Staten Island, NY July 19 — Youth, workers and residents here have been gathering for vigils, rallies and demonstrations to express their outrage over the July 24 racist killing of a 43-year-old black worker, Eric Garner.
Known as a “gentle giant,” Eric’s nickname was Nice. If you needed something and didn’t have the money, he would help you. Eric sold single cigarettes to try to get by, but wasn’t selling them at the time of his murder. After trying to break up a fight between two other people, he was choked to death by one cop as several others held him down. Unfortunately for the working class, this is not unusual. Unfortunately for the cops, there was indisputable evidence of this particular brutal attack. The soundtrack of Eric Garner saying, “I can’t breathe” over and over can be heard on a video from the scene, recorded by an antiracist young man. The next day, a second video documented the failure of the cops or EMTs to try to help the victim for nearly seven minutes after he stopped responding.
Even so, the prosecutors, the press and the politicians are still talking about “investigating,” but in essence are in cahoots to terrorize mainly black working-class men.
Broken Capitalism
Targeting minor crimes and violations is the policy of liberal New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. His reappointed police commissioner, Bill Bratton, first established a “broken windows” enforcement policy in New York in the 1990s, based on the racist theories of social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. This policy has led to record numbers of arrests in New York despite a plummeting crime rate. In reality, it is designed to break down poor and working-class people, especially black and Latin workers. The murder of Eric Garner was no accident. He was trying to fight back against police harassment; he had told lawyers at Legal Aid that he wanted to take his cases to trial.
Ramarley Graham, Kimani Gray, Shantel Davis, Kyam Livingston — all slaughtered by the cops in the past few years in New York. The local bosses “investigate,” but there can be no justice for these families under capitalism. In these committees against police murders, PLP is struggling around this point. Many protesters were also receptive to CHALLENGE and our communist leaflet about the killing of Eric Garner.
The murder spree by the racist criminal injustice system has occurred amid a growing attack on the entire working class. Real unemployment in the U.S. has been growing every year, and is even more brutal in poor neighborhoods. Wages have fallen for over 40 years. Falling wages and unemployment spur these racist killings. The capitalist ruling class needs to intimidate workers into not fighting back, and uses racism to try to divide us. The real broken window is capitalism.
Cops’ Crime Spree on Staten Island
While talking to people at the memorial site where Eric was killed, we heard two other stories of people severely beaten by cops in Staten Island in the last month. According to the New York Daily News, “seven of the city’s top 10 most-sued officers — and 14 of the city’s top 50 most-sued officers — are assigned to a Staten Island narcotics unit working in the territory of the 120th Precinct….The unit has racked up a staggering amount of lawsuits despite being the smallest narcotics bureau in the city.”
Eric Garner’s murder was shocking but not surprising. What else can we expect from a racist criminal injustice system in a notoriously racist preserve like Staten Island? Even electing liberal politicians won’t buffer us from racist murder; elections are a passive dead end. At the same time, the capitalist class is preparing for bigger wars. To fund them, they must steal even more profits by cutting wages, jobs and benefits to workers.
Under capitalism, workers produce all of society’s wealth but are ultimately expendable. The only justice for the working class will come with a communist revolution to smash capitalism once and for all.
Brooklyn, NY, July 21 — Outside Brooklyn Criminal Courts Building at 120 Schermerhorn Street, a mother still grieving for her daughter after a year, faced off against three court cops who told her she had to move her car away from the front of the courthouse.
“No parking,” one of them said. He wore three stripes. The mother’s voice, breaking but angry, said, “You killed my daughter in this building. Why aren’t you examining that and not me parking my car?” Her car had a large banner of Kyam Livingston’s photo surrounded by the dates of her birth and death. “Go inside and send out the captain. I’ll talk to him,” the mother said. The officers retreated.
No captain came out while a picket line was gathering. A few reporters from television news and newspapers showed up. No captain appeared. The chants started, “We want Justice for Kyam Livingston, Killed in a Brooklyn Cell!” The picket line grew larger as more people turned up from work. The chanting got louder and stronger. And then speeches began on a loudspeaker explaining that a racist system that can kill a black woman simply by refusing to get her medical care when she was clearly in distress for seven hours does not deserve to exist. The sounds of the picket line echoed down the street.
One-Year Memorial
This demonstration was larger and angrier than usual. Kyam’s mother had brought large photos of her daughter which some of the demonstrators carried. She also handed each demonstrator a red rose to carry in memory of her daughter. Small electric candles were given to everyone to turn on in unison. Balloons were released into the gathering dark and people watched them float higher and higher. For many it was a memorable moment. One woman struggled to maintain her erect posture as she walked on the picket line. There were the young, the old, black, white, Latin, men and women united in grief and anger.
