‘Integration, Yes! Segregation, No! Angry Students, Teachers, Parents Expose Racist School Boss

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, January 19 — “Integration, Yes! Segregation, No!” The chant rang out across the auditorium, as students, teachers and parents stood to challenge NYC schools chancellor Cathy Black. The event was the Panel on Educational Policy (PEP) meeting to vote on putting a new selective school in the John Jay campus building. While the building currently houses four schools serving mainly black and Latino students, the new school is being added to meet the needs of middle-class, mainly white families in the Park Slope neighborhood.

The PEP meeting was the final, formal Department of Education (DOE) step in approving the new school. It was also the first public meeting of new schools chancellor Black. The crowd of about 200 people was angry about attacks on working-class students across the city.

The whole meeting was filled with chanting, singing and speakers interrupting the DOE and demanding the system serve all students. Angry teachers, parents and students represented many schools threatened with closing or with the co-location of other schools in their buildings. About 40 people from the John Jay campus came to continue the fight against the racist conditions students there are facing.

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Fight County Hospital Killers

CHICAGO, IL, January 28 —  “THEY SAY CUT BACK, WE SAY FIGHT BACK!”; “THE WORKERS UNITED WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED!”; “WE NEED OUR JOBS!”; These chants shook the halls outside a budget hearing as militant black women workers from Cook County and Provident Hospitals could not get into the packed hearing room. The commissioners were deciding how much money will be cut from each department, including hospital services and jobs. Our voices were heard loud and clear, inside and outside the hearing.

Driven by the war budget and the Great Recession, the bosses plan to sub-contract the jobs of hundreds of housekeeping, dietary and other workers.  These mostly black and Latino workers have historically been the mass base for PLP here. The bosses and bankers are also closing Provident and Oak Forest Hospitals, and have not restored the hundreds of jobs cut in 2007. The County health system is already more closed than open and more patients will die, all run by Democrats and in Obama’s backyard.

One doctor, a veteran anti-racist fighter, told the board that closing these hospitals was racist murder, comparing these cuts to what happened in Nazi Germany’s medical system prior to WW II. Someone also exposed short-staffing. It’s a scientific fact that complications — including death — increase sharply when the nurse:patient ratio exceeds 1-to-5 on medical-surgical units. At Stroger Hospital, nurses on these wards are routinely assigned 7 or 8 uninsured patients. Across the street at the University of Illinois Hospital, which only takes insured patients, proper staffing ratios are used.

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Potential Power of Workers ‘On Full Display’: Kicking Out Capitalism Creates a REAL Revolution

Open violent struggle has erupted in several North African and Middle Eastern Arab nations, inspired largely by the massive uprising of workers and students in Tunisia. That revolt has driven out President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali who has fled to Saudi Arabia, reportedly with over a ton of stolen gold.

Workers are boldly fighting their bosses. In company after company —  airlines, insurance, petrochemical — workers are seizing management headquarters and demanding, with some success, that the bosses be fired. Workers are conducting regional and city-wide strikes nation-wide. In the cities of Sfax and Sidi Bouzid, mass workers’ organizations have actually seized political power, running out the mayor and city council and establishing direct organizational control over all city agencies.

These workers’ councils could develop a national network and seize power from the decrepit National Unity Government (NUG). But they don’t yet advocate expropriating the capitalists’ property and building a collectively-run communist society. Without bold communist leadership, they will fall victim to the illusion of “fair-play capitalism.” But revolutionary potential remains.

The sustained worker-student struggle continues to confront the remaining ministers from Ben Ali’s regime, including prime minister and self-proclaimed leader of a “National Unity” government Mohamed Ghannouchi.  Continued protests are demanding that all ministers of the Constitutional Democratic Rally (RDC) party be kicked out as simply being “Ben Ali light” who would maintain the same corrupt capitalist clique in power.

