CHICAGO, IL January 13 — “We have changed the climate of oppression!” These were the words uttered by a member of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 308, a Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) train worker, as more than 300 workers showed up to stop the sellout leadership from stealing another election.
It was our biggest union meeting in over 30 years, as we made phone calls, struggled with our co-workers, used social media and organized car pools to pack the union hall. It was the work of a very loose coalition of CTA workers that includes both train and bus workers that began meeting in 2011, fighting for one local union and one contract.
It could also be a sign that months of mass marches and rallies over the racist murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner have had an effect on the mood of the workers.
Sellout President Robert Kelly was trying to call a new election after having been soundly defeated. In 2012, he conspired with CTA bosses and Chicago bankers to negotiate the worst contract we have ever had. It created 700 new low-paid Customer Service Assistant (CSA) positions, who do the same work as the Customer Service Representatives (CSR). CSAs make $12.40/hr with no guarantee of a 40-hour/week while the 300 CSR’s make $30.00/hr. It also included Accelerated Discipline, which has been responsible for 300 workers being fired.
During the campaign, there was a lot of discussion and debate about whether the mostly Black and Latin workers and riders were facing racist attacks. Inspired by the mass anti-racist demonstrations, some of us wanted to make this an anti-racist campaign, linked to the issue of police terror, the rise of fascism and the threat of war. Others felt that being “too political” would hurt our chances of “winning,” even though they agreed that these are racist attacks! This raises the question: “What is winning?”
We did make progress. More workers were introduced to CHALLENGE, and a small network helped to distribute anti-racist material. That is winning. We were able to address racist police terror, as one worker was fired from the CTA based on the racist lies of the Chicago Police Department (CPD), and another’s father was killed by CPD (see past issues of CHALLENGE). That kind of struggle, too, is winning.
Ken Franklin was elected President, and while a good guy, he wanted to keep politics out of the campaign in order to “win.” He will be receiving “Congratulations” from his International President, the Mayor, and the head of the CTA, all the people he will have to oppose if he is to make a difference. His Executive Board and International are already telling him that you have to know how to “play ball.”
For us, we have to consolidate our base of CHALLENGE readers and anti-racist fighters to eventually be able to lead strikes against mass racist firings due to Accelerated Discipline. The next time CPD murders a Black youth, to shut down the transit system and lead tens of thousands of workers and youth to police headquarters or City Hall. And most of all, we want to develop a mass base for communist revolution. Winning CTA workers to build and participate on May Day will be a test of our success.

In his State of the Union address, Barack Obama called for “middle-class economics” — a brand of capitalism where workers would keep a bigger piece of the pie. But Obama’s latest promise is so much pie in the sky. A system based on the exploitation of the working class — and enforced by capitalists’ state power — can never serve workers’ needs. The two classes are diametrically opposed. “Middle-class economics” reflects an embattled, crisis-ridden U.S. ruling class that is running scared — scared of what could become a communist working-class revolution.
The day after Obama’s speech, in an opinion piece headlined, “Can Capitalists Save Capitalism?” the New York Times referenced a May 2014 conference in London. The Conference topic was “inclusive capitalism,” a concept put forward in 2002 by academics at the University of Michigan and Cornell. In a widely cited article, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” they pointed to the potential profit that could be generated by “the fourth tier,” the world’s poorest four billion people.
Addressing the London conference was Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, which impoverishes workers worldwide on behalf of U.S. bankers. Despite the reversals of the revolutions in the Soviet Union and China, communism remains the main threat to capitalist rulers around the world. Lagarde echoed Marx’s warning that capitalism, as she paraphrased, “carried the seeds of its own destruction, the accumulation of capital in the hands of a few, mostly focused on the accumulation of profits….”
Speaking for her fellow bosses, Lagarde voiced concern about “high unemployment, rising social tensions, and growing political disillusion — all of this happening in the wake of the Great Recession. One of the main casualties has been trust — in leaders, in institutions, in the free market system itself.” She pointed to a recent poll showing that fewer than one in five people believed that “governments or business leaders would tell the truth on an important issue.”
The contradiction of capitalism is that it is ultimately undermined by the inequality that creates profit, the system’s lifeblood. As Lagarde acknowledged, “The 85 richest people in the world, who could fit into a single London double-decker [bus], control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population — that is 3.5 billion people….This is a wakeup call.”
