Multi-Racial Unity Needed to Fight Gentrification

NEW YORK CITY, January 14 — Gentrification is a racist policy used by real estate profiteers, landlords, bankers, investors, educational institutions and government politicians to transform mostly black and Latino low-income neighborhoods into high-rent, mostly white enclaves. Landlords empty buildings, abandon them and declare neighborhoods “blighted.”
Columbia University is currently building a satellite campus in Manhattan’s West Harlem that will raise rents in the surrounding areas.
Landlords spread racist lies, saying black and Latino tenants in low-income neighborhoods are “dirty” or “criminals,” or that too many people and children live in the apartments and destroy property. Facing harassment, tenants move, seeking a better situation but where conditions turn out to be worse, crowded and neglected. The new neighborhood is often further from workplaces and has large numbers of unemployed.
The average price of condos here is 1.4 million dollars. Monthly rents run from $2,000 to 10,000. Condo prices in lower and mid-town Manhattan can reach as high as $90 million. Meanwhile 60 percent of NYC tenants earn $50,000 a year or below, and 30% of those earn under $30,000.
Such tenants are forced to flee these high-rent areas.
Neighborhoods change, become “hip.” Businesses cater to high-rent tenants, opening pricey markets and stores. Williamsburg in Brooklyn has been gentrified and now it’s spreading to surrounding boro neighborhoods, especially Bushwick. Bushwick’s white tenant population has grown by 19.7 percent. Agencies sometimes no longer rent to Spanish-speaking tenants.
PL’ers are helping to build a fight-back in Bushwick. We must unite black, Latino, Asian and white working-class tenants.
Demand:
Only low-rent housing
Turn vacant buildings into good low-income housing
Take over expensive condo buildings and change them into good low-rent apartments
Immediate low-income housing for families and individuals in shelters and for victims of Hurricane Sandy.
Lower rents now! Low-income families can’t pay $1,200 to $2,600 and more in rent. There are thousands of multi-millionaires and scores of billionaires in NYC. Landlords and their agents are raking in obscenely high rents on the backs of the working class.
Capitalism can not and will not provide decent affordable housing for the working class, only profits for the capitalists. We need to overthrow capitalism with communist revolution.
Communists believe that consciousness of how capitalism works is a powerful tool in the hands of the working class. We believe it’s not for the working class to make reformist compromises with the capitalists. It’s our job to unite and fight for what we need. The working class must be bold and purposeful.
Communists believe that, over time, workers will join PLP in ever greater numbers and build the fight for communism, a society in which the working class will hold all power. We will provide housing for the working class in an egalitarian society. To this goal we dedicate ourselves now in the fight against racist gentrification.

