Four years ago this month, Shantel Davis, 23-year-old Black woman, was brutally shot and murdered by NYPD detective “bad boy” Phillip Atkins. Shantel was at her grandmother’s researching college programs just hours before.  
Shantel’s family, Progressive Labor Party, friends, residents, and community groups had protested in the streets every saturday for months, then every month—rain or shine. One of the chants were, “We will always remember Shantel. We’ll always fight for Shantel, we’ll never forget Shantel.”
In the Flatbush neighborhood, we have helped build a group called “The Justice for Shantel Davis Committee,” which also organizes an annual youth basketball tournament at Tilden Park.
In Shantel’s name, join the four-year commemoration of her life and the antiracist, antisexist fightback that grew out of this police killing.
We are meeting at the site of the killing: E. 38 Street and Church Ave, Brooklyn, NY on Tuesday, June 14 at 7 PM.

Four hundred industrial workers from the Honeywell Corporation’s plants in South Bend, Indiana, and Green Island, NY, overwhelmingly rejected a company contract offer that would double their health care costs and increase the use of non-union workers. The workers make specialty aircraft wheels and brake pads for F-35 fighter planes and Boeing 747s.
Honeywell responded by locking out workers from their jobs since May 9, meaning workers aren’t allowed to work until they agree to the bosses’ contract proposals. Multi-billion dollar Honeywell is using scabs to replace strikers in order to maintain their super-profits on the backs of workers who are fighting to maintain basic pay and healthcare.
But workers are fighting back against Honeywell’s intimidation tactics! Black, Latin and white workers from the factories and nearby regions are united and standing strong. Area workers joined the picket lines and donated food to show solidarity. What is really needed is for all workers — Black, white, union, non-union and unemployed — to unite against the capitalist scum who divide and exploit workers in order to churn out billions in profits. Strikes and pickets aren’t enough to get workers their fair share because neither will destroy the profit system. Capitalists will constantly lower wages and benefits for workers. Many benefits won by strikes fifty years ago are being lost.
Since the last five-year contract, Honeywell profits increased by 152 percent while they locked out workers across the country four different times. The company invested over $27 million in the South Bend plant, making it one of its most profitable facilities. Because it successfully wrung concessions out of the United Automobile Workers union (UAW) with each negotiation and each lockout, they see no reason not to squeeze them even more.
Honeywell wants to double the cost of healthcare for workers, charging a family of four almost $7,400/year. Even worse, they want the right to increase these costs in every year of the contract. They also want to outsource more work to non-union workers while eliminating all job classifications, creating a more “flexible” workforce.
The UAW is not on the workers’ side. In March, Honeywell brought the scab replacement workers into the South Bend and Green Island factories to watch the workers doing their jobs. The UAW huffed and puffed but did nothing to stop this threat. Most of these scab workers are ex-offenders and many can’t find work due to the criminal Injustice System. So who is the UAW endorsing in the presidential election? The same politician who supported laws that greatly expanded that very racist system, Hillary Clinton!
UAW is also supporting a local politician and former kkkop who visited the picket lines for publicity. The police are instrumental in attacking and terrorizing striking workers. The police are not the workers’ friend; yet the union continues to endorse politicians favoring the police.
It’s clear that the only people who defend workers are workers themselves. We can’t rely on pro-boss unions or politicians. We can’t let them use racism or sexism to divide us. We can’t divide ourselves from non-union workers. We’re all fighting over crumbs while the capitalists devour the whole loaf! We need a communist revolution to stop all exploitation and ensure that all workers have all our needs met.
By sharpening the class war, it becomes clear that we’re up against the whole racist profit system. This will help us learn how to win. We can get a taste of the power we hold in our collective hands. That’s the difference between the union mis-leadership and ourselves. The capitalists have state power and use it to take back any reforms we may win. Let’s organize with the Progressive Labor Party for a communist revolution!

More than 150,000 workers and youth shut down France in response to anti-working-class labor reforms. The strike is hitting the bosses where it hurts the most—their profit margin and the rise of class consciousness. Strikers have also blockaded oil refineries and shut down transportation. Half of the country’s 10,000 petrol stations are either partially or completely out of fuel. Many fighters have been arrested. Protesters hurled rocks at police.
“The law eases conditions for laying off workers, strongly regulated in France. It is hoped companies will take on more people if they know they can shed jobs in case of a downturn. The law also gives employers more leeway to negotiate holidays and special leave, such as maternity or for getting married” (Nigerian Bulletin, 5/26).
Clearly, the bosses’ laws can’t and won’t protect workers. Only the working class has the power to fight in its own interests. With communist leadership, the workers of France can turn this strike against labor reforms into a battle against capitalism.
Stand up in international solidarity for the working class of France, the birthplace of the first workers’ revolutionary seizure of power, known as the Paris Commune of 1871.

