NEW YORK CITY, January 14 — Gentrification is a racist policy used by real estate profiteers, landlords, bankers, investors, educational institutions and government politicians to transform mostly black and Latino low-income neighborhoods into high-rent, mostly white enclaves. Landlords empty buildings, abandon them and declare neighborhoods “blighted.”
Columbia University is currently building a satellite campus in Manhattan’s West Harlem that will raise rents in the surrounding areas.
Landlords spread racist lies, saying black and Latino tenants in low-income neighborhoods are “dirty” or “criminals,” or that too many people and children live in the apartments and destroy property. Facing harassment, tenants move, seeking a better situation but where conditions turn out to be worse, crowded and neglected. The new neighborhood is often further from workplaces and has large numbers of unemployed.
The average price of condos here is 1.4 million dollars. Monthly rents run from $2,000 to 10,000. Condo prices in lower and mid-town Manhattan can reach as high as $90 million. Meanwhile 60 percent of NYC tenants earn $50,000 a year or below, and 30% of those earn under $30,000.
Such tenants are forced to flee these high-rent areas.
Neighborhoods change, become “hip.” Businesses cater to high-rent tenants, opening pricey markets and stores. Williamsburg in Brooklyn has been gentrified and now it’s spreading to surrounding boro neighborhoods, especially Bushwick. Bushwick’s white tenant population has grown by 19.7 percent. Agencies sometimes no longer rent to Spanish-speaking tenants.
PL’ers are helping to build a fight-back in Bushwick. We must unite black, Latino, Asian and white working-class tenants.
Demand:
Only low-rent housing
Turn vacant buildings into good low-income housing
Take over expensive condo buildings and change them into good low-rent apartments
Immediate low-income housing for families and individuals in shelters and for victims of Hurricane Sandy.
Lower rents now! Low-income families can’t pay $1,200 to $2,600 and more in rent. There are thousands of multi-millionaires and scores of billionaires in NYC. Landlords and their agents are raking in obscenely high rents on the backs of the working class.
Capitalism can not and will not provide decent affordable housing for the working class, only profits for the capitalists. We need to overthrow capitalism with communist revolution.
Communists believe that consciousness of how capitalism works is a powerful tool in the hands of the working class. We believe it’s not for the working class to make reformist compromises with the capitalists. It’s our job to unite and fight for what we need. The working class must be bold and purposeful.
Communists believe that, over time, workers will join PLP in ever greater numbers and build the fight for communism, a society in which the working class will hold all power. We will provide housing for the working class in an egalitarian society. To this goal we dedicate ourselves now in the fight against racist gentrification.

