Obama’s Immigration Fraud: Backdoor Draft of Latino Youth?

Obama’s recent order, Deferred Action, to delay some deportations of undocumented immigrants (see back page) constitutes a classic capitalist Big Lie. (The Big Lie refers to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic and anti-communist propaganda technique based on the idea that “the great masses will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”)

This is an attack on workers masquerading as a benefit. It comes from the president who has deported more than 1.4 million workers, more than any administration in U.S. history. According to the bosses’ top liberal mouthpiece, the New York Times (6/17/12), Obama is bringing “joy and relief” to undocumented Latino workers by delaying deportations for a small minority.

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Racist KKKops, You Can’t hide, We Charge You With Genocide!

Harlem March

NEW YORK CITY, June 17 — More than 200 workers and students gathered to march in the heart of Harlem today, loudly defying an avalanche of capitalist ideas and mis-leadership to condemn the racist New York Police Department and its reign of terror in working-class black and Latino communities. Afterwards, the rally fed into a mass, silent march against the racist Stop-and-Frisk policy of police intimidation and terror. Although both events were confronting similar issues, in many ways they could not have been more different.

Our rally was organized by the friends and family of Ramarley Graham, an 18-year-old black youth murdered on February 2 by racist cop Richard Haste. The Graham family and the support committee, including PLP members, decided to hold the rally here in direct response to the organizers of the main march.

In some back room, Al Sharpton, Ben Jealous — head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) — and George Gresham — head of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — made a cowardly political decision. Instead of beginning the march in the heart of Harlem, where the mainly black and Latino population deals with racist Stop-and-Frisk every day, they moved the main rally to 110th street, a mainly gentrified area.

Unlike these misleaders, we don’t fear an angry, militant response from Harlem’s black workers. In fact, that’s exactly what we welcomed!

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Racist KKKops, You Can’t hide, We Charge You With Genocide!

Flatbush Murder 

BROOKLYN, June 17 — “Murderers! Murderers! Murderers!” This chant rang out on Friday evening, June 15, from all corners of Church Ave and East 38 Street as we demonstrated against the racist police killing of a twenty-three year old black woman Shantel Davis the night before. She was shot by “bad boy” detective Philip Atkins. Shantel was unarmed. Atkins’s “bad boy” nickname comes from his reputation in this mainly black working-class neighborhood as a drug-pushing fascist who harassed, beat up, threatened, lied and arrested residents, especially youth. 

Several workers who’ve been threatened by Atkins shared their stories with PLP. One 45-year-old worker reported being stopped, and when he protested, Atkins shoved a gun into his mouth. A mother told of her son being stopped and frisked. When he objected, Atkins asked “Do you know where Kings County hospital is?” The young man said “yes.” Atkins pointed his gun at his groin area and said, “Do you want to go there?” 

Even the capitalist media revealed that he had six civil suits pending against him. Two of those lawsuits have already been resolved by the NYPD paying the victims damages. 

Community residents who had been present at the killing told how the cops had sealed off the area. They seized the cell phones of the witnesses and took the video feeds from several local businesses’ cameras.

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Mexico: Teachers Lead Mass Strike Against Bosses’ State Terror

OAXACA, MEXICO, June 1 — Led by Oaxaca Local 21, class struggle in Mexico once again has taken the form of a teachers’ strike. A week after the strike began on May 21, it was joined by the workers of Michoacan, Guerrero, and Chiapas, along with Locals 9 and 10 of the Federal District and Local 36 of the Mexico Valley, Sinaloa and Veracruz.

The main demand presented by the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educacion (CNTE), the teachers’ coordinating committee, is to eliminate the deceptively named Quality of Education Project, which is designed to privatize public education, take back hard-won labor benefits, and destroy the National Education Workers Union (SNTE).