The court police almost disappeared at the militancy of the demonstration. When the struggle against the cops for allowing Kyam to die first began one year ago, the officials would not release to the family the surveillance tapes of the cell or the names of the officers involved. The struggle has forced them to reveal the names and the videos, proving what they knew to be true all along. They now want those responsible to be brought to justice for racist murder.
To ensure that the officials don’t doubt that we will be back, every speaker said this is a continuing and growing struggle. The family is also demanding changes in the way those facing incarceration are handled. The committee wants to clean up the racist culture of indifference towards those waiting to be charged at Brooklyn Central Bookings and clean up the filth people have to endure while they are waiting. Anti-racist struggles like this are important for the survival of the working class in this racist, violent, and greedy system. PLP is fighting to end the system where racism rules the day and the bosses use their cops, courts, and prisons to threaten and divide workers.
The Progressive Labor Party knows that it’s necessary to end capitalism to destroy racism and all of the filth this system produces. This is the beginning of another year of attempting to build the Party as the agency of change. Dare to struggle, dare to win. Join us.
“I personally don’t think that race was a factor in the incident involved in this tragic death” (AM News) said NYC police commissioner Bill Bratton, referring to the murder of Eric Garner, a black father and grandfather.
Racism is so intricately woven within the fabric of capitalism that the untrained eye could easily overlook its repeating patterns as merely loose stitches within the system or within flawed individuals.
The murder of Eric Garner, like the attacks on thousands of working-class black and Latin workers and youth in the U.S., is in fact racist, not only because cop Daniel Pantaleo was white (Shantel Davis’s murderer was a black cop); it is racist because police are trained to target poor working-class neighborhoods, where the population is predominately black and Latin.
The ruling class uses violence to maintain control over the working class and to intimidate impoverished workers to accept their conditions. They use the police force to carry this out. Black cop, white cop all the same — racist terror is the name of the game.
Bill Bratton, whose policing philosophy isn’t much different from that of former commissioner Ray Kelly, has escalated the possibility of these racist attacks. His “broken windows” policy — which claims that punishing small infractions, such as vandalism, or jumping a subway turnstile — will deter more serious crimes is ineffectual and only creates a longer thread of injustice in these low-income areas. The fact that Bratton promises to “correct” the police department’s damaged relationship with these communities, while applying the “broken windows” theory, is a blatant contradiction.
Many people in our class believed that when Mayor DeBlasio was elected, he would work to put an end to police brutality because of his stance against stop-and-frisk. However, when DeBlasio selected Bratton, who is well-known for his racist policies, it showed that this mayor, like all the others, serves the interests of the ruling class: to keep the working class divided in order to maintain power. Systemic racism will continue as long as capitalism exists.
Racism means we’ve got to FIGHT BACK! Police murder means we’ve got to FIGHT BACK! Allegedly, Eric Garner sold cigarettes that were not being taxed. Somebody was losing their profits and in the rulers’ minds that was reason enough for Garner to lose his life. Profits over people: that’s capitalism.
To see the videos and hear this man repeatedly crying out, “I can’t breathe!” to no avail, showed the callousness of the police. The same lack of compassion was shown to Kyam Livingston who called out in pain for seven hours only to die because of the lack of medical attention. And again, a few days after the murder of Eric Garner, a young man was choked and punched by a cop at a subway in Harlem as he was trying to take him into custody.
Capitalism means we’ve got to FIGHT BACK!
A Comrade
WARSAW, July 23 — Meet Marek. He’s in his late 50s and has been driving a 40-ton semi-trailer truck between Eastern and Western Europe for the past 35 years.
For decades, the two-lane R2 was the only road between Warsaw and the German border. Today, Marek drives the 454-kilometer (280-mile), four-lane divided superhighway, the A2.
“Before 2004 [when Poland joined the European Union (EU)], my work was simpler and better,” says Marek. “I also earned more. Today, there isn’t any border any longer, but wages have fallen. Many drivers get paid by the kilometer. Now, your income often depends on how far you get. And the number and the seriousness of the accidents have gone up.” Some trucks are hurtling along at 140 km/h (88 mph). And “anyone who drives the A2 regularly sees serious accidents again and again,” says Marek. “Braking a 40-ton truck is no easy thing.”
Of course, the cost of training drivers for the new superhighway would have eaten into profits. And as for speeding — well, time is money.
One might think inventing a new machine or building a four-lane divided highway to replace a two-lane road would improve life. But not under capitalism. As Karl Marx commented, “The aim of the capitalistic application of machinery….is a means for producing surplus value.” Profit, plain and simple.
