DENVER, CO, November 10 — Over 10,000 members of the American Public Health Association (APHA) met this year around the theme of “Social Justice.” Members and friends of PLP, with support from various groups in APHA, challenged the organization to live up to its theme. Our proposed APHA policy statement, “Opposing the Exclusion of Undocumented Immigrants from Health Reform,” hit a raw nerve and triggered a small struggle in the association.
The liberals who run the APHA don’t want to take any public position critical of the Obama administration. But rank-and-file members, most of whom work with underserved populations day in and day out, have less interest in currying favor with politicians and more gut-level commitment to justice for the communities they serve. APHA bureaucrats used their control over a key committee to block our anti-racist resolution.
Anticipating resistance from the association full-timers, the APHA members who wrote the resolution (“the troublemakers”) started circulating drafts in the weeks leading up to the annual meeting to all APHA sections (Epidemiology, Medical Care, Maternal and Child Health, etc.) The Black Caucus was specifically targeted through the friends we have made there fighting against racism in previous years. They gave their support as soon as they read it.
A key part of our strategy was to oppose Obama’s attempt to win African Americans to scapegoat Latinos for the failures of capitalist medicine. After all, it is no small thing that the country’s first black president signed a racist health care bill that doesn’t let undocumented immigrants even BUY health insurance through the exchanges! In the end the “troublemakers” were also able to join forces with the Latino Caucus to keep the policy statement alive.
This activity, along with open sales of CHALLENGE and raising different anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist ideas in presentations,  scientific sessions and one-on-one conversations with our friends, made for a productive five days of meetings. Healthcare social policy clearly has life-and-death implications. The stress of life under an oppressive wage-slavery system leads to high blood pressure, diabetes, premature labor and infant deaths. 
For black and Latino workers, who suffer the additional layer of racism-caused stress, this disease burden is higher, for some diseases over twice as high. Capitalist poverty breeds diseases and denying access to life-saving healthcare because a person lacks money or is the “wrong race” compounds this murderous injustice.
This fight has helped to illuminate the way APHA actually works, especially for our younger friends who were a little surprised at the dishonesty of the “progressive” professionals who control key positions in the organization. Small struggles like this can provide important lessons in the “school for communism.” To be most effective, though, the struggles need the context of on-going personal relationships. One friend who always seemed pretty conservative, a federal employee from a section where we have worked for years, heard about the trick to sideline our version of the resolution. “They are starting to run this association like a dictatorship!” he commented.
At the annual “Troublemaker’s Breakfast,” a number of new friends in attendance were interested in helping us organize more “trouble” at next year’s APHA meeting in Washington, D.C.  Several of our new friends live in cities with PLP clubs, giving us a much better opportunity for more conversations with them.
Some are ready to connect health problems to social causes and will be open to revolutionary solutions. A central component of our approach will be developing a multiracial group, including both Black and Latino Caucus members, to manage the resubmission of the resolution for permanent policy-statement status next year. Long-term friendships based on the shared need to fight racism will strengthen this work in the years to come.

MEXICO — Around 120 families in the 12 districts to the east of Valle de Mexico are at risk of flooding. The area where we live sinks about half a meter a year, because of the extraction of water from the subsoil through the fourteen wells installed in the area since the 1980s. The ground has sunk 15 meters from its original level and by 2020 may sink up to 19 meters. 

The politicians did not want us inhabitants to know about the problem, so they tried to sabotage meetings and to discredit CHALLENGE when it informed us about the risk. They sent agitators to break up the neighbors’ meetings. They paid for advertisements on buses warning the population about “an organization that is trying to deceive them and manipulate them.” They weren’t successful, since it was clear that CHALLENGE serves the interests of the workers.

Because of the constant attack from the bosses against our class, we have to be organized in a party that is not electoral, a party that unites and leads millions of workers to a communist revolution. Electoral parties only look to benefit the bosses that sponsor them and the politicians that lead them. Elections are a fraud for all workers and will never lead us to a change that will benefit us.

The government used another weapon when they realized that its strategy of provocation failed. It brought a group of college researchers to create the idea that something can be done without a struggle. At first they were successful in creating an atmosphere of passivity, but it was reversed when CHALLENGE was proven right and some of the neighbors spoke about the importance of being organized.

The governing politicians explored two alternatives to “solve” the problem: the first is to evacuate the population located in the area of highest risk, and the second is to conduct hydraulic work to decrease the possibility of flooding. In reality that area should have never been populated, because of its risks. Capitalism forces workers to live in regions of high risk, like in places where lakes or rivers pass by hills. Capitalism is the problem, and the solution is to organize and fight to destroy it. 

