Cancer is epidemic, rapidly gaining on cardiovascular disease as the leading cause of death in the U.S. A United Nations research agency tells us that cancer incidence worldwide is expected to rise by 70 percent over the next twenty years. The disease is growing at “an alarming pace,” according to a 2014 report by the World Health Organization.
Why is this happening? The capitalists’ mass media would have us believe that cancer — along with obesity and diabetes — is a “genetic disease,” an unstoppable killer. A mass mailing by the American Medical Association (8/22/14) bore the headline: “New research suggests cancer can’t be eradicated.” It quoted an evolutionary biologist who maintained, “[O]ur cells’ ability to develop cancer is an intrinsic property.” Meanwhile, the media does its best to ignore or minimize the role played by carcinogens in the environment. As Scientific American (5/21/10) stated: “But scientists most likely will never be able to tease out the true role of environmental contaminants because environmental exposures, genetics and lifestyle seem to all intertwine.”
This is a gross distortion of scientific reality. In fact, the rising cancer rate is directly linked to the increase of toxic chemicals and racism in our environment. This in turn reflects the bosses’ drive for short-term profit and their utter disregard for the health of the working class. To attribute cancer — and other contemporary epidemics, like diabetes — to our genes is to blame the victims for their “deficient” genetic code.
The truth is that workers are being sickened by capitalist need for profit.
On the matter of obesity, a 2008 article in Nutrition Reviews, a peer-reviewed journal of the International Life Sciences Institute, noted:
Genetic changes are unlikely to explain the rapid spread of obesity around the globe. That’s because the “gene pool”—the frequency of different genes across a population—remains fairly stable for many generations. It takes a long time for new mutations or polymorphisms to spread. So if our genes have stayed largely the same, what has changed over the past 40 years of rising obesity rates? Our environment: the physical, social, political, and economic surroundings that influence how much we eat and how active we are. Environmental changes that make it easier for people to overeat, and harder for people to get enough physical activity, have played a key role in triggering the recent surge of overweight and obesity.
No Constraint on Capitalist Poisons
The link between environmental contaminants and cancer dates back to 1775, when Percival Pott published a study of English chimney sweeps who developed cancer of the scrotum due to soot and coal tar. Since World War II, our environment has grown increasingly contaminated with carcinogens. In his 1998 book, The Politics of Cancer Revisited, Dr. Samuel S. Epstein notes that production of synthetic organic chemicals, petroleum, and natural gas all skyrocketed in the 1940s. Plasticizers and the pesticides were introduced from 1945 through 1955.
Today the globe is awash in toxic chemicals: arsenic, asbestos, benzene, formaldehyde, ionizing radiation, soot, radon, and hair dyes. Industrial and agricultural chemicals have been polluting ground water in California for at least 50 years. Millions of tons of cancer-causing pesticides have been poured onto agricultural land around the world, contaminating food supplies. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the Allied Signal Company produced the insecticide Kepone, a chemical cousin to DDT that persists for hundreds of years, and dumped it into the James River Estuary in Virginia. In 2003, the French West Indian island of Guadalupe restricted crop-growing areas due to Kepone contamination; Guadalupe has one of the highest prostate cancer rates in the world. As recently as March 2014, the Duke Energy Company was cited for dumping devastating, toxic coal ash sludge into the Cape Fear River in North Carolina, in a pattern that goes back at least four decades.
While the Centers for Disease Control currently lists 135 substances as “potential occupational carcinogens,” or cancer-causing agents, very few of the 80,000 chemicals now in use have ever been tested for safety. According to Scientific American (July 2014), “The Toxic Substances Control Act, last updated in 1976, allows industry to use new chemicals without first demonstrating that they are safe. Instead it places the burden of proof on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Yet of the more than 50,000 chemicals used commercially, the EPA has tested just 300.”
