NEW YORK CITY, March 17—Students led the Education for Liberation conference in a local college to discuss how to fight for workers’ power while getting educated in the bosses’ school system.  True to Progressive Labor Party’s commitment to youth-driven leadership, both teacher and student comrades led two workshops on the critical topics of racial integration inside schools and the concealed issue of the school-to-prison pipeline (STPP). With an emphasis on militant fight back against racial inequality as the best “therapy.” the conference succeeded in not only strengthening the political understanding of young comrades while also widening the number of workers who are now supportive of PLP’s fight for a better world (see below).
After PLP members opened the conference by placing our fight for communism in the larger context of revolutionary history around the world, a group of high school students presented their understanding of how capitalist culture shapes emotional and psychological stress within schools using tactics like standardized testing. Other students also shared the racist ways in which capitalist school culture is organized to alienate Black students in particular.
Even though we had a definite set of values that we were putting forward, all participants were encouraged to voice their opinions. A professor stated how hard he had worked to receive his degrees, and that we should celebrate the opportunity that people have to work hard. In response, a PLP member exposed how the bosses’ education system utilizes the illusion of meritocracy to instill capitalist values in students. Everyone appreciated the productive exchange, and the professor who advocated for meritocracy was able to perceive a more critical perspective on the topic.
In one of the groups led by teachers, students were asked what role STPP plays in society. STPP is retooling classroom management and discipline to be more punitive to serve as an avenue for masses of working class children, especially Black and Latin, to eventually be criminalized and cut off from many career opportunities as adults. This invisible mechanism in turn has afforded bosses the opportunity to justify their racist portrayal of Black and Latin workers and divide the working class.
The other group, led by teachers and students, taught us that bosses make segregation seem like natural and the moves they take to entrench it seem invisible. As the panelists explained the nature of segregation at their school, participants recognized the aspects of that contradiction and discussed the steps they took to organize multiracial fightback.
Worldwide, working class youth are being exposed to capitalist exploitation everyday. This conference demonstrated that given the opportunity to teach us about the oppression they see, youth from Brooklyn to Haiti around PLP will energetically provide leadership and learn with us to fight back. More teachers and students on the forefront of class struggle in their schools and colleges will be able to add to the panels and discussions that PLP sponsors.
For now, we turned racist, anti-communist attacks in the NYC school system into the basis for a larger, wider campaign to unite more workers than ever around an agenda that will give our young people a real education. Join us in the streets on May Day!

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Letters from Students

Participating in the walkout was eye opening. Never before have I witnessed so many young people united under a common goal and demanding that the government change. The conference further affirmed the need for more youth fightback.
The school integration fight shows the power of multiracial unity and worker mobilization. Resistance against capitalism has never been tolerated in the U.S. Still, we are ready to combat these regimes.
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I felt like an active participant in a larger revolutionary movement currently making strides to abolish the capitalist order of U.S. society and establish equality on all fronts.
The conference allowed me to gather with like-minded individuals and discuss how communism would eradicate problems in schools. By looking at similar communist movements from the past, I learned new methods of mobilizing and building on current movements. What’s next for us is more student-led movements dedicated to overthrowing capitalism.
*
I felt a mixture of cynicism and hope. At the walkout, I was met with a sense of apathy and confusion among the crowd; many used this as a chance to skip school. Yet, it was empowering to march down to Borough Hall, all chanting, all washed in energy. The conference showed us a closer, firmer community willing to support us.
*
The walkout and the conference have one thing in common: ambition. Hope itself doesn’t do what we did because hope is noncommittal—a sort of expectation that change will happen on its own. It won’t. The diverse community at the conference continued what students did at the walkout. It proves our inherent determination to fight for change, even in the face of passivity.
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The walkout was a much-needed step for change in our capitalist society. As the next generation, we must fight for people’s rights as they are undermined by money and power. At the conference, we learned in depth about the School to Prison Pipeline, gun violence, and student fightbacks at other schools.
I hope individuals realize that gun violence and incarceration amongst Black and Latin youth is directly linked to the domineering rich white men. It was empowering to see so many gathered for the same cause. The fight for justice is never over.
*
Playing a local role in a national walkout was a cathartic experience. I felt I was a part of something bigger than myself, something historical. Yet, I felt that young Black and Latin students and the working class have been engaging in protests for decades, and those protests have been sanctioned, shut down, and criminalized. I realized politicians mustn’t use our future fightback as photo-ops.
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Participating in the walkout was a transformative experience. I realized the potential of a communist insurgence. I was reminded that when we harness the power of education, capitalism can be torn apart; and that students, oppressed by the mechanisms of finance capital, still have an innate calling for a freedom only to be realized on the communist horizon.
For the first time in my life, I saw kids discarding the foul education that capitalism imposed on us in lieu of organic communist mobilizing. The epigram of the day: the specter of communism haunts the U.S.