NEW YORK CITY, May 14—Nearly 150 rank-and-file workers from a dozen NYC unions attended a teach-in on the massive $72 billion debt crisis in Puerto Rico. The teach-in was organized by three U.S. unions whose membership in Puerto Rico has been decimated by austerity measures — SEIU Local 32BJ, AFSCME and the UAW. Showing international working-class solidary, workers listened to the devastation unfolding on our class in Puerto Rico stemming from decades of U.S. imperialism.
The union leaders offered reformist solutions, steering away from revolution. Such devastations are inevitable under capitalism, which staggers from one economic crisis to another. For workers, communist revolution is the only road to a decent life — a life free of debt crisis, unemployment and poverty.
U.S. Imperialism at Work
Puerto Rico’s debt crisis is a direct result of its long history under U.S. imperialist rule. It became a U.S colony in 1898 based on U.S. bosses’ need to keep Latin America — its supposed “backyard” — under its’ economic and military control. Since then, U.S. capitalist bosses has wreacked havoc on workers here, stealing profits off their labor as well as vast resources, all in the name of “democracy.”  
In recent years alone, U.S. companies have extracted hundreds of billions of dollars in profit from Puerto Rico. Pharmaceutical giants like Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Proctor & Gamble produce 16 of their 20 top-selling U.S. drugs on the island. These companies have netted $30 billion a year in profits, but pay only four percent of that in taxes. Meanwhile, hedge funds and other investors flock to buy bonds issued by the Puerto Rican government. They pay no taxes on the interest they collect. Needless to say, Puerto Rico’s workers have shouldered much of the taxes these capitalist vultures do not pay!
Given the continued exploitation by U.S. bosses, the country’s economy has unsurprisingly spiraled downward, contracting an average 1.5 percent each year since 2006. Imperialist-in-chief Barack Obama and other capitalist cronies have blamed the crisis on “mismanagement” of the economy. Workers worldwide know better: the crisis is a direct result of decades of U.S. imperialism.
Workers Pay the Price
Workers in Puerto Rico bear the brunt of this exploitation. Inequality is currently higher than in any of the 50 U.S. states; 46 percent of the population lives in poverty. Per capita income is less than half that of Mississippi, the poorest state in the U.S., while food prices are often higher because 85 percent of the food is imported. One woman reported that milk is $6 a gallon!
The two major capitalist parties, the New Progressive Party and the Popular Democratic Party, have taken turns reducing pensions for government workers, increasing taxes on water and other essentials and firing thousands of public employees. One hundred schools have been closed, teachers laid off, college tuition increased, and social programs slashed. Most doctors have fled to the U.S. mainland seeking better pay and working conditions. Women and kids suffer the most under these horrible conditions. Over 80 percent of teachers are women and most have families. As is expected under capitalism, the working class in Puerto Rico and worldwide will have the burden of paying back the debts owed.
Phony Solutions
While workers are suffering, billionaire hedge-fund owners are lobbying the U.S. Congress for PROMESA, a bill which would establish an oversight panel similar to the Emergency Managers who’ve wrecked Detroit and Flint, Michigan, to decide what gets spent on schools, hospitals and other vital social services. These austerity measures are meant to secure the bosses’ profits, not alleviate workers’ conditions.
Democrats and the unions say they want to protect pensions, provide stimulus money and extend Medicare and Medicaid payments. These proposals, however, guarantee investors’ profits while continuing to avoid paying taxes, the predatory practice that helped caused the crisis in the first place. If enacted, these proposals might temporarily alleviate some workers’ conditions, but these “solutions” by the unions and Democrats while offering workers a material and ideological buy-in for exploitative class relations, do not get at the root of Puerto Rico’s problem — the capitalist system that drives bosses to exploit workers for profits at any cost. The mis-leaders of unions and liberal parties are not our class friends.
Not surprisingly, the teach-in failed to mention workers’ class struggles here against capitalist exploitation.  In the last two years, teachers, students and parents have walked out of schools and marched on the government to demand an end to school closings, cuts in funding, and lowering of teacher pensions.
While strikes and walk-outs won’t be nearly enough to reverse these massive bosses’ attacks, they can be a learning experience in building a revolutionary communist movement that can one day overthrow the local capitalists and their imperialist masters. If anything, this teach-in showed that international solidarity among the working class is possible, and moreover is needed. In one “brain-storming” session, at the teach-in a woman’s offer of “revolution” as her answer to the crisis was met with enthusiastic applause.
Only a communist revolution would ensure that the working class would no longer carry the racist, sexist burdens of capitalism.