Rulers’ Worry: Marx Was Right
As Progressive Labor Party has pointed out, only the destruction of the capitalist profit system — and its bosses, wars, racism and sexism, exploitation and permanent mass unemployment — can solve our class’s problems. Only a communist society, led by the working class and its revolutionary party, can end the rulers’ atrocities.
Obama’s capitalist benefactors cooked up his phony “redistribution” scheme in their think tanks. Knowing full well that a Republican-dominated Congress would block them, Obama proposed tax hikes on big banks and the rich to pay for tax credits and free community college for working families. But the Democrats and Republicans are two wings of the same racist, anti-worker organization. While they may differ on tactics and occasionally on strategy, their goal is always the same: to squeeze maximum profits out of the working class.
Like all capitalist politicians, Obama has no intention of helping our class. His job is to dupe more workers into voting and accepting tightened government control. U.S. rulers, top dogs since World War II, face intensifying challenges from their imperialist rivals — China, Russia, Japan, and the European Union. Global conflict is edging closer by the day. The U.S. imperialists desperately need to convince U.S. workers that they have a stake in fighting — and dying — for the profit system.
At the London conference, Lagarde endorsed “inclusive capitalism” as “the response to Marx’s dire prediction,” and the key “to capitalism’s survival and regeneration.” By critiquing income inequality, liberal capitalists hope to mislead workers and quell the recent wave of rebellions from Mexico to Turkey to Gaza to Ferguson, Missouri.
Racism Essential to Capitalism’s Existence
Racist exploitation is the cornerstone of capitalism. The U.S. bosses reap more than $600 billion annually in super-profits from the gap in family income between white workers and Black or Latin workers. The profit system is the source of racist cop terror and the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. It is the root of segregated housing and schools and of third-rate health care. It’s the foundation for the racist, criminal injustice system, where 70 percent of the 2.2 million prisoners in U.S. prisons and jails are Black or Latin.
When white workers are won to accept these racist attacks, it weakens the fightback of the entire working class. As a result, the capitalists are freer to maintain their profits with mass layoffs during recessions and depressions  — and to drag down white workers’ wages and conditions, as well.
Racist inequalities are pervasive in capitalism. Witness the corporate movement to low-wage countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa, where two billion workers try to survive on $2 a day. Or the racist anti-immigrant attacks in the European Union, where “foreign” workers are widely blamed for rising unemployment.
In their efforts to buy working-class loyalty, U.S. rulers could afford jobs programs and improvements in workers’ standard of living during and immediately after World War II. But the current generation of U.S. bosses, beset on many fronts, cannot. The 1950’s American Dream — a good union job, a cheap home mortgage, college for the kids, a decent pension — was a reality for some workers of that era, most of them white. In 2015, it is a stinking lie.
Bosses’ Big Concern: Workers’ Revolution

On January 15, the Inclusive Prosperity Commission weighed in on the current crisis of world capitalism. The report’s authors were ex-U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and British Labor Party hack Ed Balls. Published by the Center for American Progress, the study was solely funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. In effect, it rated working-class revolution as more dangerous than the menaces posed by China, Russia, ISIS or al Qaeda:

The primary challenge democracies face is neither military nor philosophical. Rather, for the first time since the Great Depression, many industrial democracies are failing to raise living standards and provide opportunities for social mobility to a large share of their people….This is an economic problem that threatens to become a problem for the political systems of these nations — and for the idea of democracy itself.
The “economic problem” for these “democracies” (the term the bosses use for their electoral dictatorships) is capitalism, the profit system itself. The capitalists control state power — the apparatus of government, the military, courts, cops, and media  — and use it to protect their profits. While the capitalists may temporarily improve workers’ pay and conditions, their system requires the absolute exploitation of our class. Any scraps they throw at us are taken back in their next economic crisis.
The Center for American Progress squarely represents the capitalist class. It was founded by John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief of staff during the bloody bombing of Bosnia and now top campaign advisor to war-maker Hillary Clinton. Its number two is Madeleine Albright, Clinton’s mass-murdering Secretary of State. When asked in 2001 about the deaths of half a million Iraqi children by U.S. sanctions that withheld food and medicine, Albright told CBS TV, “We think the price is worth it.”
