MAY DAY: STOCKTON, CA

About 250 people came out for the May Day march here. Stockton is a town of many immigrants and farm workers. By all accounts, many are undocumented. The Central Labor Council and immigrants’ rights (mis)leaders organized the march. We missed the speeches by the Mayor and other politicians. PL’ers distributed a leaflet saying, “Nothing short of equality is acceptable.” We must identify ourselves as one working class — the producers of all wealth. Therefore, we must share all that we produce with the international working-class. The only acceptable justice for immigrants and all workers cannot be anything short of a communist revolution.

May Day: International Solidarity for A Communist World

At its core May Day means revolution, not reform. The future communist society which May Day embodies has been the aspiration of hundreds of millions — in truth billions — of working people in the past. This aspiration, distant though its fulfillment may be, nonetheless persists. The specter of communism Karl Marx wrote of in 1848 still haunts the capitalists and their rule.
May Day 2013, commemorated under the banners of the Progressive Labor Party for the 43rd consecutive year does more than embody the aspirations, the dreams even, of the world’s working people.
May Day means we have more than a dream. We have a plan, one that has proven itself and emerged victorious in the face of the most vicious assaults the world’s ruling classes have been able to launch. Twice in the twentieth century communists have turned world war and fascist invasion into their opposite, and at the height of their influence have managed to spread workers’ power over vast portions of the globe.

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Boston Bombers, Texas Massacre: Capitalists Are the Real Terrorists

Under capitalism, terror is a constant for the international working class. Workers in the U.S. have recently suffered a series of murderous attacks, in line with the global terror launched by U.S. imperialists and their allies on workers worldwide. On April 15, the day that terrorist bombs killed three people and maimed at least 170 more at the Boston Marathon, thirty people were killed in Iraq and uncounted others from Obama’s drone reign of terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan (see box).
Two days later, profit-driven disregard for workers’ safety caused an explosion at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas. This crime of capitalism slaughtered 15 people, injured more than 100 others, destroyed three public schools and wrecked hundreds of homes (see page 5).

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Reform Bill A Sham March vs. Racist Attacks on Immigrants

Washington, DC April 10 — Today tens of thousands of workers and students from around the country rallied here to demand immigration reform.  Thousands more rallied in 14 other locations around the U.S. Many protesters went far beyond supporting the current plans of bosses for reform, calling for an end to deportations and discrimination against immigrants (undocumented or not).
A dozen PLPers from DC and PLPers from other cities greeted the DC demonstrators with a revolutionary call to action, urging them to join the upcoming communist May Day demonstrations. The revolutionaries said that only the abolition of all borders through global communist revolution can finally stop the racist and nationalist attacks on immigrants around the world.

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Attack on Baby Care Unit Part of Racist Assault on All Workers

 Chicago, IL, April 19 — Today, several nurses and doctors from the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Stroger Cook County Hospital showed up at a Governing Board meeting to challenge the administration’s plan to cap admissions and have us turn away transfers of premature babies. One highly respected night-shift nurse expressed the group’s outrage at the plan. She told the board that we do excellent work and bring in $10-14 million per year to the public system. “How can you justify restricting admissions?” she asked. Half of the premature babies in the Stroger NICU are born in smaller hospitals and transported in. With rich private hospitals itching to steal our referral hospitals, putting a cap on transfers and admissions could end up closing our doors permanently.

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Howard U.: Protest Indicts Rand Paul as Racist Liar

WASHINGTON, DC, April 10 — Today Senator Rand Paul launched a Republican offensive to recruit black students into its ranks at Howard, a historically black university. Paul invited himself to the campus and the administration bent over backwards to get students and faculty to attend this event. No academic department or student organization sponsored it. Paul’s speech was an offensive, lying, and racist rewrite of the history of the U.S. and was opposed by many students.

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DC Transit Workers: Fight vs. Privatization Needs Fight vs. Capitalism

WASHINGTON, DC, April 13 — Today 30 workers from Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 689 gathered at the union hall for a meeting called by the local leadership to organize a campaign against privatization of parts of the city’s transit system. For two decades, several lines in surrounding counties have been separated by local jurisdictions from the unified rail and bus system. This has shrunk workers’ wage and benefit packages in these separate and privatized sectors as well as cut into the ATU membership, weakening the union.

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Workers, Patients March; Hospital Closings = Death Rx

BROOKLYN, NY April 20 — “SAVE LICH, NO MORE CONDOS FOR THE RICH!” That was the chant on April 7, as more than 200 Long Island College Hospital (LICH) workers and residents of the Red Hook housing project, marched together from the project to the hospital. They were demanding the hospital remain open, despite the fact that the SUNY Board of Directors voted to close it on June 18. (LICH was recently taken over by SUNY Downstate Medical Center.) The march united hospital workers and those we serve. The chants were loud and militant as workers and residents made a powerful statement, marching together through housing project many LICH workers had never been to before, even though many LICH patients live there. Every worker who attended talked about it for days.

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School Bus Workers Need Red Ideas, Not Bosses’ Union Flunkies

Brooklyn, NY April 17 —   One of the drivers who had been a rank and file leader during the school bus strike called excitedly to say that a NY Post column had exposed the lies that NYC’s Mayor Blumberg and his schools commissioner had told when they claimed that the “EPP” job security clause in ATU 1181’s contract was illegal. The bigger question is why didn’t the union leaders of 1181, the Transit Workers International Union and New York City’s Central Labor Council do anything to expose these lies and stop these attacks? We think it is because the labor movement functions as the junior partner of the bosses and their system.

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Texas Plant Massacre: Bosses the Real Terrorists

(The following is an excerpt from an article by investigative reporter Dave Lindorff, a columnist for Counterpunch):
The bulk of the American people are focusing their fears on terrorists from abroad, or… here {in the U.S.], not on corporate suites where the real evil and the real danger lies….
We had two acts of terrorism in the U.S. this week. The first…at the end of the…Boston Marathon…. [and] the second…in the town of West, Texas, where a fertilizer plant blew up, incinerating or otherwise killing at least 15, and injuring at least 150 people, and probably more as the search for the dead and the injured continues….
The villains in the West Fertilizer Co. explosion can be…easily identified: the managers and owners of the plant.

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