Community Fights Boss-Gov’t Anti-Immigrant Gang-up

OAKLAND, CA ,October 16 — The coalition that organized the May Day March in the Bay Area is now mobilizing to support workers at the Mi Pueblo supermarket. PLP members are participating and joining the community boycott and picketing here on October 20.

Mi Pueblo has 21 stores and 3,200 employees, the majority of whom speak Spanish or are bi-lingual. The owner, Juvenal Chavez, expanded and got rich by selling traditional products from Latin America at high prices in immigrant neighborhoods while paying workers substandard wages. Many, both women and men, fought these conditions and have been fired. Meanwhile, Local 5 of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union is trying to unionize this workforce as part of a state-wide campaign, the Mercado Workers Coalition, aimed at non-union, immigrant supermarket workers. 

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Miners Wage Massive Strikes vs. Racist Neo-Apartheid Exploiters

JOHANNESBERG, SOUTH AFRICA, October 11 — The wildcat strikes and rebellions of 80,000 miners have spread across seven of this country’s nine provinces to include 30,000 truckers and a pending walkout of 190,000 government workers for higher wages. Port workers may soon join in. It is a massive assault on the racist apartheid system that still permeates South Africa in the form of the war between the two opposing classes.

Striking miners have mobilized to stop scabs; truckers have torched scab trucks. The bosses are retaliating with mass firings. When Anglo-American Platinum, the world’s top producer, fired 12,000 strikers after workers refused to attend company “hearings,” and said it would hire scabs to replace them, one worker declared that could happen only “over our dead bodies.” (Associated Press, 10/11) Another warned that, “Those who are dismissed will make sure there will be no operations and that [hiring of scabs] will cause a massacre just like at Marikana” (BBC News, 10/9) where, on August 16, cops murdered 34 miners. (See CHALLENGE, 9/19)

The rebellious Youth League, which is opposing the re-election of African National Congress (ANC) leader, President Jacob Zuma, said of the firing that Anglo-American Platinum “has made astronomical

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Walkouts Spread; Wal-mart Workers Fight Slave Labor

Workers at Wal-mart have spread their strikes and protests against the world’s largest private-sector employer — 1.4 million workers — to at least 28 stores in 12 states and counting, over the issues of poverty wages, exorbitant hours, wage theft, uncertain schedules, arbitrary firings, physical threats, unhealthy working conditions and lack of healthcare coverage.

The workers are planning a massive strike and protest for the biggest shopping day of the year, “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving.

Immigrant workers have led the way, sparking the nationwide actions when they began a strike last June in the small town of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, against C.J.’s Seafood, a Wal-mart supplier. They were “guest workers” from Mexico who were paid much less than the minimum wage, forced to work shifts up to 24 hours with no overtime pay, and threatened with beatings if their breaks lasted more than five minutes. Twice they were locked inside their workplace to force them to work from 2:00 A.M. until 6:00 P.M. without overtime compensation. And if they challenged any of these horrors, they were threatened with deportation. C.J.’s Seafood brings in an annual revenue of up to $50 million and sells 85 percent of its production to Wal-mart.

Soon the strikes spread to Wal-mart stores and warehouses throughout California. In early September, 30 workers at a warehouse in Mira Loma, Ca., walked out for 15 days to protest unsafe working conditions, reporting temperatures up to 120 degrees, no access to clean water or regular breaks and faulty work equipment. Another 60 walked out in L.A. on October 4, and 250 in Pecora, followed by workers striking or protesting in

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Retiree Marchers Demand Livable Pensions

PARIS, October 11 — Over 4,000 retirees demonstrated here, and hundreds more in Marseilles, Lyons and other cities nation-wide demanding an immediate across-the-board 300-euro-a-month increase ($387) in pensions, guaranteed access to health care, aid for those unable to live alone and an increase in the minimum monthly pension to 1,425 euros ($1,838). A trade union coalition organized the demonstrations.

“Retirees are neither rich nor privileged!” shouted the crowd in La Roche sur Yon in the conservative Vendée in western France. 

