Profit System Hazardous to Workers’ Health; Protest Racist Attacks on Brooklyn Hospitals

BROOKLYN, January 11 — Hundreds of angry hospital workers and supporters rallied loudly in front of the Brooklyn Marriott Hotel here this week as racist financier Stephen Berger, a darling of Governor Cuomo, announced his plan to “save” health care in the borough of Brooklyn. Workers who had never been at such a protest (or at least not for a long time) chanted as bosses from Downstate Hospital, Wall Street moguls and Berger himself entered the hotel for a fancy breakfast.

Brooklyn is a borough of 2.5 million people.  One in five live below the poverty line and two in five are on Medicaid. An untold number are without any health insurance. In 1980, Brooklyn had 26 hospitals — now it has 15. There are now 41% fewer acute care beds, 2.3 beds per 1,000 residents, compared with Manhattan’s 4.7, the state’s 3.1 and the nation’s 2.6. Disparities in health by income and “race” are concentrated in certain New York City communities, including several in Brooklyn. In 2001, life expectancy in our poorest neighborhoods was eight years shorter than in its wealthiest; that is 4,000 extra premature deaths/year in the poorest communities.

Racism: The Worst Disease

The facts show the racist nature of the U.S. health care system. Brooklyn is 36% black and 20% Latino. Latino New Yorkers are twice as likely to have diabetes. Black New Yorkers are three times more likely to die of diabetes than white residents. Ninety-four percent of elevated blood levels in New York City are among African Americans, Latinos and Asians. If infant mortality rates were equalized, the lives of some 200 babies of these ethnic groups would be saved each year (NYC DOHMH “Health Disparities in NYC,” 2004).

The hospitals in Brooklyn who serve its poorest residents have been set up to fail by Medicaid cuts. Stephen Berger, a hedge fund mogul and part of the unelected government of New York has led a task force for Governor Cuomo to come up with a plan to “rescue” health care in Brooklyn. He proposes closing Downstate Hospital in central Brooklyn and Kingsborough Psychiatric Hospital.

Another of the proposals is to invite private investors into Brooklyn hospitals. We have already seen for-profit Medisys’ disastrous mismanagement of  Brookdale Medical Center. We’ve seen Continuum executives making between one and two million dollar salaries while millions of dollars at Long Island College Hospital’s real estate and other assets disappeared under their management. We can’t stand by and watch healthcare for profit drain other hospitals in the poor and black and Latino neighborhoods and, then abandon them for New York State to rescue (or not).

After the rally, workers asked, “Did we accomplish anything? Did anything change?” Our answer is that life is a constant struggle between the working class and the big businessmen who run the economy and the government. We were there in force as this New York ruling class announced its plan to close two public hospitals in the underserved borough of Brooklyn. We took strength from each other. But stopping their attacks is going to take more action. We need to unite patients, communities and workers, black, Latino and white, to oppose them at every stage of their plan, much like what was done during the Civil Rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s.

Interestingly, the unions were absent from this action. The union that made a deal with the Berger hospital closures a few years ago, SEIU-1199, which represents many of the affected Brookdale and Interfaith Hospital workers, was nowhere to be seen. Also the unions from Kings County Hospital, which is across the street from Downstate, including the city union’s District Council 37, were conspicuously absent. Brooklyn patients and  jobs are in jeopardy. We need working-class unity, not territorialism!

The bottom line is that we live in a capitalist system where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer; a system where the only funds the demopublicans “can’t” cut are for oil wars and bailouts of banks “too big to fail.” We have to fight against these attacks on medical care. But living conditions for the working class, especially black and Latino workers, are so rotten under this system that we will never be healthy until we rid ourselves of the profiteers and run things according to the needs of our class. Contact revolutionary communist PLP to find out more.

Imperialism Program for Africa: Billions in Profits, Pennies for AIDS

PART II

(Conclusion. In our post the source of AIDS was traced to the holocaust-like poverty heaped on Africans through colonialism, forced labor and slavery, creating starvation conditions which impelled these super-oppressed people to kill apes for food, apes which–it later turned out–carried the AIDS virus.)

Starting in the 1960′s, African societies changed from colonialism to rule by indigenous nationalist or fascist rulers allied with imperialism. For example, the Belgian Congo became Zaire. Patrice Lumumba was assassinated by the CIA. They installed Mobuto, a worthy successor to King Leopold in greed and bloodthirstiness. South Africa and Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) remained under fascist apartheid throughout this period. Armies of male migrant workers left the countryside for the newly-crowded cities, while their wives remained behind in remote rural areas. Prostitution became a major growth industry, some European companies even setting up whorehouses near their factories for their workers. A seemingly endless series of nationalist and inter-imperialist wars sent millions of soldiers and refugees all over central Africa.

