Killer Martelly Serves U.S. Masters

WASHINGTON, DC, February  5 — The president of Haiti, Michel Martelly, was in Washington, DC, this week to meet with his U.S. imperialist masters. He met President Obama in the White House and groveled before him, thanking him for assistance after the earthquake. What assistance? U.S. “aid” to Haiti has been minimal. Thousands still live in tents, five years after the earthquake. The cholera epidemic continues to take hundreds of lives. No significant progress has been made in fighting cholera through sanitation systems and vaccinations.

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Expose KKKop Killing of Kyam Livingston

Brooklyn, January 21 — Over  50 workers and youth from all over New York City gathered at Flatbush Reformed Church in the middle of a snowstorm in remembrance of Kyam Livingston, a 37-year-old mom who died while in police custody this past July.  It was the six-month anniversary of her death.  Kyam’s sister and mother demanded justice and accountability not only on the part of the NYPD but also from local elected officials who have yet to respond to the  family’s concerns thus far.  

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PL’ers Step Up Class Struggle at Profs’ Convention

CHICAGO, January 15 — A series of struggles centering around the “Boycott/Divest/Sanction” (BDS) campaign against the Israeli government’s apartheid toward Israeli Arabs and oppression in the West Bank and Gaza became a hot point at January’s annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Chicago.

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South Africa: After Mandela, Emerging Anti-Capitalist Fight

A lot of illusions in the ANC/SACP (African National Congress/ South African Communist Party) have been buried with Mandela, so that we can begin to look at the Mandela period differently. For example, there have always been struggles and movements in South Africa not controlled by them. Long before Mandela got out of prison, there was a strong mass movement in the 1980s that was independent of the ANC/SACP, most of whose leaders were exiled or jailed.

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Strikes Sharpen New Class Struggle in South Africa

There is life in the class struggle in South Africa.  Leading the wave is a strategically important strike that is galvanizing workers and disrupting the global platinum market and the South African economy. On January 23, the world’s big three platinum producers, Anglo American, Impala, and Lonmin, were struck by seventy thousand miners in the Association of Mineworkers & Construction Union (AMCU). This new and militant union is up against the African National Congress government, whose police fired rubber bullets into three thousand strikers trying to stop scabs at Anglo American.  

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MEXICO: Building PLP Is on the Front Burner

In the last few months, my PL club coordinated an intensive distribution of flyers in our area. We distributed approximately 300 to 400 CHALLENGE flyers daily. The flyers dealt with education reform, energy reform and the attacks against teachers here in Mexico. The main idea was to inform parents and elementary, middle, high school and college students that the purpose of the new reforms wasn’t to help and improve workers’ conditions but to benefit a few capitalists. The smear campaigns and many attacks against the teachers show how the capitalists try to keep people from fighting against the system, and reforms or laws that only benefit them.

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Workers of the World, Unite vs. the Warmakers!

The world’s imperialist powers are debating the best way to prepare for the next potential world war—a conflict that would no doubt exceed the wholesale killing of the working class in World War I (50 million) and World War II (100 million). Will 2014 prove a repeat of 1914, the first eruption of global war? Can the U.S. uphold its military guarantees and forge credible coalitions, or will it forsake its allies as imperialist rivalries sharpen?

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Thousands Strike vs. Israeli Apartheid

TEL-AVIV, January 5 — Fifteen thousand African refugees, mostly working class, demonstrated in central Tel-Aviv against their racist treatment by the Israeli government. This climaxed a week-long strike of 30,000 by most African refugees and immigrants in Israel — mostly in restaurants, cleaning and housekeeping — protesting their maltreatment by the capitalist regime. They are also demanding an end to their deportation to the “Open Residential Facility”  — actually imprisoned in barbed wire detention centers with three roll-calls a day in the Negev desert.

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Enough is Enough! Workers’ Armed Struggle in Michoacán

MICHOACÁN, January 26 — Progressive Labor Party applauds the angry workers in Michoacán who have had enough of the drug cartels’ violence and have picked up guns and fought back. In an inspiring example of working-class rage, many workers not only took up guns, not only attacked the criminal cartel but also attacked the police and federal agents.

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Workers Shafted by Boeing-Union-Gov’t Sweetheart Deal

Seattle area workers have gotten two sharp lessons lately in the limits of reform and why only a revolution that dumps capitalism can make real change for the working class. In one week, a judge condemned SeaTac airport workers to poverty-wage slavery despite a referendum that passed a $15 minimum wage law. And Boeing machinists found their boss and their International union leaders forcing a disastrous 10-year contract down their throats after they had rejected it in a 2-1 vote.

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