Pope Francis, the fake “Peace Pope” and “Pope of the Poor,” kneels in thrall to U.S. finance capital—the world’s leading source of war, suffering, and racist exploitation. With the Catholic church facing steep declines in membership, child-abuse scandals and the loss of critical revenue, Pope Francis has been charged with forging an alliance with U.S finance capital. To deceive Catholics and progressive workers in general, the pope is espousing left-sounding ideas, ranging from an indictment of capitalist inequality to a call to the rich and powerful to take action against climate change.
But don’t be fooled. The Pope is no friend of the poor—and certainly no enemy of the capitalist bosses. In fact, his liberalization campaign reflects the growing influence of U.S. finance capitalists—the dominant wing of the U.S. ruling class—within the church. By visiting the U.S., “His Holiness” hopes to steer Catholics and others toward backing the Democratic Party in 2016—the party that, at least for the moment, appears to be the bosses’ most reliable vehicle for expanding war and fascism. Francis’s job is to pacify workers who are disillusioned with capitalism and to restore their faith in reforming this rotten system.
This is nothing new. Going back to feudal times, the Catholic Church has used religion to promote and justify the agenda of the ruling class—along with its own vast business interests. Workers of the world need to see the Pope’s game for what it is: a charade to mislead workers and subvert revolutionary politics. Instead, workers need to channel their anger into support for the Progressive Labor Party, the only organization that can create revolutionary change. PLP fights for the total destruction of capitalism, not the phony cosmetic changes sought by the Pope.
The Catholic Church is in dire need of reform. In 2013, in response to a series of crooked Vatican bank deals and a declining membership base, the church replaced Benedict XVI—a German who’d joined the Hitler Youth—with the more liberal Francis.  But this wasn’t enough to check the church’s downward spiral. Francis has been forced to close schools and churches across the U.S. to pay billions in settlements in child abuse cases. Now he’s turning to U.S. finance capital for help.  
The Pope’s economic dealings reveal his priorities more clearly than his lofty words. In his effort to clean up the money-laundering Vatican Bank, he replaced Ernst von Freyburg, heir to a ship-building fortune from the Hitler era, with Jean-Baptiste de Franssu, a French-born executive at Invesco, a U.S. asset management firm. On June 25, even as he gave lip service to condemn the profit system’s greed, he blessed the heavyweight imperialist leaders of the phony “Inclusive Capitalism” movement, including Bill Clinton, the British Rothschilds, JPMorgan Chase, Prince Charles, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
The Pope’s lead advisor on the current refugee crisis is ultra-capitalist Peter Sutherland. After granting Francis an audience in June, Sutherland dictated the Pope’s bogus “humanitarian” stance, subsequently adopted by the capitalist rulers in Germany and other European nations as a means to discredit Russian bosses. Sutherland is the chairman of Goldman Sachs International and ex-chairman of British Petroleum. To protect their billions in profits, both Goldman and BP need the U.S. war machine to continue slaughtering workers in the Middle East.
On his U.S. tour, Francis is cheerleading for the Democrats and their campaign to keep hold of the White House. His position on global warming neatly dovetails with theirs, in contrast to the anti-science Republican deniers. Like Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders, Francis backs Barack Obama’s Iran deal, which buys time for the U.S. bosses to build up for global war. The Boston Globe (9/13/15) foresees Francis making pro-Democrat inroads against the GOP on several levels:
Conventional wisdom holds that the Democrats have the most to gain, given the pope’s expected focus on issues such as immigration and the fight against climate change. Moreover, given perceptions that the U.S. Church has been moving into a steadily tighter alliance with the Republicans, anything that cuts in a different direction arguably helps the opposition.
So just where do the Pope’s big ideas come from?
In an address during a meeting organized by the Foundation for Sustainable Development, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church reminded key personalities from the fields of science, religion, politics, and economics that finding solutions to global warming is a matter of social justice, since “peoples, communities, men and women, are at risk” (Christian Today, 9/13/15).
The Foundation has cashed fat checks from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 1996.
The pontiff’s other travels reflect similar U.S.-friendly politics. In July, Francis paid a call on Evo Morales, Bolivia’s “socialist” leader. As Britain’s liberal Guardian newspaper reported (10/14/14), Morales has “transformed Bolivia from an ‘economic basket case’ into a country that receives praise from such unlikely contenders as the World Bank and the IMF.” Both the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are controlled by U.S. finance capital; they were especially pleased when Morales lowered Bolivia’s legal working age to 10 years. The Pope is no friend of the working class.