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‘That’s how capitalism works — it starves people…’ HS Students, Workers Dissect Profit System at Communist School

CALIFORNIA, January 17 — This last weekend forty students and workers went to central California to a communist school on Political Economy. Five high school students came from one city, traveling six hours there and six hours back just to study with us. We discussed what creates value, how the wage system works, and what creates capitalism’s crises. Here are some things that the high school students had to say about the school:

“My experience was fun. I learned about why certain jobs get a certain amount of money, but I don’t understand why they don’t take money from the rich people. Instead they take it from the people that can barely get by with the money they do have.”

“My experience today was quite interesting. I learned many new things as well. I learned how the system works more in depth, and where the value of certain things comes from. Everything was explained very well, which is a good thing because it gives me a better understanding of what’s going on. I heard many personal stories that involved the system and how they do things to profit off of their employees. Ultimately, the experience was very beneficial towards my understanding of political economy.”

“My experience was amazing. I learned the difference between socialism, capitalism, and communism. It was nice. I don’t understand why the government takes more taxes from us and less from the rich.”

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Building PLP Means Choosing Life Racist Healthcare Murdering Kids

“Medical conditions like this just happen and that’s God’s plan. My sister had Lupus and she just died two days ago. It happened so fast. I dreamed about her last night. Why did God take her? That’s not for me to know…It’s a spiritual thing,” said a patient as she lay in bed.

Because of diabetes she had both legs amputated below the knees, and she suffered from hypertension and HIV. But in the housing project where she lives, her story is not unique. Recently another child died of cardiac arrest following a severe asthma attack, the third in a month for one Emergency Medical Service (EMS) crew. There’s nothing spiritual about heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, HIV and asthma murdering black workers and youth. It’s called racism and it’s the plague of capitalism.

On January 14, the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) released its “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” (MMWR), focusing on racial disparities in U.S. health care. Among the findings:

   • Babies born to black women are up to three times as likely to die in infancy;

   • High blood pressure is twice as common among blacks as whites;

   • Blacks die of strokes and heart disease much more commonly than whites, and die younger;

   • Blacks, Latinos and Native Americans, whether gay or straight, all have higher rates of new infection with the AIDS virus than whites, and the situation is worsening.

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Egypt: Without Red Leadership, Capitalism Remains, Imperialism Wins

Mass uprisings are destabilizing Egypt, an essential ally of war-making U.S. imperialists. Capitalism itself, however, the root cause of imperialist war and of the rebelling workers' miseries, remains unthreatened. Unfortunately, the protesters aim solely at ousting dictator Mubarak. Lacking class consciousness, they do not seek to overthrow the profit system. Most follow either secular nationalist or Islamist politicians. Thus, even if Mubarak is ousted, workers in Egypt will continue to suffer under a new regime of exploiters. Nevertheless, our revolutionary communist Party can learn much from the courageous, though misguided, struggles in the streets of Cairo and elsewhere.

The uncertainty over whether Islamist or pro-U.S. bosses will rule Egypt has Obama & Co. worried sick. In 2006, open elections (which the protesters demand) gave anti-U.S., pro-Iranian Hamas control of the Palestinian Authority.

Today U.S. rulers fear that Muslim Brotherhood (MB) candidates might win in Egypt. MB leader and al Qaeda supporter Mohammed Akef told CBS News (5/22/08), “MB would send fighters to fight the occupation in Iraq and Palestine.” Mohamed Atta, reported ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, received anti-U.S. indoctrination as a member of MB in Egypt.

 U.S. War Machine Armed Dictator Mubarak

 Egypt holds vast significance in the sharpening rivalry among waning and rising imperialist powers. Martin Indyk, director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution and Clinton’s ambassador to Israel, spoke of “huge potential consequences for U.S. strategic interests in a vital region.” (NY Times, 1/30) The Times explained:

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Students, Parents, Teachers Fight School Bosses’ Racism: INTEGRATE, DON’T SEGREGATE!

Protesting before the hearingBROOKLYN, NY, January 11 — “They say cut back, we say fight back!” “Separate is never equal!” These were just two of the many chants that over 300 militant students, teachers and parents shouted while picketing outside the John Jay HS campus.

