Port-au-Prince, August 17 — A speech by Haitian Pres. Martelly in a recent “home government” meeting in Miami with members of his cabinet and the Haitian-American business community, appealed to his base to reject the candidacy of Moïse Jean-Charles, a fake leftist, for Haitian Senate. “I don’t want anyone to vote for a communist,” ranted Martelly.  
This anti-communist braying reminds one of the old practices of  his political mentor, the murderous dictator François Duvalier. Duvalier eliminated those communists, and the merely progressives, the so-called “kamoken” (“bitter pills”) who were critical of his fascist state. In fact, Duvalier won the support of the U.S. bosses and their minions in the Kennedy Administration by declaring himself the “world’s foremost anti-communist.” Martelly is following suit, declaring himself an enemy of communism to please his bosses in the U.S. Embassy. Don’t let us forget, the sons of the tiger Duvalier still are tigers. While Jean-Charles is only a minor thorn in Martelly’s foot, we know from experience that the misery created by the capitalist system cannot be reformed, either by the ballot box or by any other means.
We have to take this speech seriously, because the old practice of eliminating communists can resurface as Martelly, the Haitian ruling class, and their U.S. bosses feel their system threatened — not by Jean-Charles and the coming elections, but more importantly by the anger of the working class and the advanced ideas of their growing communist leadership. Workers increasingly cannot live under the capitalist system.
Martelly and his masters are far from stifling the reality of daily life that confronts the workers and students of Haiti. That reality always removes the veils that try to hide the misery and capitalist exploitation in Haiti. The PLP has no choice but to grow and increase the militancy of our struggle and resistance against capitalism and imperialism. In fact, the entire international working class must fight and declare war on the exploiters, no matter where they are. Because, to quote Karl Marx, “the interests of the proletariat is that of humanity. “
Don’t Vote — Revolt!
In the capitalist world today, communism is illegal, it is a crime. Because the system is in danger and communism is the only solution for all, Martelly and Co. attack communism. These words are at the same time a sign of weakness, but also a call for repression against communists wherever the revolutionary movement is growing. You can even see it when the politicians speak about elections; they are worried about the reaction of the masses. Because these elections — the attempt to pull the wool over workers’ eyes — are possible only if the working class accepts them and participates.
That’s why we have to continue to chant, “Revolt, Don’t Vote!” Communists haven’t yet won the confidence of the masses. However, the actions that communists undertake now make the bosses and their politicians tremble. That’s why they have declared war. Well, it goes both ways! The PLP and the working class also declare war on the bosses and their rotten, racist, warmongering system. “Fight for communism, power to the workers!”