As workers worldwide see more clearly that capitalism leads to mass poverty and imperialist war, the Catholic Church and the U.S. finance capitalist class are desperately looking for misleaders to stifle workers’ anger. Like his counterpart, Barack Obama, Pope Francis is the friendly face of this monstrous profit system. Only the destruction of capitalism — and its bosses, wars, racism, sexism, exploitation and permanent mass unemployment — can solve our class’s problems. Only a communist society, led by the working class and its revolutionary party, PLP, can end capitalist atrocities and put cynical salesmen like Pope Francis out of business.

HAITI, August 27—“Why don’t those delinquent politicians like you? The people agree with you and take part in your march,” a worker watching a PLP-led demonstration in the south of Haiti asked a comrade. Our comrade replied, “Our struggle is the struggle of the masses for the masses, not for a single individual who wants power in order to get rich on their backs.” The struggle against capitalism continues in Haiti! More than 650 workers, students and youth, professionals and unemployed workers demonstrated today against hunger, poverty, the high cost of living and mass unemployment.
The Progressive Labor Party is building class-consciousness, organizing and mobilizing the masses around the intrinsic problems of capitalism. Hundreds of people marched for miles with signs, banners and tree branches in hand. Symbolically alluding to hunger, drought and the inaccessibility of water, people came with pots, plates, spoons, glasses and other makeshift instruments to animate the march.
Strike While Iron is Hot!
After the demonstration on July 28 (see CHALLENGE 9/2), marking the 100th anniversary of the first U.S. invasion of Haiti, our comrades and close friends worked for a month to organize a second big action against hunger and poverty, as demanded by our base. After an evaluation of the first march, PLP members and close friends met several times to  discuss how to move forward. Together we planned the next action, which was held today. As communists, we are developing a sense of how to organize class struggle. For a month, posters were put up throughout the area, hundreds of leaflets distributed, banners posted, and statements distributed to media both locally and in the capital. We mobilized door-to-door so everyone knew the plan. Our comrades dug in to discuss the source of the hunger, poverty and unemployment that workers here are facing. Using megaphones and a local radio station, we got our message out in all the neighborhoods.
Workers are developing confidence in the Party’s ideas, and are engaging with us. One close friend lent his motorcycle to a comrade for a full week. Artists and calligraphers are writing banners without charge on materials we provide. One young man lent his family’s generator for sound; a woman donated gas for it. Another friend guaranteed the sound system. Some friends made sure there was water for all the demonstrators in the stultifying heat of a summer day in Haiti. During the demonstration, a former militant mass leader and other community leaders put forward useful ideas and helped guarantee security.
Confidence in the Workers
From the beginning, the police had wanted to stop the march. But all the workers stood firm alongside the comrades of PLP. When the march crossed a major highway, local residents lined the route. Drivers and travelers who received leaflets and CHALLENGEs voiced their solidarity with the struggle. One worker pointed out how this march, disciplined and with a clear political line, was the exact opposite of the free-for-alls organized by politicians during this election season. We then denounced the elections as part of the bosses’ plan to keep power in the hands of those few who have created the misery that faces working people here.
With two demonstrations in the space of one month, some workers were worried about the absence of the capitalist media, whose representatives wanted to be paid to cover our action. That’s capitalism: trying to smother the shouts of the working class. But thanks to some forward thinking by our comrades, the message got out anyway, including some live coverage by a young journalist. The workers are committed to getting our message out ourselves—not relying on the bosses’ media, but on our own initiatives.
Onward to Building a Mass PLP!
Today’s demonstration is part of a long-range plan to develop class consciousness, including conferences on hunger, poverty, documentaries, permanent posters and banners in the streets, and an open letter to the political misleaders. We are organizing study/action groups and freedom schools to understand and act against the sources of workers’ oppression, using local radio stations to agitate. We will also participate in existing mass organizations of  city and farm workers, students and professionals to put forward our politics and win others to join PLP. Our goal is to train masses of new communist leaders.
In this continuing struggle, PLP is proving that we are honest and serious, and can win the masses with our politics instead of material incentives. We are challenging the capitalist politicians. Workers here are being inspired to fight capitalism and build for communist revolution. The PLP, our international communist party, is engaged in class struggle throughout the world. Wherever PLP is fighting back, revolutionary consciousness is growing and the masses will become more and more confident of victory!

