BROOKLYN, NY, October 21 —“Justice for Kyam Livingston — killed in a Brooklyn cell” echoed outside the courthouse that holds the local Central Booking where Kyam Livingston was left to die in a jail cell. The crowd filled with anger demonstrated here, demanding justice and the names of the killer cops on duty who refused to help Kyam as she and other inmates cried for help.
The Justice for Kyam Livingston Committee will continue to be active and hold demonstrations on the 21st of each month — the day of the anniversary of her death. (More next issue.)

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PROVIDENCE, RI, October 29 — A multiracial crowd of anti-racist demonstrators booed the NYPD racist Police Commissioner Ray Kelly off the stage at Brown University here today, forcing the cancellation of his lecture on “Proactive Policing in America’s Biggest City.” Before his scheduled appearance, students and others marched outside the hall carrying signs that said “Stop police brutality” and “RAY [CIST] KELLY.” Inside the hall chants arose to “Stop stop-and-frisk,” alluding to the Mayor Bloomberg-Kelly racist policy of annually harassing hundreds of thousands black and Latino youth completely innocent of any wrongdoing.
“Residents of East Flatbush, Brownsville and East New York don’t feel safer than they did in 2001,” said Danny Echevarria, a Brown student from Brooklyn. “Instituting systematic racism in New York City is a disgrace,” another student chimed in. Another student rose to slam the NYPD and accused Kelly of discriminating against blacks and Muslims.”
Choi, a history major from the Maryland suburbs of Washington declared, “We do not at all support Ray Kelly’s stop-and-frisk policies and…want to stand in solidarity with communities the police have targeted.”Kelly had barely started speaking when chants filled the hall drowning him out. The protest continued for more than 20 minutes until Kelly fled the stage.

The current impasse over the federal debt ceiling (and the resulting government shutdown) reflects a sharp disagreement on how — or whether —to pay the spiraling costs of broader wars. This argument reflects the bosses’ growing insecurity as their top-dog status is challenged by China, Russia, and other imperialist rivals. The coming mobilization for war has also triggered a controversial push for more centralized economic control, a key element of the Obamacare health reform.
But despite their serious differences, all wings of both the Democratic and Republican parties wholeheartedly agree on one thing: escalating their attacks on the working class. While $3.5 million in salaries were shelled out to members of Congress during the first 13 days of the shutdown, the impact on workers was devastating. While the media blathered on about re-opening the Statue of Liberty and the national parks, racist and sexist cuts hit the Women Infants and Children (WIC) food program. These subsidies help sustain life for millions of babies, cared for by predominantly black and Latino mothers. At the same time, cuts in food stamps made it that much harder for tens of millions of working-class families to put food on their tables.
Obama proposed a cut in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid totaling into the billions. But as the New York Times noted (10/5/13), “Both sides [Democrats and Republicans] recognize that the United States must confront the rising costs of the benefit programs, especially Medicare and Medicaid but also Social Security. Those are driving projections that the mounting debt will become unsustainable after 2016.” The Times portrayed right-wing Republicans as “embracing several of Mr. Obama’s plans that would trim Medicare and Medicaid expenses by $400 billion.”
Food inspections have been suspended, making millions vulnerable to food poisoning. Cost-of-living increases have been halted. Housing applications for mortgages are curtailed. But the U.S. military, 1.4 million strong, is exempt from the shutdown. So is the National Security Agency, whose main job is to spy on every man, woman, and child within reach of an automated camera or cell phone. Neither party is willing to discuss a substantial source of the multi-trillion-dollar federal debt: the 20-year funding of wars and one thousand U.S. military bases in 120 countries worldwide. Nor do they mention the $2.5 trillion stolen from the Social Security Trust Fund over the last 30 years to feed the federal budget and finance this military machine.
But other problems are not so easily papered over. The capitalists have no credible plan to address the country’s fraying infrastructure, reform its corrupt banking sector, or narrow the gap between the society’s haves and have-nots. Widening income inequality, an inevitable feature of capitalism, undermines the bosses’ ability to enlist working-class support for their war plans.
Bosses Need Fascism
Whenever the capitalists face a crisis that threatens profits, they must heighten their oppression of our class to try to escape their system’s contradictions. At the same time, they must discipline their own class, including the faction that controls the Tea Party, to protect their long-term interests and survival against bosses with a shorter-term outlook. These parallel trends mark a move toward fascism, a period when the rulers strip away the veneer of liberal “democracy” and expose their brutal class dictatorship.
On one side of the capitalists’ internal struggle stand the dominant finance capitalists, rooted in big banks like JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup and the huge firms they control, like ExxonMobil and GE. These bosses foresee a costly and global armed conflict threatening their far-flung interests. At stake is control over gas and oil in the Middle East, the essential commodities for any imperialist super-power.