Enslaved by the global market economy, conditions created by colonialism continued and worsened in “post-colonial” African societies. HIV spread like wildfire through populations ravaged by poverty, war, famine and disease. HIV spread to Europe and the U.S., and then to Haiti and Thailand, primarily through sex tourism, often child prostitution. Prostitution and dirty needles spread it to Latin America, India and Eastern Europe, centers of new epidemics. The IMF’s (International Monetary Fund) stranglehold on poor countries caused massive unemployment, promoted prostitution, imposed cutbacks in health care and education and made life-saving drugs unaffordable.

Sexism kills, just as surely as–and combined with–racism. In Africa, traditional oppression of women has meshed with new, profit-driven forms of oppression. In southern Africa, married women often don’t dare ask their husbands to wear condoms, and are pressured by relatives to stay unprotected for maximum fertility. Husbands are expected to have many sex partners while their wives are expected to be monogamous.

Some day the HIV pandemic will be known as one of imperialism’s worst crimes. Rulers in both Africa and the U.S. claim that the situation is hopeless, and that millions are doomed. Yet the money it would take to provide effective prevention and therapy now ($100 billion yearly) is only a small fraction of what imperialists spent on wars against Iraq and Vietnam. It is an even smaller fraction of the profits they’ve made from African rubber, diamonds, gold, copper, oil and slave labor. In a few countries (like Uganda and Thailand) even simple prevention campaigns have had a big impact. So building a larger movement now, that refuses to accept rules protecting the bosses’ profits, can save many more lives. Mass production and distribution of pirated anti-AIDS drugs, in collaboration with medical workers in Africa, can prevent transmission and provide treatment for millions.

A larger movement must also lead a sharp and prolonged struggle against sexism in order to transform relationships between men, women and children, ending prostitution and sex slavery. It must fight to end the super-exploitation of migrant labor. These goals can only be achieved through the revolutionary destruction of capitalism. The experience of once socialist China in eradicating prostitution, syphilis and drug addiction (which have all returned in now capitalist China) shows that revolutionary communism can, even in poor societies, solve massive public health problems.

Sources: Hahn, B.H. et al. (2000); Korber et al. (2000); Science 287: 607 Chitnis et al. (2000), AIDS Res. Hum. Retroviruses 16: 5-8; Gao et al. (1999) Nature 397: 436-441; Hooper, E.M. (1999) The River; Schoofs (2000) “The Agony of Africa” (at http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/africa) ScientificAmerican, January 2000; New York Times, 6/28/00 and 7/9/00. Recommended background: A. Hochschild King Leopold’s Ghost; W. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa; B. Davidson, “The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State”

 

King Leopold’s Legacy: Imperialism and the Origin of AIDS

“I can choose to die of starvation now, or of AIDS later”—Prostitute in Harare, Zimbabwe

A continuing holocaust of mind-numbing dimensions. Fifteen million have already died. Thirty-four million are HIV-infected, including 25 million in sub-Saharan Africa. HIV/AIDS will kill 67% of today’s teenagers in some African countries. Women are twice as likely as men to become infected. Thirty million African orphans are predicted by 2010, life expectancies dropping from 70 years to 30 in some countries. If neutron bombs were dropped on the dozen biggest cities of Africa, the damage could not be worse. International response to this crisis has been obscene. Bosses and politicians fight over drug prices and profits, while they spend much more on Viagra and baldness remedies ($333 million QUARTERLY earnings, according to Pfizer), than on all international HIV programs in sub-Saharan Africa ($600 million YEARLY of international aid for HIV/AIDS).

Though many see the AIDS pandemic either as a “natural” disaster or as a biological warfare conspiracy, it is actually rooted in the devastation imperialism has inflicted on African societies. This first of a series of articles on the political economy of AIDS will discuss where the HIV virus and the AIDS pandemic in Africa came from.

Scientists have recently learned much about the origin of HIV. Like influenza and rabies, AIDS is a disease transmitted from animals to humans. The closest relatives of HIV are SIVs, viruses carried by apes and monkeys. HIV-1 most resembles a chimpanzee SIV, found in rain forests of coastal West Africa. HIV-2, a milder West African virus, is nearly identical to a monkey SIV. These viruses have lived in their natural hosts for millions of years and don’t make them sick. Among scientists, the currently favored idea of how the viruses jumped into humans is that people hunted chimps and monkeys for meat, and cut themselves while butchering.

