Weapons production ramps up for a long, cruel war
Foreign Policy, 11/16–As the war in Ukraine shows little sign of abating, Kyiv’s Western partners are grappling with how to maintain a supply of arms and ammunition to Ukraine…without letting their stockpiles dwindle to the point that it could jeopardize their own readiness levels.

NATO is now discussing how to support members if their stockpiles fall below the levels needed to meet their defense obligations…But back in Washington, some former officials are wishing that the Biden administration and NATO allies had gotten the message sooner, and they want defense spending, which has boomed since Russia’s full-scale invasion, to continue to spike for the foreseeable future.

Behind the scenes, the United States and other NATO powers have urged Western defense companies to bump up production…“What they say is essentially show me the money,” said Mark Cancian, who served as chief of the Pentagon’s force structure and investment division until 2015.

“Their fear is that the war will end and the orders will end and they will end up with these expanded factories that don’t have any orders to fill them.”

As billionaires prosper, most U.S. workers live paycheck to paycheck
Lending Club, June/July 2022–More than half of the U.S. population — an estimated 150 million adults — currently live paycheck to paycheck, making it the most common financial lifestyle in the United States…in May 2022, 58 percent  of consumers live paycheck to paycheck…Viewed over the last year… this share has been on an upward trend: The share of consumers living paycheck to paycheck has increased four percentage points from 54 percent in May 2021. Seventy-seven percent of those earning less than $50,000 and 62 percent of those earning $50,000 to $100,000 annually were living paycheck to paycheck in May 2022, up from 72 percent and 53 percent, respectively, in May 2021 . Meanwhile, 36 percent of consumers earning more than $100,000 per year reported living paycheck to paycheck in May 2022.

Anti-Haitian racism now extends to all Black workers
Bloomberg, 11/21–As the Dominican Republic increases the deportation of Haitian nationals, Black US citizens risk being caught up in the sweep, the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo said. “Travelers to the Dominican Republic have reported being delayed, detained, or subject to heightened questioning at ports of entry and in other encounters with immigration officials based on their skin color,” the embassy said in an alert published over the weekend. The warning comes as the Dominican Republic has been stepping up the deportation of undocumented migrants from neighboring Haiti, as that nation is mired in gang violence and political instability.

China outdoes U.S. as capitalist paradise
NBC News, 4/9–Three years ago, American entrepreneur Raj Oswal traveled to the Chinese city of Shenzhen on behalf of a client. He was so impressed that he stayed and started his own tech company…The former fishing village, now a tech hub known as China’s Silicon Valley, has joined Beijing and Shanghai as the world’s top three cities for billionaires, edging out New York for the first time this year. According to the Hurun Global Rich List, an annual ranking compiled by a private Shanghai-based company, Beijing is home to the world’s greatest number of billionaires at 144, followed by Shanghai with 121. There are 113 billionaires in Shenzhen, compared with 110 in New York, while London came in fifth with 101.

Shenzhen’s rise began in 1980, when it was named China’s first special economic zone as part of the country’s “reform and opening up” under then-leader Deng Xiaoping. That allowed the city to experiment with market capitalism in an effort to attract foreign investment.

I was part of a group of 18 people who turned out to confront racist KKKop/Corrections Officer, murderer Dion Middleton, on November 16, as he appeared on murder charges for the racist killing of 18-year-old Raymond Chaluisant and then fleeing the scene this past July. The bosses’ court showed how afraid they are of working-class rebellion when court officers surrounded the family and supporters and warned us to stay away from Middleton as they prepared to escort him, flanked by armed bodyguards, into and later out of the courtroom. We barely contained our contempt.

We are working on an article for the next issue of CHALLENGE with an updated analysis of the case, but to provide some perspective, I thought to share some of my personal experience from a life of confronting KKKops.

My first experience with racist police terror came in 1986 in the middle of the Eleanor Bumpurs case, an elderly disabled Black woman who was gunned down (with a shotgun!) by KKKops in her own apartment. As a young man, I remember being stunned by the viciousness of the cops against a 67-year-old woman clearly in emotional distress. In the days before cell phone videos and social media, our main weapons of publicizing these cases were street protests, leaflets, and many copies of CHALLENGE.

