Protecting working class children from lead poisoning is not a priority for a U.S capitalist class in disarray and decline.  The lead water crisis that has poisoned workers from Flint, MI to Newark, NJ has hit New York City’s school system and the local ruling class has no real plan to protect children here from ingesting this toxin at thousands of water fountains and sinks across the five boroughs.  
Over the summer, the Department of Education (DoE) inspected the fixtures that funnel water to our children daily. Instead of accurately checking the lead levels, the water was allowed to run for long periods of time, which allowed a lot of the lead to be flushed out before measurement.  These bogus ‘tests’ have ‘proven’ that the water which 1.1 million kids drink is ‘safe.’ However, even by their own admission, the DoE admits that their safety inspection did not involve switching out lead plumbing fixtures with non-toxic alternatives (WNYC, Aug 2018).
Hot on the heels of the DoE’s summertime water inspection subterfuge, locally-based capitalist Sarah Kauss (CEO of S’well bottles) decided to donate over 300,000 bottles to provide every high school student in the city with a re-usable S’well brand water bottle.   The liberal political establishment is pushing for a youth campaign to “BRING IT” which “challenges New York City students to reduce waste through advocacy and activism.”  By their estimates if each high school student in the city foregoes disposable water bottles waste will be reduced by up to 54 million plastic bottles (NYT 9/18).
Such ‘activism’ – where crises that capitalism makes necessary are viewed as results of ‘individual’ choice – is a type that liberal mis-leaders like NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio champion.  They would have our youth believe that racism in our schools comes from ‘microaggressions’ that we carry out against each other as individuals, not from a ‘school choice’ system that has for decades cast schools with too many Black youth as undesirable.
Consumption of bottled water has exploded since the 1970s and is a major contributor to plastics production and pollution.  Today’s mounting plastics crisis was entirely predictable decades ago but the pursuit of maximum profit has meant cities have been built up with no plans to supply quality water to workers who live there.  Under communism access to clean water would be treated as a true human right.  It’s beyond a doubt that the unbelievably huge portion of society’s wealth which imperialists have poured into arms races and war since the 1970s could have, by now, provided workers worldwide with access to clean water in an environmentally sustainable way.  We have needed communism for a long time.
On top of a festering lead crisis, New York City students endure a long-running segregation crisis.  Racist policing of Black and Latino youth mean that they pass through a metal detector/scanning procedure to enter school each day.  (see letter).  These students are routinely prohibited from bringing any liquids into school.  They will be forced to fill their environmentally-friendly S’well bottles at water fixtures fed by lead pipes while their more middle-class white and Asian peers are free to bring their bottles to school with water that is (perhaps) safer.
Speaking of the rise of her company, Kauss once proclaimed:
“We’ll be a billion-dollar company,” she says. “It’s easy. I know what to do now. We have the people and the processes in place, and the market is just there.” The alternative? “We could just be a $50 million company,” she says, “but that seems kind of boring.” (Inc. Magazine, July 2016).The iron rule of capital, which spawns imperialist rivalry and requires racism to divide and super-exploit the working class, has positioned Kauss to solve the ‘easy’ problem of creating a billion-dollar company.”   
 Her naïve, ostentatious and self-serving campaign to expand her firm’s visibility and help ‘fix’ a plastics crisis that clogs the oceans of the globe has run up against the hard reality of segregation in New York City schools.  Only liberation from the rule of capital through a communist revolution gives us a shot at clean water and integrated schools for all.

*****

Student Letter

We are students, not suspects!

Every high school student in New York City received a free metal S’well water bottle. This was an initiative to eliminate the single-use plastic water bottles. The highly-policed and over-surveilled high schools with metal detectors, in New York City force their predominantly Black, Latin and Asian, low-income students to dump out their water bottles before entering school premises. This effectively denies clean water to nonwhite students. Denying students their right to bring water and drinks from home forces them to drink the lead-contaminated water present in many of the city’s public schools. The inability of these students to get through school security with their water bottles lies at the intersection of three of the city’s structural, unresolved problems: the policing and criminalization of Black and Latin students, segregated schooling, and lead contaminated water in “more than 33,000 water fountains” in New York City public schools (WNYC, 3/6).
WNYC, a New York City public radio station, completed an analysis finding that despite the city’s claims of replacing all lead contaminated fixtures, only 20 percent of schools have been notified of the water being safe to drink. Despite the dangerously high levels of lead being found in school pipes, not all students have the right of bringing their own water to class.
The denial of students to bring their own bottles of water to classes feeds into the racist and anti-working class violence students are subject to in the city’s public schools. Students are not only stripped of their autonomy but also criminalized under school security and surveillance technologies. This creates a hostile, unsafe environment not conducive to our student’s education. It is harmful to their mental and physical health. Students should not be suspects in their own schools. This inequality and denial of the basic right to clean water is a critical sign calling us to fight back against school housing and segregation.

