Since October 2011, when Kenyan military forces were deployed in Somalia, there have been dozens of terrorist attacks in Kenya: shootings, grenades, explosives. More than a hundred people have been killed and hundreds more injured. In the most recent attack, on the upscale Westgate Mall in Nairobi, at least 61 people were killed, hundreds were injured and 71 are still missing. As usual, workers are caught in the middle and we grieve with all those who lost families and friends. As in the World Trade Center attack in September 2011, the Westgate assault was directed at symbols of wealth but took the lives of many working-class people.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media has remained silent about the plundering of Somalia. The capitalist ruling classes have been using violence against workers on a daily basis all over North Africa. Three months after the invasion of Somalia in October 2011, the Kenyan military reportedly slaughtered 700 Somali militants.  Since 2007, as many as 3,000 African Union peacekeeping troops have been killed. The Somalis that somehow make it to Kenya face severe hardships. There are also concerns that the Somali community in Minnesota will be targeted in the wake of the Westgate attack (New York Times, 9/28).
On November 19, 2012, Kenyan police unleashed a wave of violence and torture against Somali and Ethiopian refugees in the Nairobi suburb of Eastleigh. These abuses are nothing new. Since 2009, Human Rights Watch has repeatedly reported Kenyan security force torture, rape and inflict other violence. The authorities have yet to prosecute anyone for these crimes. The racist character of this officially sanctioned brutality was revealed when the report quoted local police as saying “All Somalis are terrorists.”
While the bosses’ newspapers analyze the Shabab, the terrorist group claiming responsibility for the Westgate attack, it’s important to point out that the capitalist rulers are the biggest terrorists of all. The ruling class uses its military to carry out mass murder. The president of Kenya, Uhuru Kenyatta, has been charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. We should never see this type of violence as any more acceptable than terrorist attacks.

The Professional Staff Congress (PSC) Delegate Assembly unanimously passed a resolution in support of students after watching a video showing several NYPD cops holding a man down on the ground while another repeatedly kidney punched him. Two City University (CUNY) students then addressed delegates and seven hundred dollars was collected toward the legal expenses of the six people arrested.

 PSC Resolution Against KKKop Brutality of CUNY Students

On September 17, 2013, the New York Police Department arrested six people, including four CUNY students, in an unprovoked police attack against a peaceful protest by students and faculty against CUNY’s appointment of former CIA chief ex-General David Petraeus. CUNY students were punched, slammed against vehicles and against the pavement by NYPD officers…
As the union representing faculty and professional staff at CUNY—and as people who have dedicated our professional lives to the well-being of CUNY students—the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY expresses outrage at the violent and unprovoked actions by the NYPD against students peacefully protesting the appointment of David Petraeus as a Visiting Professor…
We call on the City of New York to drop all charges against the students. Further, we call on the CUNY Administration and Board of Trustees to join us in condemning the use of police violence against CUNY students engaged in peaceful protest and to take all necessary steps to ensure that [such] protest will not be met with police violence.

While the resolution pushed by these workers is commendable, the PSC leadership failed to make a head-on attack against the presence of war criminal Petraeus at CUNY.
The president told us that a resolution calling for his ouster would be ruled out of order. Legal counsel had advised that according to state labor law, the union was obligated to represent all of the members of the bargaining unit. Therefore, the union could not call on the employer to fire an employee. And so the union cannot take a stance to fire Petraeus. At the next Delegate Assembly we will fight to overturn this ruling.

