Capitalism’s worldwide crisis pushes reforms that hurt the working class. Some, like in education, are expanding here in Mexico. The relentless class struggle in the state of Oaxaca, led mainly by the union’s Section 22, is now facing a frontal attack: educational reforms promoted by the capitalists centered around the OCDE, “Mexicans First,” Televisa and TV Azteca.
These bosses’ main objective is to privatize education, to turn it into a profit-making business. U.S. educational reform has become a business reaping profits in the multimillions.
This privatization directly affects teachers’ labor rights, won through decade-long struggles: basic employment, health care, retirement, right to loans and housing and collective bargaining among others. It also affects other sectors of the working class, leading to massive layoffs. The restrictions on teachers’ social security will have an indirect effect on healthcare workers, increasing deficiencies in their social security.
Parents are affected by having to pay for their children’s education, eating into families’ income. The number of families unable to pay for education will grow, increasing the illiteracy of the population. The bosses’ fascist plan has already begun, with their repression directed at the CETEG teachers, to be followed by attacks against those in Chiapas, Oaxaca and other states.
We teachers should respond massively and militantly against these bosses’ reforms. If we unite with parents as well as other sectors, an indefinite strike at work sites combined with mass actions against transnational corporations and government offices could fight these attacks.
We must defeat the hopelessness pushed by the ruling class through its mass media which undermine our struggle and divide our class. We must build class consciousness. If teachers remain mired in trade union struggles, any gains will be limited to petty reforms which the bosses can always reverse when it suits their needs.
Teachers must organize and join a real communist party which unites all sectors of the working class, a party that fights for a communist revolution to take power, ushering in the dawn of a new worker-led society.
To organize against these many attacks by this criminal and decadent capitalist system, join Progressive Labor Party!

PARIS, April 13 — Fifty Peugeot strikers invaded a meeting here of 300 top Socialist Party leaders at their national council, charging the Socialist government with betrayal in not fighting the company’s plan to lay off 8,000 workers in 2014 and close the Aulnay-sous-Bois plant. Over-running the security guards, the angry workers disrupted the meeting, loudly chanting, “No factory closures, outlaw layoffs!” and “We are workers, not vandals, the bosses are vandals!”
The Socialist Prime Minister, who had just finished a speech defending the government’s austerity policies, fled the hall when he saw the workers coming.
The strike began at the Aulnay-sous-Bois plant on January 16, with the workers setting up shop inside and outside the factory. The assembly workshop has been renamed “Strike Square.”
The three-month strike has paralyzed production which used to turn out 500 cars a day. The company has kept the plant open with the hope of producing 250 cars daily with scabs, but “Today, practically no car leaves the factory,” said a 61-yar-old worker, Harfaoul, pointing to the immobile assembly line. The workers have chased after anyone who wants to help the company function, throwing bolts and emptying fire extinguishers against office windows.
The CGT union leadership is misleading the workers in appealing to the austerity-scripted government to set up a mediation process as a solution, saying, “You mustn’t leave us alone against the bosses,” with the threat that betrayed workers will vote for the openly fascist National Front.
This is the result of being trapped in the electoral process, presented with the “choice” of the Socialists, who are following an austerity policy, or the le Pen-led National Front, but with the same result. The latter is talking alliance with the right-wing Sarkozy UMP party — which lost last year’s election to the Socialists — and hoping to develop a populist appeal among workers sold out by the Socialists.
Rank-and-file workers’ direct strike action, as at Peugeot, needs communist leadership with the goal of overthrowing the job-destroying profit system rather than being diverted into depending on still another bosses’ party as the solution to the mass unemployment built into capitalism.