But it was in 1992 when racist police terror became something personal. I came to know a young mother, María Salim, whose 14-year-old son, Eric Reyes, had just been executed by an off-duty KKKop William Proulx (I’ll never forget that name) in East Hartford, CT. The Salim family had moved there to attempt to escape the violence of life in the city of Hartford. Proulx stalked young Eric after the boy ran away from a juvenile detention center, executing him in a parking lot with his personal gun, and let him bleed to death on the ground.

I helped lead a yearlong campaign to bring Proulx to justice and expose the racist capitalist system that caused it. Hundreds of Eric’s neighbors signed a petition we distributed condemning the murder, and our demonstrations exposed the murder as an integral part of this racist capitalist system. We also tried to provide support, comfort, and friendship to a family whose lives had been shattered. When his mother sued the town, I witnessed the bosses’ racist state kick into high gear to stalk and torment Eric’s family.

They spread false pro-cop stories in the major press, staked out the family’s home, and followed his mother around town, even arresting her on trumped up charges. The capitalist state made life hell for the family and left a lifelong trauma that haunts them to this day.

20 years later I was personally involved in another campaign against a racist KKKop shooting when the 20-year-old brother of the former student council president at the school where I taught was murdered by KKKop Ramysh Bangali as he was fleeing an armed robbery in the Bronx. Instead of protecting Reynaldo from the criminals, police gunned down the victim! We protested in front of the police station every week, one for each year of Eric’s life, but the cop was never charged, and once again, a family was left traumatized.

Black and Latin youth are the main targets as the bosses’ system terrorizes the working class to prevent rebellion over the conditions they have created in the name of their sick profit system.

Over the last 36 years, I estimate I’ve directly participated in over 20 campaigns against KKKops murdering Black and Latin people. As a moving antiracist song puts it, there are “Too Many Names.” This is a lifelong struggle. Just as racist terror is the front lines of the bosses’ rising fascism, our fightback against these crimes must be the frontline of our fight for communism, to expose the bosses’ racist state. Hasta el final (Til the end)!

Andor: Greater than the sum of its parts?
I just finished watching the new Star Wars series Andor on Disney Plus, and I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised. For a science fiction franchise that usually leans on the deeds of individuals with supernatural powers to save the day, this new show seemed surprisingly class-conscious.

It emphasized the collective and covert methods of “ordinary” persons to organize under fascism, often at great risk to their safety. The cast is multiracial, and women are seen giving courageous leadership in every episode. To be honest, to watch the show reminded me of reading about the inspiring deeds of the Red Orchestra, the communist-led partisans that were organizing across European cities when the continent was occupied by the Nazis.

But then again, Andor was produced by Disney, a bonafide capitalist “empire” if there ever was one, so I kept asking myself: what’s the catch? I think that answer lies in showing some of the leadership making cold and calculated decisions to sacrifice freedom fighters to guarantee the growth of the young Rebellion. In doing so, the writers lean into anti-communist tropes that revolutionary leaders are generally just as corrupt as their capitalist counterparts and the best thing that the working class could hope for is some kind of vague “democratic” middle ground between fascism and communism.

Only time will tell what kind of lessons about revolutionary struggle get told in upcoming seasons of the show, but I’ll definitely plan on viewing it with a critical communist lens. If other CHALLENGE readers have seen this show, I’d be interested to hear your opinion.

*****
Radiation IS harmful in low doses
The letter in the November 16, 2022 CHALLENGE “Radiation, harmful only at high doses,”accepts the ruling class view on radiation. and says, “We live on a radioactive planet” and that radiation is not harmful in low doses. Not so!

This author fails to distinguish between types of entry of radiation into the body. External radiation poisoning can kill, as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or burn the body. Internal radiation enters the body by inhalation of irradiated dust doesn’t kill or injure immediately but causes DNA and cellular damage. External radiation injury involves gamma rays. Internal radiation poisoning causes much more cellular damage than can be calculated from external exposure. Internal radiation damage comes from alpha and beta radiation. Alpha particles have 625 times more energy than gamma rays, and beta rays also have more energy than gamma rays. Since gamma radiation can leave the body and alpha radiation can’t, the latter is more damaging.

