Communists Counter School’s Racist Lies

TEL AVIV-JAFFA, December 4 — Forgoing a chance to eat turkey on Thanksgiving and celebrate the decimation of the indigenous in the Americas, PLP members traveled to Israel-Palestine to meet with veteran and new PLP members here. One new member was a Palestinian student. He attends a private “progressive” school, where he is the only non-Jewish student in his class. He asked his teachers if he could invite us to speak to his classmates and, they said yes. What we discovered what a racist education system that eradicated the history of this region.

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Between Mass Struggle and Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me burst upon the public in the midst of national turmoil over racist police terror. It is a central text in the college-wide freshman seminar at Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, DC. Coates appears regularly on MSNBC television network in connection with the Black Lives Matter movement.
But in the words of the famous dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, “What about the working class?”

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In Solidarity with Muslim and Arab Workers

THE BRONX, November 30 — Our Progressive Labor Party collective here is stepping up our anti-racist efforts in the name of the international working class and learning to give better communist leadership in our immigrant rights organization.
One constant topic of discussion is inter-imperialist rivalry and war. We read the CHALLENGE editorials about the fight among imperialists for control of oil and natural gas in the Middle East. We read about the rise of ISIS, and about the war in Syria and the heart-wrenching mass exodus of workers there, hundreds of thousands of whom have already died. Our Party’s goal of communist revolution, however long-range, is more urgent than ever.

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Bosses Use Mass Shooting for Imperialism, Fascism

In a period of escalating inter-imperialist competition, the capitalist ruling class will seize on every opportunity to use racism to divide workers—and to enlist them into the next big war.
The latest tragedy came on Dec. 2, when 14 workers were killed and 21 injured in San Bernadino, California. The two shooters, whose motives remain unclear, had apparently proclaimed allegiance to the Islamic State, or ISIS. The U.S. bosses quickly used their government and media to sensationalize the crime and whip up anti-Muslim racism. Beyond trivializing the deaths, the rulers are exploiting workers’ fears to gain support for more fascist police repression against Muslim, Black, and immigrant workers—and for the inevitable, global military conflict to defend U.S. imperialism and its declining empire.

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Mario Woods: Murdered by SFPD

SAN FRANCISCO, December 2 — “They executed my child…25 bullets in my baby”…He “was was supposed to start UPS today. He got his uniform,” …Gwen Woods described the police murder of her son Mario Woods and that his future on a real job was snuffed out. A Bayview resident said that the video is hard to watch: “He got shot like he was at a firing squad. Deplorable.”

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Laquan Present in Struggle: Now and Forever

CHICAGO, November 27 — “Your power is in the streets, not looking around in stores! Take the streets!” A member of the Progressive Labor Party said this in response to a Black nationalist mis-leader during a march on a popular U.S. shopping day called “Black Friday.”A multiracial group of Progressive Labor Party members and friends attended the march on Michigan Avenue to protest the racist murder of Laquan McDonald by the Chicago kkkops. This area is where many expensive stores and shopsare, and was called by phony mis-leader Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/ PUSH Coalition, and others. The Black nationalist mis-leaders wanted to lead the antiracist workers into the stores, “just look” around, and not buy anything.

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Fightback for Kyam’s Justice Inspires New Generation

BROOKLYN — Twenty-nine months into the struggle for Kyam Livingston, murdered in 2013 by Brooklyn cops’ racist medical neglect in Central Booking Jail, an increased presence of high school students in the monthly rally represented an important step forward.  This advance didn’t happen spontaneously. Earlier in November, Kyam’s mother, Anita Neal, joined Natasha Duncan—whose sister, Shantel Davis, killed in 2012 by the New York Police Department—in visiting a local high school. Along with a focused effort by Progressive Labor Party youth clubs in Brooklyn, the two women helped introduce a new generation of young working-class fighters to this anti-racist fight.

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Venice Beach March Builds Anti-Racist Organizers

LOS ANGELES—Three racist murders by the Los Angeles Police Department over the past six months were protested on the Venice boardwalk by 30 members of two Unitarian churches, along with members of Progressive Labor Party. The killings of Brendon Glenn, Jason Davis, and Jascent-Jamal Lee “Shakespeare” sparked chants of “Black, Latin, Asian, White! To Smash Racism We Must Unite!”

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In Rekia Boyd’s Memory, Smash Racist KKKops

CHICAGO, November 17 — Rekia’s brother led the crowd in, “I am Rekia Boyd!”  Outside the hearing, PLP led, “Racist cops you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”
More than a hundred people protested at the monthly Chicago Police Board hearing against the March 2012 murder of Rekia Boyd, a young Black woman, by off-duty kkkop Dante Servin yet to be fired. We distributed CHALLENGE and a leaflet about the Paris attacks. We exposed how the police terrorize workers to maintain the boss’s system.

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Aids Day Rally Attacks Racist Profiteering Drug Companies

Washington, DC, December 1 —Chanting “Pills Cost Pennies, Greed Costs Lives” a spirited picket line challenged the pharmaceutical lobby, PhRMA at noon on World Aids Day. Friends and members of Progressive Labor Party, Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association and DC Fights Back attacked the exorbitant prices charged by Gilead Sciences for curative Hepatitis C medications, which hit Black workers the hardest (see article in Challenge, (date)). Protesters also attacked international trade agreements that will deny many HIV medications to countries such as Vietnam, and the profits made by drug companies on the back of workers who pay taxes for government drug development and then have to watch more tax dollars given back to the companies from Veterans Affairs, Medicaid and Medicare funding. Protesters also attacked the tax dodges (“inversion”) when companies like Pfizer merge with Allergen in Ireland to avoid paying U.S. taxes, declaring “Inversion Is Perversion”!