Israeli-U.S. bombs destroy majority of Gazan homes
Al Jazeera, 12/31/23–Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza for nearly three months has destroyed 70 percent of the homes in the besieged Palestinian enclave, according to the Government Media Office. About 300,000 out of 439,000 homes have been destroyed in Israeli attacks, a Wall Street Journal report said…“The word ‘Gaza’ is going to go down in history along with Dresden [Germany] and other famous cities that have been bombed,” Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago… In nearly two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol, or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II… “Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,” said Pape.

DR Congo demands UN remove troops
France24, 12/19/23–Despite a volatile domestic situation, the Congolese government has for months been calling for an "accelerated" withdrawal of UN peacekeepers, from the end of 2023 rather than the end of 2024. It considers the UN force to be ineffective in protecting civilians from the armed groups and militias that have plagued the eastern DRC for three decades. The accusation is similar to that made by other African countries, notably Mali, which has demanded the emergency departure of the UN Minusma mission. In recent months, several Council members, notably the United States, have expressed doubts as to whether Congolese forces are ready to replace Monusco to ensure the security of the population. However, as UN missions cannot operate without the authorization of host countries, the DRC wants to force the Security Council's hand -- though its messaging has been less forceful than Mali's. Even as it complies with the DR Congo's demands, the Council is expected to underline its "concern over the escalation of violence" in the east and "tensions between Rwanda and the DRC,"…The first phase includes the withdrawal of peacekeepers from South Kivu province by the end of April 2024, beginning "before the end of 2023."

U.S.-China imperialists planning for war
Foreign Affairs, 12/12/23–Over the past decade, the prospect of Chinese military aggression in the Indo-Pacific has moved from the realm of the hypothetical to the war rooms of U.S. defense planners…With Taiwan as the assumed flash point, U.S. strategists have offered several theories about how such an attack might play out…First is a…conquest of Taiwan by China…A second path envisions a U.S.-led coalition beating back China’s initial assault on the island…many strategists are concerned about a third, more catastrophic outcome…a direct war between the two great powers leading to uncontrolled escalation…nuclear weapons, thereby triggering Armageddon…Yet there is also a very different possibility, one that is not merely plausible but perhaps likely: a protracted conventional war between China and a U.S.-led coalition. Although such a conflict would be less devastating than nuclear war, it could exact enormous costs on both sides.

Oil war brewing in South America
Associated Press, 12/31/23–A British warship arrived in Guyana on Friday afternoon amid rising tensions from a border dispute between the former British colony and Venezuela…The HMS Trent’s visit led Venezuela to begin military exercises a day earlier in the eastern Caribbean near its border with Guyana as the Venezuelan government presses its claim to a huge swath of its smaller neighbor…The dispute is over Essequibo, a sparsely populated region that is the size of Florida and rich in oil and minerals. Venezuela has long claimed it was cheated out of the territory when Europeans and the U.S. set the border…Venezuela on Thursday began military exercises involving 5,000 troops in the eastern Caribbean, citing the visit by the British patrol ship…Guyana has controlled Essequibo for decades, but Venezuela revived its historical claim to the region earlier this month through a referendum in which voters were asked whether the territory should be turned into a Venezuelan state…Venezuela says it was the victim of a land theft conspiracy in 1899 when Guyana was a British colony and arbitrators from Britain, Russia, and the United States decided the boundary.

BRIDGEVIEW, IL, December 5 - The vicious and dehumanizing racist nationalism currently exploding across occupied Palestine by Zionist fascists was mirrored in a courtroom in the south suburbs of Chicago today. The family and community supporters of Murod Kurdi – a 28-year-old Arab worker who was struck by a vehicle and killed in June of this year – were forced to endure the cruel farce of what passes as legal proceedings under this capitalist system.

Murod was murdered on June 5th in front of his home in Oak Lawn by a white woman, Leanne Cusack. Cusack had been drinking at a bar before striking him and killing him just after he exited his truck on the street. The kkkops of Oak Lawn again proved their racist nature in failing to evaluate her sobriety and charging her only with “failure to reduce speed to avoid an accident.” The killing of someone by vehicle merits, for these killer cops, a relatively minor traffic offense. Under this inherently racist system, the value of a worker’s life is next to nothing.  

The racist murder of Murod, and the abuse heaped upon his family and so many other working-class people across this greater area are helping shatter many illusions among the masses that this capitalist injustice system exists to serve our needs. The international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) has been active inside and outside of the courtroom to raise the demand that honoring Murod and so many other fallen workers means smashing this system that places private property and profit over all else and replacing it with a worker-run communist society.

Multiracial unity for Murod
A multiracial, multigenerational group of at least 30 workers came to the traffic court today and rallied outside to protest the pitiful charges made against Cusack, and to demand a penalty fit for the crime. Our presence inside the courtroom was certainly felt, as demonstrated by the beefed-up security presence.
The guards didn’t miss a beat ordering people in the courtroom to not read, write, or talk. But even with all the threats and intimidation, one university student from Students for Justice in Palestine boldly kept raising an issue of our newspaper CHALLENGE with the headline “From the rivers to the seas, communism will set us free” for all to see.