Fiscal Deal — Rulers Sharpening their Knives

Workers Pay for Bosses’ Wars, Crises

The class of big businessmen (the owners and managers of Wall Street firms and major corporations like GM, GE, ExxonMobil and Microsoft), along with the politicians and generals who do their bidding, constitute a ruling class in the U.S. Their tremendous wealth and power enables them to control — and rule —government policy. However, divisions within this class, along with infighting between the two major capitalist parties, have made it very difficult to obtain changes in federal taxes and spending vital to their maintaining U.S. capitalism’s world dominance.
Federal government spending is now 23% of the gross domestic product (GDP), while federal tax revenues are only 16% of GDP. Thus the government runs a huge annual deficit and must borrow to pay for it. The total federal debt is now over $16 trillion dollars, requiring payment of more than $220 billion in interest last year. In 2012, the deficit was $1.1 trillion, the fourth consecutive year the deficit exceeded one trillion dollars.
The rulers recognize the problem and have gone to great lengths to try to solve it. So far they’ve failed. In 2009, Obama appointed a bi-partisan Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (CFRR), headed by ex-Senator Simpson (Republican), and ex-chief of Staff Bowles (Democrat). The CFRR’s top concern was to push back rising U.S. competitors. Their report concluded: (1) high interest rates make U.S. businesses uncompetitive; (2) deficits make it harder to finance “emergency needs such as wars and recessions”; (3) China, “a nation that may not share our country’s aspirations and strategic interests,” is a huge holder of U.S. debt; and (4) investors could lose confidence in the U.S. ability to repay its debt, “triggering a debt crisis” and forcing the government “to implement the most stringent of austerity measures.”
The CFRR plan demanded slashing spending on Social Security, Medicare and other social programs and lowering corporate taxes while insulating war spending from cuts.
Like all bosses, U.S. rulers fight among themselves through the political parties they control. Those squabbles have so far derailed the CFRR’s plan. The recently passed fiscal deal will do virtually nothing to reduce the deficit. It will increase tax rates on the very rich to 39.6%, which is still historically low (the rate was 91% under Eisenhower and 70% under Nixon). Payroll taxes workers pay for Social Security and Medicare will rise while cutting a few exemptions and deductions for high-income earners. But this entire tax deal will net just $620 billion in revenue over 10 years, not enough to cover even the $1 trillion annual deficit.
That section of the ruling class whose profits depend on having a powerful U.S. world presence, from the Middle East to Asia —  which includes big Wall Street banks, oil and gas companies like Exxon-Mobil, weapons manufacturers like Boeing and other multi-nationals — is clearly alarmed by these big deficits. As the CFRR report says, they fret that huge deficits endanger the big increases in military spending required to meet the challenges posed by U.S. rivals. According to Admiral Mike Mullen, the national debt is the “[U.S.] biggest security threat.”
Although the U.S. has been increasing military spending 9% a year (mostly for its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), China has been increasing its military spending by 13% a year for the past 15 years, mostly for new weapons, ships and submarines. Though the U.S. still has the world’s most powerful military, China is catching up. It has aggressively pursued its territorial claims in the South China and East China Seas. China will surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy within the decade. It is vigorously contesting U.S. economic dominance in region after region, from Latin America to Japan and Korea to Egypt, whose new president Morsi recently went to Beijing seeking more trade and investment.
To counter China’s rising power, the Obama administration announced it will increase U.S. military presence in the Pacific. It has also vowed to contain Iran and not allow it to obtain nuclear weapons. Either one of these conflicts could lead to war and would require trillions of dollars in military spending immediately.
The ruling class won’t surrender until its power is crushed by masses of revolutionary workers. It is working overtime to win workers to fascist ideas — sacrificing for the “national interest” and supporting fascist tactics like torture (portrayed in the new movie “Zero Dark Thirty”). Groups like Fix the Debt (run by billionaire hedge fund manager Pete Peterson, with Simpson and Bowles of the CFRR as key members) plot to convince millions of people, from retirees to veterans, to accept a lower standard of living.
The next “cliff” will be March 1, the deadline for negotiations over raising the debt ceiling. To stimulate the war fever necessary to cut social programs and maintain their top-dog position, the rulers will undertake whatever they think necessary, including orchestrating a 9/11-type incident or provoking a military confrontation in the Persian Gulf or the Pacific.
A system that cannot survive without imperialist wars and massive attacks on workers’ standard of living must be destroyed. That’s why every CHALLENGE reader should consider joining PLP and organizing to smash capitalism now.

Latest Scheme Not Enough

Ruling-class spokesmen sharply attacked the fiscal deal for failing to provide the revenues necessary to maintain U.S. supremacy. Richard Haas, president of the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations, complained: “There’s a sense that we’ve been playing roulette with our position, and this deal does nothing to stop that.” New York Times’ columnist David Brooks scolds Congress and Obama for failing to slash Medicare now, saying the U.S. must choose between being a “global military power” and a “welfare state,” and can’t be both (1/8/13).
In case anyone missed the point, David Sanger, the Times’ chief Washington correspondent summarized: “With economic growth harder to come by, the only obvious way to make major cuts in the budget is to go after Social Security, Medicare and [the] $1 trillion national security budget — which includes the military, intelligence, diplomacy and development. And whenever the United States decides not to engage in some part of the world, countries look to a new source of investment and aid: China” (NYT, 1/4/13).