**

BROOKLYN, NY March 13—About 100 workers, youth and community antiracists participated in a mass forum on ending the war and capitalist crisis in Yemen. It was held in a neighborhood where many Yemeni families live. The forum was in Arabic, English, and Spanish—a great show of international solidarity (see letter, page 6).
A comrade from Progressive Labor Party linked the crisis in Yemen to the struggle against racist terror at home and raised the need to build an international movement for communist revolution. PL’ers distributed CHALLENGE and made contacts.
Dire conditions for workers
Yemen has been torn by civil war and battered by the relentless attack of Saudi Arabia and the U.S. since March 2015. With a population of 27 million, at least 10,000 have been slaughtered, more than two million have been displaced. The conditions are so dire that 80 percent of the population requires urgent food and medical aid.
With more than 14 million people without clean water or sanitation due to the targeted bombing of water treatment plants and infrastructure, Yemen has the worst ever-recorded cholera epidemic. Over 20,000 dead and 600,000 confirmed cases of cholera.
The United Nations considers it the “worst humanitarian disaster” in the world today. While the capitalist media would like to call this a humanitarian crisis (so as to strip the class politics from the situation), we know it’s a capitalist crisis of their own making.
Workers speak up
The highlight of the event was the testimony given by a number of young people who spoke of how the war impacted them. One famiy was stranded in a refugee camp, unable to come to the U.S. due to the anti-Muslim travel ban. Another was captured and tortured in Yemen.
Yet another shared a story of how beautiful Yemen was before the war, and now how her father is worried for the safety of relatives still there.
A young woman talked about the anti-Muslim racism she faces in school. A young man said that we all must do what we can to, “Stop the War! Stop the War! Stop the War!”
Yemen, hotspot of oil wars
Yemen, the most impoverished country in the Middle East, is next to Saudi Arabia, the richest. The narrow strait of Bab-el-Mandeb borders Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea. Millions of gallons of oil pass through this chokepoint each day. It may also have the largest untapped oil deposits in the world.
This area is of longtime geopolitical importance for U.S. hegemony. In 1991, the U.S. Army War College published an unclassified study that called Bab Al-Mandeb “a confrontation arena between the superpowers, which tried to establish and then promote their military presence and influence there.”
Saudi Arabia and the U.S. are desperate to keep control of the area and prevent it from falling into the hands of Iran, their major regional rival for control of the Middle East and Horn of Africa. This struggle between regional powers is drawing in the major imperialists, including Russia and China, and also explains the spreading conflicts in Syria, Somalia, Israel-Palestine, Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan. The widening war in the region is bringing the world closer to World War III.
When the bosses are locked in competition and war, it’s always the working class that suffers and dies.
First steps towards solidarity
A Middle East expert, who was a child refugee from the Iran-Iraq war, discussed the history of the conflict and attacked the billions of dollars in U.S. weapons sales to Israel and Saudi Arabia. A speaker from the National Writers Union spoke about attacks on media workers covering the war. A speaker from Yemen Aid detailed the crisis and what they are doing to try to respond to it. Those in attendance donated to the organizations, including a Haitian community group and a Latin group, showing working-class international solidarity.
A woman from the floor called on everyone to come out to protest the visit of Saudi Crown Prince Salman to New York City (see box).
The positive response was overwhelming. Building relationships with working-class families from Yemen is a step towards forging international solidarity. Whenever PLP can expose the bosses’ profit and war motives behind world crises while also strengthening confidence in our class to fight back, our class gains class consciousness.

*****

Protesters Decry war criminal Saudi Prince MBS

NEW YORK CITY, March 20—Mohammed bin Salman embarked on a three-country visit with stops in Cairo, London, and New York to strengthen his hand on the global stage.  
When he was touring NYC, protesters gathered on the City Hall on Monday and in Lower Manhattan on Tuesday to decry Saudi Arabia’s war on the working class in Yemen. Mohammed bin Salman was escorted with two limousines. While MBS was making war deals with Wall Street, oil company Halliburton, aircraft company Boeing, antiracists chanted, “Say it loud say it clear—Saudi Prince Not Welcome Here!” Protesters also picked up the chant, “U.S., Saudi You Can’t Hide—You Charge You With Genocide in Yemen.”
On tour
MBS’s visit in the U.S. included but not limited to: Trump, vice president Mike Pence, CIA director, Jared Kushner, and the secretaries of defense, treasury, and commerce. He also toured Saudi-lined oil facilities on the Texas Gulf Coast and met with Houston-based oil executives. Trump “offered an optimistic forecast of lucrative U.S. arms sales to the kingdom and more Saudi investment in the United States” (Chicago Tribune, 3/21)
MBS has a war plan for Saudi Arabia: “Saudi Vision 2030,[which] calls for localizing ‘50 percent of military equipment spending’ by the end of the next decade” (Defense One, 4/4).
In London, MBS met with defense secretary Gavin Williamson, among others. He was also greeted with massive crowd of anti-war protesters.