Leanne Cusack pleaded innocent before the judge, apparently not even willing to accept blame for the pathetic traffic violation charge. Her sleazeball attorneys made empty statements of sympathy to Murod’s family members in attendance, but in practically the same breath pushed to discredit and undermine the testimony and evidence of his brother Suphi when he took the stand. In a cynical twist, one of the kkkops from Oak Lawn brought up to testify and help absolve Cusack from blame, Mark Hollingsworth, was one of the kkkops involved in the vicious beating of Arab teenager Hadi Abutelah in August of 2022!

In the end, the judge ruled her guilty with a penalty of a fine of only $750 and thirty hours of community service. This is nothing even resembling justice or a victory for a worker like Murod or his grieving family. As his brother sadly commented after the ruling, “She gets to go home with a $750 fine, and we get to go visit my brother in a graveyard.”

The capitalist system is guilty as hell – fight for communism
Despite the non-victory, this antiracist fight is far from over. The community groups involved in supporting Murod’s family are calling for Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx to formally file criminal charges against Leanne Cusack and for Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul to launch an independent investigation into the racist terror of the Oak Lawn Police Department.

While those of us in PLP fully support efforts to expand the scope of the struggle, we caution against having confidence that we can use the master’s tools to dismantle the racist structure of capitalism. Trusting in liberal misleader bosses such as Foxx and Raoul to deliver justice for our class has historically proven to be a dead-end. Either they fail to hold these racist killers accountable at all, or they make minor reforms that give the illusion that the system can work for us when it overwhelmingly never will. And even if Cusack received a harsher sentence, it would not address the racist conditions that imperil our brown working class brothers and sisters.

What lasts longer than any specific reform is the multiracial working-class unity cemented in struggles such as this one. We plan to continue fighting side by side with our fellow workers to advance a greater understanding of how capitalism works and how true justice will not occur until this miserable profit system is buried for good.

Columbia and NYU are landlords that happen to offer classes
NY Times, 12/10–State lawmakers will unveil legislation on Tuesday that would eliminate enormous property tax breaks for Columbia University and New York University, which have expanded to become among New York City’s top 10 largest private property owners. The bills would require the private universities to start paying their full annual property taxes and for that money to be redistributed to the City University of New York, the largest urban public university system in the country…The amount the schools save annually has soared in recent decades as the two have bought more properties, and the value of their properties has also increased…the city’s wealthiest universities were bigger and richer than ever before, amassing vast real estate portfolios that have drained the city budget…Columbia has grown its physical footprint to become the city’s largest private landowner.

KKKops murder one man and arrest protesters as anger builds in Decatur, AL
SPLC, 11/17–“Over the course of the times we’ve had rallies and demonstrations to protest there’s been nine arrests,” said Aneesah Saafiyah…Her father, Danny Saafiyah Sr… “Our protests haven’t been violent. None have been. No one has been attacking the police or anything like that. It’s just the intimidation tactics that the police use.”

Stephen Clay Perkins, 39, was shot to death in the early hours of Sept. 29 in front of his home…Perkins was hit seven times. He was declared dead at a local hospital…Despite early assurances that the bodycam footage would be released in mid-October, that did not happen. As of today, the family has still not seen it.

Oil in Guyana means profits for ExxonMobil
Der Spiegel, 11/24–"There's the new Guyana! Guyana with oil!,” Nicholas Deygooo calls out as the boat heads towards his artificial island. "It wouldn’t be possible without Exxon!”…Within just a few months, floating dredgers created some 44 acres of new land, roughly the size of 24 football fields. Such a thing has never been seen before in Guyana, the sparsely populated country on South America’s Atlantic coast, sandwiched between Venezuela and Suriname…Enormous oil reserves were discovered off the coast here in 2015, shortly before 200 countries agreed to the Paris Climate Agreement, which was to herald the end of the fossil fuel era. Huge quantities of first-class "light sweet crude” are buried below the ocean floor, highly valued for its low sulfur content and the relative ease with which it can be refined…According to the plans forged by ExxonMobil and Guyana’s government, the country will produce more crude oil per capita than any other country on the planet within five years. Despite the fact that the climate crisis poses a greater threat to Guyana than almost any other country in the world.

Capitalists weigh their anti immigrant racism with their need for workers to exploit
Washington Post, 11/9–National Population Projections estimate that the population will peak at almost 370 million in 2080 before receding to 366 million in 2100, an increase of only 9.7 percent between 2022 and 2100. That is far below the rate the country has grown each decade for most of the nation’s history…Immigrant adults tend to be younger and have higher fertility rates than their native-born counterparts. Demographers say they are key to providing enough people to fill the labor force and balance out the swelling population of older Americans, and avoid the fate of countries such as Japan and Germany, which have among the world’s highest share of people over 65. “These projections make clear that immigration is absolutely essential to the nation’s future population growth,” said William Frey, a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the data. “It is also necessary to counter the extreme aging we will otherwise experience with the youthfulness of immigrants and their children.”