Workers Pay for Bosses’ Wars, Crises

The class of big businessmen (the owners and managers of Wall Street firms and major corporations like GM, GE, ExxonMobil and Microsoft), along with the politicians and generals who do their bidding, constitute a ruling class in the U.S. Their tremendous wealth and power enables them to control — and rule —government policy. However, divisions within this class, along with infighting between the two major capitalist parties, have made it very difficult to obtain changes in federal taxes and spending vital to their maintaining U.S. capitalism’s world dominance.
Federal government spending is now 23% of the gross domestic product (GDP), while federal tax revenues are only 16% of GDP. Thus the government runs a huge annual deficit and must borrow to pay for it. The total federal debt is now over $16 trillion dollars, requiring payment of more than $220 billion in interest last year. In 2012, the deficit was $1.1 trillion, the fourth consecutive year the deficit exceeded one trillion dollars.
The rulers recognize the problem and have gone to great lengths to try to solve it. So far they’ve failed. In 2009, Obama appointed a bi-partisan Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (CFRR), headed by ex-Senator Simpson (Republican), and ex-chief of Staff Bowles (Democrat). The CFRR’s top concern was to push back rising U.S. competitors. Their report concluded: (1) high interest rates make U.S. businesses uncompetitive; (2) deficits make it harder to finance “emergency needs such as wars and recessions”; (3) China, “a nation that may not share our country’s aspirations and strategic interests,” is a huge holder of U.S. debt; and (4) investors could lose confidence in the U.S. ability to repay its debt, “triggering a debt crisis” and forcing the government “to implement the most stringent of austerity measures.”
The CFRR plan demanded slashing spending on Social Security, Medicare and other social programs and lowering corporate taxes while insulating war spending from cuts.
Like all bosses, U.S. rulers fight among themselves through the political parties they control. Those squabbles have so far derailed the CFRR’s plan. The recently passed fiscal deal will do virtually nothing to reduce the deficit. It will increase tax rates on the very rich to 39.6%, which is still historically low (the rate was 91% under Eisenhower and 70% under Nixon). Payroll taxes workers pay for Social Security and Medicare will rise while cutting a few exemptions and deductions for high-income earners. But this entire tax deal will net just $620 billion in revenue over 10 years, not enough to cover even the $1 trillion annual deficit.
That section of the ruling class whose profits depend on having a powerful U.S. world presence, from the Middle East to Asia —  which includes big Wall Street banks, oil and gas companies like Exxon-Mobil, weapons manufacturers like Boeing and other multi-nationals — is clearly alarmed by these big deficits. As the CFRR report says, they fret that huge deficits endanger the big increases in military spending required to meet the challenges posed by U.S. rivals. According to Admiral Mike Mullen, the national debt is the “[U.S.] biggest security threat.”
Although the U.S. has been increasing military spending 9% a year (mostly for its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan), China has been increasing its military spending by 13% a year for the past 15 years, mostly for new weapons, ships and submarines. Though the U.S. still has the world’s most powerful military, China is catching up. It has aggressively pursued its territorial claims in the South China and East China Seas. China will surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy within the decade. It is vigorously contesting U.S. economic dominance in region after region, from Latin America to Japan and Korea to Egypt, whose new president Morsi recently went to Beijing seeking more trade and investment.
To counter China’s rising power, the Obama administration announced it will increase U.S. military presence in the Pacific. It has also vowed to contain Iran and not allow it to obtain nuclear weapons. Either one of these conflicts could lead to war and would require trillions of dollars in military spending immediately.
The ruling class won’t surrender until its power is crushed by masses of revolutionary workers. It is working overtime to win workers to fascist ideas — sacrificing for the “national interest” and supporting fascist tactics like torture (portrayed in the new movie “Zero Dark Thirty”). Groups like Fix the Debt (run by billionaire hedge fund manager Pete Peterson, with Simpson and Bowles of the CFRR as key members) plot to convince millions of people, from retirees to veterans, to accept a lower standard of living.
The next “cliff” will be March 1, the deadline for negotiations over raising the debt ceiling. To stimulate the war fever necessary to cut social programs and maintain their top-dog position, the rulers will undertake whatever they think necessary, including orchestrating a 9/11-type incident or provoking a military confrontation in the Persian Gulf or the Pacific.
A system that cannot survive without imperialist wars and massive attacks on workers’ standard of living must be destroyed. That’s why every CHALLENGE reader should consider joining PLP and organizing to smash capitalism now.

Latest Scheme Not Enough

Ruling-class spokesmen sharply attacked the fiscal deal for failing to provide the revenues necessary to maintain U.S. supremacy. Richard Haas, president of the Rockefeller-led Council on Foreign Relations, complained: “There’s a sense that we’ve been playing roulette with our position, and this deal does nothing to stop that.” New York Times’ columnist David Brooks scolds Congress and Obama for failing to slash Medicare now, saying the U.S. must choose between being a “global military power” and a “welfare state,” and can’t be both (1/8/13).
In case anyone missed the point, David Sanger, the Times’ chief Washington correspondent summarized: “With economic growth harder to come by, the only obvious way to make major cuts in the budget is to go after Social Security, Medicare and [the] $1 trillion national security budget — which includes the military, intelligence, diplomacy and development. And whenever the United States decides not to engage in some part of the world, countries look to a new source of investment and aid: China” (NYT, 1/4/13).

Obama, Clinton, Bushes Killed Millions More

We join the grief felt by the parents of the 20 children murdered in Newtown, Connecticut, and by the families of the six school workers. It’s unfortunate, however, that grief under capitalism is selectively expressed. Far less sympathy can be found for the families of children, overwhelmingly black and Latino, who are fatally shot routinely by the rulers’ cops in cities across the United States. 

Capitalist influences led to Adam Lanza’s rampage. His “me-against-the-world” outlook was an extreme but revealing reflection of the profit system’s inherent individualism and cutthroat competition. Capitalism is based on reaping profits at the expense of rival capitalists and on the backs of the losers’ laid-off workers. When workers are confronted by the lethal problems caused by this system, the rulers tell them, “You have to look out for yourself.”  The bosses’ greatest fear is that workers will discover the real solution: Uniting with our class sisters and brothers to collectively fight our oppressors.

When we, the working class, run society, collectivity will stamp out much of the anti-social pathology that periodically explodes in individuals like Adam Lanza. When communist ideas were prevalent in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, collectivity was taught almost from birth. Babies were given blocks too big and heavy for one of them to move or manipulate by themselves; block-stacking required a group of babies to work together. In school, marks were given not to individuals but to the class as a whole. As a result, more advanced students were induced to help their classmates improve.

