BROOKLYN, December 17—On two consecutive Saturdays, plainclothes thugs of the NYPD descended on the apartment of a strong Brooklyn mother who refused to take their assault. Her son is wanted by the NYPD. In the style of imperialist and fascist forces across history, terrorizing the immediate family of sought-after individuals is official policy.

The mother is a student in a college classroom where communist ideas set some of the tone of discussion. She called on new friends to help her mobilize a campaign to resist the racist harassment from the cops. Visits and meetings will be building into a campaign that draws in neighbors, family, fellow students, friends and PLP members. It’s become clear that the cops who invaded her apartment have a long history of racist assaults on the homes of many in the public housing developments of this Brooklyn neighborhood. These are not “rogue” cops. They are essential to the performing the function of policing in a segregated, capitalist society.

While legal tactics, including filing reports and potentially a lawsuit, are a part of the response mobilizing our base. Picket the precinct and building on initial door-to-door efforts in the apartment is central to our response. This case is a new front in the battle against racist cop terror because PLP is on the scene and organizing not in response to cop murder but in response to the racist assaults that form the “business as usual” of daily life no matter who the president or mayor may be.
This proud mother’s resistance to the racist assault on her home is an inspiration and an opportunity for many more to stand against the terror that shapes daily life for our class brothers and sisters here and around the world. Stay tuned.

HARLEM, December 20—A Harlem congregation and Progressive Labor Party members within it have focused on two fights this season: opposing racist police terror and supporting the Standing Rock resistance. These fights toughen up the working class for more battles ahead, building communist fighters and a communist outlook along the way.
The two fights are in fact closely related. The indigenous organizers in North Dakota were leading the struggle against the emerging global fossil fuel disaster pushed by ExxonMobil. Predictably, they have encountered the kind of brutal, racist repression like Black children suffered in Birmingham Alabama in 1963.
In September, our climate justice fighters organized a march of fifty community people against the banks that fund the North Dakota pipeline. Then a friend began the mobilization that culminated in thousands massing at Foley Square on November 15 to demand that the Army Corps of Engineers continue to block the pipeline’s construction. We were there with five college students.
At the demonstration we noticed that a number of cops we were chanting against were not wearing badges. When we called them out, one cop yelled back “We don’t need any stinking badges!”
This shows that we are entering a new territory of sharpening fascist repression. Badge-less cops can’t stop us from identifying and organizing against vicious cop attackers.
More importantly, racist police have struck twice in within weeks of each other—Deborah Danner  (Black, 66, schizophrenic) and Ariel Galarza (Latin, 49, emotionally disturbed, disabled) in the Bronx. We have been in the streets with militant workers from Harlem in outrage against these atrocities and are reaching out to college students, other congregations and community groups for a broader based actionas soon as possible: “Unite Against Racism and Sexism, No Deportations.”
Through the mass organizing, PLP is able to affect those around us, and foster a fighting climate based on communist values. We are building class consciousness, helping workers act on the principle that an injury to one member of our class is an injury to all. Engaging in the class struggle can lead workers and youth to have confidence in our class to make communist revolution. We aim to overthrow this dictatorship of the capitalists, and build a worker-run world.

BROOKLYN, NY, December 17—To expose the racist ideologies of capitalism and broaden our fight against racism our church hosted a forum on Black Lives Matter (BLM). We wanted to unite with other community and faith based groups so we traveled from our middle class, downtown Brooklyn location to host it in a community, which has been repeatedly targeted by racist police attacks.
The host from our church began the panel with a story about our “Black Lives Matter” banner. Some antiracist church members hung up this banner to support the fight against racism. The banner was stolen overnight. Another one was put up, which was also stolen. Then one morning a “Blue Lives Matter” banner appeared outside the church. We took down this racist sign. Blue Lives Matter is a racist, pro-police reaction to the antiracist fightback. Such racism must be confronted everywhere, in every way!
The moderator was a Black pastor and professor who promoted the idea of Black Nationalism. The panelists consisted of a history teacher who has been fighting the racism in schools for 20 years, a recent college graduate who is involved in mentoring Black youth, and a young Black man involved in the Black Lives Matter movement.
The teacher gave a rundown of how racism was created to control and divide workers throughout history. She recommended a book by Black historian Lerone Bennett Jr. called The Shaping of Black America. He explains how in the early days of Colonial America Black and white indentured servants lived and worked together, intermarried and even united to fight against the plantation owners. In response to this, the slave owning plantation owners made a concerted effort to divide Black from white. From preachers who promoted racist ideas to laws which made all kinds of unity illegal, the racist rulers steadily built up racism over hundreds of years. Our task today is to smash all racist ideas and practices as we fight for a better world. Challenge newspaper was distributed to quite a few people at this forum as a small part of this anti-racist fightback.
The young man from BLM broke down his experiences which led him to the movement, sparked by outrage at the death of Eric Garner and Mike Brown at the hands of racist kkkops and Trayvon Martin who was killed by a racist vigilante. The college graduate spoke of how racist treatment in the school system inspired him to create a mentoring program focused on promoting “good” behavior. He realized that it wasn’t the fault of the students that they were unfairly singled out and criminalized because of their race. He also expressed an increasing frustration with voting.
During the open discussion many people expressed support for the anti racism of the BLM movement while questioning the nationalism and divisiveness. Some promoted white privilege theory. This idea serves to divide the working class. For some it may assuage guilt over the racist past of the US, but it also hinders a united, working class fightback against racism. In reality the whole capitalist system has to go. This can only happen with multiracial unity and, as some said during the forum, with an armed struggle.

