SILVER SPRING, MD—Over 100 Montgomery County residents held a multiracial rally and march protesting the racist police murder of Robert White, a 41 year old mentally ill Black man on June 13. His crime? Walking while Black. Progressive Labor Party (PLP)distributed leaflets and connected the murderous Ku Klux Klan and the killer cops as part of the racist state power that must be overthrown with multiracial communist revolution.
The prosecutor ruled Robert’s murder was justified and released body camera footage of the encounter. The cameras show that the police officer, Anand Badgujar, got out of his car and started following Robert who was walking in his neighborhood as he did daily. Robert became agitated with the cop, and understandably so, because there was no real reason to stop him. The officer persisted, harassing him and even using pepper spray on him.
Kkop Badgujar claimed Robert knocked him down and continuosly hit him, so he responded by shooting him instead of backing off and de-escalating the unjustified confrontation. At one point on the video evidence showed footage of, Badgujar  saying, “This looks like suicide by cop” and called for backup. Despite thisProsecutor Broccolino stated, “We have, unanimously, concluded that [the officer’s] actions were justified under the circumstances,” and closed the case.
Mental illness is not a crime
Speakers from the community who knew Robert White were incensed that he was harassed and then killed simply for “looking suspicious.” A neighbor from the Silver Spring Justice Coalition said that she walks the same routes.
Robert often exchanged pleasantries with him at the store or library. No one had called the police to investigate. He walked the neighborhood daily.
He lived with his mother and father (retired school teacher and minister) and had no history of violence. Mental illness is not a crime. Walking is not a crime. Robert just “wanted to be left alone” as one speaker put it, and their is no crime in that. But don’t tell the bosses’ racist media that!
This rally followed a protest held in June at the time of the murder that highlighted the murder’s systemic, racist nature, even at the hands of a non-White cop. At that protest, Lakshmi Sridaran, Director of National Policy and Advocacy of South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) declared, “It is unfortunate that in this case [the cop] is a South Asian American and we will not stand behind that person simply because of their identity.”
After all, it is every cop’s ultimate task—whether they’re Black, white, Latin, or South Asian—to protect this rotten capitalist system at workers’ expense.
Another speaker, mother to Emmanuel Okutuga, who was murdered by cop Christopher Jordan of the same police force in February 2011, spoke passionately about the need to fight for justice and called on the Black community to realize that this can happen to them also.
Her son was about to graduate from college at Bowie State University. Video showed he was not a threat. Somehow, though, the prosecutor’s office “accidently” deleted the video and left the judge free to rule in favor of cop Jordan, calling the death “justifiable homicide.”
Montgomery County borders Washington, D.C. and appears, on the surface, not to have the level of police brutality and murder that has characterized its neighboring Prince George’s County. But the police play the same role everywhere.
Robert’s case echoes the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson—murdered for walking while Black. The struggle against racist police terror will continue under capitalism until all workers unite to create a communist world.

While U.S. imperialism is losing its grip on the Middle East, regional capitalists are at war to fill the vacuum. From Syria to Yemen, millions of workers’ lives are at stake as Israeli, Saudi and Iranian capitalists wage war to control the Middle East and its oil. The U.S. and Russian imperialists are providing military and political support to opposing sides in these wars that could escalate quickly.
The most destructive of these current conflicts are in Syria and Yemen. At least six million Syrians have fled their homes and at least 400,000 have died since 2012. In Yemen, at least six million are on the edge of starvation and over half a million were devastated in the world’s worst-ever cholera epidemic (NYT, 8/22). In both conflicts, U.S. imperialism has been mostly confined to fighting small-time terrorists (ISIS in Syria, Al Qaeda in Yemen).
The U.S. decline has their allies second-guessing U.S. power. This has created an opening for capitalists like Iran and Russia who oppose the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia, have decided to take matters into their own hands, creating more murder and mayhem.
Syria: Iran and Russia Advance Israel Readies for War
With U.S. influence weakening in the Middle East, both presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump have done little to oppose Syria’s Russia-backed President Bashar al-Assad. Meanwhile, Iran and Russia have moved in, concentrating on propping up Assad’s regime. Russia has deployed significant air power while Iran has recruited 80,000 fighters from across the region.
Assad’s Syrian army only numbers about 20,000, and many desert or go on strike if ordered to deploy outside their own neighborhoods, where they serve as guards.
 When news reports talk about a Syrian advance on rebel positions, the advance is led by Lebanese Hezbollah and units recruited, trained and paid for by Iran.
Despite Trump’s rhetoric and sanctions against Iran, he has not taken on Iran in Syria and pushed to withdraw all 2,000 troops in Syria (NYT, 4/4).  “In his haste to withdraw from Syria, Trump stands alone.
The Pentagon, the State Department and CIA are all deeply concerned about the potential ramifications if the U.S. leaves behind a power vacuum in Syria, as are Israel, Arab leaders, and other nations in the U.S.-led coalition that has fought ISIS in Iraq and Syria since 2014” (Military Times, 4/4).