Newtown Rampage Fueled by Capitalist Ideas

Obama, Clinton, Bushes Killed Millions More

We join the grief felt by the parents of the 20 children murdered in Newtown, Connecticut, and by the families of the six school workers. It’s unfortunate, however, that grief under capitalism is selectively expressed. Far less sympathy can be found for the families of children, overwhelmingly black and Latino, who are fatally shot routinely by the rulers’ cops in cities across the United States. 

Capitalist influences led to Adam Lanza’s rampage. His “me-against-the-world” outlook was an extreme but revealing reflection of the profit system’s inherent individualism and cutthroat competition. Capitalism is based on reaping profits at the expense of rival capitalists and on the backs of the losers’ laid-off workers. When workers are confronted by the lethal problems caused by this system, the rulers tell them, “You have to look out for yourself.”  The bosses’ greatest fear is that workers will discover the real solution: Uniting with our class sisters and brothers to collectively fight our oppressors.

When we, the working class, run society, collectivity will stamp out much of the anti-social pathology that periodically explodes in individuals like Adam Lanza. When communist ideas were prevalent in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, collectivity was taught almost from birth. Babies were given blocks too big and heavy for one of them to move or manipulate by themselves; block-stacking required a group of babies to work together. In school, marks were given not to individuals but to the class as a whole. As a result, more advanced students were induced to help their classmates improve.

During capitalism’s Great Depression of the 1930s, tens of millions of workers were tossed onto the unemployment rolls because they were no longer useful in creating profits for their exploiters. But during the same period, the Soviet Union maintained full employment. Everyone was needed to help build a society to benefit the entire working class. Communists believe that everyone has the potential to contribute to society. A communist society will treat and overcome anti-social behavior through reeducation and any necessary treatment. 

Adam Lanza was a creature of capitalism, from its rotten health care system to the war culture created by U.S. imperialists. In the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, well-meaning people are clamoring for reforms in mental health services and gun control. But capitalism cannot be pacified or disarmed. It depends on fascist violence for its very existence. (For an explanation of fascist violence, see letter on page 6.)

U.S. Presidents: Murderers-in-Chief

The same system that depicts Lanza as a monster makes heroes out of far deadlier mass murderers, including every U.S. president from Harry Truman to the Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Each of them is responsible for killing millions of civilians, from the genocidal use of atomic weapons in Japan to the imperialist “surge” in Afghanistan and the “collateral” civilian victims of drone killings in Pakistan. In between, the U.S. rulers have slaughtered millions of innocents through their interventions in Guatemala, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam (more than two million civilians there alone).

Many more were murdered as a direct result of the U.S. rulers’ installation of the fascist Shah in Iran, the CIA assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and the U.S. backing of South African apartheid, a fascist system that led to the deaths of fifty percent of the children before they reached the age of five. The U.S. bosses helped murder a million people by supplying Saddam Hussein with weapons and intelligence in his war with Iran, and caused another million deaths in Iraq from two wars and eight years of Clinton sanctions that cut off food and medical supplies. 

Within U.S. borders, racist cops execute scores of youth, majority black and Latino, who bear the brunt of this intensifying fascism. In 2010 alone, there were 91 unjustified cop shootings that killed the victim (CATO Institute report in NY Daily News, 12/30). 

Where the guilty U.S. rulers and their henchmen are concerned, there are no consequences for their lethal brutality. And it’s no surprise that none of these mass slaughters have drawn any public displays of sympathy from the White House.

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Rich Bosses’ Racist Cuts Hit Patients’ Health, Workers’ Jobs

BROOKLYN, NY, December 31 — Downstate Medical Center here, whose patients come from an underserved predominantly Caribbean working-class community, is threatened with closing, or privatization or both. Workers at the hospital, which belongs to New York State, are in the fight of their lives. We are living in times when the major imperialists who run this country need to divert money from health care and other human services to spend trillions on their fight with other imperialists over world domination.

