BROOKLYN, NY, July 28 — “They are trying to turn back the clock, but we are not going back to the cotton fields!” declared a nurse from Interfaith Hospital.
She was referring to the racist nature of the planned cuts in healthcare and jobs as bosses move forward with plans to close two major hospitals in Brooklyn. Workers continue to come out in the hundreds in rally after rally to fight these racist, sexist closings.  But as we go to press, Long Island College Hospital (LICH) is down to a handful of patients and workers have been put on “administrative leave” until the courts can sort out how to close the hospital and Interfaith bosses have submitted a closure plan to the Department of Health and Hospitals.
Workers at a third hospital, State University of New York (SUNY) Downstate, are also fighting for our lives. Our administration took over LICH and now plans to close it. Many think this has to do with the fact that real estate moguls will pay $500-800 million to build condos where LICH stands. Unfortunately SUNY bosses, with the active and tacit support of the union misleadership, have succeeded in dividing LICH and Downstate workers. On July 15, when LICH and Interfaith workers picketed the sexist bosses’ meeting at SUNY Downstate campus, the unions at Downstate did not support them and in spite of the efforts of some of us who work inside, only a handful of Downstate workers attended.
Many LICH workers think closing Downstate campus will save them and Downstate workers think closing LICH will save us. Not so! In fact Downstate workers have a lot to learn from LICH workers’ day-in-and-day-out struggles to save their hospital and we had better learn quickly, because the bosses and politicians will be turning their attention to cutbacks at Downstate as soon as they finish with LICH. And you can bet Downstate workers and patients will not see much of any real estate money, either!
Because the ruling class control the press, the courts, the politicians and the police, they may succeed in taking healthcare and jobs from us. What they cannot take from us is what we learn from the struggle. We learn how to organize and unite men and women, black, white Latino and Asian, professional and noprofessional. We learn who our friends and enemies are. We should not be fooled by the politicians who speak at every rally. They are mainly beholden to the wealthy donors who fund their campaigns. Part of their value to these bosses is that they tend to keep our struggles within narrow confines that don’t include things like striking or taking over the hospital.
In fact, hospital workers and patients across New York and across the country need to unite to fight the bosses’ plans to cut healthcare to divert funds for war plans with Iran and later on down the road with imperialist rivals China and Russia.  PLP members at these hospitals are working to develop and recruit new members so that we can have greater impact on turning these fights into a struggle for workers’ power, egalitarian communism, a society where workers collectively rule and share the wealth we produce to meet our needs.

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BROOKLYN, NY July 27 — “When I was a young woman in the Philippines, I sympathized with the communists and they were the only ones fighting back. Many of us did secretly but you never talked about it. We were afraid of being disappeared, which happened all the time under the [U.S.-supported] dictatorship there. Now at this age I see. I moved to this country decades ago for a better life for my family but now look what’s happening around us. Those who fought were right.”
That’s the conclusion drawn by a veteran worker at Long Island College Hospital (LICH). She and her co-workers are fighting to keep the 150-year-old community hospital open. The hospital’s scenic waterfront location overlooking the Manhattan skyline is valued at over $800 million. SUNY Downstate, which owns LICH, and Governor Cuomo hope to sell it off to the highest bidder to build luxury condos.
LICH serves the black and Latino residents of the giant Red Hook housing project and many more. There are demonstrations almost every day as the hospital has been turned into an armed camp. Despite winning every court battle and numerous injunctions to keep LICH open and staffed, Downstate abruptly removed every medical resident at LICH and declared the hospital at “unsafe” staffing levels. EMS 911 calls are banned from bringing patients to the LICH Emergency Room, and patients have been illegally transferred to other hospitals. Hundreds of staff are on paid leave and entire floors, including the Intensive Care Unit and Operating Room, are padlocked. In one incident, the Director of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit fought the ER Director to have an infant admitted.
To terrorize workers and patients out of fighting back, the bosses hired three different private security agencies, at least one of them carrying concealed weapons and no visible ID. This is in addition to hospital security and the state troopers posted here. Nurses have reported being followed to the bathroom. In one well-publicized incident, an elderly man with dementia was given a one-way bus ticket to Florida, even though he has no family there. When the Attorney General’s staff arrived to investigate, the man had mysteriously “disappeared,” and none of the five types of security surrounding the hospital ever saw him.
Some patients are refusing to be transferred elsewhere. Others will clutch at your arm and share their fear at where they will end up. Methodist Hospital, located in upscale, mostly-white Park Slope, has received many of the EMS runs rerouted from LICH. Last week, their morgue was filled to capacity with no place to put the corpses. That same day, the ER was overflowing with over 120 patients and the hospital didn’t have enough meals to feed them.