In 2010, the President’s Cancer Panel reported that “the true burden of environmentally induced cancers has been grossly underestimated.” Women who give birth with high levels of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) or DDT in their blood show an increased risk of developing breast cancer (Nature, 5/29/14). Further, environmental contaminants have been shown to permanently affect gene function. Epigenetic studies have revealed that harmful chemicals can permanently alter which genes are activated, or “turned on,” without changing the genes’ DNA coding. (The term epigenetics refers to heritable changes, influenced by the factors such as the environment, in gene expression that does not involve changes to the underlying DNA sequences). DDT can cause negative effects in animals’ offspring: “Today, no one doubts that epigenetic effects play a crucial role in development, aging and even cancer” (Scientific American, August 2014).
Business As Usual
Capitalists and their state apparatus have a long history of obscuring the cancer-environment connection, despite overwhelming scientific evidence. One glaring example: “After decades of denials, the government is conceding that since the dawn of the atomic age, workers making nuclear weapons have been exposed to radiation and chemicals that have produced cancer and early death” (New York Times, 1/29/2000).
The bosses’ indifference to our health is also exposed by the collusion between the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which promotes nuclear power worldwide. As a result, “the WHO has steadfastly resisted conducting studies on the health effects of exposure to uranium 238 following Desert Storm, Bosnia, and Kosovo” (Helen Caldicott, The New Nuclear Danger, 2002).
The capitalists’ sporadic attempts to curb pollution have little impact. The Environmental Protection Agency is chronically underfunded; the Clean Air Act is perpetually under-enforced, following the needs and urgings of industry. As stated in Occupational and Environmental Health (2011), edited by Levy and Wegman, “…the workers’ desire for comfort, income, safety, and leisure is continually counterbalanced by the employer’s need for profit.” This is an iron rule of capitalism, even more so in a period of rising inter-imperialist competition.
Lawrence Summers, chief economist of the World Bank in the early 1990s, summed up the bosses’ murderous business-as-usual in a famous memo: “I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.”
Rx for Cancer: Communist Revolution
The medical establishment’s response to the cancer epidemic is mostly limited to encouraging screening and lifestyle changes. But while mammograms and colonoscopies may detect early cancer or precancerous changes, they do nothing to prevent the development of cancer in the population in general. And while the health system urges us to stop smoking and eat a healthy diet, it generally ignores the saturation of our food with corn syrup, the fact that fast foods are all that many can afford, and the easy access of the young to highly addictive cigarettes. In 2009, the government’s public health activities received only 3 percent of the more than $2 trillion spent by the U.S. on health care.
Because of racism, Black, Latin, and immigrant workers receive the worst medical care, and are forced to live and work in areas that are the most toxic to their health.
Children are the canaries in the coal mine ( a warning of adverse conditions and greater danger), especially vulnerable to the ravages of environment-induced cancer. By 2003, according to the New York Times, the incidence of cancer in children had increased 20 percent in the preceding 20 years. For infants under one, the increase was 36 percent! The recent vogue of movies (like The Fault in Our Stars), TV shows, and books about children with cancer is a ruling-class tool to get us to accept this atrocity as the new normal.
Capitalism is “a system that fouls its own nest, both the human-social conditions and the wider natural environment on which it depends” (Monthly Review, December 2011). This is the very nature of the beast.
The cancer epidemic will be defeated only when this profit-driven society is replaced by one ruled by and for workers — by communism.
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KKKop kills again! Only a United Working Class Can End Police Terror
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- 24 December 2014 161 hits
These racist cops kill with impunity! A kkkop murdered 18-year-old Black teen Antonio Martin on the night of December 23. The incident took place at Berkeley, Missouri, just a few miles from Ferguson. Over 300 people rallied, setting off fireworks and throwing bricks and rocks at the police.
Bosses are now spreading their racist slander against this Black teen murdered by cops, but they paint their kkkops as heroes. In New York City, the mayor banned protests in “respect to mourn” the two cops killed. These racist bosses have nothing to offer our class, not even sympathy. That’s because these bankers and politicians make money off the terrorization and genocide of the working class. Capitalism is the real criminal. Cops and bosses can get away with murder while the working class gets terrorized, deported, disappeared, starved, and killed — all legal under capitalism.