If U.S. backs off, Israeli and Saudi bosses fear that Russia-backed Iran will become the dominant power across Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.
Yemen: Saudi Tail Wags U.S. Dog
In Yemen as in Syria, U.S. bosses are not calling the shots as a war unfolds. In 2015, the Saudis and United Arab Emirates invaded after Iran-backed Houthis seized the capital of Sana’a. The latest outrage has been their assault on the main port of Hodeidah. “The U.A.E…wants the port out of Houthi hands as soon as possible, saying it generates up to $40 million a month for the Houthis” (WSJ, 7/8).
It’s important to note that though the UAE is one of the smallest countries in this region, it is one with a growing imperialist appetite. “With an active-duty military of just 63,000, the U.A.E. has rapidly expanded its footprint across the Arabian Peninsula and eastern Africa.
It has a string of bases in Somalia and Eritrea and along the Yemen coast” (WSJ, 7/8)The principal weapon in Syria has been mass starvation created by attacking shipping routes so as to deprive millions of Yemenis of food and clean water.
This murderous campaign has been financed and equipped by the U.S. war machine.The UN estimates this attack will lead to 250,000 deaths from the resulting food shortages.
To stop this slaughter of profit-hungry rulers, we must oppose all capitalist and turn their imperialist wars into class wars against all bosses.
 We must rebuild the international communist movement, overthrow all the war makers, and organize a society run by the working class.

BROOKLYN, August 29—This summer, a multiracial group of more than 30 Kingsborough Community College students and workers held a beach barbecue called “Unity in the Community,” to review and celebrate the past year of struggle, and plan for the year ahead. Short speeches summarizing the past year, political discussions about CHALLENGE, good food, and sports were the orders of the day as old friends reconnected and new friendships were kindled!
Anti-racist and anti-sexist political struggle are what unites these workers and students, who hailed from Africa, across the Middle East and South Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Many of them participated in various struggles throughout the past year, while others were relative newcomers.
A year of building struggle
In late 2017, Kingsborough cafeteria workers suffered under incompetent and racist management. They endured the indignities of obeying orders from lazy sexist supervisors and incompetent administrators at the College. The workers, many of them parents, saw the absurdity of their working conditions. As we engaged in discussions over the semester, their political awareness began to grow, culminating in a bold and powerful rally. Students and staff banded together in a direct confrontation with administrators and NYPD at the President’s office.
At the end that semester, we made contact and began to build relationships with students of the Muslim Association on campus. We learned of their struggles on campus. In the spring semester we built on those discussions to take action against a racist stooge of the administration who admitted to spying on the Muslim Association. Students took the lead in confronting the racist and the administrators who supported him, resulting in his ouster. The leadership in the Muslim Association has to deal with years of history of control by faculty and administrators as well as sexism in their own group. The success of this struggle led to the beginning of another struggle to call out and oust a racist, sexist and homophobic administrator on campus, Michael Goldstein, who is protected by a network of Zionists among the faculty.
Building collective leadership
Students at the barbecue explained the collective process that went into writing the leaflet calling for Goldstein’s termination, and the collective decision-making that went into how best to distribute them and involve more students. A strength of the struggle against Goldstein is that it is drawing in and developing strong women leaders among students who have never participated in political struggle before.
PL’ers who have been involved alongside the KCC students and workers commented on the development of strong women leadership through the struggle, and talked about how important CHALLENGE has been in sharing news about these struggles among the students and workers on campus. They connected the cholera outbreaks in Yemen or Haiti to imperialist rivalry and capitalism’s insatiable need for profits and labor to exploit. They stressed that the bosses’ media always buries these stories, and that is why everyone must help sell and write for CHALLENGE. As students passed around CHALLENGE, several new contacts were made, as well as plans for new PLP study groups.
Struggle continues
Students and workers brainstormed on how to build on and sharpen the struggles of the previous year, and how to reach out to more of the 10,000 or so students on campus. They unanimously agreed that this event should be held annually! As one student put it, “we needed this. With everything going on in the world, we need to keep doing this every year for the students after us.”
Political struggle shows that education is far more than just about sitting in a classroom and learning from books or lectures from professors. Political struggle gives us a vision of a world to fight for, and a goal for our education in all subjects.
This barbecue served to break down barriers and expand the bonds of solidarity among the segregated groups of students, as well as the workers who came: the custodial, cafeteria and faculty.
With stronger personal and political ties, we head back to school this semester with the promise of struggle and hopefully even greater victories.

While Imran Khan, Pakistan’s next prime minister, is already leaning toward China, the regional power’s old bedfellow, U.S. imperialism, still has cards to play.
Since the collapse of workers’ states in Russia and China, the rivalry between the world’s leading imperialist powers continues to drive world events. Today, as a declining U.S. struggles to fend off a rising China, various smaller powers are jockeying for alliances with either one or both.