PARIS, September 13 — The Socialist government running France for the bosses since May 2012, is wobblier than ever. The bosses’ other governing party, the right-wing UMP, has been discredited by the 2007-2012 Sarkozy regime’s policies and by current scandals. The National Front fascists are eager to grab power. That’s France today: social fascists versus open fascists. The elections are a mechanism by which French banks and businesses (finance capital) maintain state power. Whether it’s the liberal fascists or the outright fascists, both sides spell disaster for workers.
The Sarkozy gang upped the retirement age and lowered retirement pensions, broke the historic strike of undocumented immigrants by promising them papers (which most strikers never received) and pushed racism. In a 2007 speech, Sarkozy adopted the racist stereotype that black people are child-like, saying, “The African man has not entered history sufficiently.…Africa’s problem is that it lives too much in the present.”
Disgusted, many voters believed François Hollande’s election campaign speech: “My true opponent….will never be elected, and yet he governs. That opponent is the world of finance.”
But since they took power, the Socialists have pursued the same fascist pro-boss austerity policies as Sarkozy. In January, then-Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault announced, “I am a social-democrat [a right-wing Socialist] and so is the president,” while defending a 10-billion-euros giveaway, supposedly to enable French bosses to compete better with other imperialists.
After the social fascists lost control of 155 cities in the nation-wide municipal elections, president Hollande named a new Prime Minister, Manuel Valls. More window-dressing — Valls pursued the same pro-boss policies as Ayrault.
Meanwhile, unemployment continues to explode — 20.3 percent in July. Deportations of undocumented workers continue — 27,000 in 2013 — which is not surprising, as Valls infamously complained in June, 2009 when he was mayor of Evry, about seeing “too many non-white faces” at the city flea market. By August, Hollande’s approval rating had fallen to 17 percent.
More and more Socialist deputies and ministers became dissidents, fearful that in the 2017 elections, the government’s disastrous policies would deprive them of their comfortable positions. Hollande and Valls responded on August 25 by ousting the dissidents.
Now, the Socialists’ governing majority in the National Assembly is a bare 50.2 percent and is expected to lose control of the Senate in this fall’s elections.
The UMP is broke due largely to shady financial deals during Sarkozy’s 2012 election campaign. Sarkozy himself is under investigation for various crimes. The party is divided into warring factions, with two others, François Fillon and Alain Juppé, vying with Sarkozy for the party’s 2017 presidential nomination.
Anti-Arab Racism Hurts All Workers
But the bosses have a third option: the openly fascist National Front (FN). In August, FN leader Marine Le Pen proclaimed her readiness to govern France. And the fascists are indeed getting ready.
This intensified anti-Arab and immigrant racism will  continue to drive down wages and benefits for all workers. It will be useful should French troops be needed as cannon fodder in Obama’s coalition in the fight for oil profits in the Middle East.
In September at the FN’s summer conference hall, a sign said, “The DPS [its storm trooper organization] is recruiting…everywhere in France.”
A hot theme at that conference was the racist, paranoid belief in the supposed replacement of French people by Arabs. Le Pen’s foreign policy councilor, Aymeric Chauprade, said: “You see it every day, this change in the population…the big replacement is obvious.” The head of the FN youth organization repeated the theme: “If we don’t do anything, our people will be replaced.”
The overt fascists have also circulated a fake ministerial letter on the social networks. It “earnestly advises” city governments to sponsor “a weekly beginner’s course in Arabic” as an extra-curricular activity in primary schools, and is supposedly signed by the Education Minister. This fabrication follows that the Eiffel Tower will become a mosque, that French schools will forbid the “plus” sign because it resembles a Christian cross, that school canteens will stop serving pork, and similar anti-Arab lies.
Large numbers here are apparently swayed by this racist garbage. According to a September 4 opinion poll, if presidential elections were held today, the FN would win up to 32 percent of the vote; UMP between 17 and 25 percent; and the Socialists 17 percent percent in the elections’ first round. In the second round, the FN would win a run-off against the Socialists but would lose in one against the UMP. In all cases, the bosses would win.
All three parties — from social fascists to open fascists — are financed and run by the bosses. For workers, the only solution to racism, fascism, mass unemployment and government austerity is communist revolution, to establish a society run by and for workers. Arab, African, French workers of the world unite!

Comrade Val Woodward, a staunch antiracist and champion of the working class, died on June 6 at age 87. Starting in the early 1970s, Val and his wife Clare organized the International Committee Against Racism (InCAR) in Minneapolis-St. Paul. InCAR was founded nationally by the Progressive Labor Party to combat racism on the job, in education and in academic publications.
Val’s antiracist and pro-working-class teaching and actions permeated his life. When serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II, Val ended up in the brig after pummeling a fellow sailor who was spouting racist epithets, stopping him in his tracks.
Val applied his knowledge and education in the field of genetics to serve the cause of fighting racism. He was a professor of genetics at Kansas State, Wichita State, and Rice University. He then taught for 33 years at the University of Minnesota, where his course on Heredity and Human Society became one of the school’s most popular. He won virtually every teaching and human rights award at the school.
But Val’s outstanding contribution was in leading the fight against academic racism wherever it reared its ugly head, under the principle that racism hurts all sections of the working class. This was especially true in his exposure of the academic racists who stoked white supremacy in the 1970s on campuses across the U.S. — the Schockleys, Jensens, and Herrnsteins. The national media disseminated their unfounded claims about unemployment being caused by genes and not by capitalist inequity, and about “inferior” intelligence being inherited by black, Latin and Native American workers.
Val was among the leaders in unmasking flawed data on “IQ genetics” and participating in campus demonstrations against college-sponsored talks that presented racist conclusions as scientific fact. Helped by Val’s leadership, hundreds joined InCAR to demonstrate at the U. of M., exposing academic racism and opposing the sponsorship of neo-Nazis and KKK’ers. Val taught the history of academic racism in the classroom and in churches, training hundreds and leading them in scores of antiracist protests.
During the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s, Val was often invited to speak at churches, clubs, sororities, fraternities and commencement ceremonies. He would explain how the atrocities of slavery and racism were based on scientific-sounding claims in deeply flawed publications. The realization of InCAR’s core principle — that racism most hurts black, Latin and Native American workers, but also hurts white workers — led to the growth of PLP during this period.
As a widely respected geneticist, Val was invited to join a delegation to North Vietnam toward the end of the Vietnam War. He participated in an international conference exposing the horrors and genetic damage of Agent Orange, the defoliant produced by Dow Chemical and dropped by U.S. bombers on civilian populations. Val was among those who brought this evidence back to the U.S., leading to scores of demonstrations challenging Dow recruiters on campuses.
Val taught students from around the world, introducing them to the Marxist analysis that racism and racist injustice are deeply embedded in the fundamental economic inequality of capitalist society. He was also an excellent athlete well into his 70s. For decades he effectively infused his antiracist outlook into the playing fields and courts where he and numerous students met to enjoy a game.
A true internationalist, Val maintained relations with many international students throughout his life, as they continued to visit him at the U. of M. and after his retirement in 2000. He authored scientific books and papers explaining the sources of racism, including Human Heredity and Society and Biology As A Social Weapon. Val passed on his antiracism to his three children, eight grandchildren and their offspring.
All who knew Val were impressed by his warmth and humor, which never failed to draw you to him as a friend. He is remembered both as a teacher and an active fighter for a world free of racism, a future that is closer because of Val’s lifetime of struggle.