Over 30,000 books on Vietnam are in print. Why is one more, Kill Anything that Moves by Nick Turse, of unique value? The short answer is that it can be used as educational material. It provides 262 pages of historical facts gained from interviews and ten years of research, which prove that relentless massacres of workers and peasants on the ground and from the air were a core element of U.S. policy 40-50 years ago just as they are today.
Studying this evidence can help readers think more deeply about the causes of American racism, militarism and fascism. It fortifies our argument that U.S. capitalism and its advanced form, imperialism on a global scale, must be destroyed and that only a communist revolution can achieve it. We should make every effort to have everyone we know read the book’s fully documented exposures of the atrocities and unending mass killings that took place in Vietnam for over a decade.  
How many of us have heard of “Speedy Express”? Turse describes this six-month operation across the Mekong Delta (Dec. 68 - May 69) led by the army’s 9th Division as “industrial-scale slaughter.” Led by Gen. Julian Ewell, the operation was planned against a background of an attempt to jump-start peace talks in Paris before Lyndon Johnson left office. The U.S. sought to bring the rice-rich region and its huge population under Saigon’s control before any peace agreement.
Ewell was given a free hand and resources that included “helicopter gunships firing hundreds of rounds per minute, B-52s shaking the earth . . . F-4 Phantoms dropping canisters of napalm by the ton, navy ships off the coast that could hurl Volkswagen-sized shells at targets miles inland, and Swift Boats patrolling the delta’s waterways with machine guns . . .”  The results were a “kill ratio” (enemy to U.S. dead) of 134:1 in April 1969. Ewell’s goal was to kill 6,000 or more a month. Body counts were the most important measure of success. Who were these “enemies”?
The Viet Cong generally avoided combat when faced with the full might of the Americans, and the army’s own estimates showed that enemy forces in the region never declined and may have increased slightly. “Night search hunter-killer missions” were introduced. Primitive night-vision devices were used to identify targets, and accompanying helicopter gunships raked the area with machine guns. Top adviser John Paul Vann reported that troops simply targeted any and all people, homes and water buffalo. U.S. forces shot anyone who tried to run from the helicopters. The act of running made them enemies that could be added to sought-after body counts.
Speedy Express terrorized civilians with 6,500 tactical air strikes and the dropping of 5,078 tons of bombs and 1,784 tons of napalm. It is beyond the scope of this report to discuss the genocidal effects of the herbicide that was extensively used along river banks.
In 1971, a former aid worker, A. Shimkin, served as a Newsweek reporter. A master statistician, Shimkin crunched the numbers reported at the “Five O’Clock Follies,” the military’s nightly press briefings in Saigon. He studied the ratio of “enemy kills” to weapons recovered. The 9th Infantry reported killing 10,899 enemy troops in Speedy Express and recovering only 748 weapons. During the week of April 19, the reported ratio was 699 to 9. The army responded to charges of murdering civilians by explaining that the victims were “unarmed Viet Cong.”
Turse details how Newsweek and other media refused to publish Shimikin’s and other reports of atrocities and how the military covered up war crimes. One account exposes how a young officer named Colin Powell had nothing but praise for officers accused in the My Lai and other massacres. The book’s detailed history shows how the racism used to dehumanize victims was promoted from the top down. Enlisted men did commit crimes due to ignorance and racist thinking, but Kill Anything that Moves shows that the worst racists were the officers and fascist CIA and State Department planners who relied on anti-communism to justify genocide.
U.S. racist massacres did not begin or end with Vietnam. They continue in Afghanistan. In earlier wars, North Korea was “cratered” and millions of Korean civilians were slaughtered. Napalm was used in needless fire-bombing of Japanese cities other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were saved for the greatest terror spectacle of all.
Massacres have been part of human history since the beginning of exploitative societies, but what is important for us to do is point out that capitalist “progress” has never been able to fulfill humanity’s hope for peace. The technology controlled by imperialists has led to mass slaughter of workers on an unprecedented scale. Capitalist control of education, culture and the media has resulted in too many Americans becoming complacent about the use of advanced technology to slaughter non-combatants. Americans are taught that their military is a “force for good,” as the latest U.S. Navy commercial tells us.
PLP struggled, often successfully, to raise the level of understanding of U.S. imperialism among the hundreds of thousands who participated in the antiwar movement our party played a key role starting in the early1960s.  Shaken by the mass character of that movement, the U.S. retreat from Vietnam was followed by a powerful ideological counterattack and intensified glorification of militarism.
Hollywood’s Rambo series was a crude example of the stepped-up propaganda used to support aggression in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.  The intense anti-Asian racism of the academy award winning movie, The Deer Hunter, attempted to justify the atrocities of U.S. imperialism’s war making.
The move to a better-paid volunteer army replacing an army of draftees, the promotion of patriotism and revenge for 9/11, and the demonization of “rogue states that hate democracy” make our job as anti-imperialists more challenging. With reporters “embedded,” media coverage of wars is better managed. We have to fight harder on all ideological fronts. Nick Turse’s Kill Anything that Moves can be used to help win people to our party. It should be used energetically — by students, GIs, study groups, high school and college teachers, and parents trying to bring political understanding to their children.
Close to a year ago, Challenge carried a front page story on Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’ midnight murders of 16 women and children in Afghanistan. We have to continue this type of exposure that pinpoints how racism leads to war crimes and how military technology is used to massacre millions, all to further the aim of U.S. imperialists to dominate the world.

