NYPD Murders Deborah Danner Don’t Vote— Organize vs. Racism

BRONX, NY, October 20—“Black cop, white cop, all the same; Racist terror is the name of the game” This chant echoed throughout Pugsley Ave. in the Bronx, as a woman comrade led a group of protestors to the 43rd precinct to protest the racist murder of 66-year-old Deborah Danner. As some reformist leaders of the protest called for “better politicians” and “better” laws, members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) called for revolution to replace the “whole damn system” with a world without racism and sexism, and that’s communism!

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U.S. Elections Growing Fascism & War

Dump electoral politics and support the fight for communism by purchasing this graphic hoodie. click the image to donate.The capitalist class around the world is sliding towards wider war and the various national bosses are moving towards more fascism amid growing volatility.  This is the true nature of capitalism. Liberal democracy is a mask that the bosses remove when it is “inconvenient”. They then use their state apparatus, the politicians, media, police and military to increasingly rule with the iron fist of fascism creating further chaos as bosses fight each other and attack the working class
This election has seen an unprecedented effort by the ruling class to use the state to elect Hillary Clinton.
The building up of the openly racist and sexist Nazi Trump by the liberal press in the primaries was meant to get an opponent that would scare the working class towards Clinton.
 “In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the candidates, but make them [Cruz, Trump and Carson] more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream Republican Party.
We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.” (email from Clinton campaign to DNC, dated 4/7/2015. Reprinted in Counterpunch, 10/11/2016)
Trump became the Republican candidate the main wing ruling class ultimately settled on out of fear that Clinton could lose to Cruz and thus strengthen the relatively smaller Koch-led “Tea Party” bosses.
Black, Women Workers refused War
One main reason the rulers want Clinton is to win Black and women workers to fight the bosses wars. The last 15 years of a two front war in the Middle East exposed

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Protesters Decry State Murder of Jessica Williams

photo used from Sana SaleemBAY AREA, October 22—Workers and students from Progressive Labor Party and friends demonstrated against the racist and sexist murder of Jessica Williams, a Black mother of five. Sergeant Justin Erb killed Jessica on a Thursday, May 21 this year in Bayview, the only Black neighborhood in San Francisco.
The police try to justify her murder by saying she was driving a stolen car. This is similar to the racist, sexist murders of Shantel Davis (June 2012) in Brooklyn, New York. The police try to paint these Black women workers as criminals in order to justify their murders. We refuse to accept this! None of these women deserved to die!

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Workers Seize Control of DA’s Townhall

LOS ANGELES, October 17—What was supposed to be a peaceful, orchestrated town hall meeting with the Black District Attorney of Los Angeles, Jackie Lacey, was quickly taken over by hundreds of angry multiracial protestors, with chants that shook the room. “Shut it down, shut it down!”  This action emphasized the vital importance of fighting racism in any reform struggle and several friends moved closer to the revolutionary communist ideas of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP). As the Ferguson rebels have said, “It’s the whole damn system.”
Los Angeles boasts the most diverse police department in the country while also leading the nation with the most racist murders by cops!  Since 2000, nearly 1,000 people have been killed in LA County and since 2004 over 2,000 people have been killed in six Southern California counties.  Even with all of this bloodshed, only one cop has ever been indicted and he was later acquitted.

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West Wednesdays: Letters to Lynch Campaign Ignites More Fighters

BALTIMORE, October 19—Powerful “West Wednesday” rallies continue to demand justice for Tyrone West and for all working-class victims of systematic capitalist police terror. Such rallies have been held every single week since the vicious, racist police murder of Tyrone in July 2013. Among fighters who participate in the weekly West Wednesday rallies, there is a growing understanding, due to PLP’s continual presence and influence, that the root of the problem is the system of capitalism.
Black Bosses, Enemy of Workers
The police—along with City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, both Black women and both of whom have refused to prosecute the killer cops that took Tyrone’s life—are part of capitalist state power. Along with the military, courts, prisons and federal government, this state power is, in reality, an apparatus that exists for the purpose of violently suppressing the working class. And, since Black workers are the most oppressed and the boldest in fighting back against injustice, state power terrorizes Black workers and students most violently of all.
Recently, Tyrone’s family has asked that many of us send letters to the national Attorney General, Loretta Lynch (fitting name) – another Black woman, who heads the Department of Justice (DOJ) – demanding that the case be reopened, and that the guilty cops be prosecuted and incarcerated.

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Haiti: After Hurricane, Rise in Cholera

The cholera epidemic is spreading in Haiti following the devastation wrought by Hurricane Matthew. While the hurricane was a natural disaster, the cholera is not. It is a disaster caused by capitalist profit and the United Nations. Pharmaceutical companies were “unable” to produce enough vaccine and still make a profit. So they didn’t. Also not profitable were the building of clean water and sanitation systems to prevent the epidemic. So they weren’t built.
Six years later “… cholera is stalking the areas gutted by the hurricane, …where clean water was already hard to find, long before the storm...Without clean water or disinfectant, the people are defenseless...The toll from cholera is unknowable” (NYT, 10/15).

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Fight Displacement of Working Class Families

NEW YORK CIY, October 11—A local rally denounced the racist displacement of working-class families.
Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members are active in a community organization that is confronting evictions and dislocation. Members of the community organization were frustrated and angry. A community coalition led by evangelical pastors organized a march supposedly against gentrification. In reality the purpose of the march was to win the community to religion and to their churches. They actually discouraged any kind of fightback, as a sound truck blared out religious music and people distributed church cards.
They boldly chanted, “Tenants, yes. Evictions, no,” and distributed 800 flyers calling on tenants to fight back. The contradiction was obvious to all. The working class in the area grabbed the PLP flyers, saying, “This is what we need.”

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War and “Peace”: Colombia’s No Deal Blocks U.S. Plans

On October 2, the peace deal between the Colombian government and the fake leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was narrowly defeated in a public vote, leaving a 50-year conflict in limbo. While the deal may still be revived, the “no” vote—like Britain’s Brexit vote in June—exposes the limits of imperialist control by the main wing of the U.S. ruling class, which had pushed for a settlement as a tool to expand its presence in Colombia.
As communists, we know that life under capitalism is anything but peaceful for the international working class (see history of fake left movements in Latin America on page 4). However the deal in Colombia sorts out, it will be no victory for workers. Instead, it will enrich a section of the Colombian ruling class while opening new opportunities for imperialists from the U.S., Europe and Asia.

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Fighting Alongside the Masses to Fight the Storm

Since the evening of the hurricane, our comrades were out to help people in danger. In one provincial town in the South that was hit hard by Matthew, we kept in phone contact until the networks went down. We warned against going out because of flying debris from roofs. During the night, the brother of a comrade, himself close to the Party, facilitated the evacuation of several disabled people.

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Hurricane Matthew in Haiti A Capitalist Disaster

Haiti, October 8—Hurricane Matthew has struck Haiti with a vengeance this week. The working class of Haiti has been attacked twice by the bosses—once by climate change that brought on the hurricane itself (see box, page 4), and again by the total disregard from local and imperialist bosses for human life. For both the hurricane and the destruction of lives and livelihood, capitalism is guilty as charged.
Over 1,000 are known dead, and more than 500,000 affected by the collapse of tens of thousands poorly built “little box” houses. Crops were totally uprooted and untold thousands of farm animals died in mainly three regions, South, Southeast and Grand’Anse.

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