New York City, May 6 — Today a small squad of 30 City University of New York (CUNY) students and 10 faculty bid a noisy farewell to the hated mass murderer general David Petraeus. He has been masquerading as a professor for a year to cover his war crimes and his disgrace after a sex scandal drove him out as CIA director.  This was his last public appearance here and chants of “Death Squads Petraeus, you can’t hide, We charge you with genocide!” greeted him as he slunk into Macaulay Honors College behind a wall of uneasy administrators and city police.
“Drones” Petraeus is also chairman of the KKR Global Institute, Judge Widney professor at USC, senior fellow at Harvard, and co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on North America. He recently co-published an article in Politico titled, “The Great American Comeback” where he argues that this racist country is on the cusp of a “great revival.” This is exactly the kind of warrior scholar the ruling class desires, one who mucks up the minds of working-class youth with bourgeois ideas and practices.  
Recently, Condoleezza Rice was forced to cancel her commencement address at Rutgers. Homeland Security czar Janet Napolitano faced big protests at the University of California. Now, Petraues leaves CUNY after a semester of pushback.
While the chants and speeches were spirited enough, PLP members were joined only by a few of our student and faculty friends and some leftists. It was good to protest Petraeus as he moves his warrior-scholar self to other colleges, and militant students did make his tenure here pretty uncomfortable. But the small numbers show that imperialist war, preparations for war, and the militarization of the capitalist university are not on most people’s minds.  We have a lot of work to do. This campaign was good practice for the Party’s forces, young and veteran.
The campaign against the CUNY ROTC officer-training corps will continue in the Fall, along with a focus on opposing military research. The faculty/staff union has set up a Committee on Militarization and is considering a resolution against ROTC later this month. Faculty are working with students on events to make the danger of imperialist war better understood on CUNY campuses.
Our anger will continue to disrupt the use of the university by the war machine and the police state. PLP’s view is that the bourgeois university, an integral part of the capitalist state, must be smashed along with its military power. Communist revolution will have to transform all levels of education so that it contributes, not to profit wars, but to a society capable of abolishing war.

SOMA, Turkey, May 19 — “This is not something that suddenly happened. I can tell you that there are people here who are dying, people who are injured and it’s all because of money…They send us here like lambs to slaughter. We are not safe doing this job.”
That’s what a surviving coal miner told CNN Turkey about the fire that officials claim killed 301 miners. The actual number will be much higher. He also accused a supervisor of giving the wrong directions to trapped miners, leading them away from the oxygen supply. This fire was not a random accident. It was mass industrial murder.
On May 13, just days after two U.S. coal miners were killed in a collapse in West Virginia, an underground coal fire in Soma knocked out the mine’s elevators and ventilation system, trapping the miners in toxic fumes. It happened during shift change, with 787 miners in the mine. Some of the 301 bodies recovered so far were burned beyond recognition. More are still underground. Many who were rescued may not survive their injuries.
Another miner said of the official numbers, “We are not even counting outsiders who come here as part-time, unregistered workers,” including many youth who turn to the mines due to extreme poverty and the high cost of education.
On April 29, during a hearing in Parliament, the government of Prime Minister Erdogan rejected a call for a safety inspection at the mine. And when he travelled to Soma the day after the explosion, Erdogan told angry mourners and relatives, “Explosions like this in these mines happen all the time.”
Anti-government demonstrations broke out across the country. Student protests in Ankara and Istanbul led up to a one-day strike by the major trade unions on May 15. A march was held in Ankara from the Middle Eastern Technical University to the Energy Ministry.  The marchers erupted in a rock-throwing protest in front of the headquarters of the ruling Justice and Development Party. In Istanbul, there were demonstrations in Taksim Square and young people laid down in the metro station, representing those killed in the mine. A demonstration of thousands was attacked by hundreds of riot police firing tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons.
As a result of the mass actions of workers and youth, four mining company executives, including the manager, were arrested charged with causing multiple deaths and injuries through negligence.
U.S. Investors Reap Millions
Soma, with a population of around 100,000, is a major center for lignite coal mining. Turkey has rich supplies that are used for domestic power. The Energy Minister recently announced that Turkey would invest $118 billion by 2023 to meet their doubling energy consumption. According to Pieter Verstraete, a Türkiye Burslari Researcher at Bilgi University in Istanbul, these investments have been accompanied with privatization, deregulation and wage-cuts, to keep the mines profitable and attractive mainly to U.S. investors. The average wage for miners is only $500/month.
What these investors also find “attractive” is cutting safety costs, “flexible” work conditions, less training, and subcontracting unskilled and unregistered under-age workers. And it’s not just the privatized mines. A report by the General Miners Union in March 2010 stated that between 2000-2009, there were 25,655 “accidents” in the state-owned mines of the Turkish Coal Corporation (TTK), and that 98 percent could have been prevented with proper training and safety inspections.
Such mining disasters due to bosses’ profiteering at the expense of safety also occur worldwide. In 2010, 29 miners were killed in West Virginia.
But what’s proper to the bosses is anything that generates more profits. Whether its hundreds of miners in Turkey — or more than 1,000 garment workers  buried/burned alive in the factory collapse in Bangladesh, or coal miners in the U.S. —our lives are just the cost of doing business. And as horrible as these numbers are, they pale in the face of those being slaughtered by growing imperialist wars, poverty, and curable disease around the world. The best way to answer these murders is to rebuild the international movement for communist revolution. The truth is, nothing less will do.

