BOGOTA, COLOMBIA, March 12 — When Attorney General Ordoñez dismissed Bogota’s Mayor, Gustavo Petro, on December 9, he laid bare the capitalist farce behind the current crisis. It clearly demonstrates to the workers that under capitalism we cannot hope to live humane lives, or, as Petro himself claims, to mutually co-exist without the big tycoons hoarding everything and leaving only a few crumbs for the working class.
That’s why the corrupt Colombian state, represented by the Attorney General, deposed a mayor who had become a royal pain because of his attempts to eliminate some of the unfair benefits enjoyed by the country’s owners in his attempts to reduce the bleeding of “public” coffers. That was exposed in the garbage collection contract whose cost infinitely exceeded its real value, in addition to similar rotten contracts he uncovered.
That’s why the organized mafias retaliated by taking advantage of the 1991 Constitution which gave supreme powers to the Attorney General. He can act autocratically, investigating, judging and sentencing, clearly exposing the nature of this “democracy.” Even more pathetic is that Mayor Petro, in his defense speech, underscored the role he and others played in writing that Constitution as something positive for peace and democracy in Colombia.
Petro asked for peaceful ways to express discontent and suggested the formation of committees of indigenous communities, peasants, students, workers, environmentalists, LGBT and anti-bullfighting groups to defend the “Humane Bogota” on behalf of a “democratic” revolution. Aida Avella, a survivor of the genocide launched against the UP (Union Patriotica), also argued, like Petro, for a pacifist struggle to defend “democracy” and praised Nelson Mandela as an example of the “possibility of social change through peaceful means.”       
Progressive Labor Party advocates many forms of struggle and in this case supports many workers organizations, but we clearly don’t believe in the false capitalist “democracy,” and even less in this “peace” being promoted since our class is murdered with bullets and misery on a daily basis.
Leaders like Mandela and Gandhi become capitalism’s useful tools in exchange for some apparent gains and a comfortable position while doling out crumbs to the working class. Just look at India and South Africa where the working class is exploited by the big mining corporations after the pacifist leaders abandoned any real struggle.
To the contrary these same “leaders” expose their commitment to pacifism by repressing the working class, as did Petro himself when he used the police to defend the “Rights of States.” Such was the tragedy for the working class.
That’s why we must organize the working class around PLP’s communist program, take advantage of all workers’ struggles, clarifying what must be the final objective, the elimination of capitalism. Then the working class, led by its communist party, can determine its own destiny and bury the handful of exploiters of our labor.  
Red Worker

CHICAGO, March 10 — Chanting, “Let Us Teach”, 250 teachers, parents, and students rallied in support of 25 Chicago teachers who have taken the bold step of refusing to give a state-mandated test. The Illinois State Achievement Test (ISAT) is given over an eight-day period for two hours a day. In addition to teacher boycotters, more than 1,000 parents have signed “opt-out” letters telling the schools they don’t want their children to take the test. Top dogs at Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have had a virulent reaction to the stand taken by teachers and parents.
CPS has called opting-out parents every day for a week urging them to have their children take the test. They have patrolled the classrooms of active anti-ISAT schools, making sure that testing, not teaching, was occurring. Although non-testing students should have been allowed to read a book or engage in another quiet learning activity, at some schools students were forced to just sit there with the test booklet in front of them. Teachers were threatened with loss of their teaching license. At Saucedo School, where 20 teachers boycotted, educators were admonished for teaching opted-out students. They were told not to do any more teaching, just to supervise silent activities.
This seemingly irrational behavior on the part of those running the school system is motivated by power and control. As U.S. capitalism fights to retain its world dominance and prepares for the next world war, they need to control education. This was made very clear in the March 2012, Council on Foreign Relations report about military preparedness.
They write that more than half of all high school students either don’t graduate or are unable to pass the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery and “many U.S. generals caution that too many new enlistees cannot read training manuals for technologically sophisticated equipment.” Condoleezza Rice and Joel Klein, authors of this report, recommend “the creation of more meaningful assessments and simulations of student learning and, then, a coordinated, national effort to create targets and repercussions tied to the Common Core.”