HIV is relatively new to humans. The earliest verified HIV case was in 1959, in Kinshasa, Congo; African blood samples from earlier times are free of the virus. HIV exploded in Africa during the early 1970’s, just before it spread to the U.S. and Europe. Very early cases were found near the borders of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. From there it quickly spread to Zambia and Tanzania. Before the 1970’s, AIDS was as unknown in Africa as in the U.S.

HIV evolves rapidly. Its gene sequences accumulate mutations in a steady, clock-like manner. The more differences, the more time has passed since viruses had a common ancestor. By comparing the genes of currently circulating viruses, it is possible to make an informed guess as to when the common M type of HIV-1, the one responsible for the worldwide pandemic, began. The best guess is in the 1930’s.

HIVs not only jumped from animals to humans recently; they also did so OFTEN, at least four times. This is inferred from the fact that some HIV strains are genetically more similar to SIVs than to each other. So it seems that HIV is relatively easy to catch from animals, and that no special mutations are needed to make it virulent in humans. In fact, a lab worker recently developed AIDS from a monkey SIV after an accidental needle stick.

So, if the virus jumps easily to humans, why did the pandemic not start until the late 20th century? What changed that made repeated transfer to humans more likely and explosive growth a certainty?

Until the late 19th century, most Africans farmed and lived in rural villages. Then feverish land grabs among imperialists—seeking rubber, gold, ivory and diamonds—created the largest forced labor system since African-American slavery. For example, King Leopold II of Belgium seized the Congo and ruled it for years as his personal rubber plantation. Fifteen million Congolese died in this genocidal holocaust. Forced labor was the rule in colonial Africa. Copper mines in Katanga (Congo) rounded up miners from Zambia, Rwanda, Angola and Mozambique. Colonial armies drafted millions of Africans during both world wars. During the 1930’s, the French built a railroad through coastal West Africa, drafting hundreds of thousands of African laborers from distant locations and marching them through the rain forest under appalling conditions of near-starvation. According to one theory, it is here that Africans first were exposed to SIVs, as workers made desperate by starvation had to hunt apes as food.

Another theory places the origin of AIDS in the Belgian Congo and neighboring countries. In his thoughtful book, The River, Edward Hooper argues that HIV spread to humans through racist trials of polio vaccines. During the late 1950’s, Hilary Koprowski of Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute gave an experimental oral vaccine to over 300,000 Africans, using them as guinea pigs. Hooper suggests that Koprowski may have grown vaccine poliovirus in chimp cells contaminated with the SIV ancestor of HIV. Hooper’s ideas lack solid evidence, but they are being taken seriously enough to prompt testing of remnant vaccine stocks.

Whichever theory turns out to be true, it is clear that the crossover of the virus was a result of conditions created by colonialism. But what caused HIV’s later explosive growth? (Continued tomorrow)

Lesson of Harper’s Ferry Raid

Working-Class Violence: A Key to Revolution

In mobilizing the October 17 Harper’s Ferry march to commemorate the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s raid and to finish the job, two keys to revolutionary change stand out: revolutionary violence and multi-racial unity.

Revolutionary Violence

The government of a capitalist society enforces the exploitative and racist oppression of the working class by any means necessary, including violence by the cops at home and the military abroad. The capitalist state asserts a monopoly on the right to use violence, and uses it whenever workers and rebels threaten the bosses’ rule — on picket lines, in community rebellions against racism or in insurrections threatening bosses’ investments worldwide. The working class has no choice but to meet this capitalist violence with organized mass violence of its own. Failure to do so guarantees defeat.

Consider the Garrisonian abolitionists in the 1830s and ‘40s. They felt that with “moral suasion” slave-owners would eventually surrender their slaves. But “morality” will never trump the economic advantage of exploitation by elite classes, be they slaveholders or capitalists. The battle in Kansas (see CHALLENGE, 9/30) and the raid on Harper’s Ferry brought home that truth, and the ensuing Civil War demonstrated most certainly that only great violence could end the exploitation of chattel slavery.

Slavery was violence. The capture in Africa, the leg irons and imprisonment of the Middle Passage across the Atlantic on slave ships, the whip of the overseers to enforce interminable backbreaking work, and the master’s branding iron, jail cell and noose maintained slavery. The federal government guaranteed the legitimacy of this daily violence in Article IV of the U.S. Constitution and supporting laws, and used its armed might against both Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion and the 1859 Harper’s Ferry Raid.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 restated the Constitution’s provision making it illegal to aid escaped slaves but now required citizens of Northern states to actively assist their recapture whenever asked by private slave-catchers and/or federal marshals. Refusing to help could mean six months in prison or a $1,000 fine, even if the person seized had never been a slave at all! No trial by jury was allowed in such cases, since Northern juries would not generally convict someone who opposed slavery. No supposedly escaped slave could ever testify.

