The Republican and Democratic national conventions are designed to build a nationalist, racist consensus around the attacks in store for workers as U.S. capitalism spirals into a deepening crisis. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are two sides of the same ruling-class coin. One spews openly racism to divide the working class; the other makes empty appeals to “racial justice” while trying to hide a four-decade track record of racist, sexist, anti-worker advocacy and political misleadership.              
Republicans Celebrate Racism
The first day of the Republicans’ hate-fest was labeled “Make America Safe Again”—for U.S. capitlists. It featured two hard-line state terrorists: former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, one of several Black speakers who were used to blame Black victims for the atrocities of capitalism. They attacked anti-racist protestors and indicted Black Lives Matter for the shootings of cops by deranged, lone-wolf snipers. They were wildly cheered by the delegates, of whom less than one percent were Black—the lowest share in more than a century (slate.com, 7/19). This convention was a Klan rally with confetti and balloons.
The Republican speakers proudly declared that Blue Lives Matter, when all the data shows that Blue Lives Murder. In 2015, 42 on-duty cops were killed by gunfire—down 14 percent from the year before, and less than one-third the total shot and killed in 1973 (npr.org, 12/29/15). In 2015, U.S. cops shot and killed 990 people. Black people were killed at three times the rate of white people, even after adjusting for local demographics. Although Black men “represent 6 percent of the U.S. population, they made up nearly 40 percent of those who were killed while unarmed” (washingtonpost.com, 1/6). None of these legalized lynchings resulted in a cop convicted for murder or manslaughter (Huffington Post, 1/13).
Cops are the thugs of the billionaires and their politician puppets. Their job is to protect the capitalists’ private property; they have license to kill whomever they please, including 494 white workers last year. Racist police terror is aimed at pacifying the entire working class. All workers share an interest in fighting back against it—and in smashing the capitalist state that breeds it.
Trump ended the Republican proceedings with transparently racist calls for “law and order” and to “make America great again.” Ignoring data that shows that immigrants in general—and the undocumented in particular—have a far lower violent crime rate than U.S. citizens (Wall Street Journal, 7/4/15), he demonized the undocumented as savage criminals: “They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities, with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.”
Trump’s Nazi-style racism—given a megaphone for the past year by the capitalist media—is infectious. Some delegates threw peanuts at a Black CNN camerawoman and yelled, “This is how we feed animals!” A Republican congresswoman was booed when she said she was born in Mexico. At a recent basketball game in Indiana, white high school students held up Trump signs and shouted, “Build that wall!” and “Speak English!” at a heavily Latino crowd (CNN, 3/1).
But anti-immigrant racism is not exclusive to Republicans; Democrat Barack Obama laid the foundation for Trump’s outrageous scapegoating. Since taking office in 2009, Obama has deported more than 2.5 million people, more than any other president in U.S. history, including thousands of women and children feeling capitalist violence in Central America this year. The same racist, sexist administration has oppressed and murdered Muslim workers around the world, from round-the-clock surveillance of mosques to drone assassinations.     
Racism Hurts All Workers
In this time of vile public racism, we need to point out that anti-racist protests around the world, involving hundreds of thousands of people, have been largely multiracial. These demonstrations do not promote individualistic violence (see page 6); they represent essential fightback against the violence of the state. It is now more important than ever to build a mass, multiracial movement against racism.
The nationalist divisiveness fed by the Black Lives Matter leadership weakens our ability to build such a movement. Funded by billionaire ruling-class figures like George Soros, these misleaders are wedded to dead-end, stay-within-the-system solutions. But the contradictions of capitalism cannot be solved by reform. Led by the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, the international working class must confront the imperialists’ war plans and fight for communism, a society run by and for workers. The whole damn capitalist system has to go! Power to the working class!
Trump Talks, Clinton Kills
Trump is an obvious target for anti-racists. But he’s got a long way to go before he can match the damage done by the Clintons during Bill Clinton’s presidency alone. On the first of four nights of the Democrats’ lies and hypocrisy, Michelle Obama praised Hillary Clinton for “her lifelong devotion to our nation’s children.” The first lady somehow forgot about the millions of Black and Latin children driven into deep poverty by the Clintons’ racist welfare reform in 1996; Hillary Clinton rounded up votes for the legislation and later called those impoverished families “deadbeats” (The Nation, 3/1). And it must have slipped Obama’s mind that the Clintons left millions of children fatherless when they championed the 1994 crime bill, which led directly to racist mass incarceration. Hillary Clinton cheered the bill on, stoking fears of young Black men as “super-predators.” Of the more than two million workers behind bars today, 40 percent are Black, three times their share of the U.S. population. For imperialist crimes against the working class, Hillary Clinton takes a back seat to no one. As a U.S. senator, defending the interests of her patrons at ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs, Clinton vigorously supported U. S. slaughters in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Obama’s secretary of state, she devastated millions in Syria, Libya, Haiti, and Honduras. She is an avid supporter of apartheid Israel and its illegal settlements on the West Bank. She wants to escalate the war in Syria by imposing a no-fly zone, which could accelerate a U.S. military clash with Russia.
As Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs said of the Democratic nominee, “Her so-called foreign policy ‘experience’ has been to support every war demanded by the U. S. deep security state run by the military and the CIA” (Counterpunch, 05/3). This is where feminism—reactionary identity politics—leads the working class: to mass murder and the terrorization of working-class women, men and children.  
Third Option: Communist Revolution
What a choice! The open fascist Trump promises to attack and divide workers and fortify the U.S. police state while enriching billionaires like himself. The liberal fascist Clinton is ready to rally workers to fight and die in imperialist wars that will benefit only billionaires, as well.
But there’s another alternative: fighting for workers’ power (see pages 4, 5, 8). Under capitalism, elections hold no future for our class. Electoral politics is an ideological jail—but we can break out! Our option is Progressive Labor Party, a revolutionary communist party that is building a mass workers’ movement to smash the capitalists and their politician stooges. Don’t vote, revolt!