While hundreds of thousands of inhabitants in the poorest parts of Mexico City lack water, thousand of liters coming from the Sierra Nevada are sent to the river and end up drained in the city of Pachuca. CONAGUA (Mexico´s national water commission) began studies to take advantage of this water, a project costing an estimated one billion pesos. They expect to store the water in a lake in Xico, make it drinkable and channel it to Mexico City. The project doesn´t specify if it will avoid the risk of flooding. For now it only exists on paper. 

No one forgets the scenes in 2000 and 2010 when thousands of families lost all of their belongings to sewage flooded from the channel. The government sent police to suppress them when they demanded help. Once again we see the hatred that the bosses and governments feel towards us workers. Capitalism is a racist system, which destroys the lives of all workers, but especially of the poorest.

We also don´t forget our class brothers who died or were affected in Tabasco, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Puebla, Veracruz and Tamaulipas. The government says climate change is the reason for the disasters. The reality is that these phenomena become tragedies because of the permanent risk workers live under in this system. Capitalism is the disaster. Only a society led by the working class can give us safety. 

The risk of flooding and the lack of water in the eastern area of the Valle de Mexico show that the capitalist system doesn’t work for the working class. The only alternative is to be organized in a communist party, PLP, to destroy killier capitalists and build a society led by the workers. 

Huge deficits in foreign trade and the federal budget are hampering U.S. imperialists’ ability to pay for the widening wars they need. The trade gap sucks $44 billion out of the U.S. every month, as the U.S. imports more than it exports. The federal budget deficit jumped from $960 billion in 2008 to $1.42 trillion in 2009. The growing division among U.S. capitalists, evidenced by the Tea Party phenomenon and its proclaimed “anti-tax” and “anti-big government” advocacy, makes it more difficult for the rulers Obama represents to tackle the federal deficit in the U.S.. Meanwhile, the total cost of U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan (and now Yemen and Pakistan) has topped $3 trillion.

Obama’s recent Asia trip, intended to address the trade problem, was a failure. “Confidence in U.S. global economic leadership continues to wane,” was how the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), U.S. imperialism’s top think-tank, summed up the G20 summit. (CFR website, 11/12)

Seoul G20 Meeting Showed
Imperialist Rivalry Driving Force in World

Open conflict prevailed in Seoul. Chinese and U.S. bosses charged each other with devaluing their currency to boost exports. “A 7.5 percent drop in the dollar over the past four months is making American goods cheaper overseas as demand in emerging economies propels sales for companies like General Electric Co.” (Bloomberg, 11/11/10).

The Federal Reserve’s printing of 600 billion new dollars, dumping them into circulation — announced during the G20 summit — only intensifies the trade war. It cheapens U.S. currency and lowers prices of U.S. exports, and makes foreign imports more expensive.

Host South Korea flatly rejected increased imports from the U.S., despite Obama’s diplomacy and the presence of 30,000 GIs in the country. In general, the heads of the world’s wealthiest countries told Obama what he could do with his plan to double U.S. exports: “G20 members rebuffed U.S. efforts to set firm targets for current account imbalances” (CFR).

The glaring lack of cooperation in Seoul proves that nation-states are essentially the instruments of separate, profit-driven ruling classes bent on selling their wares at one another’s expense. And, with profit margins slashed by the economic crisis, the competition is becoming more cut-throat. “The fractious Seoul summit suggests that policy divergences are the shape of things to come” (CFR). Divisions within the U.S. also undermined Obama. Following Democrats’ election losses, leaders in Seoul doubted his ability to get Congressional backing for the trade deals he promised.

Obama Deficit Plan #1: Attack Workers’ Social Security,
Medicare

While Obama was in Asia, his commission studying ways to reduce the budget and put the U.S. economy on a fiscally sounder war footing (see below), released its proposals: domestically, cut back Social Security and Medicare, raise the retirement age and raise taxes.

(The kind of thinking that went into this panel is reflected in Obama’s appointed co-chairman, Alan Simpson, who referred to the retiree organization AARP as “the greedy geezers of America” and called Social Security “a milk cow with 310 million tits.”)

Raising taxes, however, has become political poison in an increasingly Tea Partying Congress, whose candidates just bought dozens of seats in the recent elections. These capitalists profit far less from the imperialist wars the Rockefeller forces need to control foreign oil supplies and pipelines on behalf of the likes of ExxonMobil and Chevron.