Join and Build PLP
PLP’s goal is to destroy these butchers and smash the system behind them. With workers’ trust in the capitalist government and system on the wane, it is time to sharpen struggles in all our organizations and lead workers against this failing society. We have a tremendous opportunity to win masses to join and build the Progressive Labor Party and a communist future.

New York City, January 19 — PLP and friends upped the ante against racist cops and slumlords under the leadership of Black, Latin, and Asian women this Martin Luther King (MLK) weekend. Over 1,000 CHALLENGEs were distributed. This weekend was yet another demonstration that workers will fight back under communist leadership. The ability for the international working class to abolish capitalism hinges on making anti-racism and anti-sexism central to our fight. With PLP, such a world is possible.
Church Avenue: Trail of KKKillings  
We kicked off the weekend with a long march against racist cops down Brooklyn’s Church Avenue in the bone-chilling cold. The rally began at the site of murder of Kimani Gray, a 16-year-old Black teen killed by racist cops Mourad Mourad and Jovaniel Cordova in March, 2013. Over 50 workers and students shut down the street. Many, some pushing their children in strollers, joined the march.
We stopped traffic in all directions with a picket on E. 38th and Church, where 23-year-old Black woman Shantel Davis was killed by the racist black detective Phillip Atkins in June, 2012. Though all these cops have a history of racist assaults and the city was forced to pay out millions to victims of previous attacks, NYPD awarded some of these cops for “heroism.”
The march ended with a rally on E. 18th and Church, where we regularly protest for Kyam Livingston, a 37-year-old Black woman worker. Kyam was killed in by the cops who deliberately refused to give her medical attention at Brooklyn Central Booking in July, 2013. Three powerful women took the mike; all three were brought into the struggle by the murderous NYPD. It is no accident that Black women, who are ruthlessly exploited by the bosses’ state, are leading the fight against the racist cops and courts.
Reds, Not Experts
Saturday’s mini-communist school was led by fresh recruits from PLP’s Ferguson project. Three Black and Asian women introduced the recently published Fight Racism pamphlet and facilitated discussion. In one group, participants talked about how to live an antiracist life while living under racism. Capitalism has divided our class so much that we must make a conscious effort to foster multiracial relationships in our lives. Another group pointed out that racism is an international fight and that abolishing borders is crucial to abolishing racism.
Why is it significant that this school was led not by the veteran white comrades, but by the handful of Black and Asian women who recently joined the fight for communism? PLP doesn’t believe in experts! For a communist revolution to succeed, masses of workers must learn and fight for our ideas. Under capitalism — where women workers are silenced, objectified, battered, abused, raped, and exploited — it is no small victory that our fight for workers’ power is led by Black, Latin, and Asian women. We train those most oppressed to be in leadership, for it is their class experience that will advance the revolution.
Turn Up the Heat on Slumlord
One Black woman, a youth worker who recently joined PLP, and her family have been suffering under their racist and sexist slumlord, Fred Basal, who refused to provide heat during winter. This forced the family to boil water to keep warm. One pot accidently fell on two children. They got second-degree burns. Basal not only refused to help with the medical bills and provide heat, he also pushed for rent!
This is no isolated incident. During the coldest months of 2013 and 2014, New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) received over 200,000 heat and hot water complaints. And so, this Saturday, a PLP contingent went to Basal’s office in Jamaica, Queens to turn up the heat against this racist and sexist slumlord. We chanted, “Fred Basal, Just Face it! You’re a Slumlord and a Racist/Sexist!”
The youth worker is the main breadwinner of over seven people in her home. This system gets away with oppressing Black women and their families through poverty wages, slum housing, abusive healthcare, and the systemic terrorization of our kids in the schools and on the streets. Under capitalism, Black mothers don’t have “the right to raise their children in a healthy environment.” Our working-class kids are dispensable for the bosses. Only a communist system will allow Black workers, women workers, and youth to live to their full potential. The basis of racism and sexism — exploitation and profit — will be smashed.
Small But Strong
A multiracial crowd of over 400 gathered at the “Dream4Justice” march in Harlem on MLK Monday. Local black politicians like Jumaane Williams preached from the podium about upholding the traditions of peaceful protesting. These misleaders have nothing to offer us but rotten ideas like voting for our next capitalist dictator. The ruling class will only fund politicians, organizations, and ideas that will sustain capitalism.