This is war against our class. The bosses preach peace and shoot bullets. Missouri has spent over $12.5 million since Ferguson to quell protests. Missouri will continue to rebel and will have the backing of the international working class. Justice for Mike and Antonio will come from the working-class burying this murderous system once and for all. This means a violent communist revolution.
The revolutionary communist PLP rejects all acts of individual terror or anarchist street theater. We are organizing on our jobs and in our schools, churches, unions, military and many other places where workers are present. We are building a mass movement to combat police terror, imperialist wars and their root cause, capitalism, with strikes, rebellions and walkouts. In the process, we are winning workers and youth to see that racist terror will end only when the working class takes power with communist revolution. Our strategy is to build a Party of millions leading millions more, across all borders.
Far from ushering in a new era of peaceful coexistence, Barack Obama’s opening to Cuba reflects a sharpening
inter-imperialist rivalry. By restoring ties to the Caribbean island, Obama and the U.S. capitalists he serves are seeking to reassert U.S. influence in Latin America at the expense of Russia, China, and Venezuela. While the U.S. bosses’ media focus mainly on economics and politics, the shift also has a significant military dimension. As the Russian and Chinese war machines set their sights on Cuba, it signals a growing probability of global conflict.
The pro-U.S. Jerusalem Post (12/18/14) praises Obama’s move in geo-strategic terms: “Alarmingly, the Russians in recent months have been using Cuba to build up a menacing Cold War-era presence at America’s doorstep.” For U.S. rulers, a rehabilitated Cuba lowers the risk of Russia moving in “just a short boat ride away from the Florida Keys.”
The inside story was revealed by Bill Gertz, a writer for the right-wing Washington Times — owned by the Unification Church, which has close ties to South Korea’s national intelligence agency. According to the New York Times (12/3/2000), Gertz has used his special access to publish “more classified information than anyone else in America.” On December 17, he wrote:
Months before President Obama announced on Wednesday that he is seeking to do away with decades of U.S. economic sanctions against the communist regime in Cuba, Russia concluded a security deal with Havana aimed at bolstering intelligence and military ties to the island dictatorship.
The Russia-Cuba agreement was announced May 16 …. The security agreement comes amid fresh U.S. intelligence agency concerns that Russia is taking steps to follow through on plans to conduct strategic nuclear bomber flights over the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea, possibly with the help of Cuba and Venezuela.
Russian officials recently held discussions with both governments about the use of airfields for Russia’s Tu-95 nuclear capable bombers, known as the Bear H. The bombers have been conducting large numbers of threatening flights near U.S. coasts in recent months.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stated Nov. 12 that Russia would begin sending long-range bombers to the Gulf. “We have to maintain [Russia’s] military presence in the western Atlantic and eastern Pacific, as well as the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico,” he said, noting strategic bombers would be dispatched to the region for “drills.”
China, Cuba: Military Allies
Meanwhile, China’s state news agency, Xinhua, reported, “China’s top political advisor Yu Zhengsheng met with Cuban Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces Leopoldo Cintra Frias on Thursday. Saying bilateral military ties are part of party-to-party and country-to-country relations between China and Cuba, Yu spoke highly of the progress in high-level exchanges and training between the two militaries” (12/11/14).
Since 1823, U.S. foreign policy has followed the Monroe Doctrine. President James Monroe declared that any efforts by outside powers to colonize or interfere with states in North or South America would be viewed as acts of aggression — and would require U.S. intervention. From that point forward, the Marines invaded any Latin American country where U.S. corporate interests were threatened.