Union Leaders, Politicans =
Dead End for Workers
Local 1199 SEIU and the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) have been staging rallies to bolster a strictly legal effort to save LICH. At the same time, they have undermined any attempts to build unity with the Red Hook residents or stage direct actions like a sit-in in the ER with staff and patients or blocking the removal of equipment. They have hitched their wagon to Mayoral hopeful Bill DeBlasio, who turns every action into a campaign appearance and “civil disobedience” photo-op.
PLP is in the thick of this struggle, trying to expand the readership of CHALLENGE while participating in meetings, rallies and endless discussions with our co-workers about the need for unity with Red Hook residents, fighting racism, and for communist revolution. There’s a good chance that LICH will be added to the list of St. Vincent’s, Peninsula, North General, and the dozen hospitals that have closed in as many years in New York City. The bosses have announced that Interfaith is next and SUNY Downstate has already laid off about 1,000 workers even as they sell off LICH. And for all the union’s campaign contributions and providing foot soldiers, Obamacare will not restore any of these racist, murderous healthcare cuts.
LICH may likely close, but like the woman quoted above, many workers and patients can be won to see that “the communists are right.”  We need to expose the double-edged racist and sexist nature of these attacks on workers. PLP can grow with new friends and new fighters and the revolutionary communist movement can be strengthened.

SAN FRANCISCO, July 9 — Fifteen hundred students, teachers, staff and community members marched without a permit from the downtown campus of San Francisco City College (CCSF) to rally at the Department of Education, protesting the threatened closing of the college. CHALLENGE was distributed to the marchers. PLP’s job is to give communist leadership in this struggle, steer the fighters to the left with our paper CHALLENGE and study groups, continue to build strong ties and recruit them to a communist outlook.
School and community organizers and a few politicians denounced the recent decision by the ACCJC (the publicly chartered but private accrediting agency) to cancel CCSF’s accreditation effective next year. The ACCJC report praises the education offered at the college but cites administrative and financial problems as the reason for their decision.
Some classes for the 85,000 mostly Asian, Latino, black and immigrant students have already been cut, some campuses closed, wages of teachers and staff cut, and some counselors and school workers laid off. These racist and sexist cuts and closings expose the bosses as the bloodsuckers they are. The ruling class doesn’t really care about educating working-class youth. They care about money for their imperialist wars.
The downsizing was triggered by the capitalist-caused economic recession, which saw $53 million cut from the CCSF budget. However this outrage originates with corporate interests who directed the Federal Department of Education to turn community colleges into junior colleges that supply new workers for local businesses. The bosses see community colleges as factories to churn out as low-paid workers and soldiers  as fast as possible.
There is $2 trillion circulating in the world with no place to profitably invest it, so corporate interests speculate with stocks and derivatives or just hold on to their cash. These capitalists have recently discovered the $650 billion yearly spent for U.S. education. And they are in the process of continuing to privatize parts of it through student loans, testing, textbooks, on-line resources, tutoring services, charter schools, and private trade schools.
Some misguided workers, including the “leadership” of the Service Employees International Union, preach obeying administration directives instead of fighting back. Some want to concentrate on winning back the old status quo and characterize the ACCJC as a rogue organization. Others want to focus on the media and politicians. While the politicians and Board of Trustee members pretend to be on the students’ and workers’ side, they are here to placate us.
PLP and others see the cuts as a new reality where capitalists, acting through their government, wage continuous war on the working class for profits and for a better position to battle capitalists from other countries, economically and militarily. We must organize masses of students, workers and the community by building multiracial unity. We need to go beyond an “against-privatization” line and resist ruling-class ideas of education as a neutral space. Private or public, schools are a way for bosses to control students.
As the bosses prepare for war, they need to tighten the chokehold on workers and all the institutions through which they rule. In a word, the bosses are building fascism in the U.S. These attacks on our class are just a glimpse of what’s to come. Democrats and Republicans, their think tanks and their henchmen like the ACCJC, will continue these attacks until we smash them and the working class takes political power.
While PLP is inside the reform movement that aims to save this community college, we must be fighting to win the masses to communist ideas and practice and to join PLP. Building our communist party to smash capitalism is the only way we will ever have an education worthy of our working-class children.