COLOMBIA, October 10—Ivan Duque, the representative of the interests of US imperialism, landowners and big capital, became the president of Colombia. In his development plan he wants to impose a package of harmful reforms against workers, ordered by theOrganisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and backed by the bosses’ business agenda.
They include health, economic, and tax reforms, reducing taxes to big capitalists and increasing taxes on the products of the family basket, dismantling all the subsidies to the humble people, reforming the labor code, increasing the retirement age and permitting wages below the minimum. This will end the little job stability and the achievements we made with fight, sweat and blood.
They will dismiss teachers and close schools privatizing education to guarantee the application of these measures. They will not hesitate to continue applying police brutality and state terrorism through paramilitary groups and anti-restitution armies, criminalizing social protests, killing more than 300 social leaders and anyone who opposes them.
Electoral politics=support for class for enemies
This reactionary pol was elected in the last election with 10,365,000 votes won using a nationalist campaign of slander, threats, falsehoods, corruption and vote buying misinformation with anticommunist warmongering propaganda, driven by the media RCN and Caracol. This was noticed in the consciousness of many proletarians who, with their political and ideological ignorance, end up supporting their class enemies.
Gustavo Petro pacifist candidate of Social Democracy, got 8,029,000 votes, appeared to be a good potential for supporters who want to change their lives and are tired of paramilitary terrorism and the right-wing dictatorship. Unfortunately they believe in the bosses’ electoral promises that sound good in  theory, but in practice are set against our needs defending private capitalist property, and wage slavery.
Communism, the only solution
The bourgeois class takes advantage of the setbacks, and corruption of left-wing candidates, turning them into a disaster for the proletariat making these policies lose credibility in our class, imperialism will not let this system of new socialisms practiced in Venezuela, Brazil and Nicaragua prosper. Even though they demoralize the struggle of the workers.
These warmongering bosses think that their failed bourgeois democracy and fascist terror will be able to stop the unity of the working class, but they are wrong, because many proletarians in the world are uniting in the construction of an international communist movement to put an end to oppression and capitalist exploitation.
Our party PLP is led by rural and urban workers and students that struggle to build communist consciousness with a long-term revolutionary work style to create a communist society without bosses or profits, without racism or politicians introducing revolutionary consciousness and fighting the lying influence of the bourgeoisie.
With our revolutionary program we are doing mass work educating the masses in the ideas of collectivity and proletarian internationalism, only with the strengthening of the international PLP our communist party, can we get out of this swamp of capitalist electoral fraud, crushing these fascists and defeating the ruling class with the communist revolution.

