PL’ers Lead Hundreds to Defy Cops

LOS ANGELES, November 30 — Over 2,000 workers converged on LA’s City Hall on November 27, anticipating the police raid to remove the Occupy encampment. PLP mobilized a group of about 20 students and workers to show solidarity and help organize a defense of the camp. In the hours leading up to the midnight deadline, the PL group distributed 100 CHALLENGES and organized a picket line chanting, “The workers united will never be defeated” and “Whose streets? Our streets.”

As midnight neared, PL led the picket into the streets, defying the police who told the PL’er on the bullhorn leading the march to get back on the sidewalk. Eventually, what was a relatively small picket turned into several hundred protestors, taking over a street intersection next to the main Occupy encampment on the south lawn of City Hall.

Many expected a confrontation with the LAPD that night. However, it was not until the following night that the kkkops raided the camp, overwhelming the couple of hundred occupiers with a force of 1,400 cops. Under orders from the “progressive” LA Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, the cops utilized their best “community policing” techniques to avoid an all-out confrontation with the occupiers.

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Cops’ Attacks Can’t Stop Protest of Racist Tuition Hike

NEW YORK CITY, November 28 — Today the City University of New York (CUNY) trustees outdid themselves in fascist absurdity. They locked all Baruch College students, faculty, and other workers out of their own school so that they — bankers and ruling-class stooges appointed by the mayor and governor — could impose a racist 33% tuition hike on the mostly black and Latino and immigrant students.

The events of the previous Monday triggered the lock-down. On November 21, a militant group of 500 students arrived at the “public” meeting where the CEOs and other bosses that make up the Board of Trustees (BoT) supposedly listen to testimonies from the community. This is another capitalist lie. The decision had already been made.

Nevertheless, students and workers gathered, ready to make the BoT listen to them. CUNY responded with baton-wielding “public safety officers” and NYPD cops. Students were sitting in the lobby chanting, “Occupy the Lobby!” The cops attacked, swinging their batons wildly. In discussion during and after the event, PL’ers stressed that this was, and is always, the role of the kkkops: to terrorize workers, especially black, Latino and women workers, into submission.

We were not intimidated, and returned today for the BoT to officially vote on their racist plan. So angry were students and workers over last week’s cop-attack that CUNY bosses had to shut down the entire college to hold this meeting!  Like slave-owners whose greatest fear was the slave revolt, the bosses today acted out of fear for they could not trust anyone at Baruch. More than 15 students were arrested, including one student whom the cops sexually harassed.

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Brazil: Cops Occupy Workers’ ‘Favelas,’ Kill Youth

The working class in Brazil continues to pay a high price for having a  pseudo“leftist” government. These rulers work only to benefit the international capitalist class, spending the country’s international reserves to save Europe’s bosses from their financial crisis. Meanwhile, they continue to exploit Brazil’s workers.

During the first five days of November, 1,800 workers went on strike against LG Electronics, the Korean multinational, demanding the rehiring of ten workers fired for fighting to improve their miserable working conditions. In the state of Ceará, university professors and students have been on strike since November 11 against budget cuts.

Meanwhile, as pseudo-leftist president Dilma Rousseff talks of “democracy,” police in Rio de Janeiro occupied the favelas (slum neighborhoods) of Rocinha (which alone has 70,000 residents), Vidigal and Chácara do Chapéu. The action was justified as part of the Police Pacification Unit (UPP). The occupation began on November 13, to continue indefinitely.

The UPP, initiated by Governor Sergio Cabral in 2008 in the Santa Marta favela, is supposedly designed to expel drug-trafficking gangs from the favelas while installing community security systems. According to Rio de Janeiro’s town council, 29 of the city’s 605 favelas are already controlled by the UPP. Most are in the southern part of the city, where is also home to some of the richest neighborhoods. A good example is Rochinha, sandwiched between such luxurious neighborhoods as São Conrado and Leblon. Unlike most big cities, where the poor population is isolated on the periphery of the city, Rio’s poor occupy the hills throughout the city. The social inequalities are more obvious and transparent here.

Does it fight drug trafficking?

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Purdue U: Actions Mount to Fire Racist Prof

HAMMOND, IN, November 27 — Demonstrations at Purdue U. Calumet (PUC) against racist Professor Maurice Eisenstein show no signs of dying down. Students have been campaigning without let-up to force the administration to fire Eisenstein.

The students’ actions include circulating petitions, urging victims of Eisenstein’s racist and sexist attacks to file formal complaints, and organizing public demonstrations and a campus-wide forum. Despite right-wing opposition and institutional apathy, students are demanding nothing less than immediate termination of Eisenstein’s professorship at PUC, and won’t back down until that goal is achieved.

Eisenstein has used his classes to disseminate his extreme Zionist and imperialist rhetoric — advocating extermination of Arabs, and the colonization of their lands by Israelis and Americans. He has stepped far beyond the usual pro-imperialist stance on current events, propagating into hateful dehumanization of Arabs, blacks, Latinos, migrant workers, and women. His extremism has culminated in direct personal attacks on students and faculty.