Obama Deficit Plan #2:  Make War Machine Leaner and Meaner

The supposedly bi-partisan Obama budget panel that proposed the deficit plan has sterling imperialist credentials. Co-chairmen are Bill Clinton’s old chief of staff Erskine Bowles and conservative ex-senator Simpson, who’s ready to impoverish elderly workers. Bowles sits on Morgan Stanley’s board (his wife is on J.P. Morgan Chase’s board). Simpson served on the 2006 Iraq Study Group that led to Robert Gates replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the consequent deadly U.S. surges in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As for military savings, Bowles-Simpson targets GI health benefits and costly weapons systems that are useless for the wars the Pentagon is actually waging and planning. It also urges the closing of lavish U.S. bases in Europe and Japan in favor of Spartan “forward operating bases” closer to potential flashpoints. Troop strength, however, remains unscathed in the proposed cuts. So much for beating swords into plowshares.

Nowhere do profit-saving Bowles and Simpson mention saving workers’ lives by ending U.S.-led genocide in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars, and far bloodier ones to come, are central to U.S. imperialists’ schemes to save themselves in the face of sharpening global rivalry. 

What the working class needs is the kind of fight-back PLP is helping to organize among transit workers (p. 5); teachers, parents and students (pp. 3, 4); Mexico (p. 1); and GM (p. 7). PLP is bringing our communist ideas to these class struggles, the basis for growing the Party into the force the working class needs to destroy the profit system and its mass racist unemployment, poverty-producing crises and worker-killing imperialist wars.

Only a communist revolution can create a worker-run society that can eradicate these evils. 

BROOKLYN, NY, Oct, 28 — “The parents united will never be defeated!” This chant greeted parents as they entered school for parent-teacher conferences. About thirty students and teachers picketed at the entrance and passed out flyers inviting parents and neighbors to an upcoming meeting to discuss the Department of Education’s (DoE) plans for racist attacks against our schools. PLP members and friends helped organize this event as part of a growing campaign to build multi-racial unity against the destructive plans of the local education bosses.

Our building houses several schools, which were created as part of an earlier reform program. Education officials broke up large comprehensive high schools around the city and created smaller schools which they hoped would be easier to control. In our case, the building is physically located in a mainly white, middle-class neighborhood. However, the students who attend all the schools are black, Latino and Asian working-class youth from surrounding neighborhoods. While teachers have struggled to help these students learn, graduate and go on to college, the DoE has placed every obstacle they can in the students’ path. Budgets in the schools have been cut every year, the 100-year-old building has not been renovated and students are scanned through metal detectors every day as if they were criminals.

The newest attacks on our school are the most blatantly racist yet. We have been told the DoE plans to put an additional school into our building because the DoE’s formulas say that our space can hold more students. The stated purpose of this school is to “serve the immediate neighborhood,” the wealthier, white parents who have historically sent their children to magnet schools in other neighborhoods if they cannot afford, or do not believe in, private schools. This new school would be screened, meaning students would have to meet high academic standards to get in. The building will get millions of dollars worth of renovation to accommodate the new school, although our schools have been told we would not be renovated, even if we increased our enrollment to match their formula for space usage. The DoE has said they may remove the metal detectors with the addition of the new school, something they have refused to do for years when the school housed mainly black and Latino students. We’ve even heard rumors that the DoE is consulting with the custodial staff about the possibility of creating a separate entrance for the new school.

This kind of segregation within the same building is one of the most disgusting manifestations of the racism built into the capitalist system. This new school would create a system of “separate and unequal” within our building. Some of the politicians and DoE functionaries who have addressed the issue have been very direct about it, although others claimed that the current schools could reap benefits from the additional money coming into the building with the new school.

Students and teachers in our schools are horrified and looking for ways to fight back against this assault. In the past, students from our schools walked out over the cell-phone ban and have protested budget cuts to the schools and mass transit. Last spring, teachers picketed against the budget cuts before school. We know we now need to unite students, teachers and parents in class struggle. The actions on parent-teacher conference night were our first steps this year in fighting these new attacks.

That day, the debate team of our schools organized a debate on the issue during the after-school program attended by about 100 students and teachers. Although the student debaters are all against the DoE’s plans, they carefully researched and presented both sides so there could be a full discussion. After the debate, students and teachers were invited to “do something instead of just talking” and join the picket in front of school to publicize the issue to parents. A group of teachers, including Party members and friends, has been meeting after school to plan parent outreach and other tactics. These are good, but they are baby steps. Many of the students and teachers involved are already CHALLENGE readers. We aim to develop a student study group and many more CHALLENGE readers as more angry students, parents and teachers join the fight-back efforts. If Party members give leadership to the struggle, it has the potential to explode into mass anger. We have a lot of work to do and a lot of lessons to learn.