On the other side, smaller U.S. bosses zero in on tax reduction and “smaller government” as cures for their own declining profits. This faction derives profit mostly from domestic investment, as distinct from imperialist adventures abroad. Its main backer is Koch Industries, among the largest privately held U.S. firms, not openly traded on the stock market. The Cato Foundation think thank, a mouthpiece for these smaller bosses, regularly rails at Obama’s efforts to raise the debt ceiling to pay for the U.S. war machine.
Just as the Washington crisis began, Cato published “America Is Spending Too Much on Defense” (Cato website, 10/3/13). To U.S. imperialists backing Obama, this was heresy: “A cataclysmic conflict like World War II is unlikely to recur. As such, the continued spending for an ever-receding likelihood needs to be seriously assessed....There is no need for the maintenance of a large standing military force.” The piece denied U.S. imperialists’ war justifications: “Europe seems to face no notable military threats, the Taiwan/China issue remains a fairly remote concern, and Israel’s primary problems derive from the actions of substate groups” [Hamas and Hezbollah].
Big Capital Begs to Differ
JPMorgan and Exxon and their Washington stooges, however, differ on every count. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel toiled most recently for the Atlantic Council, a “nonpartisan” think tank funded by JPMorgan and Exxon. This group ceaselessly warns of Russia’s menace to Europe: “Russia, in turn, cannot be certain of NATO and U.S. intentions in Central and Eastern Europe and thus feels compelled to modernize its defenses to protect the deterrent value of its strategic nuclear forces” (Atlantic Council website, 5/21/13).
As for China, U.S. imperialists’ big worry is that the inevitable clash may come sooner than expected. As Foreign Affairs, another Exxon-JPMorgan organ, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, noted: “There is a real danger that Beijing and Washington will find themselves in a crisis that could quickly escalate to military conflict....The danger of a crisis involving the two nuclear-armed countries is a tangible, near-term concern” (September/October 2013).
This tension was evident at the recent meeting of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, involving 40 Asian countries, which Obama had to miss because of the U.S. domestic crisis. China took advantage of his absence as it steadily expands its Asian sphere of influence.
Israel, which Cato dismisses as a minor worry, is part of the oil-rich Middle East, cornerstone of the U.S. global empire. By discounting Israel, Cato ignores Iranian and al-Qaeda threats to U.S. energy interests in Iraq, Kuwait and, above all, Saudi Arabia.
On October 4, the Atlantic Council (10/4/13) quoted Director of National Intelligence James Clapper’s attack on the radical Republicans and their threat to U.S. imperialism: “I’ve never seen anything like this. From my view, I think this — on top of sequestration...seriously damages our ability to protect the security and safety of this nation and its citizens.... This is not just a beltway [inside Washington] issue. This affects our global capability.”  The same piece, “National Security and the Shutdown,” urges Obama to secure war funds. Until there is certainty in the defense budget, the Council argues, “credibility and readiness will decline.”
Finance capitalists within the Republican Party are also alarmed. The New York Times reported (10/13/13): “One top [Republican] party fundraiser said the Wall Street financiers and corporate executives he counts on for support are ‘having fits’ over the [Republicans’] brinkmanship strategy, especially related to a potential default if Congress does not agree to raise the debt ceiling later this month. ‘The donors I raise money from understand the vital importance of credit markets and are upset that the U.S. credit system is being put at risk’” (Washington Post, 10/5/13).
Only One Side — The Workers’ Side
As these two gangs of bosses vie for power and profits, the working class has no stake in either side. Both spell death for our class. Both exert state power on behalf of the capitalists and against the workers. It is our job to expose them and organize direct opposition to their attacks. We must fight back against racist police terror, mass imprisonment and unemployment. We must attack the special oppression of women in the workplace and the degenerate depiction of women in the bosses’ media.
Only a movement of millions led by a mass revolutionary communist party, the PLP, can destroy the profit system and the misery it creates. Only a communist organization can establish a workers’ state run by and for our class.
Shutdown, yes! Shut down capitalism completely, once and for all! Join PLP!

Washington, DC, October 8 — Today PLP rallied at a major subway station to denounce the police murders in this area over the past few days. PL’ers and friends distributed over 400 leaflets and CHALLENGEs to outraged workers and students. Several workers asked for bunches of flyers to share with their friends, and others expressed the need to take action against the kkkops. A resolution calling for the indictment of the cops has been introduced at the Association for Humanist Sociologists meeting in Arlington, and others are joining this effort against police brutality and racism.
The Case of Miriam Carey
In a gross display of brutal overkill, the Secret Service and the Capitol Police shot 17 times and killed Miriam Carey, an unarmed young black woman. She apparently tried to first crash her car into the White House and then tried to crash it into the Capitol. The cops put out the word that there was “an active shooter incident” to get the public behind them, but the only shooters were the trigger-happy cops. In fact, Cathy Lanier, Chief of Police, boasted that the bollard barriers to both the White House and Capitol, put in place after 9/11, worked perfectly.  If that was the case, there was absolutely no reason to gun down the driver. But it you’re black, the cops shoot first and ask questions later.