U.S. imperialism’s economic globalization strategy, enforced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and carried out in alliance with the national ruling classes of each country, has

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Immigration Reform: Dead End for Workers

Under capitalism, immigrants are exploited for super-profits and demonized by the bosses in a relentless effort to divide the working class. Unitarians from across the country are congregating in Phoenix from June 20 to June 24 to stand in solidarity with immigrant workers and oppose Arizona’s racist, anti-immigrant law, SB 1070. Despite President Obama’s announcement (see page 2) to suspend deportations for a limited group of students and workers, many Unitarians understand that immigrants will remain under attack in Arizona and elsewhere as long as our society is geared to create profit for the few at the expense of the rest of us.  

Obama’s cynical election-year ploy will allow an estimated 800,000 undocumented immigrants under the age of 31 to obtain driver’s licenses and renewable two-year work permits, but only if they came to the U.S. before they turned 16 and are in school or have a high school diploma or GED.

It does nothing for the 11.2 million remaining undocumented workers

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Pakistan: Workers Enraged over Bosses’ Nationalist Killing Machine

The hell of capitalism is intensifying for the working class of Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands of workers are demonstrating in the streets every day, opposing the bosses’ stranglehold on their lives. They are struggling against massive unemployment which has risen 43 percent since 1999. About 75% of the country’s population of 180 million — 6th largest on earth — earns no more than $2 a day. While Pakistan has the 7th largest standing army in the world and a nuclear arsenal, 110 million people are hard-pressed to even eat two meals a day.

Of its ten million industrial workers, half are controlled by fake, essentially company unions, puppets of the bosses while the other half are excluded from worker-led unions altogether. Eighteen million farm workers are completely unorganized. Child labor is spreading. There is no electricity from 14 to 22 hours a day and no natural gas for two to three days a week.

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Fight Oakland School Closings

OAKLAND CALIFORNIA, June 18 — PL’ers along with parents, teachers, students and Occupy Oakland Education have been fighting the closing of five Oakland elementary schools that serve mainly black and Latino youths. We’re currently occupying Lakeview Elementary in Oakland and are running a free summer school, “The People’s School.”

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Workers, Parents, Students Unite: No to Layoffs!

NEWARK, NJ, June 4 — The attacks on students and education workers in the Newark Public Schools are continuing.  As previously reported in CHALLENGE, there have been budget cuts, school closings and dual locations of charter schools.  The newest attack comes in the form of layoffs of about 200 teachers and support staff.  These workers were notified a month before school ended that their positions will be eliminated next fall because of budget cuts.

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Thousands March vs. Israeli Rulers’ Apartheid

TEL-AVIV, ISRAEL-PAESTINE, June 9 — Thousands of workers and activists, both Jewish and Arab, marched in central Tel-Aviv . They protested the apartheid enacted by the Israeli regime against Palestinians in the West Bank and within the “green line” (the western part of historic Palestine). This rally came at the time when the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to build hundreds of new apartments in West Bank settlements, marketed exclusively to well-off religious Jewish settlers. The marchers chanted “Occupation is a Crime — Freedom Now for Palestine!” “Jaffa and Ramallah — the same Revolution” and “The People Demand to End the Occupation.”

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Jim Crow Israeli Style

TEL-AVIV, ISRAEL-PALESTINE, June 11 —Dozens of immigrant refugees, mostly black workers who fled the horrors of war and fascism in Eastern Africa, were rounded up today by the “Oz” unit of the Israeli Ministry of Internal Affairs (the equivalent of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit.) Violently arrested in the early hours of the morning, these workers were hauled off to detention centers, pending their deportation back to war-torn, famine-struck South Sudan or overtly fascist Eritrea.

This pogrom, carried out under the bosses’ laws, is only the latest attack in the Israeli ruling class’s campaign against the so-called “infiltrators,” workers who came to Israel either as refugees or as immigrants from East Africa. On May 23rd, a mass rally of racists in south Tel-Aviv was led by Knesset Members Regev, Ben-Ari and Danon. During this violent rally, several black passerbys were attacked (with the racists calling them “Dirty N****,”) and a pub belonging to the African community was vandalized and robbed by the incited mob.

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