“We won’t be the laughing stock for the suckers!” the protesters in Lyons chanted, mocking the bosses who say they “won’t be suckers” and bear any tax increase.

“Retirees are not privileged, it’s the financiers who should be taxed!” the Paris protesters chanted. Today’s protests were sparked by government plans to tax pensions 0.15 percent next year and double it in 2014. The tax is supposedly to pay for care for old people who can’t live alone but in reality, it’s to help

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Anti-Racists Confront DC Nazis, Cops

Washington, DC, September 22 — Today, over 300 anti-racists confronted a dozen Nazi/Klan white supremacists. Only their 500-strong police escort saved them from severe beatings that would have discouraged them from future events. Protesters nevertheless drowned out their racist filth with militant anti-racist chants. 

These racists rode into Lincoln Park on the anniversary of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. This apparently deliberate attack on anti-racism echoed the 2006 KKK rally at Harper’s Ferry, the site of John Brown’s raid against slavery. Ironically, they arrived on a bus with a black driver and labeled Haymarket (the location of the 1886 protests that gave rise to May Day, the international working-class holiday). 

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Syrian Invasion Looms Over Gas Riches

The imperialist drumbeat to invade Syria is getting louder by the day. The U.S. rulers have found a willing partner for a push to war in the energy-rich slave state of Qatar, which borders Saudi Arabia on the Persian Gulf. This blossoming alliance seeks to use the Arab Spring upheavals and the Iraq War to heighten its profitable influence in the Middle East.

In a September 25 address to the UN General Assembly, the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, urged other Arab countries to do their “military duties… to do what is necessary to stop the bloodshed in Syria.” 

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Multi-Racial March Hits Cover-up of KKKops’ Racist Murder

Two comrades went into the Haitian countryside to meet with two groups about the necessity to build the struggle against capitalism. The first group was a reading group made up of 15 high school and university students. The second group was a freedom school (“tilekòl”) of 12 regular agricultural workers and 30 of their friends.

The agendas of both meetings were to discuss a mass campaign to end cholera in Haiti and the historical importance of August 14. This date commemorates the initial planning meeting in Bois Caïman, in the north of Haiti in 1791, of slaves for their revolution against slavery. 

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Expose NYC Top Cop’s Racist Death Squad

New York City, September 27 —  “Justice for: Shantel Davis!”

 We chanted in the halls of the Presbyterian Church where the Women’s City Club of NYC was presenting the head of the murdering NYPD, Ray Kelly, an award for enhancing the life of residents.

Our interjection of anti-racist politics as well as the reality about the death squad (NYPD) that Ray Kelly leads was not welcoming news for these high-society women. We brought the fight directly into their arena. The struggle for an indictment of the kkkop Philip Aktins continues, intertwined with the struggle to end capitalism’s racist reign.

Walmart Workers Strike Against Slave Labor

ELWOOD, IL, September 20 — Workers at Wal-mart’s contractor Roadlink here have been on strike since September 15. Two days earlier they had filed a lawsuit for non-payment for all hours worked, for being paid less than the minimum wage and for non-payment of overtime they had worked. Several workers who sued were fired on the spot. This sparked the walkout.

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‘Free Trade’ Masks Intensifying Exploitation

The term “free trade” is a lie, since it implies that it is only about buying and selling (trade) without hindrance (free). Actually, free trade agreements (FTAs) are a mask to cover exploitative relationships imposed by the more powerful economies on the less powerful — i.e., imperialism. Take, for example, the “United States–Dominican Republic–Central America Free Trade Agreement” (CAFTA-DR). This treaty, like other FTAs, contains malignant elements that are hidden under the benign-sounding title. 

CAFTA-DR prohibits any Central American country from opposing an attempt by a U.S. business to set up a subsidiary within its borders, so long as the business meets certain requirements. And if a member country objects that those requirements have not, in fact, been met, that country can be sued by the U.S. business at the World Bank. In 1965 the World Bank set up its International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) for just that purpose, with the participation of almost 150 countries from around the world.

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