When the author says “we live on a radioactive planet,” it’s true that Earth has radon and that radiation naturally reaches Earth from cosmic rays, but the body is built to handle this radiation with robust repair capacity.  The body is NOT built to handle the 1,400 new man-made radionuclides from atom bombs, nuclear-powered ships or plutonium factories. The Atomic Energy Commission (now the U.S. Department of Energy) and other authorities tell us that low level radiation is safe. This is a lie! In fact, nuclear submarine personnel have increased rates of cancer; babies of X-Ray technicians have increased birth defects, etc. The author of the letter claims that after the meltdown in Chernobyl, it was found that people had doses of radiation “to the thyroid that were a tiny fraction of the doses used in nuclear medicine to save lives.” This is untrue! Chernobyl fallout caused increased thyroid cancer (Busby, 2022). Medical radiation also causes cancer. There is a large literature on low dose radiation causing cancer, birth defects and other harm.

The research on radiation in both epidemiology, invitro and in laboratory animals indicates that radioactive agents inside the body create damage to DNA and other adverse cellular effects (Busby, 2022). Busby presents evidence “that atmospheric nuclear testing in 1959-63 caused the increased global cancer epidemic that began some 20 years after the fallout.” Internal adverse effects from radionuclides inside our bodies are not detected with the external dose devices. Not surprisingly, all the research sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency and its fellow agencies in the countries using nuclear technology have a vested interest in confusing the public to force acceptance of continued nuclear power plants, atomic powered ships and atomic weapons.
Busby, Christopher. 2022. “Ionizing radiation and cancer: The failure of the risk model.” Cancer Treatment and Research Communications 31: 100565.

*****
Critical the cult of the individual and voting
The article in the November 30th issue of Challenge on Stalin was excellent and timely given the renewed attempts by the U.S. and European bosses to attack Stalin. The article said so much with the line “The reason the capitalists hate Stalin is because he helped lead a revolution that threw them out of power”.

What people do (or don’t do) does make a big difference. As the article documents, Stalin made an enormous contribution to the working class. He gave leadership on how to fight the bosses and have the will to win even in the face of massive counter attacks and setbacks. That leadership set the tone for the communist movement.

There are two criticisms I have of the article as well. First, when we write about the old movement, particularly when we’re writing about Stalin and Mao it’s important to point out that they fostered the cult of the individual. The cult of the individual ended up being devastating to the movement as it gave a backward idea about leadership and when Stalin died it left many members paralyzed and not trained to help develop the line. It was then impossible at that point for the members to correct the Party and get it back on the path towards communism.

The second criticism is that in a couple of places the article talks uncritically about using voting to make decisions inside the party. Voting is a bad way to make decisions. We believe in communist centralism and the idea of from the masses to the masses.

The October 30 election victory of fake-leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva – better known as Lula – as president of Brazil points to a sharpening of inter-imperialist rivalry and intensified fascist control over the working class. In a sign of deep divisions among both bosses and workers, Lula defeated his incumbent rival, gutter racist and climate change denier Jair Bolsonaro, by a razor-thin margin and secured his third term.

A popular former trade unionist, Lula enjoys a cult-like status in the economic powerhouse South American nation, where previous capitalist reforms by his Workers Party threw some crumbs to sections of the working class. Several leaders of the U.S.-dominated liberal world order expressed hope for improved ties with Brazil after the unstable Bolsonaro presidency--notably top-dog imperialist President Joe Biden, who personally called Lula to congratulate him (Reuters, 10/30).

But Biden and Company’s optimism is likely misplaced. Lula’s return to power figures to consolidate Brazilian capitalism’s alliance with the U.S. rulers’ main imperialist rival, China. During his first two terms in office, from 2003 to 2010, Lula oversaw a dramatic expansion of diplomacy and trade with China that both sides appear eager to rekindle (SCMP, 10/31).

As Lula and his Worker Party cronies opportunistically work both sides of the imperialist competition for their own benefit, it’s the workers in Brazil and across Latin America who stand to lose. Liberal bosses like Lula will cynically promote all-class unity, nationalism, and identity politics while simultaneously escalating racist, sexist attacks and more environmental destruction.

