For the working class of West Africa, Ebola is a crisis. But for U.S. imperialists, the viral outbreak is an opportunity — to extend their military influence, expand their domestic war powers, and fuel the racism that exploits and divides workers throughout the world. U.S. rulers are using Ebola to accelerate their move to fascism, the stage of capitalism where the veneer of social democracy gives way to the naked reality of the bosses’ dictatorship. Only by imposing fascism on the working class can the rulers militarize the U.S. and prepare for the global war to come. Only through fascism can they hope to stave off the challenge of imperialist rivals like China and Russia.       
From cholera in Haiti to hurricanes in New Orleans or New Jersey, “natural” disasters are in fact caused by capitalism. The bosses’ drive for profits — the essence of the capitalist system — leads them to neglect infrastructure: roads, bridges, sea walls. When medical breakthroughs fail to promise a high return on investment, they get ignored. On October 23, the New York Times reported that scientists in the U.S. and Canada had discovered a vaccine that was “100 percent effective in protecting monkeys against the Ebola virus” — nearly a decade ago. With adequate funding, the life-saving product might have been licensed and in use by 2010. Instead, it sat on the shelf.
As Adrian Hill, co-director of Oxford University’s vaccine program, told the Independent (9/7/14):
Well, who makes vaccines? Today, commercial vaccine supply is monopolised by four or five mega-companies — GSK, Sanofi, Merck, Pfizer — some of the biggest companies in the world.
“The problem with that is, even if you’ve got a way of making a vaccine, unless there’s a big market, it’s not worth the while of a mega-company …. There was no business case to make an Ebola vaccine for the people who needed it most …. It’s a market failure.
Even now, as overblown panic in developed countries has triggered a push for a vaccine, U.S. bosses have no incentive or plan to relieve workers from the miseries of capitalism. To date, Ebola has afflicted about 10,000 people in West Africa. Hundreds of thousands more are fleeing the outbreak and its economic dislocation. But despite the scale of this suffering, it pales next to the malnutrition that is “directly or indirectly responsible for 3.5 million child deaths every year, in sub-Saharan Africa,” according to the United Nations. From 1992 to 2012, the World Hunger Education Service noted, “the number of hungry grew in Africa … from 175 million to 239 million.”
Africa’s deadliest scourge is starvation, essentially death by poverty and the profit system.  
Oil and M-16s
U.S. bosses and their puppet, President Barack Obama, are using Ebola to get the jump on China and Russia in exploiting oil and gas reserves in the affected region. ExxonMobil, Chevron and Anadarko Petroleum all have offshore operations in Sierra Leone and Liberia, where reserves have been estimated in excess of one billion barrels (Reuters Africa, 11/03/09). It’s likely no coincidence that Obama is sending in thousands of troops: “The U.S. military presence in West Africa [now 900] is expected … to climb to 3,900 in coming weeks” (Washington Post, 10/26/14). Meanwhile, a public relations competition is in full swing. As the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), U.S. imperialism’s top think tank, pointed out:
The United States pledged $350 million [to a UN Ebola aid fund]; the UK has committed $200 million.... Chinese and Russian donations have been notably low: China has pledged around $50 million and Russia has contributed $1 million (CFR website, 10/24/14).
Foreign aid is a basic tool of imperialism. France is contributing $88 million to the Ebola cause to re-colonize Guinea, a former possession. Britain is focused on its former colony, Sierra Leone. Liberia — founded by ex-slaves deported by U.S. racists and home to a vast Firestone rubber plantation — occupies Washington’s attention.
How the Bosses Use Ebola
Domestically, Ebola helps U.S. imperialists planning for a potential World War III by furnishing grounds for tighter, more militarized government control, especially of people’s movements. Several states have enforced quarantines of healthy medical workers returning from West Africa. In addition, Obama “has ordered the Department of Defense to form a 30-member military medical quick strike team that can deploy quickly — within 72 hours — to any new outbreaks of Ebola in the U.S.” (Global Research, 10/23/14).