Castro’s Cuba defied this doctrine. In 1960, after it seized a billion dollars worth of U.S. corporate holdings, the U.S. imposed a trade embargo and banned travel to Cuba. (While the travel ban was generally effective, the Progressive Labor Movement—forerunner to Progressive Labor Party—successfully broke it in 1963.) In recent years, as U.S. power has weakened, competing capitalists from China, Japan, Germany, France and Spain have jumped into South America, making deals with Brazil, Chile, Argentina and others. The U.S. has grown marginalized in its own backyard.
Now China is using Cuba to entrench itself in the region. Vladimir Putin is moving to outflank the U.S. by strengthening Russia’s military ties there. In response, U.S. rulers would have to gear up their military machine to recapture their once-dominant position.
War Is the Name of Rulers’ Cuba Game
Bankrolled by oil firms like Exxon and Chevron, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) hosts a program called Military Forum, where senior Department of Defense officials “present their unique insights and vision on the direction of U.S. national security and defense policy” (CSIS website).
A year ago, these warmongers ran conferences headlined, “The Case to Remove Cuba from the Terrorist List” and “Cuba: Finding its Place in the Global Market?” Now those questions have been settled. On December 2, two weeks before Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced a normalization of relations, the forum topic was “Getting to Normal: A Legal Pathway for U.S.-Cuba Policy Reform.”
The road to Obama’s Cuba gambit was paved by the U.S.-led manipulation to lower oil prices. Even as demand shrinks in a worsening global economy, crude oil production soars in the U.S. and junior partner Saudi Arabia. This has little to do with breakthroughs in U.S. fracking or the Saudis’ desire to retain market share. In reality, U.S. rulers are aiming to punish — if not overthrow — their rivals in Moscow and Caracas. As oil prices have plunged 50 percent since June, economic chaos has ensued in Russia and Venezuela, capitalist petro-states at the top of the U.S. hit list. U.S. rulers pulled the same trick in 1986, when Vice President George H. Bush convinced Saudi King Fahd to depress oil prices. The resulting dislocation helped assure the demise of the Soviet Union.
Even while forced to admit that Cuban health care and education put the U.S. to shame, U.S. politicians are boasting that the move toward normalization proves the “failure of communism” in the island nation. But Cuba never had communism. Its ruling party, following the lead of a decaying Soviet Union, never gave full working-class state power a chance. Misled by the myth of the halfway house of socialism, Cuba maintained lethal aspects of the profit system. Its revolution was doomed from the start.
Cuban Socialism = Capitalism
As Maria Elena Hernández, a senior Communist Party official, told the New York Times (12/20), “We’re going to be like China and Vietnam, a socialist country with capitalism.” By retaining wages, Fidel Castro’s regime locked in wage differentials and a small privileged class, hallmarks of capitalism. In Cuba, as in the USSR and China, socialism led straight back to the capitalist profit system. China is now the world’s second largest capitalist economy. It features mass unemployment and poverty wages for hundreds of millions. A select few have become billionaires on the backs of the working class.
It is socialism — a fig leaf for capitalism — that has failed, not communism. It is the profit system that continues to fail billions of workers worldwide.
A normalized Cuba will spell full-blown capitalism for its working class. It will inevitably lead to heightened exploitation, lower wages, accelerating racism, and growing prostitution to serve foreign-owned hotels and casinos.
For the international working class, the U.S. opening to Cuba can have only one result. Only war can resolve the capitalists’ perpetual fight for markets and cheap labor.
U.S. Police State to Combat Ferguson Rebellions
Obama will use his Cuba scheme and “We are all Americans” rhetoric to recruit more Latin youth into the military, to wage war against our sisters and brothers worldwide on behalf of U.S. imperialism. To pursue these wars, the bosses will intensify fascist measures within the U.S. to stop rebellions by the working class. Exhibit A: The brutal repression of demonstrators in Ferguson, Missouri. The rash of racist killings by cops across the U.S., the poverty wages earned by millions, the mass racist unemployment with no end in sight — the time is ripe for rebellions that the bosses can squash only with increased terror.