BROOKLYN, October 6—“Honestly I didn’t think that the leafleting against Goldstein would accomplish anything or even get a reaction. I was wrong. Those leaflets really scared the administration - it’s freaking them out, and now they’re going to respond.” A sympathetic Kingsborough Community College (KCC) faculty member recently related this to a member of the Progressive Labor Party. The racists fear direct, mass confrontation and at KCC, they are getting it!
Last spring, a group of students, faculty and workers came into possession of hundreds of extreme racist, sexist social media posts by KCC administrator Michael Goldstein. Goldstein shared Facebook posts that said Islam “executes gays, chops off heads and stones women.” Another shared post said “Confederate veterans are American veterans.” Still another questioned “politicians who protect illegals who rape and murder.” In response, about 1,500 leaflets were collectively produced, printed and distributed around campus calling for Goldstein’s termination. Phone calls were made to the Human Resources office and Chief Diversity Officer to complain. Some students even discovered where Goldstein’s office was, and slid the leaflets under his door!
Students, sympathetic faculty and staff and some PL’ers found out recently that Goldstein has been removed from his position as KCC’s Director of Public Relations. The stripping of his formal power - and his embarrassment to the administration - is a partial victory for the student-led antiracist forces at KCC! The administration continues protecting him by shuffling him around, and it will take mass struggle to drive racists likeGoldstein out.
Racists show their colors
Now the racists have responded. In an article on a rightwing website Goldstein claimed the leafleting is part of a systematic campaign of anti-Jewish racism against him. Also, around two dozen KCC professors received certified letters saying Goldstein is considering legal action against them.
On September 6, an “exclusive” article appeared on a website, Campus Reform (see box) featuring an interview with Goldstein. He whined that he’s been accused of “vile, false allegations of racism,” and accused a group of faculty of being anti-Jewish. The Lawfare Project, a pro-Israeli, nonprofit law firm, sent a letter on his behalf to CUNY Interim Chancellor Vita Rabinowitz, crying about a supposed “ongoing discrimination campaign” against him. As if antiracism was discriminatory!
The Campus Reform article, faithful to its fascist heritage, made bizarre and dangerous allegations. With no evidence whatsoever, it names and blames a professor who had absolutely nothing to do with the leafleting campaign.
Goldstein threatens legal action
Then on October 3, a group of about two dozen KCC faculty received certified, confidential letters from the Lawfare Project notifying them that Goldstein is considering legal action. In “anticipation of litigation,” the professors are instructed:

“to retain and preserve all emails, voicemails, text messages…social media postings and communications as well as all other electronic or printed documents, records…in any way relating to:
-Mr. Goldstein
-Your views on Israel
-Your views on Zionism
-Your views on Jews
-Your views on Palestine; and
-the Progressive Faculty Caucus [group of left-minded KCC]
…This notification extends to all emails generated on a CUNY/KCC server.”

The fascists are on a fishing expedition. They have no idea who is responsible for the antiracist campaign against them. Like the Israeli fascists they adore, they attack indiscriminately. They feel protected by a government that promotes racism. Their “freedom of speech” is a farce that only applies to racists like Goldstein, whose connections to fascist, terrorist groups like the Leadership Institute (see box) show us how deadly serious the bosses are about defending racism and capitalism.
The leaflet distributed at KCC is 100 percent right when it states: “It will take as many of us as possible to unite and build a movement to fight back [against racism].” However many were involved, it will take many more in the struggles ahead. That’s because as communists we know that fighting racism is necessary for any progress for all workers and students. Join us!

In this period of escalating inter-imperialist competition, rival capitalists worldwide will seize on every opportunity to undermine the ultimate threat to their profit system: a united international working class. Within the U.S., bosses use anti-Muslim racism both to deflect workers’ anger over a failing economic system and to ready them for enlistment into World War III. In their ruthless battle for control over Middle East oil, U.S. and Russian bosses are waging a war of terror against millions of Muslim workers, from the devastation of Syria to the carpet bombing of Yemen. Meanwhile, both Washington and Moscow are keeping a close eye on the Chinese imperialists, who are making significant Middle East inroads, via trade and investment, from Iran to Egypt to Israel (theasiandialogue.com, 1/22).

Caught in the middle are the Uighurs, a minority group in China now under the bosses’ media spotlight. According to an August report by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), as many as a million Muslims in Xinjiang, most of them Uighurs, have been held in “re-education camps” that are “shrouded in secrecy” (Guardian, 8/30). There are allegations of torture and of thousands of children being herded into de facto orphanages while their parents are held indefinitely (Associated Press, 9/21).

The Chinese bosses have predictably denied these allegations of brutal mass repression. Since Xinjiang is closed to outside journalists or observers, the story is open to question.  While the Uighurs are clearly super-exploited and oppressed by the Chinese capitalists, they also have a long history as pawns of U.S. imperialism. This dates back to the late 1970s, when Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, formulated a strategy to use disaffected Muslims against the U.S. imperialists’ competition in Central Asia and the Middle East.

In the 1980s, Uighur nationalists were recruited to join Osama bin Laden in the CIA-backed war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. To generate anti-China propaganda, the U.S. government funded Uighur networks on Radio Free Asia and through the World Uighur Congress. The lead spokesperson for the UN’s CERD is a lawyer named Gay McDougall, who sits on the board of the Open Society Justice Initiative—an organization founded by billionaire George Soros, the CIA’s partner in sponsoring the anti-Russia “color revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia, among other places.