Despite much evidence to show his complete unsuitability as a professor, the university has been apathetic to the point of complacency for almost two decades. Only after the impassioned protests from a multi-racial coalition of angry students has the university begun to take the issue seriously. Meanwhile, both Eisenstein and a small group of his supporters are hiding behind a right-wing excuse of “free speech” while turning a blind eye to his abuse of power as a professor and the potential consequences of racist indoctrination.

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L.A. Times Praises Karl Marx! Capitalism’s Savage Disease: Mass Unemployment

“The real number of unemployed or underemployed people in the U.S. is a stunning 26.9 million,” (LAT, 11/30), although figures below indicate it’s closer to 35 million.

“The term ‘reserve army of labor’ is vintage Karl Marx” admits the LA Times. “But,” it continues, “let’s not hold that against it if it’s on the mark. These workers are on reserve; they are standing ready to work. And their sheer numbers make them an army.”

The ‘8.6%’ Scam

The bosses’ media spouts a “drop” in the U.S. unemployment rate to 8.6% (from the previous month’s 9%). Obama hails this as a sign of economic recovery. But this spurious figure results from the fact that 300,000+ workers who gave up looking for non-existent jobs are no longer included in the labor force and therefore are not counted as unemployed. According to such fraudulent figuring, if a few million more workers give up looking for these non-existent jobs, the jobless rate might “drop” to 6%!

Shadowstats.com reports that this “drop” in the jobless rate “actually signaled ongoing economic collapse…not the ongoing recovery heralded by the Administration and…Wall Street,” given the “swelling ranks of ‘discouraged’ workers.”

Not only does the government’s 8.6% jobless rate not include part-time workers who want but can’t find full-time jobs, nor “discouraged” workers who’ve given up looking for work after 26 weeks (which would raise the rate to 22.6% — Shadowstats.com), but it also excludes:

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Students’ Sit-in Breaks Rules, Blasts Racist Bosses

CHICAGO, November 23 — The Occupy Wall Street movement came to Chicago State University (CSU) today as the Independent Student Union (ISU) led 75 students and faculty to occupy the president’s office for two hours.

An ISU leader listed local campus issues and explained that Illinois owes CSU $15 million, including $3 million in state grants. During the following speak-out, many students, tired of being disrespected and given the run-around, detailed the university’s failure to facilitate registration; to properly process withdrawals from a class (leading to Fs on the transcript); to repair crumbling infrastructure; to treat students with respect; to raise funds; and to improve communications with students.

A married couple, both CSU students, brought their children, showing them by their example that we need to unite and fight back. The father told President Watson that his administration was damaging CSU’s reputation by not providing a student-friendly environment. A student brought her mother, a CSU alumnus, who remembered that students had the same complaints when she was attending.

Support from Purdue

A transfer student, about to graduate, was incensed over the lack of recognition for maintaining a 4.0 average. Students who came from Purdue U. Calumet to support the occupation described their campaign against a racist professor on their campus.

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Act Against School Privatization ‘Fired up, won’t take it no more!’

CHICAGO, December 3 — More than 500 black, Latino, and white parents, students, education workers and other working-class Chicagoans, including PL’ers, assembled today at a local school to say, “We’re fired up; we won’t take it no more!” Earlier in the week, Chicago Public School (CPS) officials had announced the racist closing or restructuring of 21 schools. Since 2001, CPS has already closed 44 schools, “turned around” 17 more, and opened 80 charter schools in their place.

The overwhelming majority of the closed or reorganized schools are predominantly black or Latino. These attacks disrupt the lives of students, especially the disproportionate numbers of homeless children who attend them. The immediate aim of today’s conference, representing thousands, is to stop these proposals.

As many declared, the responsibility for these actions lay with the politicians at City Hall, the capitalists on the Board of Education, and the bank and corporation directors. They expressed their disgust with the  CPS spokespeople who claim that the changes will help prepare every student for college. In reality, students who move from one school to another generally do no better academically, and sometimes do worse.

The real motive for these actions is the money that comes from privatization. The ruling class has decided to spend less on educating poor black and Latino working-class students, in order to boost profits in the developing education business sector. Their plan for our children consists of unemployment, war, prison, and at best a low-wage, dead-end job, not college.

Students Aren’t Just Test Scores

Turnaround and charter schools are also models for the teaching of capitalist ideology. As conference speakers pointed out, many education workers at community-based schools, those targeted by CPS, take pride in serving the children and their families. They aim to provide support when loved ones die or become ill, or unemployed or lose their house. They nurture the emotional, artistic, and physical aspects of the child, as well as the intellectual. This is not what the capitalists want for our children.

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March vs. Columbia U.’s Ravaging of W. Harlem, Fake Jobs ‘Pledge’

NEW YORK CITY, December 9 — Today,  there was a breakthrough in the long struggle to force Columbia University to live up to its commitments to the West Harlem area that it has destroyed in order to build a new campus. Columbia promised to create 7,000 new jobs, but no one from the community has been trained or hired yet by the fake “Employment Information Office” just south of 125 Street.