The 1857 Dred Scott Decision deepened this tyranny. The Supreme Court ruled that no black person, slave or free, was a U.S. citizen and had no right to bring a case to court. This essentially legalized slavery nation-wide and officially endorsed racist doctrine.

Racist Laws Still Exist

Similar practices continue today! The U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) staffs checkpoints on roads leading north from Mexico (sometimes hundreds of miles above the border), randomly stopping and searching vehicles, particularly those containing people who “look Latino.” Those who cannot prove their citizenship or produce documents showing they’re legally in the country are jailed and deported. ICE has employed similar tactics in raids on factories, movie theaters and wherever Latino workers are concentrated.

Similarly, the police beat and kill African American and Latino workers with impunity across the country.  No jury trial for them, just cops acting as judge, jury and executioner!  Killer cops are rarely indicted and virtually never convicted. Such state terrorism is designed to keep workers docile, divided and intimidated, echoing chattel slavery.

And so our class faces a violent, mighty foe. We must not shrink from what must be done today, organizing in factories, in the military and on campuses, not merely to resist but to turn the guns around on the world’s most violent ruling class. But such violence must be based in the masses.

Consider John Brown’s trip east after the January 1859 battle in Kansas. During this journey, his band of 15 helped 11 slaves escape and confronted and defeated 60 government soldiers trying to capture them. He fought and moved about with confidence since thousands of anti-slavery activists backed him wherever he went. In fact, when the Kansas governor demanded, via telegraph, that the U.S. Marshal at Springdale “capture John Brown, dead or alive,” the marshal responded with great irony, “If I try to capture John Brown, it’ll be dead, and I’ll be the one…dead!”

Similarly, Brown boldly declared that since President Buchanan had offered $250 for his capture, Brown would give $2.50 for the safe delivery of James Buchanan’s body.

A massive, militant anti-slavery movement existed, powerful enough to markedly limit federal government action. It had grown from the thousands who escaped from slavery and from their supporters. John Brown did not march on Harper’s Ferry to create a movement, but to put that movement on the offensive, just as he’d done in Kansas.

The Progressive Labor Party has mobilized against hundreds of demonstrations and attacks by the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and Minutemen. Only the presence of hundreds of cops prevented the fascists from being torn apart by anti-racist fighters led by PLP. Similarly, it was only the power of the federal government to enforce laws that protected the slave-owners from being crushed by enslaved workers and their allies.

As the communist movement grows once again, we must prepare to defeat ruling-class violence with mass, working-class violence that sweeps away all capitalist institutions and bosses. Nothing short of this will enable us to rebuild a society based on equality, collectivity and sensible management of the planet’s resources for the needs of the working class, now and in the future. J

(Next issue: The Importance of
Multi-Racial Unity

OBAMA: NEW CEO FOR U.S. IMPERIALI$M

The expanding “war on terror,” the stock market crash, mass racist unemployment and home foreclosures, police terror, fascist immigration raids and racist budget cuts are all built into the racist profit system. These are the issues that moved millions to respond to Barack Obama’s call for “CHANGE.”

But Obama isn’t offering anything new, except a liberal face in the White House. His cabinet and top advisors are mostly Clinton and Carter re-treads with decades of loyal service to Chase, Citibank and Exxon-Mobil. His National Security Advisor is mass murderer General James Jones who led the saturation bombing of Yugoslavia, killing thousands.

Every president is a defender of capitalism, a system composed of two classes: the bosses who own everything and profit off the backs of the overwhelming majority, and the working class, who only own our labor power and produce all value, including the profits of the bosses.

The government is run by this ruling class, which makes Obama the new CEO for U.S. imperialism.
The bankers and billionaires comprising the U.S. ruling class will continue spilling rivers of blood to maintain their control of Mid-East oil and their rank as the top imperialist power. While they try to secure a permanent presence in Iraq, they will escalate the war to Afghanistan, Pakistan and, if necessary, Iran.

‘NATIONAL SERVICE’ — A BACK-DOOR DRAFT TO SUPPLY CANNON FODDER FOR THE BOSSES’ OIL WARS

One of Obama’s main goals is winning millions of youth, especially black youth, to wrap themselves in the American flag and fight for U.S. imperialism in these oil wars. Right now, amid this emerging Depression (see page 5), millions of black and Latino workers and youth as well as workers in general are becoming fed up with the effects of a racist profit system gone wild. So Obama’s job is to win them back with his all-class unity — “we all have to pull together and sacrifice” to save the system — which masks his role as the bosses’ servant. The rulers’ National Service scam is designed to get millions, especially youth, to work for low, or no, wages, as volunteers “to support America,” particularly in the military.

