WASHINGTON, DC, April 10 — Today Senator Rand Paul launched a Republican offensive to recruit black students into its ranks at Howard, a historically black university. Paul invited himself to the campus and the administration bent over backwards to get students and faculty to attend this event. No academic department or student organization sponsored it. Paul’s speech was an offensive, lying, and racist rewrite of the history of the U.S. and was opposed by many students.
Students challenged his racist re-writing of the history of black workers in the United States. Two students raised a banner declaring “Howard University Doesn’t Support White Supremacy,” correctly labeling Paul for what he is — a racist. The audience erupted in applauses in support of the students’ bold action.
Belying their pretense of academic freedom, the University administrators had the campus police swarm the two students, roughly shoving them out of the auditorium. The students continued to protest outside the building, declaring that capitalism promoted racism, and that neither the Democratic not the Republican Party had anything of value for black students.
The racist Republican Party that the Democratic Party is slicker at winning black and Latino votes in overwhelming numbers (although most potential voters don’t bother to even participate in the bosses’ electoral shell game). Since the share of these groups in the population is growing, Republicans realize that they must figure out a way to appeal to them if they are to remain relevant.
Rand Paul also wants to position himself as the bold new Republican leader willing to take on the task of cutting into Democratic support among black students. This is a tough road, given that for 50 years, Republican leaders have appealed to gutter racists in their campaigns. Richard Nixon launched the famous “Southern Strategy” to get racist white southerners to leave the Democratic Party and join the Republicans. Then, Ronald Reagan used a blatantly racist tale about black welfare Cadillac mothers to help win the election in the 1980s. George H. W. Bush similarly used the Willie Horton racist falsehood in his campaign in the 1990s. And Rand Paul wonders why black people don’t vote Republican, even though it’s the party of Lincoln?
Students and faculty are outraged at this administration-sanctioned racist lecture and repressive action against students.  We should not be surprised, but instead understand that U.S. universities are not wide-open forums for a free flow of ideas. They are corporations controlled by boards made up of bosses and their politicians. Universities encourage curricula that support the status quo and discredit revolutionary alternatives. The Rand Paul event, as absurd as it was, is simply another rightwing effort to keep students tied to the capitalist system, and may well be followed by further efforts to move the university discussion further to the right. The University is an arena of class struggle. It is up to us to wage the ideological and practical battle to expose and defeat racists and capitalists on the campus.

WASHINGTON, DC, April 13 — Today 30 workers from Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 689 gathered at the union hall for a meeting called by the local leadership to organize a campaign against privatization of parts of the city’s transit system. For two decades, several lines in surrounding counties have been separated by local jurisdictions from the unified rail and bus system. This has shrunk workers’ wage and benefit packages in these separate and privatized sectors as well as cut into the ATU membership, weakening the union.
The DC government — run by liberal Democrats, most of whom have been endorsed by the local unions — has decided to investigate the cost savings from further privatization, this time for lines inside Washington, DC itself. This would cost another 175 union jobs and workers hired for those lines would end up worse off. This is just another bosses’ tactic to roll back workers’ standard of living to boost their own profitability.
Two approaches on the issue quickly developed. The union leadership and the organizer from Jobs with Justice advocated educating the membership about the danger of privatization and the possibility of layoffs if this occurred. They advocated that ATU workers and their allies circulate a petition to the Mayor demanding privatization be stopped.
 In contrast, PLP’ers and other militant workers advocated a strategy based on political analysis showing how the bosses’ privatization tactic is part of a general racist attack on unions the bosses are using to solve their current economic problems. (A huge majority of the transit workers are black and Latino.) These workers felt that we needed to urgently educate workers about how this privatization attack and many more similar assaults on workers’ well-being will continue as long as capitalism continues because of its need to maximize profits. Winning workers to see the need to eliminate capitalism has to be part of any strategy to fight privatization.
On a tactical level, both approaches are similar. Both want to have meetings and rallies against privatization, build a worker-rider alliance and eventually carry out work actions to drive the point home. The difference is in the message. Only revolution can win the fight against privatization. Any other “victory” will be short-lived, or the gains we make will be taken from some other workers. Moreover, if workers understand that this attack is just one arrow in the quiver of the capitalists, with more attacks to come, they will become more active and aggressive now in the current fight.
Our approach requires us to fight as hard as we can to preserve jobs, but also to organize for May Day around the goal of destroying capitalism, with its racist practices, and fighting for communism.
At the meeting several workers were skeptical about their co-workers joining in the fight, whether simply for the fight against privatization or the broader fight against capitalism. But blaming the workers won’t get us very far. An organizer must figure out why our brothers and sisters are not fighting back vigorously and convince them to change. This often requires patience and perseverance, including clear education about the urgency of the need to resist the capitalists’ systematic attack on our well-being. We are not going to win every battle, but by fighting together we can build a stronger movement against capitalism, and this will create the basis for our eventual victory.
At the end of the meeting several workers took May Day leaflets and posters, a step in the right direction.