At our past actions at this center to demand these jobs, we involved a few Columbia students and a small number of community residents and local church members. This time we had a very spirited demonstration, complete with drums and noisemakers, with a group of about 60, including 30 students, some supporters from Occupy Wall St, more church activists and members of the Coalition to Preserve Community, which has fought the expansion for years.

The marchers’ energy and militancy was exciting to the participants and passersby alike. We started at the gates of the Columbia campus where the NYC police and University security had previously tried to stop us from marching to the middle of campus; this time they didn’t even try.

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Workers, Students Battle Murderous Regime Fighting Fascism in Haiti

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, November 19 — Huguens Leroi was a 24-year-old student at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FASCH) campus of the University of Haiti (UEH), and an actor in a university theater group that commemorated the 2010 assassination of his activist mentor, Professor JnAnil Louis-Juste.  In October, Huguens was himself killed by two gunshots at a busy intersection near the Port-au-Prince airport. As usual, the police are lying about “an investigation being under way.” Another FASCH activist, Onald Auguste, was “disappeared” from the campus on October 31 (the second recent case), and has not been heard from since.  On November 10, students organized a one-day strike to protest his kidnapping, blocking roads with a demonstration at the Ministry of the Interior.

FASCH students regard these assassinations and disappearances as more than just business as usual by Haiti’s ruling class. They see them as part of a new attempt by President Michel Martelly to accelerate the move toward fascist social control. The Martelly regime is organizing vigilante killers known as milis wòz (literally “pink militias,” because Martelly often wears pink) to eliminate “extremists.” A music video on Haitian TV shows macho uniformed officer-thug types rapping and recruiting young men from the United Nations earthquake refugee camps, and lining up young children to salute them.

Martelly recently attempted to reinstate a Duvalier-style Haitian army under his direct control for the stated purpose of eliminating foreign and local “extremists” and “terrorists.” But this plan led Martelly into conflict with the imperialists who really rule Haiti. Although the U.S. embassy maneuvered to get Martelly into power and then supplied him with a prime minister from former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s staff (Gary Conille), they apparently do not trust him with his own army for now.  Martelly was forced to accept instead a beefed-up Haitian National Police. (The disagreement may have prompted Martelly’s attack on the U.S. embargo against Cuba during his visit to Havana this week.)

UN ‘Peacekeepers’: An Occupying Army

The National Police is no less a fascist force; one unit is now on trial in Les Cayes for the massacre of unarmed prisoners.  And behind the police, as always, stand the UN’s “peacekeepers,” the occupying army MINUSTAH, which recently had its mandate renewed with strong backing from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

FASCH students are fighting this fascist trend, linking up with unionized workers and warning all workers of the need to organize against it. An antifascist resistance cannot rely on liberal bourgeois forces. PLP in Haiti is saying that the only way to defeat fascism is to overthrow the capitalist system itself with communist revolution.  And the key to launching a revolutionary movement in Haiti is to build the international Party here as a communist fighting force. The struggle against rising fascism today will test and harden communists in Haiti and other students and workers for the even greater battles ahead. PL is in a position to lead this struggle because of our growing roots among workers both organized and unorganized, including the camp residents.

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U.S. Rulers Seek to Use ‘Occupy Wall Street’ to Re-elect Warmaker Obama

Occupy Wall Street has given U.S. capitalists high hopes that clash with the egalitarian goals of the movement’s rank and file. The bosses dream most fondly of enlisting OWS in re-electing war-maker Obama, who just upped the likelihood of a new major war by killing twenty-five Pakistani soldiers and opening a U.S. Marine base in Australia, opposite archrival China.  

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), U.S. imperialism’s top think tank, gushes that the occupiers “could emerge as a battle-hardened cadre of skilled organizers well-positioned to influence the issues at stake in the 2012 elections” (CFR website, 11/11/11). The CFR thinks that OWS can help sell Obama’s push to tax the rich to pay for global war readiness, in the guise of “fairness” and job creation: “Increasing taxes on capital gains and closing corporate tax loopholes would allow renewed investments in critical public goods like roads and railways.”

This plan dovetails with the U.S. Army War College’s calls for renewing “infrastructure required to effectively project our military forces overseas” (USAWC report, 3/15/06). But many in OWS see through the voting booth farce. At the New York City camp near Wall Street, the idea of voting was highly unpopular. Some protesters sat on voter registration tables set up by Democratic Party flunkies and refused to register.

Bosses Misguide Workers with ‘99%’ Politics

Savvier ruling-class strategists, however, understand that the success of OWS reflects the growing alienation of Obama’s base due to widening Middle East wars and a flagging U.S. economy. In the liberal, imperialist, Rockefeller-bankrolled Nation magazine (12/12/11), William Greider wrote, “Many of the young people and minorities who campaigned and voted for [Obama] in 2008 might drift away to Occupy’s direct action... [and] may just skip voting in 2012.”

On the other hand, Greider sees how his imperialist masters could benefit from the lack of revolutionary, communist leadership within OWS: “Yet this new force can ultimately help Obama if he responds to its message. Led by the young, the movement is aligning with the reviving militancy of labor and other progressive constituencies. The spirit is open-armed and patriotic, not negative and divisive.... [T]his movement is not about electoral politics — not yet, anyway. It is about saving the country.”

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