During capitalism’s Great Depression of the 1930s, tens of millions of workers were tossed onto the unemployment rolls because they were no longer useful in creating profits for their exploiters. But during the same period, the Soviet Union maintained full employment. Everyone was needed to help build a society to benefit the entire working class. Communists believe that everyone has the potential to contribute to society. A communist society will treat and overcome anti-social behavior through reeducation and any necessary treatment. 

Adam Lanza was a creature of capitalism, from its rotten health care system to the war culture created by U.S. imperialists. In the aftermath of the Newtown massacre, well-meaning people are clamoring for reforms in mental health services and gun control. But capitalism cannot be pacified or disarmed. It depends on fascist violence for its very existence. (For an explanation of fascist violence, see letter on page 6.)

U.S. Presidents: Murderers-in-Chief

The same system that depicts Lanza as a monster makes heroes out of far deadlier mass murderers, including every U.S. president from Harry Truman to the Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Each of them is responsible for killing millions of civilians, from the genocidal use of atomic weapons in Japan to the imperialist “surge” in Afghanistan and the “collateral” civilian victims of drone killings in Pakistan. In between, the U.S. rulers have slaughtered millions of innocents through their interventions in Guatemala, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam (more than two million civilians there alone).

Many more were murdered as a direct result of the U.S. rulers’ installation of the fascist Shah in Iran, the CIA assassination of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and the U.S. backing of South African apartheid, a fascist system that led to the deaths of fifty percent of the children before they reached the age of five. The U.S. bosses helped murder a million people by supplying Saddam Hussein with weapons and intelligence in his war with Iran, and caused another million deaths in Iraq from two wars and eight years of Clinton sanctions that cut off food and medical supplies. 

Within U.S. borders, racist cops execute scores of youth, majority black and Latino, who bear the brunt of this intensifying fascism. In 2010 alone, there were 91 unjustified cop shootings that killed the victim (CATO Institute report in NY Daily News, 12/30). 

Where the guilty U.S. rulers and their henchmen are concerned, there are no consequences for their lethal brutality. And it’s no surprise that none of these mass slaughters have drawn any public displays of sympathy from the White House.

Meanwhile, beginning in the 1970s, U.S. officials initiated the wholesale elimination of mental health facilities. That’s when U.S. imperialists’ defeat in Vietnam and sharpening foreign economic competition first threatened the top-dog status that they’d enjoyed since World War II. Over the same period, Pentagon spending (in today’s dollars) has doubled. The state psychiatric hospital in Lanza’s Newtown, which once served up to 4,000 patients, was closed in 1995 as the imperialists tightened the workers’ belts.

Lanza was diagnosed with autism, a disorder affecting the brain’s development of social and communicative skills. The great majority of autistic people never hurt anyone. But Lanza’s case showed that even the children of affluent families are denied adequate mental health care in a society whose rulers have other priorities.

Factional Fight Over Militarizing the U.S.

Different factions of U.S. capitalists have pounced on the murders in Newtown to push their competing views for militarizing the nation. Politicians and TV pundits, careful not to offend their ruling-class patrons, never denounce the alienating, dehumanizing, death-dealing profit system. Instead, they attack the scheme of one capitalist gang or another to mobilize the U.S. populace for war. The conservative, mainly Republican, National Rifle Association (NRA) blasted the liberal, mainly Democratic media for distributing the shoot-’em-up video games played by Lanza. The NRA then called for uniformed armed guards at the door of every school in the land, along with concealed guns for teachers and principals. 

Liberals fired back with both barrels, ridiculing NRA mouthpiece Wayne LaPierre. The NRA’s plan to put state-sponsored gunmen even in wealthy suburban schools is outrageous to the liberals, even though armed cops and metal detectors already “greet” working-class students each day in liberal-run cities like New York and Chicago. The liberals want their cannon fodder to be willing, not intimidated. This policy split recalls the divergent methods among the Nazis, who used both blunt terror (the Gestapo’s ruthless fascist police) and calculated indoctrination (the Hitler Youth) to consolidate their hold on the German population.  

The New York Times heaped hypocrisy on hypocrisy by attacking NRA-boosting gun manufacturers’ ties to video games, where the gun-makers get generous product placement. “These troubling relationships expose the NRA’s disingenuous [deceitful] strategy of blaming the media” (NYT, 12/27/12). But in defending the video media, the Times failed to disclose the industry’s direct link to imperialist war-makers far bigger than Bushmaster or Colt.