Obama, Bush and McCain all fell in line and supported the $700 billion bailout of the bankers and Wall Street parasites while millions swell the unemployment lines. Racist misery is built into the profit system.  Black workers suffer twice the unemployment rate of white workers (four times the rate for black youth). In Detroit, Milwaukee and Buffalo, over 50% of black males, age 16-64, are unemployed. Millions more are either under-employed or have given up looking for work. Twelve million undocumented workers and youth face racist detention camps and deportations just for looking for work.

Obama will now preside over the world’s largest prison population, 2.4 million, 70% black and Latin males. Hardly a black or Latino family in the U.S. doesn’t know someone who’s either in jail, on probation or parole. This result of racist police terror rivals the old South Africa apartheid system.

One of Obama’s mentors, Chicago’s Mayor Daley, rose to power as a State’s Attorney prosecuting black workers and youth who “confessed” to crimes they never committed while being tortured in Chicago police stations. The prison doors will not swing open on Obama’s watch. The victims of racist police terror will not be sent home to their families.

The change we need won’t come from reshuffling capitalist politicians and bureaucrats no matter how “smart” they appear. We need mass actions and a mass movement, not to “fix” capitalism but to smash it. We need to turn every attack into an opportunity to build a mass revolutionary communist PLP that can ultimately lead the working class to power and to a world based on meeting the needs of the international working class.

FIGHT BACK!

• IN THE FACTORIES AND UNIONS. Oppose every plant closing; organize strikes and plant occupations, like the 240 Latino and black workers at Republic Windows did in Chicago last month. Learn from the striking UAW workers at American Axle in Detroit, Seattle’s Boeing workers and Stella D’Oro workers in the Bronx. Show solidarity with rebelling students and workers in Greece, throughout Europe and China who fought fascist conditions this year. Build unemployment committees on our jobs and in our unions to unite laid-off workers with their still-employed brothers and sisters.

• IN THE COMMUNITIES. Organize factory, union and neighborhood committees to fight evictions and immigration raids. Work in community centers and church soup kitchens and food pantries, talking to volunteers and those in need about the racist profit system and the need to destroy it.

• IN THE SCHOOLS. Fight budget cuts, racist testing, militarization and fascist conditions.

• IN THE MILITARY. Bring the fight against imperialist war and racist police terror in all these organizations to show how the only way out of this endless and escalating war on terror is to win soldiers and sailors to rebel against the brass and overthrow the capitalist war-makers.

The more we do, the more we can expand the circulation of CHALLENGE. The more we expand the readership of CHALLENGE, the more we can do in the class struggle.

The nature of the capitalist beast will not change because a liberal face is in the White House. He won’t bring peace, full employment or freedom for immigrant workers or to workers jailed by this criminal INjustice system
Yet, in the absence of a mass revolutionary movement, millions of potential revolutionaries hold out hope. Many illusions must be shattered. We have a big job before us. Let’s engage the enemy everywhere we can, and use every battle to build the revolutionary communist PLP.

IS THIS THE RACISM WE CAN EXPECT FROM OBAMA?

• When Chicago’s Cook County Health Bureau closed half the clinics used by predominantly black and Latino uninsured workers, slashing 2,000 jobs in 2007 — and just destroyed another 500 jobs on January 1 — not a word of protest came from Obama as clinics closed in his South Side neighborhood.
• Obama was directly involved in the destruction of Chicago Housing Authority projects on the West Side, displacing tens of thousands of black working-class tenants. The Boston Globe reported (6/27/08): Chicago’s “Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator…[was] subsidized by the federal government….But it’s not safe to live there….Collapsed roofs and fire damage….Mice….Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks….
• “Thousands of apartments across Chicago…built with [government]…subsidies — including several hundred in Obama’s former district — deteriorated so completely that they were no longer inhabitable.
• “Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama’s close friends and political supporters….[who] profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama’s constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.
• “As a state senator…[Obama] co-authored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers….He…campaigned on a promise to create [a]…Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year….
• “Grove Parc…[symbolized] giving public subsidies to private companies…an approach strongly backed by Obama….”
• Obama’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development is Shaun Donovan who, as NYC Commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), laundered public-housing renovation funds through private not-for-profit social service agencies to evade paying union wages. Donovan used HPD low-income housing funding to bring racist gentrification to Central Harlem, replacing long-time African-American, African immigrant and Latino working-class residents with luxury housing for affluent professionals and business owners. This is the guy Obama has picked to set national housing policy!