By contrast, the capitalist health system has virtually no plan in place to treat Ebola in U.S. hospitals, leaving nurses and other healthcare workers either unprepared or scared away by the bosses’ media hysteria. Even so, some workers are fighting back. A protest in Dallas, in front of the hospital where a worker from Liberia died, called for justice for this victim of capitalist neglect.
Politicians from both parties have proposed a travel ban from West Africa, a move that would only discourage healthcare workers from going to treat patients there. The rulers are also stoking racist fear of African immigrant workers, who live in fear of being quarantined or deported (see page 4). Their children are bullied in school; their neighborhoods are terrorized. U.S. imperialists know Ebola is not the apocalypse. They are using the disease to gauge the limits of their ability to extend fascism.
U.S. rulers would love nothing more than a true pandemic to blame on a foreign enemy and galvanize U.S. workers toward war. The bosses had hoped to use 9/11 to that end but fell short, in part because a one-time attack failed to force workers to fall back on the state for their protection. An acute, long-term health threat could be more effective in this respect. It’s worth noting that before 9/11, U.S. ruling-class planners were preparing mainly for bioterrorism and their own fascist counter-moves (see box).
Communism: The Best Medicine
Under capitalism, the working class cannot escape the lethal deficiencies of a profit-driven health system. Communism — a system run by and for workers, without profits or bosses — would prevent many diseases by eradicating their underlying causes. It would cope with unforeseen outbreaks by using science in the service of the masses. The Chinese Revolution eliminated parasitic afflictions like schistosomiasis. It organized masses of “barefoot doctors” who, with proper training, were sent to the countryside to treat and contain curable illnesses. By organizing the masses, China ended the destructive flooding of rivers. Famine and malnutrition, facts of life for workers and peasants for centuries, became things of the past. Unfortunately, the abandonment of communist goals and the pursuit of capitalist profit in China have eroded those landmark advances.
Stamp Out the Disease of Capitalism!
Progressive Labor Party is fighting for a society run by the working class, one that will eliminate profit for all time. The reversals of the Soviet and Chinese revolutions have taught us the dangers of vestiges of capitalism, like the wage system and privileged elites. Freed from profits or bosses, a communist society will put the working class first. Food and water will be shared. And racism—a source of most of today’s threats to workers’ health—will be outlawed.
In short, communism will eliminate the most dangerous disease of all — capitalism. So join the fight to destroy the profit system and build the Progressive Labor Party!

Brooklyn, NY, October 10 — Over 200 high school students, parents, teachers and community members filled the cafeteria at John Jay Campus in Park Slope tonight for a town hall against racism.  Student after student spoke of the daily attacks they faced, mainly from the New York Police Department and school safety officers.  The event was sparked by the latest “crime” of Hanging-Out-While-Black-or-Latin on a street corner in this gentrified, mostly white neighborhood.
Several weeks ago, a neighborhood resident witnessed the kkkops following and eventually driving out a group of black and Latin students who were socializing on a public sidewalk. She went to a community board meeting and blasted the cops’ commander. The officer responded that the teenagers shouldn’t be there if they weren’t playing basketball or soccer or “doing something productive in the neighborhood.”
Apartheid in Brooklyn
This blatant support of apartheid policies angered John Jay students, parents and teachers, who had recently rallied against the racist murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. They are building a movement against racism in Park Slope and in and around John Jay, and were ready to respond to this latest attack.  The student government and PTA at one of the four schools on the campus immediately took action by organizing the town hall.
Students spoke of their daily run-ins with cops and local businesspeople, who make it clear that the teenagers aren’t wanted in the neighborhood. When John Jay students go to neighborhood parks, cops park nearby to watch their every move. Under orders from the NYPD, school safety agents follow suit, yelling and shoving the kids to leave the neighborhood and go home immediately after school.
At the town hall meeting, as a man in charge of John Jay’s school safety agents approached the mic, the kids started to jeer and boo. He tried to get support by saying that his staff of safety agents was mainly black and Latin, but this appeal to nationalism didn’t work. The students shouted, “So what? They still harass us!”