DHAKA, BANGLADESH, September 28 — “We will not hesitate to do anything to realize our demands…The economy moves with our toil,” declared Nazma Akter, the woman who is among the leaders of 200,000 mostly women workers who struck hundreds of the country’s garment factories demanding the tripling of their monthly minimum wage from $38 to $104. (Reuters, 9/23) As if to give substance to her declaration, workers from ten factories in the city of Savar attacked a military base, seizing rifles and ammunition and injuring five para-military Guards (ACA News, 9/22).
 “One hundred dollars is the minimum we have asked for,” one striker told Agency France Press (9/23). “A worker needs much more than that to lead a decent life.”
The uprising, now in its sixth day, saw angry workers battling cops in the streets, 10,000 blocking major highways in and around this capital city, setting fire to warehouses, attacking plants that stayed open, pelting factories with bricks and smashing police vehicles. When club-wielding cops shot rubber bullets and tear gas canisters at the striking workers, the latter responded by hurling broken bricks at the cops. At the latest count, 70 workers and eight cops had been injured in the clashes.
The bosses got to the heart of the problem: capitalism’s drive for maximum profits. The Press Trust of India (9/26) reported they said, “Major [wage] increases would erode Bangladesh’s advantage as a cheap labor source compared to other garment exporting countries like India, China and Vietnam.” The Associated Press (9/25) described “global brands [as] unwilling to pay higher prices amid stiff competition.” Thus, competing bosses engage in a “drive to the bottom.” Bangladesh’s exploiting garment bosses reap $20 billion from exports to the U.S. and Europe, supplying billion-dollar companies like Walmart, GAP, Sears and Target.
Bosses’ ‘Industrial Peace’ vs.Workers’ Class War
The workers’ militancy, which has exposed the profit system’s racist exploitation in this former colonial country, has unnerved the rulers. No wonder The New York Times, leading mouthpiece of the ruling class, devoted an editorial (9/26) to a call for higher wages and better conditions. It stated that the Bangladesh government and bosses, and the Western companies profiting from these low wages and hazardous working conditions, “all have a stake in industrial peace.” They fear that its absence could provide fertile ground for class war under communist leadership. Eventually, this could lead to a revolution for the complete overthrow of capitalism that pays these indecent wages and reaps billions in profits stolen from the workers’ labor.
In a communist society run by and for our class, there will be neither bosses and profits, nor their racism and sexism which rake in super-profits. Nor will there be the kind of death traps which killed 1,132 workers in the Rana Plaza factory last April. The working class will act from each according to their commitment and collectively decide what should be produced by our labor and distribute it according to need.
Now the garment bosses have offered a 20 percent increase — to $45 a month! — which the workers declare is “inhumane and humiliating.” So after “assurances” of a negotiated pay hike by November, they say the strike was ending after five days. But on the sixth day workers were in the streets of Savar and Navayangan, cities where they have closed 300 factories while the government continues to deploy troops in the Gazipier industrial district.
The workers in Bangladesh, especially the women garment workers, are setting a shining example for the entire international working class. Their actions are telling us that class war against the bosses is the road to travel. Our signpost must read, “Forward to communism!”

FLORANGE, FRANCE, September 26 — Workers waving trade union flags jeered French president François Hollande when he came to the Florange steelworks today. Workers also demonstrated their bitterness in front of the ArcelorMittal Steel Corporation offices.
In February 2012, the corporation was threatening to shut down the Florange steelworks. The union leaders endorsed Hollande for president and led the workers to welcome him with open arms when he came to the site during his presidential election campaign. He promised a law to force corporations to sell a factory instead of shutting it down.Gravestone that the bosses quickly removed from the Florange site after it was erected in April 2013. It reads: “Betrayal. Here lie the promises of change that F. Hollande made to the workers and their families in Florange on Feb. 24, 2012.”
Today, the steelworks has been shuttered and the law has been watered down to an obligation to “look for” a buyer.
For months, Hollande has been promising to bring unemployment down. When the latest figures showed the number of unemployed falling by 50,000 in August, the Socialist Party exulted that “the president has made the strategic choices that our country requires.”
In reality, the fall resulted from 77,500 workers being struck off the lists because, the phone system to which they are required to regularly call was broke. This resulted in the loss of unemployment benefits. Since opinion polls show support for the Socialist Party plummeting in the run-up to the March, 2014 municipal elections, the Socialists will stoop to any trick to try to persuade workers that the French economy is improving.
Official figures show 5,397,200 jobless workers, 19.1% of the workforce, including part-time workers who want full-time jobs.
Rulers’ Racism Rampant
When the government isn’t trying to deceive the working class with misleading data, it’s trying to divide it with racism. Interior minister Manuel Valls — France’s “top cop” — said on September 24 that “it’s illusionary to think that we’re going to solve the problem of the Roma population through integration alone.” He added that “the Roma are destined to go back to Romania or Bulgaria.”
This sort of racism can be expected from Valls. In June 2009, as mayor of Evry, he complained about seeing too many “non-white” faces at the municipal flea market.
An additional 840,000 households — mostly previously-exempt low-paid workers — will pay income tax this year. The Socialist government labels this “sharing the burden” of the austerity measures taken to guarantee that France pays its sovereign debt to finance capitalists.
This is the capitalist hell of unemployment and racism that the “lesser-evil” Socialist government presides over. It exposes the futility of participating in the bosses’ electoral circus and depending on their promises to solve workers’ problems.
Toasting Pesticides with French Wine
But workers here would be ill-advised to try to drown their troubles in wine. A report just published by the consumer protection group Que Choisir indicates that all French wines contain pesticides — from 300 to 3,000 times as much as is legally allowed in drinking water.
France does not limit the amount of pesticides that wine can contain. This makes the capitalist grape-growers happy while poisoning the working class (seven of the 33 different pesticides detected cause cancer). Scientific studies also show that vineyard workers have up to 11 times as much pesticide in their bodies as other people, and die more frequently of cancer.
Meanwhile, French bosses offered to lead an attack on Syria which workers in France roundly rejected. In France, like everywhere else in the world, the only solution to the ills of capitalism is communist revolution.