ISRAEL-PALESTINE, September 16 — The Zionist government continues its racism against the 20 percent Palestinian minority within the state. According to Minister of Education Naftali Bennett, the new school year in Israel began on September 1 in an orderly fashion. The 33,000 Palestinian-Israeli students on strike since the first day of school disagree! These students attend 47 “community schools” administered by a private Christian church whose existence precedes Israel’s itself. The schools teach students of all religions and employ teachers of all sectors as well.
These schools reject the racist brainwashing curriculum of the Ministry of Education. The Palestinian nationality is preserved in these non-government schools. Students are told the truth about the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, the forcible expulsion in 1947-48 of 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of over 500 villages by terrorists who would become the leaders of the future Israeli state. Government schools teach the lie that all Palestinians voluntarily left rather than live with Jews.
Furthermore, the relatively high quality of this education results in 94 percent of the graduates ending up with an academic degree. In fact, out of all Palestinian academics within Israel, 84 percent of those in technology, medicine, and law are alumni of the private Christian schools.
Naturally, the Israeli state is threatened by the idea of educating Palestinian students, whom it treats as second-class citizens, and has been cutting the Christian schools’ budgets year after year. The crisis escalated this year. In addition to cutting the budget, the state is limiting the fees these schools are allowed to charge parents. Private Jewish schools still get 100 percent funding from the state. A Palestinian student in Israel gets 29 percent of what a Jewish student would get.
For the past two weeks, there has been only limited coverage in the Israeli media. The capitalist state has offered two “solutions” — either these schools become official state schools, which would definitely abolish the only places where students get an alternative to the Zionist version of history, or they become schools for rich Arab people only. Considering the majority of Arabs in Israel are below average financially, this option would make the church money. But, it would also force many students to go to state Israeli schools. Lastly, many of these private schools are the only option in places where the State hasn’t even provided official schools for the Arab families.
To support this struggle, here is a link to a statement signed by a large group of Palestinian-Israeli academics on this issue: https://www.facebook.com/hossam.haick/posts/508729419305184.
The racist and savage anti-Palestinian ideas and practices of the Israeli government are used to justify and win Jewish workers to support its existence as a violent state where only Jews enjoy full rights. However, Jewish workers do not profit from this racism. While Palestinian workers suffer more directly and sharply from the occupation and racism, Jewish workers also endure high unemployment, low wages, housing shortages and a militaristic culture. So long as bosses are able to keep workers separated physically or ideologically, all workers will suffer.
Neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — or any other boss, politician, Jewish or Arab — is a friend of the working class. All of them maintain their power and profits from the exploitation of workers. And they build and depend on racism, nationalism, sexism and religion to divide us.
For a better world where all children can live in true peace, justice and egalitarianism, all workers in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, whether Jewish, Arab, African, refugee or immigrant, must unite to fight back. As a united working class, we can rid the world of capitalism and the exploitation, racism, wars and other horrors inflicts upon us.

Editor’s note: Let’s fight in solidarity with thesestriking students, and raise communist ideas. These Christian schools are limited by their own religious and Palestinian nationalist ideology. The fight against racist cuts to
education must be coupled with a rejection all religion, nationalism, and borders.

Albinos workers are being mutilated in Tanzania (76 since 2007), and their body parts sold to witch doctors.  Men are raping albino women to cure themselves of HIV-AIDS.  Who bears the blame for these atrocities? So-called “human nature”? The ignorance and superstition of the masses?  Corrupt Tanzanian government officials?  Profiteers—the witchdoctors and middlemen who abduct, mutilate, and kill?
Knowing who or what to blame leads us to the solution.  The international Progressive Labor Party lays the blame squarely on imperialism, the competition among capitalist bosses that keeps the working class mired in ignorance, misery and desperation. Capitalism has transformed the centuries-old discrimination against albino workers into a profit-inspired atrocity.  Only by destroying this system can we liberate our class from the rule of profit and build a truly humane society: communism.  