Florida vigilante George Zimmerman stalked and murdered unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin. Yet on July 13, a Florida jury found Zimmerman not guilty. Zimmerman was acquitted by a jury of six — and by capitalism. Hypocrite Barack Obama, after saying that Martin resembled his imaginary son, okayed the verdict: The law must be obeyed. Under capitalism, of course, laws are enacted to enforce the bosses’ profit system. Obama is the enforcer-in-chief who just recommended NY Police chief Ray Kelly for the Homeland Security post because he did an “Extraordinary Job”  
The racist triggerman didn’t act as a lone, self-appointed executioner. The admitted cop wannabe followed U.S. rulers’ official (if unstated) fascist rules for police: a) Assume that all black and Latino youth are criminals; and b) Shoot to kill.
New York City’s killer cops are a leading example of the top-down, systematic terror campaign that Zimmerman mimicked. In a secret recording exposed in March, Deputy Inspector Christopher MacCormack, one of the top cops in the Bronx, told a police officer to stop-and-frisk “black males 14 to 21.” On average, the NYPD stops and frisks each and every young black or Latino male two to three times a year. Within the last 18 months, the city’s “finest” have shot dead Ramarley Graham, Shantel Davis, and Kimani Gray, all young and black, without cause, along with Reynaldo Cuevas, a 20-year-old grocery worker who’d escaped an armed robbery at his store.
These racist killings are hardly restricted to New York. They include Oscar Grant in Oakland, 18-year-old Lamon     Khiry Haslip in Riverside, California (who was shot by cops while handcuffed), and Antwoyn Johnson in Chicago.
 

Racist U.S. Rulers Killing Workers Worldwide
The U.S. spreads racist murder internationally. U.S. corporations like Walmart and Gap thrive off the exploitation and killing of garment workers in Bangladesh. Millions of workers and youth are victims of U.S. imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Drones are just the latest weapons to kill civilian workers indiscriminately.
The outrageous Zimmerman verdict reflects an intensifying racist assault by beleaguered U.S. capitalists upon the entire international working class. The rulers’ profit rate is falling because they are losing global market share, mainly to China. Their costly Iraq and Afghanistan invasions aren’t paying out the oil and gas windfalls they’d hoped for. As a result, U.S. bosses must shift their problems onto the backs of workers and youth like Trayvon Martin. They do this in three ways:
Drastically cutting jobs, wages and social services to shore up shrinking capital.
Suppressing rebellion against these attacks by unleashing racist police terror on the segment hit the hardest, black and Latino youth.
Misleading white workers to blame their own worsening plight on fellow working-class victims instead of the real capitalist culprits. This division among workers, coupled with a lack of anti-racist fightback, enabled the bosses to cut white and black industrial workers’ wages in half. Obama led the charge by imposing these cuts at General Motors after a temporary government takeover and bailout. It became clearer than ever that racism hurts white workers as well.
Stop-and-frisk and police murders are but the latest examples of the racism of U.S. capitalism. The United States and its economic growth were founded on racism, from the genocide that murdered millions of Native Americans, to the enslavement of black workers on the cotton plantations of the South, to the KKK-driven Jim Crow laws that exploited, lynched and otherwise killed masses of black workers after the Civil War.
No Justice under Capitalism
Along with the cops, the courts are an integral part of the bosses’ state power. In the Zimmerman case, the judge ruled that racial profiling could not be used as evidence against the racist killer and excluded it from the case. Passing new laws cannot help the working class, since all laws are enacted to protect the profit system at all costs. Nor will electing “better” politicians change things for workers, since they, too, represent the bosses’ system and operate within the same framework. The pro-boss union leaders, who defend capitalism and betray workers who break the law to defend their class interests, are no better.
In protesting the Zimmerman acquittal, we must not fall into the trap of making capitalist “justice” our main demand. If a guilty verdict happened to be won against the likes of Zimmerman or any of the countless racist killer cops, the bosses’ media would use it to say “the system works.” Instead, we must focus on destroying the profit system that uses the phony concept of “race” to manipulate and exploit us.
Only communist revolution can change the conditions facing the working class. Only revolution can smash the bosses’ state power and the exploitation of their profit system. Only a revolutionary communist party, like the Progressive Labor Party, can sweep away the bosses and lead the working class into power. Joining and building PLP represents the only meaningful, lasting answer to the bosses’ attacks.

Modern Slavery
The criminalization of the working class, especially blacks and Latinos, has risen as the fortunes of U.S. capitalists have sunk. In 1960, when U.S. imperialism ruled the worldwide roost, U.S. prisons held about 350,000 inmates. Half a century later, with the population barely doubled and violent crime in sharp decline, the prison population has steadily expanded to more than 2.5 million. According to the Center for American Progress (3/12/12):
The prison population grew by 700 percent from 1970 to 2005, a rate that is outpacing crime and population rates. The incarceration rates disproportionately impact men of color: 1 in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men.