The purpose of the A2 is to intensify the exploitation of low-paid Polish workers. In April, 2013 the average net monthly wage in Poland was $945.
The European Commission’s March 2011 document “Frontier Economics” says, “Good transport connectivity is regarded as key to supporting economic activity and inward investment in the Lodz and Wielkopolska Regions….[which] have attracted significant inward investment from multi-national organizations in the food, distribution, electrical manufacturing and car manufacturing sectors” — Nestle, Unicom, Wrigley, Volkswagen and Skoda.
The A2 itself is a capitalist money-maker. Built as a public-private partnership meant the public sector (the EU and Polish government) took the risk, while private corporations rake in the profits.
The construction companies charged 2.5 billion euros ($3.45 billion) for the final section of the A2, largely coming from the European Investment Bank. The rest came from bank consortiums and private investors, who got a 40-year concession to operate the toll road.
Marek isn’t the only worker whose quality of life has plunged. Today, there’s a fast food restaurant (belonging to a U.S. chain) at practically every A2 rest stop. A retired worker shakes his head: “On the R2, I always stopped at one restaurant called the Las Vegas….There was always something fresh to eat. You don’t get that here.”
At the Las Vegas, Magda, 26, has worked a 12-hour shift at the old R2 for the past two years. “My shift begins at 7:20 a.m…. We clean the rest stop, check the stocks and of course serve the customers. However,…when the A2 opened, the number of customers fell practically overnight.” The boss has laid off one-third of the workers.
On June 4, the A2 was officially named Freedom Highway by Polish president Broneslaw Pomerowski and German president Joachim Gauck. But the freedom is only for the capitalists.
So long as the profit system exists, scientific and technological progress will be used to increase the exploitation of the working class. The only realistic answer is a workers’ revolution to establish communism, when progress will serve to lighten the day’s toil.
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Zionists’ ‘Protective Edge’: 56-year Onslaught vs. Palestinians
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- 31 July 2014 69 hits
The world is witnessing yet again a brutal and murderous act of aggression by Israel’s Zionist government against the Palestinian people in Gaza. In the mobilized media of Israel and the pro-Zionist press abroad it’s presented as an operation driven by “The concern for peace and the well-being of the population in South Israel.” But is it really?
After the first Zionist expansion, beyond the borders of the partition plan (November 1947), which included the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of 540 Palestinian villages, known as the Nakba, the Zionist leadership of the newly born state of Israel embarked on a project which they termed as “development settlements.” They built Jewish-only settlements such as Shderot, Netivot, Kiryat Gat, Kiryat Malachy and Yerucham along the borders with Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The main aim was to erect a human shield (cannon fodder) which would protect Israel from an invasion by a “foreign” army.
In the early 1950s, Israel’s ruling class used the wave of Jewish immigration from Iraq, Yemen and the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia) to populate these settlements. Additionally, wealthy Jews — local and foreign, with the aid and funding of the Israeli government — built factories in these settlements, using the local population as cheap labor, thus extracting huge profits. These profit-thirsty tycoons were presented to the public as “[p]hilanthropists who supply jobs to the people in the development settlements.” As world capitalism progressed and reached the level of globalization, profits declined and the “philanthropists” closed the factories, leaving behind huge unemployment. They then moved the factories to the Far East — India, China and Taiwan where labor costs are the cheapest.
There’s no doubt that the inhabitants of these “development settlements” are not responsible for the present grave situation (mass unemployment and daily rocket attacks). They themselves, like the people of Gaza, are direct victims and paying the price for Zionist aggression and expansion.
Ever since the creation of Israel, all Israeli Zionist governments, “left” and right, followed the policy of conquest of Palestinian lands and expulsion of Palestinians (the indigenous population) to make the entire territory a Jewish state. This principle was set by Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, who used the term “The right time” — sitting on the fence, strengthening the IDF (Israeli armed forces), waiting for the right time, using a provocation to strike at the Palestinians, expand and at the same time get the world’s imperialist powers to support the acts of aggression.
This method of expansion was first used in the 1956 Suez operation during which Israel collaborated with the British and French colonialists to conquer all of Sinai while the colonialists occupied the strategic Suez Canal. Unfortunately for the Zionists, they did not consider the interests of the then rising U.S. imperialism. They put their money on the decaying British and French colonialists. Thus the Zionist ruling class was forced to give up the gains of this futile campaign due to massive U.S. pressure.