NEW YORK CITY, May 1 — There were two marches here today. The one in Union Square was dominated by pseudo-left parties and groups and included some immigrant and community organizations. The one at City Hall was led by the NY Central Labor Council and the Democratic Party. On the surface, they appeared to be very different. But in essence, they were similar. Both stripped May Day of its revolutionary content and both reflected their lack of confidence in the working class.
And this is no surprise! These marches were organized by professional misleaders who seek to divide our class and fight for scraps instead workers’ power. A small PLP contingent marched, calling for a communist revolution. Many workers and passersby took the paper. A group of young women joined our chant, “Democrats, Republicans, All the Same. Racist Murder is the Name of the Game.”
Reformist May Day
The rally in Union Square was a May Day marathon, with groups coming and going and speaker after speaker going on and on for more than 5 hours before marching down to Foley Square. There may have been 50 organizations participating, but few had more than two dozen people with them.
Meanwhile, at City Hall, about two dozen of the city’s largest unions had signed on to the May Day Coalition for “Labor Rights — Immigrant Rights — Jobs for All.”  But with the exception of the Laborers’ Union and CUNY Professional Staff Congress, there was little rank-and-file presence. With all the City unions entering contract talks, there was only a handful of transit workers and teachers. Healthcare and city workers’ unions — with more than 350,000 mostly black and Latino workers combined, facing jobs cuts as a result of racist cutbacks — turned out only staff and officers and little else. A painfully long list of union honchos shared the stage with elected officials, sending the message that the future is bright with Mayor DeBlasio in City Hall.
Neither march mentioned racist police terror. Neither march had more than a handful of fast food workers or other low-wage workers. Neither march warned of the threat of growing imperialist wars. Neither march called for an end to racist unemployment. And neither march called for the building of a mass revolutionary communist movement.
Have Confidence in the Working Class
The PLP May Day march in Brooklyn was the exact opposite. It put revolutionary politics up front and for a few hours, took the streets in the black and immigrant neighborhood that on every other day is controlled by the racist police. People on the sidewalks saw themselves in our ranks, joined our chants English, Spanish, and Creole and embraced Challenge, over thousands distributed.
Yes, we have a long way to go. But the contrast in the two days’ events is a testimonial to our confidence in the workers and youth to grasp revolutionary communist ideas and make them their own. It is a testament to the strategy of building a base for communist ideas and for PLP. We have a very long way to go, but we are winning!

Excerpt from NYC’s Why I Joined PLP Speech

What does capitalism mean?
You gotta fight back!
All of us, every single one of us has gone through the indoctrination machine, the behemoth which attempts to crush you from all sides, the machine which tries to dehumanize you and destroys any semblance of hope in our unity. The monster that makes it seem that going down capitalism lane is the only way forward, even though we’re carrying the entire world on our backs, seeing ourselves dying every step of the way. I knew that things were bad but I was told to put my faith in the system which causes this destruction, that I’d just have to wait as either a politician, or the market, or a charity, or god fixed everything that was wrong with our world!
I was told to put my faith in capitalism as I saw my family break their backs to support us.
I was told to put my faith in capitalism as I lived one paycheck away from homelessness every week.
I was told to put my faith in capitalism as I saw my mother work harder and harder, yet have less self-worth every day.
I remember asking my mother why she thought we were poor. She told me that it’s because she wasn’t smart enough, that she didn’t work hard enough. And our entire life she had been bearing the burden of our poverty completely on her shoulders, blaming herself every step of the way.
I told her that it wasn’t her fault — that the system wasn’t set up for us to be happy. It was set up for us and those like us to be slaves and the few to be the slavemasters. And she understood, because she isn’t stupid even though capitalism tells her she is every day. And we aren’t stupid. We can see how capitalism is destroying us and we know it needs to be taken down and yet still, I was told to put my faith in capitalism.
Long had I realized the very thing which I’ve been told would solve all problems in our world was in fact the root of the issue and — I was done waiting for capitalism to solve all our problems. I was done watching as capitalism destroyed humanity. I was done seeing my life become more and more commodified, objectified, and meaningless under this system of oppression. And for a long time, I just didn’t know what I should do to fight back.
But a year ago I was met with this beautiful idea, one that was quite compelling, that had me slapping my forehead saying, “Why wasn’t I able to articulate this before?”
The people I met, who helped me learn about it, spoke with such fervor it was hard to ignore. For the first time since the years my mother would tell me, “Hijo, you could become anything you want, anything that’ll make you happy,” I was filled with hope a rare and wondrous emotion which capitalism makes much too uncommon.
And one year ago today, I did become something that made me happy. I became a communist, and joined the struggle with my working-class brothers and sisters. I dedicated my life to the pursuit of a world which actually makes sense and takes care of everyone and everything in it.
Since I joined I’ve grown as both an individual and as a part of the collective. I’ve made friends that I will have for life. And I know when s*** goes down, all of you will have my back as I will have yours. Because this isn’t some club of loosely connected people. This is the working class this is a communist party ready to take it all down. That’s why I joined the Progressive Labor Party.
Now, even if you’ve been in the Party for long time, I ask you to recommit to the working class. And if you haven’t joined yet, I ask you to think about it, because no one is going to fight this fight for us. If we don’t do it soon, they’ll be nothing to fight for. So join the Progressive Labor Party, and fight for communism!