Why Xinjiang Matter$

Four times the size of California, Xinjiang is a strategically situated “autonomous” region in northwest China that borders Russia, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, and four other countries. Of late, Xinjiang has seen an economic boom, with major development projects bringing prosperity to cities like Kashgar. The region accounts for more than 20 percent of China’s natural gas, oil, and coal reserves (powermag.com, 1/1/16), along with significant cotton production, technology and textiles manufacturing, and gold and uranium.

Xinjiang is critical to the Chinese bosses’ Belt and Road Initiative, their blueprint for dominating trade throughout Asia and into Europe and Africa. The region has 16 Class A “land ports,” where foreign vehicles can deliver goods directly (china.org.cn). In addition, Xinjiang contains a dense network of natural gas pipelines, railways, highways, and air routes linking China with Eurasia.

The Uighurs are predominantly Sunni Muslims who speak a Turkic language and are ethnically distinct from the Chinese rulers who have controlled the region since the 19^th century Qing Dynasty. Over the last 20 years, as economic opportunities have soared, the region has seen a mass influx of Han Chinese, the main ethnic group in China, to the point where they nearly match the Uighurs’ numbers in Xinjiang. But that’s where any semblance of equality ends, according to an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times (3/18/14):

The best jobs have gone mostly to the Han Chinese. Uighurs lucky enough to find jobs often end up doing manual labor—toiling in coal mines, cement plants and at construction sites. Unemployment among young Uighurs is widespread….There’s little wonder that discontent has become so widespread.

Chinese bosses: opiate dealers for the masses

The stark inequality in Xinjiang has led inevitably to a spike in anti-Uighur racism, a resurgence of Uighur separatism, scattered incidents of violence, and a Beijing attack against the Uighurs’ practice of Islam—or what it calls “religious extremism.” Two years ago, President Xi Jinping sent former Tibet boss Chen Quanguo to set up “internment camps that hold Muslims without trial and force them to renounce their faith and swear loyalty to the [so-called] Communist Party….Former detainees say one can be thrown into a camp for praying regularly, reading the Quran…” (Associated Press, 9/21).

Capitalism needs nationalism and religion to divide workers and deflect their class hatred against the capitalist system, the real source of workers’ misery. As Marx wrote, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the masses.” After the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that followed in the late 1960s, workers freed themselves from the chains of religion that had strangled class struggle in favor of the old ruling class. 

But the fake “communists” who rule China today have no problem with religion—as long as they’re the ones pushing the opium. In August, China’s famous Buddhist Shaolin monastery “raised the national flag for the first time in its 1,500-year history” (NYT, 9/24). And on September 22, Beijing and the Vatican reached a compromise deal to recognize seven bishops appointed by the Chinese government and fully legitimize the Catholic Church in China (NYT, 9/22).

U.S. bosses: world leaders in anti-Muslim racism

The turbulence in Xinjiang gives the capitalists yet another opportunity to bash the Cultural Revolution, a historic working-class victory—however temporary—to uphold communist ideas and practice among hundreds of millions of workers. The bosses are using the Uighurs once again to push their poisonous, anti-communist mythology: “As in Stalin’s Russia, children are encouraged to inform on their parents” (Guardian, 9/15). As a trade and tariff battle pushes the U.S. and China into “a new economic Cold War” (NYT, 9/19), 17 U.S. senators and congresspeople have called for sanctions against Chinese officials responsible for the reported detention camps.

Now consider the U.S. record of anti-Muslim racism since 9/11: the torture and rendition of terrorism “suspects” to murderous regimes, the indefinite detention of uncharged individuals at Guantanamo Bay, the indiscriminate drone killings expanded by President Barack Obama, the proposed “Muslim ban” by President Donald Trump.

And consider, too, the more than 2 million workers imprisoned in the United States, the nation with the world’s highest incarceration rate—more than four times the rate in China (World Prison Brief, prisonstudies.org).

Even by the standards of the U.S. ruling class, the hypocrisy is overwhelming.

A better alternative

Neither ethnic nationalism nor religion can solve the problems of Uighur workers. Only the international working class, united against racism and sexism and led by a revolutionary communist party, can smash capitalism and its oppression of workers everywhere. Join us!