Liberal imperialist George Soros, funder of movements like Occupy and the Color Revolutions worldwide, granted $33 million to organizations such as the Hands Up Coalition and other Black Lives Matter organizations. In the crowd, a small but strong group of PL’ers held a banner for communist revolution — the solution that needs millions of workers and youth, not politicians and grants. We attracted many who took up literature and followed our chants.
In particular, a group of high school students from the Bronx gathered around us. They loved the chant “Racist Cops You Can’t Hide — We Charge You with Genocide!” For many, it was their first time at a march or on a bullhorn; they were inspired by the young PL’ers who encouraged the students to chant. It is under communist leadership that we see the potential for our Black, Latin, and immigrant youth unfold.  
Ready for May Day!
This weekend also included initiating the May Day organizing committee. May Day is a celebration of the international working class, the day we look back on our year of organizing, and look forward to what more must be done. Come celebrate May Day, a communist holiday, with the international communist Progressive Labor Party on May 2!

BALTIMORE CITY, January 14  —  For the 76th time, ever since the brutal racist police murder of unarmed Black worker Tyrone West in July of 2013, a weekly West Wednesday rally was held today, demanding justice!  
Mr. West, aged 44, was beaten to death by 12 to 15 cops, after a traffic stop during which they dragged him by his dreads out of his car. The cops called Mr. West the “N” word several times, maced him, tasered him and beat him.
A witness said — after Mr. West tried to escape from the unbearable beating, and ran a short distance to a nearby alley — that officers caught up with him and started beating him again, this time with batons on his head and back. Another witness said he was at a relative’s house and had gone outside when he heard women screaming.
He “vividly remembers” one of the officers “cocking his arm all the way back, and laying a haymaker [a punch using a person’s full strength, intended as a knockout] on the man. At this point, he was already definitely down, and I didn’t see any movement.”
Racist News Station
Attacks Anti-racist
This week, the West family, along with the Baltimore Bloc organization and other activists, rallied outside FOX45-TV at night, in the bitter cold, but as always with bold and inspiring determination!  There has been a West Wednesday rally every week, regardless of rain, freezing temperatures, or snow!
We held this week’s rally at FOX45 because on December 21, the day immediately after the crazed shooting of two cops in New York City, FOX45 repeatedly aired a false and vicious accusation. Fox45 claimed that Mr. West’s sister, Ms. Tawanda Jones, along with others, had been chanting “We won’t stop! We can’t stop, so kill a cop!” at the large Justice for All protest in Washington DC one week earlier. In actuality, the chant was, “We can’t stop! We won’t stop, until killer cops are in cell blocks!”
The manipulated video seeming to show Ms. Jones saying “Kill a cop” was an attempt to discredit and weaken the massive, nationwide fight against police terror. In fact, that lie, first aired repeatedly by FOX45, was then aired nationally by many TV stations. In addition, the on-air distortion put a life-threatening target on the back of Ms. Jones, who is well-known to Baltimore police as a leader of the West Wednesday rallies and a strong participant in many additional actions opposing terror and murder by racist police. Those who killed Mr. West are still on the force. No charges have been pressed against them.
Just two weeks earlier, a couple of the cops who were involved in beating Tyrone West to death had also severely beaten another Black man, Mr. Abdul Salaam. However, if those two cops had quickly faced appropriate justice for the beating of Mr. Salaam, then Tyrone West might still be alive today!
Reacting quickly after the lies aired on FOX45, members of the West family and supporters repeatedly contacted the station, and strongly insisted the story be retracted. FOX45 nevertheless ran the lie yet again but, in the end, the station had no choice but to come clean (well, partly clean), because the original, unedited video clip, clearly showing the real chant — which demanded that killer cops be put in cell blocks — was available for everyone to see on the internet. Under pressure, FOX45 interviewed Ms. Jones, and did indeed show that interview on their station. They also apologized on air, but called the manipulated video a “mistake,” refusing to admit it was done on purpose.
In addition, FOX45 fired two people: the reporter, Melinda Roeder, and also the cameraperson, Greg McNair. However, those two seem to have been used as fall guys for higher-ups. As the Baltimore Sun newspaper reported, “Roeder said the idea for the story came from station management — it was not hers. FOX45 management has declined to discuss how the edit came to be.”