ISAT is an old test, not tied to the national Common Core standards, but CPS does not want teachers and parents to get in the habit of deciding what to teach or what tests students should take. Current education policies — national standards, attacks on unions, and accountability tied to test scores — are consistent with a plan to shape the workforce and the military to best serve capitalist interests. Schools have always played this role, but the intensity of worldwide competition makes schools particularly important now.
The teachers who bravely stood up to CPS and decided to teach, not test, put the interests of the students first. They broke the rules. Although these teachers are not communists, they have demonstrated the important communist principle of allegiance to the working class. This display of allegiance also brought on the harsh CPS reaction. PLP looks forward to the day when even more students, teachers, and parents rise up against the racist, oppressive education capitalists provide and fight for a communist future.

The education system is in crisis not only in Tanzania but in Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Latin America, the U.S. and the worldwide. The crisis is caused by the fact that the schools are in the hands of the bosses. The bosses control of education leads to inequalities in the system, the haves and have-nots. 
In the colonial era the educational system worsened in the African states because it was based on “races.” Whites were favored as were certain tribes that the colonialists chose to prepare for managerial and professional duties. Most of the schools were built in urban areas where whites used to live.
After independence the masses thought that the educational system would improve but it remained a cursed system on the African continent and in the world at large. Education remained a commodity in which the sons and daughters of the rich got better education, especially in private schools owned by the bosses, while the poorer majority failed to get any education at all.  In 1985, Tanzania succumbed to the pressures of neocolonialism and became a “free market economy.”  Through the UN’s machinery, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and UNESCO, education became too expensive for most Tanzanians.
The IMF imposed conditions on the Tanzanian government.  In order to get aid they had to cut back on government expenditures, like public education, health services, public transportation, and communication.  They caused the stagnation of technology by draining Tanzania of its experts, like professors, doctors, engineers.  Their offers of investment were tied to the importation of their expensive finished goods.
The net result of these policies means that today about 85 percent of Standard Three pupils in government schools are unable to read Kiswahili and solve mathematics problems (Zaida Mgalla). Mgalla reports that English performance is even poorer. Her results show that vast numbers of children are not acquiring basic skills in primary education. Ms. Mgalla said, “We are in a society of two classes. The privileged with more wealth who can afford private schooling do much better than most people. When it comes to education, Tanzania is not one nation.”  The reforms that she calls for could never succeed since the system is still owned by the bosses. 
Education is serving the imperialist system that blocks true economic advancement for the masses. Teachers and students need to form an alliance to fight for free and equal education for all, to end employment benefits for some while others face a lifetime of insecurity, for a good supply of food to the students, for extra-curricular activities for students to keep them physically fit and mentally stable.  
As this alliance organizes struggles, PLP has an oppurtunity to build a truly international party in East Africa and to win workers and students to the idea that a profit system will never truly educate the working class. We must seize power from the bosses in order to end classes and free us from exploitation.  Then education will be for and by those who actually create all value in society: the working class.

The hypocrisy of the Obama administration is off the rails. Obama has denounced Russia’s president Putin for a “breach of international law” by seizing the Crimea in the conflict over the Ukraine. His Secretary of State, John Kerry, has accused Russia of being “in direct violation of international law.” Their mouthpiece, the New York Times (3/3) claims Putin “stepped outside the bounds of civilized behavior.”  And the European Union (EU) is backing the U.S. all the way, “in defense of Western values.”
Dictator Putin sending troops into the Crimea is relatively minor compared to the actions of U.S. rulers — presently and historically — along with EU members France, Britain, Germany and Belgium, among others. While Obama poses as a global sheriff on the side of “international law,” actually he is the world’s outlaw-in-chief. Under capitalism and imperialism, “international law” boils down to the law of the jungle. It represents anything that capitalist powers can get away with, especially through the use of military force.