The Zionists had to wait 11 years before once again applying “the right-time” method. In 1967, Egypt, led by the nationalist Gamal Abdul Nasser, held military drills, moving troops into the Sinai. Israel used the opportunity to attack on three fronts, demolishing the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in six days. In the process they conquered all of Historic Palestine, including Gaza from Egypt, the West Bank from Jordan (Judea and Sumaria in Zionist terminology) and the Golan Heights from Syria.
In 1982, the Israeli ruling class repeated “the right-time” method, using an assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador to the UK in London, and invaded Lebanon, reaching and occupying Beirut. Israel, led by fascist Prime Minister Begin and fascist Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon, tried to install a “friendly” collaborating government in Lebanon headed by the pro-imperialist Bashir Jumail. Once again they gambled on the wrong horse. The murder of Jumail two days into office plus Israel’s part in the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, led to Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983 due to pressure applied by the imperialist powers.
The current Operation “Protective Edge” is the latest act of aggression where “the right-time” policy is being used (see front page). The Israeli Zionist ruling class could not “swallow” the Palestinian unity government that included Hamas. To Jerusalem’s dismay, this government was recognized and endorsed by the European Union. U.S. imperialism, stuck in the Iraq-Afghanistan quagmire, received it with silence.
From day one, the kidnapping of the three young settlers gave the Zionists the opportunity to act against Hamas. The Israeli government declared Hamas to be responsible for the kidnapping, before it had any evidence as to who the kidnappers were or to the whereabouts of the victims. It has continued this rhetoric while police officials admit Hamas was not involved.
Thus they created an atmosphere that would justify attacks on Hamas activists in the West Bank, completely unrelated to the kidnapping itself. Israeli rulers also arrested 53 ex-Hamas prisoners released in the Shalit deal (in which Israel released Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the freeing of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, held by Hamas in 2011). In so doing, it violated the deal.
Consequently, the Palestinians in the West Bank organized mass demonstrations which escalated into a revenge kidnapping when young Jewish settlers set afire a 15-year-old Palestinian boy. As a token of solidarity, Palestinian organizations in Gaza, not associated with Hamas, started firing rockets on Israeli “development settlements” such as Shderot. Hamas did not want this escalation and tried to stop it. When they failed, they were forced into firing rockets in order to save face among the Palestinians as the leading organization of the struggle against Israeli occupation and siege.
For the bloodthirsty Zionist government in Jerusalem, this was “the right time” for another onslaught on the Palestinian people. The IDF air force conducted close to 2,000 missions over the 360-square kilometers of Gaza, killing over 1,300 Palestinians (and counting), including hundreds of children, demolishing nearly 1,000 houses and forcing over 100,000 people to evacuate their homes mainly, in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza strip. Meanwhile, the Israelis had two civilian victims.
The present racist Zionist leadership is worried about the demographic balance in Historic Palestine. Racist Benjamin Netanyahu & Co. do not want to see a Palestinian state based on the “two-state solution.” They foil every attempt in this direction through what is termed “The Peace Process.” Yet meanwhile they don’t want one state (a Jewish state) where 50% of the population is Arab (the present demographic situation in Historic Palestine). So they do their best to “dilute” the Palestinian population.
The Zionists know they cannot use direct expulsion (“transfer”) as they did in 1948, a step that may lead to the isolation of Israel internationally. So they use other means: massive bombardment, siege and blockade of the densely populated Gaza strip (1.8 million people in 360-square kilometers, 5,000 people per 1 square kilometer), trying to impel Palestinians to “desert” and later claim “they left of their own free will,” the claim they used after expelling 750,000 in 1947-48. Israel’s message to the Palestinians: “If you stay here we will make your life miserable and if necessary we will kill you.”
Like every regime with fascist characteristics, the Israeli bosses do not have a long-term strategy. Until 1987, Israel faced conventional armies of corrupt capitalist regimes in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Since then (the first Intifada), Israel is facing popular Palestinian resistance forces and cannot defeat them. In operation “Protective Edge” despite the massive strikes on Gaza, the Palestinians still fire around 60 home-made amateur rockets into Israel every day .
Without revolutionary communist leadership, Hebrew and Arab workers are the main victims of the murderous Zionist bosses’ aggression and the adventurous acts of the corrupt Hamas leadership.
The “one-state” vs. “two-state” dispute is a phony capitalist concoction. The working class needs only one state — a workers’ state. Arab and Hebrew workers should build their revolutionary internationalist communist party — the Progressive Labor Party — which will provide the leadership in the struggle to smash the capitalist Zionist government and the reactionary Arab regimes in the region, destroy capitalism and establish a communist society which will create a bright future for all workers in the region, one with no exploitation and imperialist wars.