This bosses’ lackey claimed he had no idea what was happening at John Jay and that our campus might need new agents. He was booed again, because
several students from other New York public schools came with the same complaints about the NYPD and school safety. The town hall made one thing clear: While black and Latin students in New York face the brunt of attacks by the NYPD, school safety agents and the city’s Department of Education, all youth are being attacked across the city. We are all hurt by racism.
How to Smash Racism
The town hall raised big questions. Why are black and Latin youth targeted for this abuse? What can we do to end racism for good? Members of Progressive Labor Party struggled for those involved to understand that racism is inherent to capitalism, and therefore can only be destroyed through communist revolution. We have a long way to go in winning that big struggle. But the small class struggle we are waging brings us one step closer each day.
Several family members of people murdered by the NYPD attended the town hall, and one of them spoke about the oppressive role of police in this society, and how students’ and workers’ rights are non-existent in the current period of war and fascism. A call was made to follow up the meeting with a march to the local police precinct.  Most who attended left with a copy of CHALLENGE.  
The ruling-class need for racism will continue to provide opportunities to unite workers in sharp struggles around these issues. The growing network of families and friends of victims of police murders, combined with the leadership shown by young black and Latin students at this event, is a force to be reckoned with. The fight for a world without racism will advance by building PLP and the fight for a communist world.

NEW YORK CITY, October 16  — Fighting back against the fascist jailing of 39 young people arrested in a violent police raid on the Grant and Manhattanville public housing projects last June, over a 100 protesters, including 60 Columbia students and about 40 others, showed up at the court hearing today. There were so many, the hearing was shifted to a smaller courtroom at the last minute, just to keep them out!
The arrested youths haven’t been charged with actual crimes, only with conspiracy. Their arrests were a full-scale racist assault, as the cops swarmed the projects on 125th St, complete with helicopters, bashing down doors, trashing apartments, intimidating grandmothers and toddlers, seeking to arrest 103 indicted young people. Bail was set so high that no one was able to post it, which has meant four months in jail with no trial.
These projects house poor, black residents and provide shoddy services and almost no recreational facilities. Young people go to failing schools without after-school programs and have few job opportunities or organized activities.
Rather than providing any kind of services, or even repairing and maintaining apartments, the rulers and their NYPD spent three years planning this raid, searching cell phone data and social media to find connections between kids to present as evidence of conspiracies! At the hearing for the first 37, all were sent back to jail for another two months—and the prosecution is offering them “deals” involving twelve to fourteen year prison sentences.
A positive development is the growing unity among parents in the projects, a local church and students at nearby Columbia University. The students joined community and church members in a demonstration and press conference outside the courthouse and and inside as well. With not even enough room for all the families to sit, the students took up a vigil in the hall outside the courtroom for three hours. Both lawyers and parents came out to say thanks — the support is very important.  Hearings for another group of arrestees is next week, and we will return to support them too.
Parents and some students will also continue to gather in the local church in which we have been active for many years to build this struggle and to demand that Columbia University live up to its promise to donate $17 million for projects the community wants, in compensation for Columbia’s massive expansion into Harlem.
As we have seen in Ferguson and on Staten Island, the ruling class and their police servants are out for blood, and the degree of force and intimidation is escalating rapidly. As conditions for workers worsen and wars increase, rebellion that unifies workers, the unemployed and students is needed — and it’s beginning to grow. With communist leadership, that rebellion will lead to revolution, and to a future where the working class rules on its own behalf.

STATEN ISLAND, NY, October 17 — “You haven’t answered any of my questions!” an angry nurse shouted at Mary Bassett, the New York City’s health commissioner. The subject was Ebola — and the surge of racism that is scapegoating immigrants for the failures of capitalism in containing this disease.
At an overflow town hall meeting in “Little Liberia,” home to thousands of residents from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, many spoke of how teachers were sending their children home merely for being West African, or refusing to ride in the same elevator. Some local healthcare professionals have called for an indefinite ban on flights from the three affected countries, or a quarantine of the entire neighborhood!
