighting beside and with parents, students, and fellow teachers has forced us to get to know everyone in a more authentic way.” This non-communist teacher was expressing our belief that revolution is born out of class struggle.

In the upcoming weeks, we need to continue to build with parents, students, and people in the community. We need to make sure that CHALLENGE is the paper of record in our struggle, our flag. We need to introduce as many people as possible to the Party’s ideas.

Through this struggle, the Party is becoming a real presence in our school, with more students, teachers and parents exposed to communist ideas. “Is this our school newspaper?” one debater asked when a Party member distributed CHALLENGE at a debate team practice.

Our actual school newspaper just published its inaugural issue full of articles about the situation. The students and teachers responsible for the newspaper were not afraid to address the racism of the DoE’s plans. The articles have been picked up by neighborhood blogs, drawing both racist and supportive comments, expanding the debate.

Our big chance to stand up in unity against the bosses’ plans is coming soon. The DoE is required to hold public hearings before making changes to any schools, and our’s is on January 11. While we know that these hearings usually serve as rubber stamps for decisions which have already been made, we are planning to attend in full force, parents, teachers, students and community members, to fight back. Even if the DoE follows through on its plans, we will have learned, and hopefully grown, a lot from this struggle. J Join us at the public hearing. Show the racist Department of Education that we won’t take this lying down!

Date: January 11th, 2011

Time: 6pm

Location: JohnJay Campus, 237 7th Ave,   

                Brooklyn, NY 11217



OAKLAND, CA, December 13 — The results of the “neutral” arbitration between AC Transit (mass transit in SF Bay Area)  and ATU 192 have come back: major sacrifices for bus drivers, mechanics, and maintenance workers.  Topping the long list is an unprecedented 6% pay CUT in the first year of the contract.  Also, the company will no longer pay workers for the first day off when they call in sick. Sick workers will have to come in to work, if they can’t afford to miss a day’s pay. For parents who are holding  a whole family together on one paycheck — and there are many among us — this is blackmail. 

These are the results of the supposedly “neutral” arbitrator.  But how can the process be called “neutral” when transit workers have to bail out the transit agency?  We didn’t cause the crisis, the banks did! Yet the banks and corporations don’t have to pay extra, even though the transportation WE provide adds value to THEIR real estate and allows THEIR businesses to function. 

Without a Fight

At a special meeting in July, the International union representative said, “I believe AC management is scared to go to arbitration.” Scared?!  Management wasn’t “scared” of arbitration.  They only opposed arbitration because they knew the union leadership was not prepared to strike.  They punked the union — and our President had the nerve to “thank” the arbitrator!  As recently as November’s union meeting, the local President still called the Arbitration a “victory.”

Many drivers say, “What they’re trying to do is  break the union.” 

OK, question: Who needs to “break” the union, when management is already able to cut our pay without a fight?  The union is broken already — from the International on down. 

Out of the Woodwork

Now that the damage is done, workers are upset.  Most of the blame is placed on our local union leadership, and many workers want to replace them.  In this situation, people start to pop out of the woodwork, and talk about running for union office. 

These people have organized nothing over the past several years.  No protests, no newsletters, no nothing.  Many don’t even go to union meetings.  Some are ex-union officials who have been in hibernation since they got booted out last time, and want to hold office again.  Others are people who like to pretend like they have all the answers, and if only they were president, they would be “smart” enough to “get things done.”

Need a Movement

As much as people might want to believe that electing the right person could solve our problems, what we need is a mass movement.  The history taught in school in this capitalist society tells us that the leader is everything, the masses are nothing.  But communists don’t buy it — we know that masses of people make history, especially through protests, strikes and revolutions.

Instead of focusing on who the next President will be, we need to get started building a movement that involves rank-and-file union members.  We have a lot of work to do: produce a newsletter, protest at the Board Meetings for the re-hire of our laid-off co-workers, and prepare for future job actions.  This is going to be a hard, long process.  But it’s the only way for transit workers to get a taste of the real power that we have: power in numbers, power to shut down transportation, power to shut down the capitalist economy.  That’s a lot of power! 

Workers power’ is a “dirty little secret” that the bankers and CEO’s don’t want us to find out about because once we do, we might use it to make a revolution!  That’s why Progressive Labor Party is organizing a Political Economy class in the Bay Area.  Any transit workers who would like to understand more about how capitalism works are invited.  Once we are conscious of our true strength as a working class, nothing can stop us! J