As competition between imperialist superpowers China and the U.S. intensifies in the Horn of Africa, bomber-in-chief Barack Obama has laid the capitalist legal basis for a wider oil war in Somalia. The resulting devastation of the working class shows, more than ever, that we need communist revolution.
Oil Chokepoint: Bab el-Mandeb
Off the western flank of the Arabian Sea, the U.S. is hard-pressed to keep control over the oil shipment chokepoint at the strait of Bab el-Mandeb. The strait separates Djbouti and Yemen, between the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal. Nearly four million barrels of oil pass through it every day (Business Insider, 11/3): “[H]e who controls Bab el-Mandeb has his fingers around the throats of both the EU and Asia’s economies” (Counterpunch, 11/17/11).
This area is of longtime geopolitical importance for U.S. hegemony. In 1991, the U.S. Army War College published an unclassified study that called Bab Al-Mandeb “a confrontation arena between the superpowers, which tried to establish and then promote their military presence and influence there.”
In the 1990s, the main U.S. rival in the area was Russia. Today it is China.
Somalia: From Bombs to Ground Operations
Somalia’s working class is caught in the crossfire of the imperialists’ fight to control Middle East oil. Barack Obama has expanded a mandate for war against Al Qaeda to include Somalia, a precedent that president-elect Donald Trump will be free to escalate (NYT, 11/28). As Obama rains bombs on Somalia and murders masses of workers, the scope of the operation is expanding. According to official statistics, the number of U.S. Special Operations forces on the ground has climbed from 120 in 2007 to 300 (Reuters 7/14). The tempo of their rampage has increased to six raids a month (Telesurtv, 10/16). After conducting a covert operation until 2014, Obama has folded these raids into the perpetual war waged under the post-9/11 “Authorization for the Use of Force.”  
While the future of this conflict is unpredictable, U.S. bosses will need many more ground troops to hold off its imperialist rivals.  
History of Imperialist Carnage
Imperialist designs on the Horn of Africa date back to the nineteenth century. Through occupations by British, French, Italian, Russian, and U.S. forces, the impact on workers has been the same: capitalist exploitation, instability, periodic famine. In 2006, after U.S.-backed warlords in Somalia were defeated by a group called the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), U.S. imperialism supported an Ethiopian invasion. As the ICU splintered, a faction called the Shabab emerged. Aligned with Al Qaeda, it became the main anti-U.S. force on the ground These little terrorists seek to impose their own brand of capitalist exploitation on the local working class, different only in scale from the big terrorists of U.S. imperialism.
In 2010, U.S.-fomented instability and outright slaughter have combined with drought to bring famine to Somalia. At least 250,000 workers and children have starved to death. Tony Lake, UNICEF director and Clinton-era national security advisor, budgeted ten cents per person a day to feed our class brothers and sisters through this crisis, a death warrant signed by a trusted henchman of U.S. imperialism (telesur.net 9/11/16).
Djibouti: New Scramble for the Horn
A rising China looms as the main threat to U.S. imperialism, and to U.S. control of Bab el-Mandeb in particular. The Chinese imperialists are building their first overseas military outpost in Djibouti, a tiny nation between Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. The Chinese base is eight miles from the only acknowledged permanent U.S. military base in Africa (WSJ, 8/19).  
Dijoubti represents the latest example of China’s pivot toward Africa. Beyond the $200 billion spent on the continent in 2012, surpassing the U.S., China has pledged to invest $1 trillion by 2025 (CNN Money, 12/5/15). Chinese President Xi Jinping openly refers to the Djibouti base as a key in defending Chinese interests in Middle East oil fields. Xi’s top naval officers consider “steadily advancing overseas base construction” a top priority for Chinese capitalist (WSJ, 8/19). As the U.S. prepares for a wider ground war, direct clashes with China are a growing possibility.
Yemen: Obama’s War
Another country caught in the superpowers’ crossfire is Yemen, across Bab el- Mandeb from Djibouti and bordering Saudi Arabia to the south. Yemen is being torn apart in a proxy war between the Iran-backed Houthi rebels and the pro-Saudi/U.S. regime. A Saudi-led coalition has conducted indiscriminate air strikes across the country, killing thousands of workers. For the imperialists, the stakes are high; Saudi Arabia contains the world’s largest reserves of cheaply extracted oil. Obama and the finance capitalists he serves fear any threat to U.S. control over the world’s foremost profit center.
Fight for Communism
In years past, millions of workers and students looked to communism in their struggles against imperialism, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation in the Horn of Africa and beyond. Nationalism led these fighters down a dead end. Progressive Labor Party is proud to carry forward the banner of the struggle against imperialism and rebuild proletarian internationalism. Let the imperialists start their wars—the workers can and will finish them with communist revolution! We have nothing to lose but our chains!