BROOKLYN, NY April 20 — “SAVE LICH, NO MORE CONDOS FOR THE RICH!” That was the chant on April 7, as more than 200 Long Island College Hospital (LICH) workers and residents of the Red Hook housing project, marched together from the project to the hospital. They were demanding the hospital remain open, despite the fact that the SUNY Board of Directors voted to close it on June 18. (LICH was recently taken over by SUNY Downstate Medical Center.) The march united hospital workers and those we serve. The chants were loud and militant as workers and residents made a powerful statement, marching together through housing project many LICH workers had never been to before, even though many LICH patients live there. Every worker who attended talked about it for days.
The racist police presence was heavy. In contrast, the same 76th Precinct assigned just two unarmed Auxiliary officers to a march of 75 mostly white residents two weeks earlier, through the wealthy Brooklyn Heights neighborhood. Uncertainty reigns on all sides as to whether or not the hospital will actually close. But the past month has seen promising activity fighting the closure and building the PLP.
One of the biggest victories has been winning workers and youth from Red Hook and LICH to see this struggle as a fight against racism. On March 13, a community group called the Red Hook Initiative (RHI) hosted a meeting of 35 mostly black and Latino women residents, along with LICH nurses, doctors and paramedics. Militant young volunteers distributed hundreds of flyers for the meeting across the sprawling housing development, the largest project in Brooklyn. We discussed how there are an average 60,000 ER visits a year and over 100,000 patients receive specialized care at LICH annually. The proposed closing will mean certain death for Red Hook residents, making the hospital closing a vicious racist attack. The response was overwhelming, but we did not have a clear plan of action that everyone could begin organizing for.
After this meeting, the unions representing LICH workers, the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) and 1199SEIU, held a joint union/physician coalition “leadership” meeting. The union leaders follow the bosses’ playbook that relies on paying for publicity in the bosses’ media and closed-door meetings of hand-picked “leaders.” But a paramedic brought two militant Red Hook youth to speak about the hospital closing as a racist attack. In the end, NYSNA, 1199SEIU and the LICH physicians group scheduled the April 7 march.
The struggle to bring some of these fighters to May Day is afoot, although complicated because CHALLENGE readers are busy working second (even third) jobs as they brace for losing their primary income. More work lies ahead in building PLP in Red Hook, and every experience selling CHALLENGE has been positive. We know that bigger racist attacks are on the horizon as the U.S. gears up for growing imperialist wars. The children of Red Hook and LICH workers will soon be called on to kill and be killed while our families face poverty, overcrowded hospitals, schools and prisons. The struggles that we have participated in over years here have planted the seeds. This struggle will nourish them. We will greet this May Day a little stronger than last year, and with some momentum.

Brooklyn, NY April 17 —   One of the drivers who had been a rank and file leader during the school bus strike called excitedly to say that a NY Post column had exposed the lies that NYC’s Mayor Blumberg and his schools commissioner had told when they claimed that the “EPP” job security clause in ATU 1181’s contract was illegal. The bigger question is why didn’t the union leaders of 1181, the Transit Workers International Union and New York City’s Central Labor Council do anything to expose these lies and stop these attacks? We think it is because the labor movement functions as the junior partner of the bosses and their system.
 As Challenge has reported, ending EPP was a major part of the bosses’ plan to cut the wages of school bus workers. Workers are both furious at and resigned to the 15% cut in wages, loss of paid time off during winter and spring break vacations and the increase in their share of the costs of health insurance premiums. Most of all they see the possibility of mass firings of senior higher paid workers when the new school year begins in the fall. What would have happened if the leadership of 1181 had called on its members to stop scab buses? What if the international union had supported the strike with cash for strike benefits that would have offset the lost wages workers missed for a month? What if the central labor council had called for all its member locals to join mass picketing of bus barns?
Then a real fight would have been made over the bosses’ plans. This kind of fight will never happen if we look to the enemies in our midst (the union flunkies) for leadership. That’s why we need to build a workers movement around the communist ideas of the Progressive Labor Party.
We urge our brothers and sisters who led the strike earlier this year to join us in the streets on Saturday April 27. This is the day the working class reviews its forces and celebrates its accomplishments. Your leadership provided a great inspiration to workers and students all around the world. You will feel the excitement as we march in the streets of Flatbush with workers and students from around the world.
We learned from you how international our struggle is as we met and talked with your members from Haiti, Eastern Europe, Dominican Republic, Italy, Puerto Rico and all over the world and how you united to combat the bosses attacks. We were impressed by the commitment and perseverance that we saw in this battle. But this is a lifelong battle and that is what Mayday represents-the necessity of workers to fight back and make revolution.
This struggle is international as workers all over the world face the same attacks. This is a day to make our voices heard and our presence felt. Let’s take the lessons we learned from the strike and go forward –we will win when hundreds, thousands and finally millions of workers embrace these ideas.