‘Call of Duty’ Unites Bosses

Big Oil, the gun and video game industries, and the arms manufacturers are all inter-connected. “Call of Duty,” reportedly Lanza’s favorite interactive video game, comes from French conglomerate Vivendi’s wholly owned U.S. subsidiary Activision. One Vivendi board member, Christophe de Margerie, serves as chairman of oil giant Total, whose billionaire shareholders profit mightily by his partnering with the U.S. killing machine. Total, which originally sided with Saddam Hussein, now controls oil fields throughout Iraq as a payoff for French troop contributions to the U.S.-led Afghan slaughter. Late last month, Vivendi’s CEO, Jean-Bernard Lévy, became chairman of arms maker Thalès, tenth on the Pentagon’s list of death merchant contractors.

The liberal Times speaks for a U.S. faction planning for ultimate all-out global war. It sees violent video games as a means for recruiting “middle-class” youth who aren’t yet reached by today’s economic draft. The latest installment of “Call of Duty,” so beloved by both Lanza and the Times, envisions a World War III against Russia a decade away and features a “USS Obama” aircraft carrier.

It’s not such a big leap from games like “Call of Duty” to the real-life massacres planned by U.S. rulers. GE boasts that its “IPS5100 [weapons/vision system] can be used in armored vehicles to give troops 360° situational awareness with the help of panoramic imagery that can be manipulated by touch screen, joystick and game-style controller” (Business Insider, 3/13/12). The video games’ usefulness in pre-training potential U.S. soldiers underlies the Times’ “don’t-blame-the-games” stance. 

Communists + Class Struggle = Revolution Against Capitalism

Overthrowing the intensifying fascism of the capitalists who enabled Newtown will require a supreme collective effort by a communist-led working class. The seeds of this struggle can be seen in the growing class struggles worldwide. Masses of women (and men) are marching against fascist anti-women violence in India. Garment workers are staging militant protests against profiteering murderers in Bangladesh. Anti-austerity demonstrators are on the march in Pakistan, France, Haiti, Spain, Egypt and Portugal. Miners are armed for class war in South Africa. In the U.S., battles continue to rage against racist cop killings in New York City and Los Angeles and union-busting in Wisconsin and Ohio.

As the Progressive Labor Party’s influence and leadership grows in the two dozen countries where communist clubs have been established, our ideas will win masses of workers to understand that this vicious capitalist system can’t be reformed. Destroying it and building a new society — run by and for our class, which produces everything of value — must become the order of the day. Join PLP!

BROOKLYN, NY, December 31 — Downstate Medical Center here, whose patients come from an underserved predominantly Caribbean working-class community, is threatened with closing, or privatization or both. Workers at the hospital, which belongs to New York State, are in the fight of their lives. We are living in times when the major imperialists who run this country need to divert money from health care and other human services to spend trillions on their fight with other imperialists over world domination.

The threat to Downstate comes against a background of other hospital closings and forced mergers. Brooklyn’s Interfaith hospital was forced into bankruptcy just last month and will be closed. At Downstate, Gov. Cuomo, who is also planning huge Medicare and Medicaid cuts, hired John Williams as the new President of Downstate. Williams and his allies already have a long history of gutting healthcare and closing or privatizing hospitals. 

At George Washington University in D.C.,where Williams made his reputation, he was made Vice President in charge of the medical school and hospital because the Trustees liked the way he had helped sell 80% of the hospital to for-profit Universal Health Services. He did such a good job, he was able to collect salaries from both GWU and Universal — until they found out! To balance the medical center’s budget, which had been losing millions each year, Williams closed five suburban clinics and the HMO. He also sold off the faculty practice plan and laid off 500 staff members and 50 doctors. Now Cuomo wants him to do the same here, and is paying him over $750,000 a year to do the hatchet job.

Many of us have worked at Downstate for years. We have worked through hiring freezes and pay lags when there were cutbacks. We have worked short-staffed, trying our best to meet the needs of our patients. We have fought for adequate staff.   Depending on the state of the capitalist economy, things have been bad or worse. It has been no picnic for workers or patients in this state-run hospital.

Williams would redefine our medical center as a “clinical enterprise.”  His plans likely include some form of privatization, possibly a closure of Downstate. He threatens the latter if we workers and patients don’t sacrifice. We must demand these cuts be rescinded, and that more government money be available for care of uninsured workers. 

The bosses and their henchmen like Williams are trying to take back hard-won benefits from the remaining union workers by spreading the lie that we have it “so good.” It is the height of hypocrisy when people like Williams and his other high-paid six-figure cronies try to paint regular state workers as greedy and lazy!

What kind of system makes the healthcare of the working class (especially the black, Latino and immigrant workers) secondary to profits? For our patients and our co-workers, we reject sacrificing for the capitalist system. Read CHALLENGE to learn of workers’ struggles around the world against imperialism and for communism.