War By Terror, A Presidential Duty
Last October the McClatchy news service reported that “the Obama administration violated international law with top-secret targeted-killing operations that claimed dozens of civilian lives in Yemen and Pakistan.” And Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University’s law school, indicated the scope of the Obama U.S. government’s ongoing contempt for that international law:
According to Senator Lindsey Graham…, the Obama administration has killed 4,700 individuals in numerous countries, including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Obama has successfully embedded the process of drone killings into the executive branch is such a way that any future president will inherit it, along with the White House ‘kill list’ and its ‘terror Tuesday meetings. Unbounded global war is now part of what it means to be president.
Obama’s war machine protects over 1,000 bases worldwide, including dispatching Special Forces for targeted assassinations. But his administration is only following U.S. rulers’ war policies to maintain U.S. top-dog status, especially to control the flow of oil and gas which usually is behind many of its invasions. Hardly a year has gone by in the 20th century and into the 21st that the Pentagon and the CIA haven’t engaged in invasions, the overthrow of elected governments and assassinations. Beginning in 1898 when they grabbed Cuba and the Philippines (where they first introduced waterboarding and killed thousands, “outside the bounds of civilized behavior”), then throughout Central and South America in the first half of the 20th century and then triphammer style in the post-World War II era.
U.S. Presidents’ Military Machine Marches On
Their “breaches” of a non-existent international law included:
1953: Overthrowing the elected government of Iran and installation of the dictatorial Shah
(Eisenhower);
1954: Overthrowing the elected government of Guatemala which led to 100,000 deaths
(Eisenhower);
1962: The CIA-directed assassination of Congo’s elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba
(Eisenhower);
1965: Invasion of the Dominican Republic to eliminate an elected president who didn’t bow to Wall Street’s wishes (Johnson);
1971: The CIA-aided anti-communist massacre of over a million workers in Indonesia by dictator Suharto’s government (Johnson);
1963-1973: Invasion of Vietnam and accompanying bombing of Cambodia and Laos, a failed effort which led to five million deaths over ten years (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon);
1973: CIA-Henry Kissinger-inspired overthrow of the elected government of Salvatore Allende in Chile and takeover by the fascist Pinochet (Nixon);
1979: The $30 billion CIA campaign from Pakistan to invade Afghanistan and counter the Soviet presence there (which led to the Taliban seizure of power and training of Osama bin Laden) (Carter);
1983: Invasion of tiny Grenada that presumably had a “Marxist” government (Reagan);
1979: Arming and backing of fascist death squads in Nicaragua and El Salvador (Reagan);
1989: Invasion of Panama to squeeze out Japanese banking influence (Bush, Sr.);
1994: U.S. Invasion of Haiti (Clinton);
1999: Wholesale bombing of Yugoslavia which killed thousands and destroyed huge amounts of infrastructure (Clinton);
2003: “Shock and awe” invasion of Iraq — on the pretext of non-existent weapons of mass destruction — which killed hundreds of thousands and displaced four million, leaving that country in a shambles of daily killings (Bush, Jr.);
2001: Invasion of Afghanistan, a key to the oil and gas of central Asia (Bush, Jr., Obama);
2010: The deployment of the U.S. Navy around Haiti and backing of the UN force there, keeping workers under wraps (Obama);
And now the invasion of U.S. Special Forces into southern Libya to fight “enemies” in four adjacent African countries (Obama);
European Bosses No  Slouches
Either
But EU capitalists, while not up to U.S. “standards,” are no slouches either. French imperialists engaged in the slaughter and torture of tens of thousands in its carnage in Algeria. It now has troops in half a dozen African countries to protect its investments in these former French colonies. Belgian King Leopold perpetrated a holocaust in the Congo, killing and mutilating up to 15 million workers and peasants in 1876--1908. Over two centuries, British capitalists ran roughshod over central Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, among others), South Africa and India. Nazi Germany under Hitler enslaved and slaughtered tens of millions in his master-race scheme. These are the “Western values” they’re protecting in the Ukraine whose people are suffering from a Nazi-led overthrow of another autocratic government, protected by Putin.
It’s time the international working class put an end to hypocrite-in-chief Obama, his capitalist allies and fascist Putin. Only a communist revolution can destroy this motley crew of “breachers” and put our class in the saddle.