The latest hotspot is Pakistan, where the local capitalist bosses selected Khan, a one-time cricket superstar who rolled to a heavily rigged election victory July 25 (see page 5). The erratic celebrity candidate was backed by the military, which has ruled Pakistan for half its history. He was chosen for his popularity and support among young workers in particular, and most of all because Pakistan’s rulers are desperate to keep the impoverished masses and a growing middle class in line amid economic crisis.
Leading up to the election, members of opposition parties were harassed and arrested. Others were forced by military intelligence agencies to join Khan’s  Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. Criminal cases have been opened against nearly 17,000 opposition party supporters, and corruption investigations launched against several opposition party leaders (Guardian,7/21).
Workers in Pakistan are fed up with poor sanitation, roving black outs, high unemployment and religious violence.  The reality, however,  is that their material conditions will continue to deteriorate unless they break with dead-end politicians like Khan and join a movement to build a communist world, free of imperialist conquest and exploitation.
Big terror, little terror
Not so long ago, Pakistan was a major pillar of U.S. imperialism and a hedge against Soviet-leaning India. By 2001, after 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of neighboring Afghanistan, U.S. military aid to Pakistan amounted to billions of dollars a year. The Pakistani bosses’ threw their public support behind the U.S. rulers’ “War on Terror” against the U.S. bosses’ own former creation, the Taliban, and its Al Qaeda offshoot, even as they privately hid and funded the Little Terrorists against the Big Terrorists of the U.S.
As the inevitable boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism hit Pakistan, the country’s bosses were forced to repeatedly turn to the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF) for billions in economic aid—a total of fourteen times since the 1980s (Bloomberg, 7/26). In 2015, as the IMF began pressuring Pakistan to repay the loans and dictated harsher attacks on the working class and its standard of living, masses of workers fiercely fought back (CHALLENGE, 5/20/16).
U.S. decay paves way for China’s rise
Pakistan’s bosses have seen U.S. imperialism kill hundreds of thousands in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without anything resembling a U.S. victory. They are witnessing the turmoil under U.S. President Donald Trump, who tweeted: “The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit….No more!” (1/1).
Meanwhile, Pakistan continues to fall behind on its loan repayments. Militant workers are demonstrating and striking for a better life. As Pakistan’s bosses began looking for an alternative, neighboring China saw an opening to weaken U.S. control over Pakistan and extend its own imperialist reach through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also known as One Belt, One Road.
New money, same old imperialism
In 2015, China announced the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a $62 billion effort to modernize Pakistan’s infrastructure to serve China’s rising economy:
The project is branded around the theme of connectivity: power stations, ports, dams, transmission lines, roads and fibre optic cables linking Pakistan to the Chinese internet. Among projects to be completed in 2018 are a mass-transit light railway in Lahore, and a coal-fired power plant in Karachi (Guardian, 8/3).
In 2016, in return, Pakistan leased control of an entire city to China for over 40 years, the deep-water port of Gwadar. Over the next several years, new rail, road, gas, and oil pipeline networks will align Pakistan with major cities in western China, oil-rich Iran, the U.S.-dominated Middle East, and Africa.
Muhammad Zubair, governor of Sindh Province in Pakistan (including the commercial hub of Karachi and two gigantic seaports), is a close ally of Nawaz Sharif, the former prime minister who was arrested on corruption charges 12 days before Khan’s contested election. He openly acknowledges that the Chinese relationship is about more than economics: “It gives China the security leverage they desperately need. Obviously they want to compete with America….They have global ambitions, and we have been their friends long before anyone else” (Guardian,8/3).
But all that glitters is not gold. Chinese imperialism may seem less ruthless at the moment than the U.S. variety, but a wolf is still a wolf. In Sri Lanka, after their $8 billion dollar investment in various port projects failed to turn a profit, Chinese banks forced the island country into a 99-year lease on the port in Hambantota, with 70 percent ownership going to China (New York Times, 6/25).
This is classic imperialism in action, and U.S. bosses are worried. They are stipulating that any future IMF loans cannot  be used to pay off Pakistan’s debt to China. The inter-imperialist rivalry in Pakistan exposes how big powers use “legal” banking institutions to keep nations impoverished and strong-arm them to do their bidding.
With U.S. imperialism in decline and China accelerating its challenge, the storm clouds of global war are fast approaching. The various rulers know they need to win workers to nationalist ideas to fight that war. But the international working class cannot be fooled by nationalist rhetoric. Whether it takes the form of liberal democracy, state capitalism, or openly fascist authoritarianism, all forms of capitalism are dictatorships of the bosses. All of them exploit workers’ labor. All of them will slaughter millions to protect their profits. With the leadership of the Progressive Labor Party, workers must organize and unite to create a new society that serves the needs of our class.
As PL’ers in Pakistan recently declared: “Our local struggles have an impact on workers all over the world. Only international communist revolution under our international communist party can free the working class from the daily miseries of capitalism. Join us!”