The first question to Bassett, an appointee of liberal Mayor Bill DeBlasio, came from a nurse born and raised in Sierra Leone: Why had the city failed to follow Center for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines to protect those assigned to treat Ebola patients with proper gear? When the commissioner hedged on her answer, and the nurse kept pressing her, security tried to take the microphone away.
The event was packed with television cameras, reporters and police. It started late, with city, state, and federal politicians wasting the first hour by repeating that New York is a city of immigrants, and that immigrants have nothing to fear. The commissioner had nothing useful to say beyond stating that anyone with “Ebola-like symptoms” should somehow get to the designated “Ebola Center” at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan.
The hundreds of West African immigrants loudly asked why a center wasn’t on Staten Island. As a matter of fact, why haven’t Ebola Centers been created in every borough to care for residents who may be exposed? One man received thunderous applause when he asked why the government couldn’t send vans or buses to reach residents who may be too afraid to step foot outside their homes, especially those with documentation issues who do not trust the government. The city representatives’ only response was to tell people to keep checking the CDC’s website for updates.
New York is about as prepared for Ebola as it was for Hurricane Sandy, another “natural” event turned into a disaster by capitalism. To the bosses, working-class lives are worth little, whether we are threatened by imperialist war, racist police terror or a viral epidemic.
Profits Over Cures
The Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), also known as Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever (EHF), is an infectious, aggressive virus with a high mortality rate. It was first identified in 1976, and experts remain unclear on its origins. Until this year, Ebola vaccine development was considered a high-cost, low-profit investment.
Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, explains that even small, poorly funded labs have made tremendous progress in developing Ebola antibody therapies, including five candidate vaccines that successfully protected non-human primates from Ebola. But the large pharmaceutical companies, Fauci noted, showed no interest: “To develop a vaccine that treats little outbreaks every thirty or forty years — well, that’s not much incentive” (Scientific American, 7/30/14).
Contrast this murderous indifference of capitalist medicine to the communist society envisioned by Progressive Labor Party, where money will be abolished and scientists will work to save all workers’ lives.
Imperialism Bred Ebola Crisis
The Ebola outbreak is in a region where the capitalist health infrastructure has been decimated, partly due to two civil wars in Liberia. These conflicts were the product of U.S. imperialism, which divided the majority indigenous Krahn people and the descendants of 19th-century U.S. slaves. With the backing of U.S. President James Monroe, the newcomers colonized Monrovia and helped secure business relations with the U.S. ruling class. More recently, dogfighting capitalist factions have used child soldiers to help them murder hundreds of thousands of workers. Millions more were displaced into refugee camps, perfect breeding grounds for Ebola. As for the long-term impact, the capitalist mouthpiece Financial Times suggested that the economic impact could ultimately kill more than the virus itelf, as workers flee farmlands and mining, timber and rubber companies suspend operations (FT, 10/09/14).
None of this history was lost on the audience packing the hall in Staten Island. The event got even hotter when a paramedic denounced the rise in racism against people from West Africa and the row of complicit politicians seated in the front row. He exposed the myth that the city is “one happy family” by pointing out that the last ten years have seen twelve city hospitals serving black and Latin workers shut down.
He also said, “We’re standing two miles from where Eric Garner was strangled to death by racist killer cops. That’s the city we live in, and we as working people need to unite!” The audience cheered and responded, “That’s right!” Some rose to their feet.
After volunteering to help spread public awareness about Ebola, the paramedic finished by saying, “As members of the international working class, whether you’re from Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, or Staten Island, we need an international, multiracial, anti-racist movement to fight back like Ferguson did against racism and Ebola!”
The audience cheered, the politicians were furious, and the cops looked uncomfortable and angry. Outside, after the meeting, a lively discussion connected the Ebola outbreak to the imperialist-backed civil wars that have shattered Liberia and Sierra Leone. More than a dozen men and women from the neighborhood shared their experiences, from their lives in their home countries to the racism they’ve experienced in New York. When someone mentioned the need to build a movement to fight back, one woman said, “Now we’re talking about revolution!”