Tanzania Workers Enter a Dark Night
In 1985, the capitalist class in Tanzania agreed to comply with the U.S.-backed International Monetary Fund (IMF) to boost profits. The Tanzanian government eliminated free health care, subsidies for farmers, laws that prevented politicians from investing in business, and many more gains won during Tanzania’s earlier pro-Soviet/Chinese period.  In order to fool the workers into accepting these attacks, the ruling class promised the workers empty “get rich quick” schemes, the illusion that everyone could become a capitalist boss.
The working class in the fishing industry around Lake Victoria and the mining industry around Shinyanga and Geita were the most vulnerable.  These industries were European capitalist-owned with an all-African workforce. For years, the workers had seen these bosses become wealthy from exploiting Tanzanian resources and workers.
But without a communist movement, they had no way of understanding the inner workings of imperialist exploitation.  When their livelihoods collapsed, they were susceptible to being lured into a strange and horrible new “occult economy”—the buying and selling of the body parts of albino people.
Modern Origins of Ritual Murder
In the 1950s, British colonial officers stocked Lake Victoria with a fish called Nile Perch.  It was to be a new “cash crop,” exported as a delicacy more profitable than coffee or cotton, while the European bosses exported automatic weapons on the return flights to fuel imperialist-backed civil wars on the African continent.
But for 40,000 local fishermen in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, all bordering Lake Victoria, this capitalist ecological experiment turned out to be a disaster.   The locals couldn’t afford to buy the motor boats or fishing gear that were necessary to catch the Nile Perch that lived in the rougher, deeper parts of the lake.  Furthermore, Nile Perch, like the British, turned out to be vile predators—killing every living thing in the lake, from algae to the smaller fish the locals depended on.
In the 1980s, European, Asian, and Israeli capitalists were allowed by the Tanzanian government to build fish processing plants in the cities around Lake Victoria.  The fishing industry was booming, but true to the capitalist business cycle, the predictable bust followed. By 2005, the lake was overfished, factories had closed or were operating below capacity, and workers’ livelihoods were ruined.  This story is told in the documentary film, Darwin’s Nightmare (2004), by Hupert Suaper.
It is no coincidence that the first murder of an albino person occurred shortly after this crisis, in 2007.  Witch doctors made a promise to desperate fishermen that the golden hair of albinos, spun into their fishing nets, would attract fish and make them rich, and that albino body parts, made into amulets, would usher in other kinds of good fortune.  Some workers, infected by capitalist greed and individualism, became middlemen in the trade of albino body parts to witch doctors.
Bosses’ Solution: Blame the Workers
Predictably, the capitalist press has reported extensively on this “barbaric, backward, human rights disaster” while neglecting to connect the ‘occult economy’ to the crimes of capitalism—the destruction of workers’ livelihoods, imperialist exploitation of resources, and the failed promise of the “free” market.
There is no justice under capitalism. President Jakaya Kikwete and other politicians are using these atrocities to expand their power and establish legitimacy with the international capitalist community. They have reinstituted the death penalty for those found guilty of participating in the trading of albino body parts, and instituted a method for neighbors to anonymously turn in those they suspect of being middlemen. These measures help them pass the so-called “human rights” test, guaranteeing a steady flow of money from the United Nations, NGOs and other funders who use “human rights” as a smokescreen for imperialism. At the same time, these politicians created tax laws that exempt most international companies from paying taxes for the first ten years. Along with tax evasions by businesses, this amounts to more money per year than what the UN says cut poverty levels in half (http://www.policyforum-tz.org/files/Howmuchrevenuearewelosing.pdf). Politicians are rewarded with luxury for fanning the flames of poverty -that make the working class of Tanzania vulnerable to the witchdoctors’ scams.
Good Morning, Revolution
When the Tanzanian ruling class unleashed this era of naked exploitation and robbery in the 1980s, they left the workers as bad off or worse than they were during British colonialism.  The murders of albino people have to be seen within this context.  As dark as the situation seems, the solution – communist revolution- must be seen in context as well. Throughout the first two-thirds of the 20th century, under the leadership of the international communist movement, workers around the world, including Tanzania, made great strides in the class war.  The capitalists have been on the offensive since then to take back everything the workers won. The Progressive Labor Party fights to end the dark night faced by our international class by organizing a mass, PLP for armed revolution, from East Africa to Latin America. Only communism can outlaw profit-making and build a society that values all workers’ lives, because communism means the working class is in power. Under communism we will put behind us once and for all the depraved practices spawned by capitalism, and unleash a new era dedicated to the health and well-being of our class throughout the world.