Racist Lynching Must Be Punished!

PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY, MD, December 22 — The People’s Coalition for Police Accountability, joined by CASA de Maryland and other community organizations rallied today at the Upper Marlboro Courthouse. The rally demanded that the State’s Attorney (the county prosecutor) Glenn Ivey indict the prison guards who, without a doubt, strangled Ronnie White in his jail cell. The medical examiner’s final report determined that he was, in fact, murdered in his cell.

The lynching of this 19-year-old black man must not go unpunished! Capitalism maintains extreme racism to keep the working class intimidated and divided, so there’s no surprise that Ivey dismissed the grand jury investigating this case, without an indictment. Under capitalism, there’s no justice in cases like Ronnie White’s. Only a revolution for communism will end racism and the ruling class’s attacks on the working class.

Anti-racist organizers leafleted hundreds of people at Metro stations and at the courthouse. White’s family stepped forward boldly to attack the media’s demonization of Ronnie. Tens of thousands of people in the Washington, D.C. area saw TV and journal news reports about the rally. The bold, loud demonstration at the courthouse made it impossible for Ivey to ignore it. He felt compelled to speak to the press and continue his lie that he was still investigating the case and just had “a few loose ends” to finish up! He spent an hour with a protest delegation trying to sweet-talk his way out of trouble. We will never let him make this lynching a “cold case”!

Mobilizing workers around the racist brutality of the law enforcement system is the order of the day. We must attack the “blue wall of silence,” the culture of racist police violence and the cops’ and guards’ ability to kill with impunity. As capitalism’s current international financial crisis intensifies, the bosses will use the full extent of their state power to terrorize workers even more.

We in PLP must bring our communist politics to the struggle against the racist brutality of the bosses’ goons (cops, guards, etc.), showing that only a society without bosses — communism — is the long-range end to this horror. CHALLENGE must become our ideological weapon in this vital task.

D.C. Rally Blasts Pols Over Housing for AIDS Victims

WASHINGTON, D.C., December 1, –– Progressive Labor Party members celebrated World AIDS Day today at a rally demanding housing for people living with AIDS. Our central objective was to help our friends understand that capitalist politicians cannot give us what we need, that racism like that of the AIDS epidemic is inherent in capitalism, and that only developing a revolutionary party to destroy capitalism and racism can get us off the treadmill of begging our rulers for crumbs as our friends die.

We joined with 60 people from DC Fights Back, the Metropolitan Washington Public Health Association, American Medical Students Association, Student Global Aids, Empower DC (a D.C. housing advocacy NGO) and the National AIDS Housing Coalition. We demanded immediate housing for the 278 people on the D.C. waiting list for the Housing Opportunities for People With AIDS (HOPWA) Program. This program is pitifully under-funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The noon rally outside the field office of HUD included a picket line around tents and cardboard houses with brightly-painted signs calling AIDS housing a life-or-death issue. We demanded that the HUD director speak to us. We chanted “Racism means, FIGHT BACK” and “AIDS housing is the name of the game, HUD and HOPWA, Shame, Shame, Shame.” One speaker declared that stable housing for people living with AIDS is an absolute necessity so that complex AIDS medical treatments can actually be implemented and maintained. After initially refusing to meet, housing officials finally responded by offering to schedule a meeting on the issue.

The strength of this event was its multiracial composition and its confrontational nature. The coalition challenged the power structure by demanding housing, the critical missing link in AIDS treatment, going beyond education and outreach efforts in the community. As supposedly “progressive” D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty cozies up to developers and closes homeless shelters like the downtown Franklin Shelter, the battle for housing will become fiercer. In fact, when real estate developers threw Fenty a lavish birthday party on December 6, over 100 furious housing advocates and union members confronted Fenty and his billionaire buddies, carrying a big angry sign saying, “Kill the Homeless—Vote Fenty”.

Recruiting our friends to the PLP’s revolutionary strategy remains challenging. PLPers working in the community and with students brought a contingent of 15 people to the World AIDS Day protest and its four planning meetings, but many still harbor illusions about pressuring politicians and hoping for good results. One friend told us, “I really felt more comfortable with this rally than at May Day. May Day was good but this is my struggle.” We have to win him and others to seeing that the real struggle is against the capitalist system even as we fight day to day for the working class.

CHALLENGE was distributed at the rally and several participants in this work read it regularly. As the battle with the city and federal government heats up, and as the economic crisis intensifies, the need for revolutionary action will become clearer to our readers. Today’s study groups and regular reading of CHALLENGE will help many see and join the road to revolution.