Boston Bombing  Whoever planted the pipe bombs that killed three people at the Boston Marathon and injured more than 150 is a terrorist who committed a heinous act of murder.  We must understand that this tragedy is just one example of many in the world.  Everyday people in Iraq, Afghanistan, India and in several African countries, routinely experience urban bombings.   Even wealthy cities, such as London and Tel Aviv, have experienced urban bombings.  They have become part of life in our unequal, unjust world. 

Capitalism Kills  The root of terrorism worldwide is the anger and suffering generated by poverty and inequality.  Capitalism is a truly brutal system, causing massive war, starvation, and racist inequality throughout the world.  This deadly profit system causes horrific destruction and loss of life from Haiti to Greece.  The U.S. has the productive capacity to produce enough food to feed the whole planet.  However, 40 million people worldwide die every year due to starvation.  This, too is a kind of terrorism, where innocent lives are lost needlessly.  Even in the U.S. today, we experience economic terrorism in the form of huge cuts in workers’ wages and benefits and massive unemployment.

US Government is one of the biggest Terrorists    One of the biggest perpetrators of terrorism is the very person who claims to be our protector, President Obama.  Obama and the US government claim that “surgical” drone strikes, using unpiloted aircraft, avoid civilians.  They say that drones offer a low-cost, politically low-risk means of prosecuting their “war on terror” without engaging U.S. troops.  However, of the untold hundreds of innocent people killed so far by drones, nearly half are children, according to a recent study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of mostly noncombatants have been killed by the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan alone as it fights to control the most plentiful supplies of cheap oil in the world.  These are examples of state sponsored terrorism.

Bombing and Fascism   Since 9/11, the bosses have been monitoring all workers more closely.  Although they do this in the name of security neither the country nor the world is safer today.  Similarly, the Boston bombing tragedy, will be used to win people to accept more centralized government control over our lives.  Under Obama, Supermax prisons continue to lock up 1000s in complete isolation, driving many insane. Many of these prisoners are completely innocent. Under Obama, we have more racist cop terror.  Under Obama, we have drone surveillance inside the US.  Under Obama, we have more FBI wiretapping and more cameras watching us. As the manager of the US profit empire, Obama is leading us down the path of fascism (i.e. police state). 

The working class worldwide suffers from U.S. imperialism’s march to wider wars.  Our class’s answer remains to intensify class struggle against these murderous rulers and their poisonous profit system. We can see this happening in Pakistan’s mass strikes, and in workers’ mass protests in Greece and Spain. We see renewed struggle beginning to emerge in the U.S., with the fight -backs against racist cop terror and anti-Wall Street demonstrators in cities across the country.

The only solution is communist revolution  Progressive Labor Party is a revolutionary communist party dedicated to eliminating capitalism as the only way to end imperialism, fascism, racism, sexism, exploitation, poverty, and terrorism.  If we want peace in the world, we must eliminate the war-makers.  We are fighting for communism—a society run by workers where the wealth is distributed according to need not profit.

March on May Day  May Day is a holiday celebrated worldwide.  It was inspired by a massive general strike for the eight-hour work day organized by workers in Chicago in 1886.  On Saturday, April 27th, in Brooklyn NY, Progressive Labor Party will march to fight to smash all forms of terror including imperialist war and racist police terror, and to end racism, sexism, and wage slavery.  Join us!