NEW YORK CITY, March 24—“I come from Haiti, a country Donald Trump calls a ‘shithole.’ What he leaves out...is that Haiti was a rich and green island when Christopher Columbus arrived.” Thus spoke a Haitian immigrant at a fundraising dinner of over 100 guests. “But after the Spanish, French and U.S. came and went, Haiti looked totally different. Channeling Trump, maybe what I should have said was ‘after the shitheads came and went,’ Haiti was left in debt and had been stripped of its natural resources and left in misery. No resource was more affected than its forest cover: two-three percent of Haiti is green today; compare that to its nearest neighbors, the Dominican Republic at 28 percent and Cuba at 31 percent.”
Solidarity since 2010
A Haitian community group and a local church organized the fundraising dinner. It’s been eight years since the 2010 earthquake devastated the working class in Haiti. Every year since, we break bread and talk about building solidarity between workers in Haiti and those in the U.S. All funds raised go towards reforestation projects in small communities in Haiti.
Pointedly attacking the racist results of imperialism, we were a group of Black, white, Latin, Arab, U.S.-born and immigrant working-class people who mingled, sang inspiring songs in Creole, English and French, and laughed together, showing in word and deed how multi-racial and international unity can fight the bosses’ plans for our class.
More similar than different
One participant spoke about the current war in Yemen, supported financially by billions of U.S. arms dollars, and called on the audience to come out to oppose the visit of the Saudi Prince to get more money for bombs (see page 4). An Arab worker spoke poignantly about the cholera epidemic, showing how people from Yemen and Haiti, two countries in different parts of the world, are united in their common oppression by the profit system, whether by so-called “natural” disasters or expressly by war. “There is more that unites us than separates us,” he said, pledging an additional donation to fight the effects of deforestation in Haiti.
This event had a more political character than in the past, in part because of the reality of world events and the racist-in-chief in the U.S. White House, but also because of the influence of PLP’s ideas inside these organizations.
We have fought for our friends to understand why Haitian workers and other immigrants are forced to leave their homelands in an attempt to escape the super-exploitation of the capitalist system, whether looking for jobs or to get away from wars, as the imperialists fight among themselves to divide up the world for their own class interests.
We are clearly one working class, and should have no allegiance to anything but our class, our flag and the Party that represents it. On to May Day!

DETROIT, MI, March 15— The U.S. courts are investigating and charging United Auto Workers union (UAW) officials for accepting bribes from Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV (FCA).
As the UAW constitutional convention approaches this June, the union mirrors the state of U.S. capitalism: corruption, declining power and influence. The situation is ripe for union misleaders and company bosses to indulge each other with bribes, luxuries, and money laundering.
The convention is supposed to set the tone for the 2019 contract talks with General Motors, Ford and FCA. But the main goal is to renew a 25 percent dues increase from 2014. Then, as now, the leadership used the contract talks with the auto bosses as the reason to keep feeding a strike fund that stands at more than $700 million. Another joke—a huge strike fund for a union that barely fights the bosses, let alone goes on strike. It is just more money to pad the misleaders’ lavish lifestyle.
Union bosses accept bribes from auto bosses
But it turns out that while UAW leaders were increasing our dues, they were also taking bribes from FCA bosses. Last July, federal prosecutors charged FCA executives with funneling $1.5 million in bribes to UAW officials in exchange for a contract that ultimately cut wages and benefits and sharply expanded the number of low-paid temporary workers. Like workers everywhere, auto workers are exploited more and more as the bosses get richer. Even more disgusting, the bribe money was taken from funds meant to train hourly workers. According to the indictments, the bribes were intended to keep UAW sellouts, “fat, dumb and happy.”
FCA’s chief negotiator, Alphons Iacobelli, and Jerome Durden, an FCA financial analyst, have both pleaded guilty and are cooperating with prosecutors. The money was going directly across the bargaining table to UAW VP for Fiat Chrysler, General Holiefield and his administrative assistant Keith Mickens. A new indictment against Mickens alleges that he and other UAW officials arranged for travel for Monica Morgan, Holiefield’s wife. Mickens also served as vice president of Leave the Light on Foundation, a phony charity used to launder money.
Morgan pleaded guilty to accepting $200,000 and UAW staffer Virdell King pleaded guilty to the improper use of a credit card to make tens of thousands of dollars of personal purchases and expensive gifts for other UAW officers. This included a $2,180 shotgun for UAW VP Norwood Jewell, who was forced into early retirement.
Expose ruling-class collusion
This scandal will keep growing. Iacobelli’s plea deal refers to a plan to make secret $50,000 payments to select UAW officers on the eve of the 2015 contract negotiations.
There was mass rank-and-file opposition to the 2015 contract. Workers are furious and threatening to reverse the dues increase and reject any initial contract settlement. Could there be a strike against FCA next year? The UAW leadership would allow a strike only to cover the stink of the current bribery scandal.
This corruption is the logical result of more than 50 years of pro-capitalist union leadership that has covered its treachery in racist “Buy American” flag-waving and being foot soldiers of the Democratic Party. UAW leaders, like the rest of the AFL-CIO leadership, work to ensure the bosses’ profits and keep a lid on the class struggle. Prosecuting a few crooks will not change that.
The Progressive Labor Party (PLP) aims to build an international communist movement, led by industrial workers, that can lead our class to power. By building an international PLP, we can plant the seeds for autoworkers worldwide to unite and take on the racist profit system.