The threat to Downstate comes against a background of other hospital closings and forced mergers. Brooklyn’s Interfaith hospital was forced into bankruptcy just last month and will be closed. At Downstate, Gov. Cuomo, who is also planning huge Medicare and Medicaid cuts, hired John Williams as the new President of Downstate. Williams and his allies already have a long history of gutting healthcare and closing or privatizing hospitals. 

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Fight-Back Thwarts Hospital Frame-up of Militant Retiree

BROOKLYN, NY, January 5 — Four months of struggle to fight false criminal charges against Ira Wechsler, a retired hospital worker active in the continuing struggle to fight cutbacks and the intended closing of Downstate Medical Center, have been rewarded with victory.  On Dec. 4, the Brooklyn DA had to drop the charges, which were trumped up to try to split workers’ unity against the cuts.

Ira, recently retired from Woodhull Medical Center, is a long-time District 1199 union member. The charges grew out of collusion between corrupt 1199 union officials and the bosses of the merged SUNY Downstate-Long Island College Hospital  medical complex. They want to defeat the rank-and-file rebellion against their plans to destroy health care for predominantly black workers from the West Indies.

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Rebuild Bedouin Homes After Israel’s 42nd Demolition

AL-ARAKIB, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, December 15 — Several local and international working-class activists, including a PL’er, visited the “unrecognized” Bedouin village of al-Arakib and helped rebuild its demolished shacks and sheds. On Tuesday, the racist Israeli authorities demolished the village for the 42^nd time since the summer of 2010! Israel likes to showcase itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East.” But this “democracy” demolishes the homes of impoverished Bedouin workers and subsistence peasants because they are in the way of the real-estate capitalists’ steamroller.

In front of this criminal bosses’ state and its terrorist police, the villagers of al-Araqib fight back and stick to their ancestral land. They will not move, as the regime wants, to the nearby mis-planned Bedouin town of Rahat, where there are no jobs. The village’s leader, Sheikh Sayakh, once again thanked the Jewish, Arab and international working-class activists who come to help the villagers in their struggle.

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Black, White Workers Blast Conrail, Pols over Toxic Gas Spill

Paulsboro, New Jersey, December 28 — From a garment factory in Bangladesh to a chemical spill here, capitalism’s murderous worldwide reach shows that the working class must put this profit-hungry beast down with communist revolution. Few Paulsboro residents were thinking about the need for communist revolution however on November 30 when a railroad tanker filled with vinyl chloride derailed and crashed into the Mantua Creek. It released a cloud of this toxic gas into the community. 

The derailment was caused when the bridge failed to close properly. Parts of the bridge date from 1873. A few years ago, Conrail replaced the worker who operated the bridge with an electronic system to save the company about $100,000 a year. The electronic system failed so often that Conrail dispatchers and engineers routinely ignored the system’s red lights and drove trains across the bridge if it “looked okay.”

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Racist FEMA Treats Sandy Victims As Slaves

New York City, December 28 — Over 1,000 people left homeless by superstorm Sandy were moved into Manhattan hotels after spending a couple of weeks in various shelters. They were dumped at the door, often at fancy establishments, without money, food, clothes, healthcare, or means of transportation. With thousands of empty apartments and even more vacant luxury condos, the bosses would rather pay $300/night for a month than put families in permanent housing for a year.

These mostly black and Latino workers, who previously received some public assistance, now face eviction to homeless shelters. The racism and total human disregard with which they are being treated shows the true nature of U.S. capitalism.

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Spain: Protests Force Eviction Halt Jobless

Workers Scour Dumpsters for Food, Scraps

The international economic depression caused by the internal contradictions of the capitalist system has hit Spain particularly hard. Unemployment in that country has reached 25%; 22% of Spanish households live under the poverty line and an additional 30% are living on the edge of poverty (NYT, 10/26; MercoPress, 2/24). 