The one and only answer to this capitalist hell is communist revolution. Communism is the opposite of capitalism and socialism. It eliminates bosses, cops, profits and all of their evils: racism, the special oppression of women, mass unemployment, poverty, and imperialist war.
Communism: Our Class’s Future
Communism means workers’ power, a society led by the workers’ communist party composed of hundreds of millions of workers. Everyone can become a communist leader. Our class will share all the benefits produced by our labor, the source of all value. This is the only decent future for our class, for our youth. This is what the Progressive Labor Party fights for. Join us!
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Forum: Hails Ferguson Rebellion, Shuts Down Streets
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- 24 December 2014 170 hits
NEW YORK CITY, December 21 — The Progressive Labor Party and other antiracist protesters escalated the fight against U.S. kkkapitalism here this weekend. Rising fascism in the U.S. — and an onslaught of racist murders by the cops — has left workers and youth no choice but to fight back. These two days in New York demonstrated that workers and youth are not only open to communist politics, but are willing to organize under communist leadership.
Forum: Fight Like Ferguson
A multiracial crowd of over 140 workers and youth filled a Harlem church on Saturday to learn about fighting racist violence. A Ferguson rebel and fighters from Baltimore spoke about the need to build a resistance against racist police terror. On July 18, 2013, Tyrone West, a 44-year-old Black worker, was beaten to death by more than a dozen Baltimore cops. On December 18, seventeen months later, the state’s attorney declared the kkkops had used “objectively reasonable force” and would face no criminal charges. This murder forced workers in Baltimore to fight back. Every time the capitalist state kills one of our class brothers or sisters, it also recruits untold numbers of enemies against itself.
The Harlem forum displayed multiple branches of an antiracist movement budding all at once: the Ferguson rebellion that ignited an international fire to burn this capitalist system down; other local fightbacks, already in place, that enabled the spirit of Ferguson’s resistance to spread; the response in our schools and community organizations, led mostly by youth; the potential to recruit hundreds for communist revolution through bold and consistent political work. PLP has been active for years with families of police murder victims. We have had a significant presence in Ferguson. Our work has begun to bear fruit as the seeds of future actions are being planted.
Taking the Streets of Harlem
After the forum, the participants took the streets. We marched through the Manhanttanville and Grant housing projects, where police raided and arrested 40 young Black people in June in a full-scale racist assault, complete with helicopters. The cops swarmed the projects. They bashed down doors, trashed apartments, intimidated grandmothers and toddlers, and sought to arrest 103 indicted young people.
Complete with wanted posters of Darren Wilson, the killer of Michael Brown, and a banner calling for communist revolution. Marchers chanted, “Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Shut this racist system down!” Residents took CHALLENGE and expressed interest in fighting with us; a group of neighborhood youth joined the march. After we took half of 125th Street, Harlem’s main east-west thoroughfare, the cops were quick to show up. We were not intimidated. Workers threw their fists in the air in solidarity as we stopped traffic. Four Black teenage girls joined us chanting, and continued to follow us on the sidewalk after a cop prodded them off the street.
Our initial plan was to conclude the march with a picket of the State Office Building. But after seeing the outpouring of workers’ solidarity, we continued to march past the building and picketed in the street, blocking traffic all four ways. Drivers refused to move their cars. Their response showed us that many workers are ready to fight and take communist leadership.
The forum and rally were led by youth who organized against the police in Ferguson during the week following the no-indictment verdict for Michael Brown. That experience gave PL youth courage and confidence to defy cops in New York. We have many more lessons to learn and battles to fight, but this weekend showed that everything we do counts. Every time we protest, we intensify the potential for more rebellion.