In Prince George’s County
The day before, in Prince George’s County, the cops chased a man through the woods and shot and killed him as he supposedly reached into a bag. The seven-year veteran cop claimed he feared for his life.  But no weapon was found at the scene — other than the cop’s gun.
Behind Police Brutality
The “War on Drugs” by the government and cops intensified their targeting of black and Latino workers and led directly to the mass incarceration that jams the jails and prisons throughout the country.  The “War on Terror” similarly unleashed military-style attacks against any “threat to the homeland.” The working class is enduring ever greater fascist terror, in addition to massive cutbacks in social programs, wages, and benefits. More devastation lies ahead unless the working class mobilizes to fight back to limit such attacks.
Ongoing Struggle
In a related action, workers and students in the Peoples Coalition in Prince George’s County recently rallied to demand the indictment of the county cops who killed Archie Elliott 3rd as he sat handcuffed in the front seat of a police cruiser in 1993. This case, like the murder of Medgar Evers, the Mississippi NAACP leader,  and the murder of four black Birmingham girls in a church bombing, cries out to be re-opened and the killer cops brought to justice. After protest and mass petitioning by the Coalition, the states attorney finally met with Archie’s mother and her supporters. But the response? There was no way the state of Alabama would re-open the 20-year-old case, even as the states attorney acknowledged that the cops were out of control in the 1990s.  
Now there are two more bodies that the killer cops have given us, in D.C. and in Prince George’s County, and more throughout the nation. The cops will continue to play their role of terrorizing the working class with brutal racist repression. Justice cannot be won in a racist capitalist system. But the working class can stop them cold with communist revolution.

NEW YORK CITY, October 15 — More than 90 people filled the room to “Defend the CUNY Six--Drop the Charges Now!”  Others were barred from entering by campus security. As reported in the last issue of CHALLENGE, students demonstrating against General David “Death Squad” Petraeus teaching at the City University of New York (CUNY) were attacked by the NYPD on September 17. A panel composed of two students, two professors, and an Iraq war veteran addressed students and their supporters. They denounced the militarization of the community and explained how U.S. Imperialism must be defeated. While the audience responded well to the speeches, little practical plans were put forward.
An anti-war veteran of the 1960’s struggles gave the most concrete remarks. He stated, “The best defense is a good offense!” Because of the week-by-week demonstrations, Petraeus has been forced to teach his
Monday seminars in a bunker-like environment with underground garages. PLP and friends must resume these demonstrations wherever he hides, wherever he goes. More importantly, we must build a large citywide anti-imperialist movement on every one of the CUNY campuses because most CUNY students do not yet know about Petraeus, and the foul deeds of the U.S. military and the CIA.
More than that, Progressive Labor Party must be at the forefront of this struggle, calling for communism — a system without wages, imperialist wars, racism, and sexism — as the only solution to the terror capitalists rage against workers and students, domestically and internationally. PLP should use this momentum to build for their International College Conference to Smash Imperialism on November 8 and 9, as it will provide a real alternative to building illusions of a safer capitalism. The conference will engage friends in critical questions, such as what is the relationship between imperialism and fascism; how do we build an antiracist and antisexist movement on campus; why is a communist party, PLP, necessary to building, sustaining, and advancing a communist world.
The veteran suggested that we concentrate our forces next week on a particular campus. For example, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) center is at City College. Despite strong faculty opposition voiced at a Town Hall meeting at the College of Staten Island, the Provost continues to connive to bring in ROTC (see CHALLENGE 10/16). Progressive forces from CSI must be brought together with folks from the three campuses where ROTC has already been instituted:  City College, Medgar Evers, and York.
At any rate the students are determined to fight on. They have received letters of support from the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY). Money has been raised to replace broken glasses and to pay for legal expenses. The workers in PSC will raise more money if needed. But the students alone cannot sustain the struggle by themselves. They need to build strong relationships with faculty and other campus workers, and with soldiers and sailors as well. History shows us that during the course of the struggle against the murderous Vietnam War, both soldiers and students alike rebelled against imperialism. And the majority of the U.S. working class was won to see that slaughtering workers in other countries was not in their interest.
Today the task of building an anti-war movement is more difficult than in the 1960’s because we live in a period of developing fascism.
Police terror against black and brown youth has increased. The union movement has been decimated. Thousands of people remain in detention even though they haven’t been charged let alone convicted. More undocumented immigrants have been deported under Obama’s reign than in any other point in history. Every day new reports come out of increased government spying on civilians at home. Why is all of this happening now? U.S. capitalists are on a collision course with capitalists from China, Russia and other countries. (Russia has a naval base in Syria). To prepare for future conflicts the U.S. government plans a stronger military with more black and Latino officers being trained in ROTC on NYC campuses. The ruling class also plans to develop more and more patriotism among workers and students. Well, we are not going to go along with this program! With communist ideas and practice, fight back!