On the auto workers’ picket line
I traveled to Michigan during the auto strike and a couple of us headed out to the auto workers’ picket lines to talk to workers about class struggle, fighting racism, and the communist revolution. We had some great conversations. One worker from the Dominican Republic has been working there for ten years. He has had several surgeries in that period, including his knee and hip, due to job-related problems. He emphatically denounced the multiple-tier system and proceeded to explain several aspects of our communist line to us! He said, "When you've got people doing the same job for different pay, some are struggling while some are not. That's nothing but division and it just shouldn't happen!" I told him how coal bosses in Kentucky pulled the same racist tactics because they thought bringing immigrants into the coal camps would prevent miners from organizing. I pointed out how such anti-worker ideology seeks to divide workers and create a justification for paying some even less. He exclaimed, “Right, they even used it to justify slavery! The capitalists take as much as they can convince us to allow.” We talked about the media slander the union has been getting, using the same talking points from 100 years ago. "Yeah”, he said, “it's corporate media for a reason -- that's who they work for. They say prices will rise if we get a raise. Well, prices have already been rising!"

The workers I talked to believe that strikes are necessary or else living standards will continue to deteriorate."It's just unsustainable,” declared another worker. Another worker mentioned that he had family from Germany, and I said, "Don't ask the media what Ford and GM were doing during WWII to support the Nazis!" He responded by calling out Ford's anti-Semitism, noting how the Nazis awarded Henry Ford with the highest award a foreigner could receive for collaborating with them. Another worker declared, "You put your body on the line here for 30 years and the boss doesn’t even wanna give us healthcare? No way! Health care shouldn’t be a boss’s bargaining chip, we workers should own the whole economy, state, and society. It's only common sense!"

The workers we talked to are clear -- they will fight hard not to be sold out like in 2008 – and they’re optimistic!
*****

What a small world
In 1995 I was in a San Francisco hospital and was in conversation with another patient.  We started talking about authors, and I said one of my favorites was Tillie Olsen, the beloved writer of working-class women’s lives.  We talked a little about her and he finally said “It sounds like you really like her.  She’s my aunt, and she’s visiting me this afternoon. I’ll introduce you.”  

When we met, I mentioned my father had been in the Communist Party in San Francisco in the 1930s, and she said “You look just like him!”  They’d worked on the CP newspaper together, and during the 1934 general strike, they’d moved the printing press for leaflets from house to house every night to prevent the cops from smashing it.  

We visited her friend in the hospital, Bill Bailey, a longshore worker whose lungs were so bad he could hardly speak, from corrosive cement dust in the holds of ships he was unloading.  During the 1930s, he led a big group of CP members who crashed a party on a nazi luxury liner anchored in New York City and tore down the nazi flag.

According to a 3/23/2019 New York Post story, I read much later, Bailey quit the CP in 1956 saying Stalin was a “paranoid, sick SOB.”  This must explain why, after the visit, Tillie Olsen said seemingly out of the blue, “I never believed Khrushchev’s lies about Stalin!”

The fight for against genocide of Palestinian workers on a college campus
As a new college student, it was motivating to see activism on my campus coming from a high school in which many weren’t politically involved. On November 8 and 9, I joined many in the fight for Palestine: students led speeches and chants such as “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!”
Even after walking and chanting, these students only grew with fervor and the chants became louder. One of the rallies culminated with students beating pinatas of Netanyahu and Biden, with only more enthusiasm from the students. Another rally delivered a coffin to the administration building in protest of the school’s holdings in investment firm BlackRock, the world’s largest investor in military hardware.

This wasn’t taken lightly by the school chancellor and board, who sent out a letter one day later condemning “Anti Semitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Arab hate,” but it was very targeted toward the peaceful protests against racism and genocide in Gaza, mentioning an instance of “Anti Semitic language.” He however, did not mention many of the instances of harassment and intimidation that occurred against Muslim students.
While school leaders claim to be against all forms of bigotry, they turn a blind eye towards that affecting the already oppressed – their only aim is to further the capitalist, fascist agenda, by intimidating students and protesters. The true nature of their financial and political interests is being revealed, reflecting the interests of wealthy business tycoons and political pawns that run the board. The primary goal of their funding of the Zionist government of Israel is to gain control over Mideast oil, furthering their financial assets through such a valuable resource.

While chants such as “from the river to the sea” have been viewed as anti semitic by some, they advocate for nationalist ideals that further divide the working class. Even during many of the speeches at these rallies, Hamas was not criticized for its slaughter of Israeli civilians on October 7 and nationalist ideals were further pushed to students by the leaders of the rally.

For the working class to be truly united, and for the true liberation of Palestine, it is important for us to acknowledge how we should unite and reject both anti-Palestinian racism and nationalism.