Seventy percent of inmates in U.S. prison are black and Latino. According to The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander, more black men are behind bars or on parole or probation than were enslaved in 1850.
This racist process has nothing to do with actual crime and punishment. It derives from the ceaseless economic, political and military conflict among imperialist powers. Just after World War II, U.S. capitalists controlled 60 percent of the world’s manufacturing. Today, with the U.S. share down to 18 percent, U.S. rulers can’t afford to offer working-class people like Trayvon Martin a decent job (or education or health care). Instead, these marginalized workers are stopped, frisked, jailed, and killed. It’s no coincidence that the jobless rate for Trayvon Martin’s 16 — 19 age group stands at a crippling 44 percent for blacks — and a not-so-rosy 20 percent for whites.

Don’t Be Fooled by Bosses’ Racist Lies
Even worse, U.S. rulers exploit the inequality they themselves create to divide and weaken us with the phony concept of “race.” The Zimmerman verdict encourages white workers to pin capitalist-caused social ills on black workers. It advances the bosses’ favorite lie: that jobless, criminal, welfare-dependent black people drain the tax monies paid by white people. The corollary lie is that black workers steal white workers’ jobs.
The New York media recently have had a field day with the dubious report of a white man who said he was laid off from Goldman Sachs, Wall Street’s richest investment firm. The man, according to the newspapers, stumbled drunk into a restaurant, spied a black couple, and cursed them as “n-----s” who were somehow responsible for his job loss. The black man then punched the white man, sending him to the hospital. Police, of course, arrested the black man, and the unemployed white man became an aggrieved martyr in the tabloids.
Last time we checked, however, neither black nor white workers ran Goldman.

Turn Resistance into Revolution
At some point the racist Zimmerman verdict will come back to haunt U.S. rulers. The capitalists have a long-term need to mobilize the nation for war against their imperialist rivals, but the bosses’ racist attacks on workers and freeing of a racist murderer won’t inspire patriotism among black workers.
The anti-racist anger our class expressed at the freeing of Zimmerman has the potential to evolve into a bigger movement against racism in the U.S. and worldwide. Racism can only end through smashing capitalism led by Progressive Labor Party. Only its communist politics can arm workers to challenge the bosses’ attacks. Only a united, multiracial working class can turn modest advances into outright rebellion against the ruling class. Only a mass revolutionary communist party can effectively mobilize against racist cops, organize political strikes at the point of production, and lead the charge to exterminate capitalism.
The rulers fear the potential power of the international working class to overthrow them. But even as they attempt to use racism to attack us and divide us, rebellions are spreading worldwide. In Egypt, Brazil, Turkey, Greece, Spain and Bangladesh, millions of workers are taking to the streets to oppose the ravages and injustices of capitalism. The Zimmerman verdict sparked major demonstrations of tens of thousands in at least ten cities across the U.S and worldwide.
We must turn such resistance into attacks on capitalism itself, raising the call for communist revolution as the only solution for our class. This can be accomplished only with a mass Progressive Labor Party, containing millions of workers, to lead the working class to that goal. Join us!

NEW YORK CITY, July 13 — “Justice for Shantel Davis! Justice for Kimani Gray!” That’s what you’d have heard if you passed by Brooklyn District Attorney (DA) Charles Hynes’ office this past week as Progressive Labor Party completed another successful NY Summer Project, an event filled with activism, learning and relaxation the communist way.
For three consecutive days, PL’ers and friends rallied to demand the indictment of the racist kkkops who killed two youths, Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray. It’s been over a year since Shantel was murdered by Detective Phillip Atkins and four months since plain-clothes NYPD cops gunned down Kimani Gray.
DA Hynes has allowed these racist killer cops to walk free. By doing so, Hynes has basically told black workers to suck it up and get over it. But we won’t follow the scenario they’ve laid out for us. PLP has worked alongside the bereaved families and will continue the struggle.
While an indictment might be a winning battle — although, of course, that wouldn’t guarantee a conviction — there’s another struggle that must be carried out as well. At the rallies, PL’ers stressed the need to destroy this capitalist system through communist revolution. Since capitalism cannot exist without racism, it is the backdrop of these grisly racist murders. Eliminating it will prevent them from happening ever again. Capitalism reaps billions in profits from racist pay differentials and uses black unemployment as a threat to white workers’ jobs.
Another part of the Summer Project was a guided walking tour of Brooklyn, checking out several stops on the abolitionists’ Underground Railroad, the route by which slaves escaped the Southern plantations. The city has targeted two stops for destruction on behalf of real estate developers, wiping them out as historical landmarks. Slavery is a brutal part of U.S. history; it’s no wonder the rulers want to obliterate the sites.