There’s an important lesson in all this. At first glance, it may seem that, yes, FOX is super-conservative, racist, and dishonest. No surprise.
TV, Radio, Movies All Part of the Bosses’ Propaganda Machine
It’s important, however, to dig deeper. As it turns out, FOX45 is owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, and their reach goes far beyond just FOX. In fact, Sinclair is one of the largest and most diversified television broadcasting companies in the U.S. today. They own and operate, do the programming, or provide sales services to 162 television stations in 79 markets. Sinclair’s television group reaches approximately 37.5 percent of all U.S. households, and includes FOX, ABC, MyTV, CW, CBS, NBC, Univision and Azteca affiliates.
In other words, the lie, about Ms. Tawanda Jones’ chanted wording, was not just a FOX lie. It was a lie by the whole spectrum of capitalist-owned media. When fired reporter Melinda Roeder let the cat out of the bag and — probably telling the truth in this instance — said the manipulated news coverage came from above, who knows from how high up the order the lie originated.
One thing for sure, the lie benefitted the entire capitalist class, which needs racism and police terror as part of its ruthless effort to keep the working class oppressed and under control. Maybe a brain-washed station manager, seeing life through the lens of sick capitalist culture, made the decision. Or maybe someone in the know, much higher in the media hierarchy, gave the order. Either way, it was not simply a conservative local FOX reporter, doing her own predictable distortions. It was the media, owned and controlled by the capitalist class, doing what their class needs.
On a personal level, as a result of the media’s cold-blooded decision to air a shameless lie about Ms. Tawanda Jones, they have put her in grave, ongoing danger. On a daily basis, Ms. Jones is receiving threats. Ever since the airing of the lie about her on nationwide TV on December 21, she has also been enduring nightmares, and is no longer able to sleep well.
Nevertheless, despite these personal difficulties created by the capitalist class, Ms. Jones together with similarly courageous family members remain steadfast in their commitment to the struggle. They are fighting to win justice for her brother, for all victims of police brutality, and for everyone else who may one day face that same fate.

Beyond the Sinclair Broadcast Group, it’s also important to recognize that the nationwide FOX network is not — as many people think — a fringe conservative voice, largely disconnected from the rest of capitalist media and business. The truth is that FOX News is owned by 21st Century Fox.
The number-two owner of 21st Century Fox — after Rupert Murdoch — is Prince Al-Waleed, the 16th-richest man in the world, and a nephew of the late king of Saudi Arabia, an important ally of powerful U.S. oil companies.
In addition to FOX, Al-Waleed has investments in Apple and Twitter. He also has big stakes in rival media giants Time Warner and Disney. Time Warner owns HBO, Cinemax, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, Warner Brothers and DC Comics. Disney owns Pixar, Lucasfilm, ABC, ESPN and Marvel. Even more significantly, Al-Waleed helped rescue the U.S. banking giant Citigroup twice, and he is one of its largest investors. The members of the Board of Directors of Citigroup, who hire and fire the CEO, and make policy for that powerful bank, also sit on — and interlock with — the Boards of Directors for many other major corporations including Target, Ford, Estée Lauder, Pepsi, Comcast, AT&T, Halliburton, Johnson & Johnson, and American Airlines.
Simply put, FOX and Baltimore’s dirty-dozen cops are not the only ones guilty of criminal behavior. It’s the whole capitalist class of super-rich business owners who don’t care whom they hurt in order to preserve their wealth and keep the working class in its place. They use racism to justify a third of their blood-soaked annual profits, derived from paying Black and Latin workers less than white workers. And they also use racism to divide, weaken and conquer the whole working class — of all skin colors — who suffer with low wages and meager benefits, whether working for the country’s largest private employer, Walmart, or working just about anywhere else.
In the struggle against racism and police brutality, we need to defeat the entire capitalist class, not just FOX. What’s needed, after revolution, is a new world in which racism can finally be defeated, a world of sisterhood and brotherhood where we share the benefits of our hard work for the good of all, without rich and without poor.
Progressive Labor Party calls that way of life communism, and — let’s be clear — if we want to end police brutality, we need to dedicate our lives to the struggle for that new world, run by and for the working class. Dare to struggle!  Dare to win!