Building Ties in the Working Class
Without deep and broad ties to the working class, the militancy and political sharpness of communists would be for naught. In addition to our Ferguson and Baltimore friends, two young people from upstate New York we met in the Ferguson jail came to this weekend’s actions. When asked to name the most gripping part of their trip, these new friends talked about PLP’s collectivity and organization. “You have dedication and love. Having this collective is beautiful…this bond. A big bond among everybody, that’s what really impacted me….Where I come from, [it’s about] them not having a clear view of the world. But y’all give people a chance to open up to y’all…to be themselves…to decide for themselves. I’m going to tell my people that you are real!” The relationship we built among youth we’d just met is based on communist confidence in the working class. PLP aspires to build a world based on collectivity and need, not individualism and profit.
‘We Surpassed Fear’
The following day, Sunday, we marched down Church Avenue in Brooklyn. Kyam Livingston was a 37-year-old Black worker killed in 2013 in a Brooklyn holding cell by gruesome medical neglect. Family and fighters marched despite the brewing terrorization of protesters after the killing of two cops in Bedford-Stuyvesant the day before (see page 1). Kyam’s mother cried, “I will fight for you, Kyam, until I die. Every day!” As the youth and workers of Ayotzinapa, Mexico, have declared, “They have taken so much from us that they have even taken away our fear.”
As one of our new friends said, “How the officers dedicate their lives to kill us, we gotta dedicate ourselves to fight back. I don’t even know him [Mike Brown], but I’ll put my life on the line… We ain’t got no guns but we staying strong…People ask how you turn up like that. Simple fact is we surpassed fear. Ain’t nobody scared no more.”
Armed with the courage to fight back, multiracial unity will lead to more rebellions. It will open the door to a mass organized movement under communist leadership. With armed struggle to defeat capitalism, an egalitarian communist world where racism, sexism, and imperialist war will be outlawed, will rule the day.
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2 Cops Dead: Only a United Working Class Can End Police Terror
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- 24 December 2014 167 hits
Brooklyn, December 20 — When Ismayaail Brinsley killed New York Police Department cops Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos in Bedford-Stuyvesant, he did nothing for the mass movement against racist police terror. He was a man with a long history of mental illness who had earlier shot his girlfriend. Minutes later, according to the cops, he shot himself.
Before the bodies were even cold, Mayor Bill de Blasio, Police Commissioner William Bratton, Police Union Chief Patrick Lynch (fitting name), and a host of media talking heads and scribblers found their common talking point. They all linked the murder of the two cops to the mass outrage against racist police terror and the failure of two grand juries to indict the killers of Eric Garner and Mike Brown. No one even mentioned the racist carnival by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association the night before the shootings, when cops spat in the face of the Garner family and supporters by wearing “I Can Breathe” t-shirts at a City Hall rally.
Terrorism Only Serves the Bosses
The openly racist Lynch and Bratton directly blamed the anti-racist mass marches and rallies that have swept the country since the Ferguson rebellion. Liberal de Blasio used the occasion to call for a “suspension” of antiracist demonstrations. The recent falling out between Lynch and de Blasio is little more than political theater. Both agree that the anti-racist movement should get off the streets.
The capitalist bosses will exploit the killing of the two cops on many levels. The politicians and their Klan in blue will use them to blunt a growing anti-racist movement and retake the offensive. We may see a renewed wave of police terror against Black youth and sharper attacks on political groups who are part of the antiracist movement. The bosses may try to make an example of the anarchists who tried to throw trash cans on the Brooklyn Bridge two weeks ago.
Their real aim is to terrorize and scare the masses of workers, many of them getting active for the first time. No doubt, the police will use these murders to increase their surveillance of groups like Progressive Labor Party. They now have the perfect excuse to spy on and disrupt the “first responders” to the latest siege of police terror.
The revolutionary communist PLP rejects all acts of individual terror or anarchist street theater. We are organizing on our jobs and in our schools, churches, unions, military and many other places where workers are present. We are building a mass movement to combat police terror, imperialist wars and their root cause, capitalism, with strikes, rebellions and walkouts. In the process, we are winning workers and youth to see that racist terror will end only when the working class takes power with communist revolution. Our strategy is to build a Party of millions leading millions more, across all borders. Terror and terrorism only serve the bosses.