One notable stop was Plymouth Church in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. Its first pastor, Henry Ward Beecher, was a major figure in the abolitionist movement. The Church — adjacent to shipping docks — was a key stop in enabling slaves to escape to Canada. An important lesson to learn from the abolitionist movement was its willingness to break the bosses’ laws in order to do what was right. Under capitalism, many atrocities are carried out legally against the working class. Resistance from slaves and the abolitionists who aided them played a crucial role in eliminating slavery.
There were some disagreements between PL’s ideas and the guide conducting the tour. The latter said that the stained glass windows in the Church sanctuary depicted important moments in history, rather than biblical events. Images included the invention of the printing press; Lincoln presenting the Emancipation Proclamation; Beecher taking a trip to England to campaign against its involvement in the Civil War, and so on.
When asked why there were no depictions of black fighters, the guide said that after the Civil War, the whole country entered a state of amnesia. Furthermore, some white church-goers were not comfortable with black workers, saying there’s “a church down the street just for them.” As a result congregations were segregated. This clashed with the anti-racist stance the Church had taken before the war.
The tour guide also mentioned an instance when Beecher stomped on John Brown’s chains. John Brown was a white abolitionist who organized a raid on a federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. While federal troops crushed it and executed Brown and his comrades, the raid was one of the crucial elements in provoking the Civil War. Brown believed only violent resistance could overthrow slavery.
When asked why Beecher would stomp on Brown’s chains, the tour guide stated that Beecher saw himself in the middle ground in the fight against slavery. He felt John Brown was too radical. But we know Brown was right. It took hundreds of slave revolts and a Civil War to finally end slavery in the U.S.
However, in an attempt to continue it in another form, the rulers in the southern states passed the Black Codes in 1865 and 1866, severely limiting the rights of the newly freed slaves. Then in 1866, the U.S. Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts, placing the southern states under military rule, effectively eliminating the Black Codes. But after the 1877 Tilden-Hayes Compromise, the troops were pulled out and the ruling class in the South passed Jim Crow laws to enforce second class citizenship for black people, which became another form of slavery. These laws became the main target of a future struggle — the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Later in the Summer Project, PL’ers and friends watched “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975,” a collection of recently discovered footage showing the later stage of the Civil Rights Movement as seen by a group of Swedish news reporters. The newer generation was not as patient with non-violent protest against segregation and racist police attacks.
In 1964, the first great black rebellion had occurred, in Harlem, after a NYC cop murdered a black teenager. Black residents marched through the streets, battling the cops. The then young Progressive Labor Movement (PLM), forerunner of the PLP, was very active in that protest. Its newspaper CHALLENGE became the flag of marching rebels. The rulers falsely accused CHALLENGE of fomenting the rebellion.
Other rebellions followed, in Newark, NJ, Detroit, Los Angeles and elsewhere. President Lyndon Johnson was forced to divert deployment of the 82nd Airborne Division from Vietnam to Detroit to put down that uprising.
The Swedish film documented the 1968 Martin Luther King assassination, with urban rebellions erupting nationwide. The police and the National Guard were mobilized to quell them. The U.S. government enacted several Civil Rights Acts in response. Yet the Black Panther Party (BPP) then rose in popularity, standing for armed self-defense and black nationalism which meant black workers must become capitalists in order to be liberated.
Some Panthers posed a danger to the ruling class in that they stressed that racist capitalism was the real problem for black workers and youth. The Panthers provided free medical care, free breakfasts and schooling and other social welfare programs in black neighborhoods. While the BPP saw the need to include women inside the organization, they routinely relegated them to roles submissive to their male leaders. This led to extreme sexism within the organization that the bosses eventually used to destroy it.
In 2010, Bobby Seale, a founding member of the BPP, stated its objective was to gain “community control and community input into the political institutions that affect our lives.” But the bosses will never allow these institutions, such as the courts and police, to be placed under “community control.” Their purpose is to protect the ruling class and control the working class.
The movie’s final section focused on government introduction of drugs to black war veterans and black communities to try to deter any effective resistance. The havoc they created can still be felt today. It indicates how far the ruling class will go to protect its system of exploitation. The movie’s overall message was aimed at attacking the use of violence in the process of struggle. At our study group, we talked about whether the movie was correct. No one agreed and said without black workers’ rebellions, schools across the U.S. would have never instituted free lunch programs and more.
The Summer Project ended with a trip to the beach. Building friendly ties among comrades is an important aspect of building for a communist revolution. The Summer Project may be over, but our fight continues. We hope to see you next year!