Unite vs. Racist Murders of Immigrant Workers

PATCHOGUE, LONG ISLAND, NY, November 18 — Hundreds attended the November 16 funeral service for Marcelo Lucero held at a local church. The day before, a few thousand people attended a vigil protesting the racist murder of Mr.  Lucero, a laundry worker from Ecuador, who was walking with a friend when a racist gang of drunken teenagers attacked them.

The gang told cops they were “hunting for Mexicans.”  Mr. Lucero tried to defend himself, but was outmanned. Swastika-tattooed Jeffrey Conroy plunged a knife into Mr. Lucero’s chest, killing him. Conroy has reportedly been involved in other anti-immigrant attacks. Shortly before the gang assaulted Mr. Lucero, it beat up a restaurant worker from Colombia who managed to get away.

PLP’ers at the vigil distributed 200 CHALLENGES and gave out hundreds of leaflets titled, “Don’t Be a Sucker for Racism: Racist Hysteria Pushed by Bosses, ICE and Politicians Behind Murder of Marcelo Lucero.” [ICE is the Immigration and Customs Enforcement cops].

The people at the rally were mostly Latino, but were joined by many blacks, Asians and whites who came to demonstrate their outrage over this racist crime. Those who read the PL leaflet readily agreed that this murder was not an isolated incident but part of a national campaign to terrorize and scapegoat immigrants.
Though speeches by preachers and politicians were pretty lame, the mood of the crowd wasn’t. When Patchogue’s mayor spoke the crowd started shouting “Justice! Justice!”

One older Jewish teacher there told a retired PL teacher that she had attended County executive meetings to oppose the anti-immigrant proposals of Steve Levy, Suffolk County chief. She asked rhetorically: “Do you think these stupid kids would have done this without years of people being riled up by politicians like Levy?” When asked about Levy’s party, she said: “Oh, he’s a Democrat. You know they’re all the same!”

Levy has been a major force in the anti-immigrant hysteria sweeping the U.S., which in many areas has become ethnic cleansing. Last year, Levy asked county cops and ICE cops to raid homes where undocumented immigrants were believed to be living.

This led to one immigrant being found dead in the woods near Huntington Station. Mr. Lucero’s killers came from an area near Farmingville, L.I., where, in 2000, two Mexican day-laborers were kidnapped and beaten. In 2003, five racist teens set fire to a Mexican family’s house.

A group of anti-racists, including PLP’ers, were arrested back then after confronting a racist harassing day-laborers in the area. After a lengthy trial, the anti-racists defeated the frame-up charges.
Even after these racist incidents, Levy continued preaching his poison, actually appearing on national TV on the CNN Lou Dobbs program, another anti-immigrant racist.

The murder of Mr. Lucero occurred as a murder trial is beginning in Shenandoah, Pa. Over the summer, in a similar incident, a gang of white high school football players killed Luis Ramirez, 25, a laborer from Mexico.
Meanwhile, even the FBI has reported that since 2003, hate crimes against Latinos have increased by 40%. But another branch of Homeland Security, ICE (the Immigration police) is intensifying this racist trend with its Gestapo-like raids of factories nation-wide, separating children from their parents. Of all hate crimes targeting national origin and ethnicity, 62% are committed against Latinos.

This racist assault against undocumented immigrants is based on the big lie that these workers “take away jobs” and social services from “Americans.” Those who fall for this garbage — like these racist teens or workers who applauded when fellow immigrant workers were arrested in a plant raided by ICE (tipped off by the pro-boss union) — are just dividing our class. They are cutting their own throats by helping the bosses, the source of all  our problems. It’s no accident that amid this racist pogrom against immigrants, millions are losing their homes and jobs and social services are being slashed. Meanwhile, the government is bailing out the big bankers and bosses guilty of these attacks and is spending trillions on the oil wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, without any major fight-back by workers.

In New York State, NYC Republican Mayor Bloomberg, a multi-billionaire, and Democratic governor David Paterson have just announced massive layoffs and cutbacks in all public services, and increased tolls and fares in public transportation.

Those who think that Obama will help workers are in for a big surprise. Obama has shown that his first loyalty is to the same bankers and bosses behind the economic meltdown.

As communists, PLP’ers say that when workers and youth get suckered by racism, the entire working class suffers from the resulting disunity. One example of how racism disarms all workers and youth politically: one of the teenagers who attacked Mr. Lucero is the son of a Puerto Rican and African-American family, themselves victimized by racist attacks when they first moved to Long Island several decades ago. So this youth, instead of fighting the racist rulers and their thugs, joins in an attack against other victims of racism.