The growing poverty has led to a rapid increase in homelessness and stressed the traditional aid to the poor networks run by the Catholic Church. Julio Beamonte, the director of Spain’s largest Catholic charity Caritas, commented in June that poverty in Spain now rivals the poverty that Europe experienced in the aftermath and rubble of World War II (Catholic News Agency, 6/6). 

A secretary for Caritas summed up the situation, “There are more poor people than last year, and they are poorer. After four years of financial hardship, poverty is more widespread, more intense and it is creating a polarized society in which the difference between rich and poor is growing” (MercoPress).

A recent report on National Public Radio’s (NPR) All Things Considered discussed the new mass phenomenon of “dumpster diving” in Spanish cities. This practice, common in the United States, involves the mining of urban waste sites (dumpster, trashcans, and dumps) for food and sellable goods, particularly metals that can be sold as scrap. One such dumpster diver told the reporter, “I used to build new houses, do renovations and refurbish old historic homes.” Now he digs in the trash for food. 

A Moroccan immigrant searching dumpsters in Barcelona told the reporter, “Now it seems so much of humanity is without work or anything. So this is better than robbery, you know? Collecting scrap metal. You can even jump down into the dumpster, no problem.” He then went head first into the dumpster with a friend holding his feet (NPR, 11/11).

In the midst of this growing poverty the capitalist class is finding new ways to profit from this poverty. Restaurants in Spain have begun to offer to reheat cash-strapped workers’ food while renting them cutlery and plates (Reuters blog, 9/24). After noting that “poverty is returning to Europe” British mega-company Unilever has shifted its business strategy in Europe to profit from the world’s poorest countries. They now offer consumers laundry detergent in five-wash packets, shampoo in individual packs, and single-serving packs of foods like mashed potatoes (Telegraph, 8/27). These individual portions are more wasteful and more expensive in the long run, but are all that workers living on the edge of poverty can afford.   

Workers in Spain are not content to simply bear the crisis on their backs. Mass street protests have forced Spanish rulers to pass a new two-year moratorium on evictions of poor families who can’t pay their mortgage. Yet the temporary nature of these reforms was immediately apparent. As Business Week notes, this moratorium is no gift to the working class: “Spain is trying to balance the threat of social unrest with protecting banks.” Deutsche Bank goon Bernd Volk re-assured, “It [the moratorium] seems clearly meant for extreme cases and is supposed to not overly dilute the rights of the banks” (BW, 11/16).

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Israel-Palestine ‘People’s Court’ Slams Rulers’ Rotten Public Housing

BAT-YAM, ISRAEL-PALESTINE — Recently, hundreds of anti-capitalist activists gathered in the municipal museum here to hold a “People’s Court” over Israel’s rotten public-housing system, which included scores of testimonies of its working-class victims. Two PL’ers joined this event to show solidarity with the victims and support for their struggle. This lousy system can’t provide even a minimal roof over the heads of thousands of workers.

This “court,” of course, being a workers’ convention while the bosses still hold state power, lacks any real authority to try our class enemies. But exposing the bitter truth about the public housing system is an essential step on the road to organizing a mass struggle against capitalism’s crimes. And the day will come when the working class will seize its destiny — and state power — and will be able to truly judge and punish its exploiters.

Israeli Sexist Laws ‘House’ Workers in Tents

The absurdity in capitalist “public housing” was exposed from the first court testimony. Esther, a single mother suffering from cirrhosis and living in a tent with her son, can’t afford housing in the “free market.” A public housing official told her to “have two or three more children!” Why? Because Israel’s rotten capitalist law allows public housing for single mothers only if they have three or more children. Esther wishes Prime Minister Netanyahu and Finance Minister Shteinitz could live in a tent even for one day rather than in their fancy mansions.

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