Thousands are gathering in New York and other cities around the world for the September 21 People’s Climate March to attack capitalist complicity in global warming.  Two days later, government leaders will meet yet again at the United Nations in another doomed and hypocritical show of concern over climate change. Meanwhile, Barack Obama has sanctioned a huge expansion of fracking for natural gas. Fracking leaks methane, a greenhouse gas that traps 25 times more heat than carbon dioxide.
Capitalism cannot possibly solve the same climate problem it has caused. It is first and foremost a system of competition driven by profit, while the needs of the world’s workers are ignored.  Indeed, virtually all the problems of the international working class are caused by vicious capitalist exploitation and imperialism, the global rivalry that has led to more than a century of massive world wars and smaller proxy wars.
The Progressive Labor Party stands for communist-led revolution by hundreds of millions of armed and determined workers around the world. Only by eliminating capitalism and organizing a world of cooperation and equality can we meet the needs of all humanity. Only by smashing the capitalist bosses can we hope to stop and reverse the harmful effects of global warming.
The impacts of global warming include the following:

• melting glaciers and rising sea levels that will eventually force 10 percent of the world’s population to abandon coastal cities;
• ever-increasing floods and droughts, as rain and snow shift from one region to another;
• more frequent and violent hurricanes and tornadoes;
• more pest-caused diseases, increasingly without effective treatments;
• destruction of more and more agricultural areas;  
• killer heat waves and home-engulfing wildfires, among other catastrophic effects.  

While workers all over will suffer from these effects, those who will suffer the earliest and the most are the hundreds of millions of workers in Bangladesh, India, the Philippines, and Nigeria, who stand to face more frequent life-threatening conditions  (http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/sep/27/climate-change-poor-countries-ipcc).
Global warming is the inevitable effect of decades of expanded burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas.  Greenhouse gases trap heat and warm the oceans and atmosphere, while the mining, drilling, and sale of fossil fuels produce the biggest profits of all. Capitalists, who are driven to maximize profits, will never leave trillions of dollars in the ground.  Nor will they abandon their investment of trillions more in fossil-fuel infrastructures, including millions of oil-burning vehicles, refineries, pipelines, tankers, and power plants. The U.S. military is the single largest consumer of oil on the planet, using over 100 millions barrels of oil per year on ships, vehicles, planes, and ground operations.
Imperialist Rivalry Leads to Endless War
Every capitalist military on the planet consumes oil and control over oil is vital for imperialist rivals to control each other’s ambitions. The rivalry between the U.S., European Union, Russia, China, India, and other rising imperialist nations to control oil and gas (as well as minerals, land, and other resources) will lead to endless war. Millions of civilians are massacred by these national juggernauts in their competition for resources, underpaid labor, and export markets.
We can march by the billions and still never produce any change in this rivalry until we rid ourselves of capitalism, a system that feeds on genocidal wars, racism, sexist oppression, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, sickness and early death.  This means seizing power from the capitalist class, which steals the value of our labor and funnels these profits to fund their wars for supremacy and control.
Cooperation between imperialist rivals is impossible. We are shouting in the dark unless we organize a worldwide communist movement to seize their power through revolution. The September 21 march can help build such a movement, but letting the politicians send us home with more empty promises will only delay the day we can stop the burning of fossil fuels. And further delay means greater and greater difficulty in reversing the accelerating effects of greenhouse gases.  
Only Communism Can Stop Global Warming
The means to end the use of fossil fuels and stop global warming with clean, sustainable energy: wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal already exists. The only thing that stands in the way of achieving non-polluting sustainability is capitalism. For the foreseeable future, the capitalists’ greatest profits will continue to reside in fossil fuels. It is the competitive profit system that continues to kill us and to render the planet more and more unlivable.
The revolutionary elimination of capitalism by a movement of hundreds of millions of workers, led by PLP, is our goal.  Join us in ending this death-dealing and planet-destroying system of capitalism and imperialism, and in building a system run by and for the world’s working class — communism.