Unless we overcome racial divisions and wage a united fight against capitalism, we will never be able to achieve a society that serves our needs, not those of the billionaires and their bought-and-paid-for politicians.

Anti-Immigrant Raids Attack on All Workers

GREENVILLE, S.C., October 7 — The Gestapo-like immigration police (Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE) has struck terror again, raiding the Columbia Farms poultry plant today and arresting 330 immigrant workers. Some 450 ICE agents started the raid at the 9:00 AM shift-change, breaking up families and leaving children without their parents.

They burst in like Nazi storm troopers, terrorizing workers. Similar to previous mass raids in a Laurel, Miss. electronics plant and an Iowa meat-processing plant, the agents blocked the gates to prevent workers from escaping. They then separated workers, giving blue wristbands to U.S. citizens and immigrants with resident cards, enabling them to leave.

Today we see the biggest anti-immigrant attacks “since the dragnet-style sweeps of the 1950s known as ‘Operation Wetback.’ On any given day, more than 30,000 ‘illegal’ immigrants are crowded into jail cells awaiting deportation. Annual deportations now exceed a quarter million, the highest level in U.S. history… This year there have been nearly 5,000 arrests, 10 times the level of just five years ago.”  (Edward Alden, NY Post, 10/12). The claimed aim of the raids is to catch people guilty of I.D. thefts and those working without “proper documents.” But as Alden says, “the raids are conducted in headline-grabbing fashion designed to incite fear among other undocumented workers.”

The real aim is to terrorize immigrant and all workers to work for less and under rotten conditions, in order to produce super-profits for the bosses. So this is basically a terror attack against the entire working class. The same methods ICE is using today will be directed against any workers fighting for their jobs or for decent conditions, particularly in this age of economic meltdown.

The rulers are already preparing for any major fight-back against their economic crisis. The 3rd Infantry’s 1st Brigade Combat Team is returning from Iraq to be used as “an on-call federal response force for…emergencies.” (Army Times, 9/8)

Workers who support such raids, thinking they “will preserve jobs for Americans,” are not only fooling themselves but betraying their interests and those of the entire working class.

Italy: Black Workers Rebel vs. Racist Mafia Massacres

ITALY, Sept. 25 — Racism has grown all over Europe as the bosses need to superexploit immigrant and non-white workers to obtain massive profits and blame them for the crisis of capitalism. The racism built into the capitalist society breeds racist killers. The area of Castelvolturno was the scene of the first racist killing in post-war Italy when in 1989 Jerry Eslan, a black man, was killed by racists in the nearby Villa Literno. Today, racist violence is even more common.

More recently in Castelvolturno, a racist massacre was carried out by the Camorra, the local mafia. It was the biggest mafia killing in recent years. Some local gangsters randomly fired against a group of black workers and youth, killing six of them. The bosses’ media reacted to this atrocity by blaming the victims, who were condemned as criminals and drug dealers.  In spite of these stereotypes, 99% of black workers work under semi-slave conditions in the tomato fields. But the mobsters shot at random to “teach blacks a lesson.”  Six were killed just for being black, just as neo-Nazis burn immigrant workers’ refugee centers to “teach them a lesson,” and just as Roma people (often called by the racist term Gypsies) have been victims of a recent pogrom at the hand of racist mobs and the right-wing Berlusconi government. According to these racist killers, all immigrant and black workers should be killed.

This time black Italians protested the killings with a mini-rebellion, burning garbage cans and damaging some cars in the Caserta zone of Castelvolturno. A similar small rebellion took place in the bigger city of Milan.

These workers and youth are tired not only of being exploited on their jobs, but of being charged higher rents and of discrimination in general. They are tired of being treated as second-rate citizens.

In Milan, an Afro-Italian teenager was beaten to death with iron bars by two store owners.  The killers said he stole some cookies, as if that was a crime punishable by death. This slander was repeated by the media without any real investigation of what happened, even though no cookies were found. Racism was the real cause of this horrendous crime.

The bosses, their media and some people influenced by racist ideas are labeling all blacks and immigrants as criminals, while treating the big criminals of the Mafia and their politician and cop protectors with kids’ gloves.

Racist brutality is a universal aspect of capitalism, from Milan to Paris to Brooklyn (like the recent killing of a mentally-impaired Latin worker with a taser) to Maryland (see article p. 3). Any worker who falls for this bosses’ racism is cutting his/her own throat, particularly today when the rulers need more racism to divide workers so they can exploit ALL workers even more to pay for their economic crisis and wars (Italy has a military contingent fighting with NATO in Afghanistan). Our slogan must be: same enemy, same fight! Black, Latin, Asian, immigrant and white, unite to smash capitalism and to fight for communism!