As members of the international working class, we have nothing to gain by supporting any boss. Our future lies in building the mass communist Progressive Labor Party as the revolutionary alternative to fascism, environmental devastation, and war. Join us!

Imperialist competition hurtling toward WWIII
The over-the-top congratulations to Lula from imperialist leaders around the world shows Brazil’s importance to the global profit system. Brazil’s $1.45 trillion economy is second largest in the Western Hemisphere (International Trade Admin, 1/22) and eighth largest in the world. Lula is deeply committed to the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, Indian, China and South Africa), which he helped found in 2009. In 2019, he said that he envisioned BRICS as “an instrument of attack. So we could create our own currency to become independent from the U.S. dollar in our trade relations” (Asia Times).

In Bolsonaro’s first election campaign, he accused China of “buying Brazil” (Reuters, 1/24). Once in office, he aligned with ex-U.S. president Donald Trump and delayed Chinese trade agreements. But with Lula back, and China investing more in Brazil than in any other country, the two countries should restore their close ties—a clear threat to the weakening U.S. bosses in their Latin American “backyard.” Lula’s election is one more step toward World War III.

Liberal bosses are more effective fascists
Shortly after his runoff win, Lula stated, “This country needs peace and unity. This population doesn’t want to fight anymore” (BBC, 10/31). Make no mistake: liberal politicians’ plan for “peace and unity” always involves their boot on workers’ necks!

With global capitalism entering a period of contraction, Brazil’s bosses see Lula as a more reliable stooge to ram through fascist attacks than the erratic Bolsonaro. In his previous presidential terms, Lula took advantage of a commodity boom and surging demand from China to finance social programs like Bolsa Familia, cash payments that helped alleviate extreme poverty (Foreign Policy, 11/4). This time around, facing an enormous debt crisis, the Brazilian bosses won’t fund big reforms. Rebellious workers will see more sticks than carrots.

Shrewd politician that he is, Lula has shown a willingness to work with bosses of all stripes in the name of a “better” Brazil. His vice president-elect, Geraldo Alckmin, presided over rampant police murder and cover-ups as governor of Sao Paulo state (HRW, 7/29/13). Lula’s likely appointee for environmental minister, Marina Silva, a Black woman from similar humble origins, will exploit identity politics while failing to offer any real solution to the devastation across the Amazon and beyond (AP News, 11/12).

Bosses who look and talk like us are no less dangerous when they’re put in charge of a lethal, racist profit system in crisis. The working class must expose and confront these deadly misleaders wherever they are and fight for true workers’ power and communist revolution.

Liberals lie, Black and women workers die!
Black workers in Brazil fought for survival under Lula’s previous regime, and they won’t be stopping now. The government-directed, militarized violence in Brazil’s neglected favelas (slums) will continue because they’re an essential tool for Brazil’s ruling class for keeping workers oppressed and intimidated.

In July, in the Complexo do Alemao favela in Rio de Janeiro, 18 people died in a violent militia-style attack. Residents said cops prevented them from helping the injured and called the attack a massacre (BBC, 7/22). Not a single politician running for office—including Lula—spoke in support of these workers. Under capitalism, politicians everywhere applaud cops for doing their state terror dirty work.

The same deadly state violence assaults women throughout the country. Brazil has “one of the highest rates of femicide—the killing of women due to their gender—in the world” (The Status of Women in Brazil: 2019, Prusa, PICANÇO, Barnes, et. al). Meanwhile, the bosses try to convince women that the only way to change the system is to vote or run for office. Case in point: ex-president Dilma Rousseff. who was impeached over the same kickback scandal that sent Lula to jail for 17 months.

Back to a fightback future
It won’t take long, as Lula shows his true colors once again, that he’ll be faced with the bold tradition of militant fightback from the working class in Brazil. In recent years, mass protests have been waged against deforestation, transit fare hikes, racist police terror, and displacement from favelas. Unsurprisingly, many of these fights are led by Black and indigenous workers, key revolutionary forces for our class.

PLP invites all of these antiracist fighters into our revolutionary struggle for a world without bosses or politicians, where the working class and its mass Party runs society in our own interests. From Brasilia to Beijing, workers of the world unite!