It preceded a public hearing on the racist Department of Education’s (DoE) proposal to four millions of dollars into installing a new, “selective school” within our building, catering to the mostly-white, middle-class Park Slope neighborhood. These are millions that could have been used all along to improve the four existing schools in the building. The “selective school” will segregate incoming white students from the current black and Latino school population

Our chants grew louder and our numbers mounted in a block-long picket line, joined by workers from a nearby hospital. Drivers honked their support. Students and teachers from many other city schools answered the call to protest the racism and continuing re-segregation of public schools. PL’ers have played a leading role in this struggle to win everyone to understand the DoE actions as a racist attack on the predominately black and Latino student population in the building.

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Capitalism Is Cause of Violence Tucson Gunman Murders 6; U.S. Imperialists Murder Millions

Capitalist politicians of all stripes are falling all over themselves to capitalize on the Tucson shootings and boost their popularity. Obama responded to the sickening massacre with sickening hypocrisy. At a memorial service there, he called for “more civility in our public discourse.” Meanwhile, Obama commits barbaric mass murder for the benefit of his liberal, imperialist bosses. As Obama spoke of “healing,” the U.S. war machine he heads was busy maiming and killing. Since Inauguration Day, Obama’s escalating Afghan war has slaughtered 2,002 civilians, most along a U.S.-planned pipeline route.

Jared Loughner murdered six people. But Obama & Co. perpetuate atrocities far more deadly against workers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Millions have died so that Exxon Mobil could gain access to Iraq’s biggest oilfield. Pilotless drones, Obama’s preferred instrument of terror, target villages in Pakistan and Yemen.

Obama commands secret U.S. death squads called Special Operations forces “in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning of last year....Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world” (Washington Post, 6/4/10). So it was particularly stomach-turning when assassin-in-chief Obama exploited the innocence of  nine-year-old Tucson victim Christina Green.

To sugar-coat his imperialist masters’ widening war agenda, Obama talked of “forging a country...worthy of her gentle, happy spirit.” In other countries, however, U.S. attacks regularly incinerate and dismember children Christina’s age.

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An Anti-Racist Struggle Grows in ‘Flatbush Gardens’

BROOKLYN, NY, December 29 — At a December retiree meeting of former city workers, “C” told us of a struggle our retiree group should support. She is a member of the tenants’ association of “Flatbush Gardens.” This is a sixty-year-old housing complex of some 59 buildings and over 10,000 tenants. Seventy members of Service Employee International Union (SEIU) Local 32BJ have been locked out by their employer, Renaissance Equity Holdings, since November 29, 2010. She told us that her tenant association had joined the picket lines already. They see a common interest in fighting a landlord who has been cited for over 7,000 violations in this housing complex. 

Many of us knew of this complex when it was called Vanderveer Estates. The management company wants to attract more affluent white tenants from Manhattan. The name has changed but the rats have remained.

A group of retirees visited the picket lines to show solidarity and to get to know these workers. We learned that the workers’ contract expired last spring and after they filed an Occupational Safety and Health Complaint in October, Renaissance locked them out. As is the experience of many workers, their boss is demanding a big cut (34%) in pay and reductions in family health coverage.

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France: Fierce Fight vs. Lipton Bosses Is No Tea Party

MARSEILLES, FRANCE, January 4 — Nearly 200 workers at the Fralib factory in nearby Gémenos are engaged in a fierce fight to prevent the Unilever company from closing its plant here, which has been producing Lipton Tea for 118 years.

Unilever has just “bought the U.S. company Alberto-Culver for $3.7 billion,” declared union steward Oliver Leberquier. “That’s proof they don’t have any financial worries.”

Last spring, the Fralib workers struck for nine weeks for a 200-euro/month ($260) raise but were forced to accept the company offer of 16-euros/month ($21), although they did win wage payment for three strike days, a week of paid holidays and a 1,200-euro ($1,560) one-time bonus.

Meanwhile, in 2008 then-Unilever CEO Patrick Cescau raked in 4.7 million euros for himself — almost 400,000 euros ($520,000) a month!

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