It is hard to count demonstrators spread out across thousands of mobilizations, but it seems that over half a million people were involved in “Act Four” of the Yellow Vests mobilization in France on Saturday, Dec. 8.

In Bordeaux, a huge joint demonstration uniting university students and Yellow Vests chanted: “Students and Yellow Vests! Same Macron! Same struggle!” In Toulouse, Lyon, Saint Etienne, Marseilles, Dieppe and dozens of other towns, many thousands marched. Even in smaller places like Albi or Auch, there was a fine Yellow Vests demonstration.

A lively picket was organized in front of the factory in Sarthe, which makes tear gas grenades. At Saint-Avold, in the east of France, a replica of a guillotine was placed at a major roundabout. A few days earlier in the port of Saint Nazaire in Brittany, demonstrators repainted the banks of the town in bright yellow, while a cake shop owner in the south started selling special lemon eclairs in the form of a Yellow Vests protester!

A people’s movement like this can never stand still: It has to keep rising or it will quickly decline. People make sacrifices to go out and occupy the roundabouts and motorway toll booths, they find the time and money to go to Paris or to the regional capital for the Saturday demonstration, and they live the stressful life of activism. But they want results. Although the togetherness and the dignity of resistance are important to people, unless some progress is seen each week, the temptation to go home, watch TV and repaint your bathroom instead will tend to win out.

Read at Yellow Vests: Act Four: Where is France Going?

The 500 Chicago charter school teachers at 15 UNO/Acero charter schools reached a tentative agreement with management on December 9. The strike has been suspended.

Chris Baehrend, the chairperson of the Charter Division of the Chicago Teachers Union, said: “This is a victory for students, parents, teachers and all staff. Because we stayed united, we won smaller class sizes, sanctuary schools, a reduced school year and equal pay with district [non-charter] teachers.”

Read the union’s announcement at CTU strikers reach tentative agreement with UNO/Acero management

On Nov. 25, 2016, Fidel Castro, the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution, died at age 90.

Around the world and especially on the island he helped free from capitalist exploitation, organizations and individuals celebrated his life and contributions on the second anniversary of his death. These remembrances coincided with the final stages of wide public discussion both in Cuba and its diaspora to update the Cuban Constitution — a document that guarantees socialist development and the right to universal free health care and education as well as access to culture and sports.

Of the many proposed constitutional updates, one of the most discussed and noted is Article 68, which deletes references to gender in defining marriage. The proposed new Cuban Constitution defines marriage as between two people instead of between a man and a woman, opening the door for same-sex marriage.

In his first interview, Cuba’s recently-elected President Miguel Diaz-Canel supported equal marriage rights. He told TeleSUR on Sept. 17 that recognizing marriage as between two people without limitations is part of eliminating all forms of discrimination in society.

How is it that Cuba leapfrogs forward?  

On Nov. 29, Mariela Castro Espín, director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education (CENESEX) in Havana and an activist for LGBTQ+ rights, explained why Cuba was ready for same-sex marriage in a video interview with the BBC. She said through a translator:

“This change is important because it is the political will of the Cuban government to advance a human rights agenda and to extend it to as many areas as possible.

“It is time that the people of Cuba understand the need to recognize and protect the rights of everyone without excluding people by their sexuality, their gender identity, disability or race. …

“Cuban society is showing it is continuing as a society in revolution. It is in an experimental stage of a socio-economic and political system in a socialist democracy, not a social-democratic one. This means we can have the mechanisms for a fair society.

“Cuba is far more advanced in comparison with other Latin American countries because the people have managed to take power and they are backed by the Communist Party.”

And this is also why Fidel Castro’s memory and life still give struggling people so many lessons. On May 1, 2000, he said:

“Revolution is having a sense of the historic moment; it is changing everything that must be changed; it is full equality and freedom; it is being treated and treating others like human beings; it is emancipating ourselves on our own and through our own efforts; it is challenging powerful dominant forces in and beyond the social and national arena; it is defending the values in which we believe at the price of any sacrifice; it is modesty, selflessness, altruism, solidarity, and heroism; it is fighting with courage, intelligence and realism; it is never lying or violating ethical principles; it is a profound conviction that there is no power in the world that can crush the power of truth and ideas.

“Revolution is unity; it is independence, it is struggling for our dreams of justice for Cuba and for the world, which is the foundation of our patriotism, our socialism, and our internationalism.”

Challenging class-based gender roles

Cuban women have been integral to the struggle for independence from colonialism. Carlota Lucumí, an enslaved Cuban woman of Yoruba origin, lost her life leading an 1843-1844 slave rebellion at the Triunvirato sugar mill in Matanzas. Cuba gave the name “Operation Carlota” to its international military support that, alongside Angola’s MPLA national liberation front, defeated the racist apartheid South African regime at Cuito Cuanavale in 1988.

Cuban independence fighters Mariana Grajales and Ana Betancourt are remembered for their early roles. After the July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago, Haydée Santamaria and Melba Hernández were imprisoned. In the Sierra Maestra mountains, Celia Sánchez and Vilma Espín(mother of Mariela Castro and founder of the Federation of Cuban Women) were leaders and organizers.

Fidel Castro formed, armed and trained the Mariana Grajales women’s platoon. Brigadier General Teté Puebla is the highest-ranking woman in Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces.

“How can we give rifles to women when there are so many men who are unarmed?” asked some of the men. Fidel answered, “Because they are better soldiers than you are. More disciplined.”

Cuba’s 1961 Literacy Campaign not only eradicated illiteracy in a year, but opened new horizons, especially for the young women teachers who broke traditions’ chains to build the new socialist revolution. Check out the wonderful movie “Maestra” for more on this transformation.

Following the 2018 elections, 53.2 percent of the Cuban National Assembly delegates are women. They are diplomats, like Ambassador Anayansi Rodríguez Camejo at the United Nations and Josefina Vidal, Cuba’s chief negotiator in the reestablishment of U.S.-Cuba diplomatic relations.

As documented in Leslie Feinberg’s 2009 book, “Rainbow Solidarity in Defense of Cuba,” gender reassignment surgery is available free of charge, and a person’s right to change their name and sexual identity was acknowledged by Cuban law. (p. 86)

Mariela Castro Espín told the BBC interviewer: “The world is very different from Cuba. It doesn’t mean that Cuba is better, but Cuba is fighting to make a different world. If they left us alone, and our project doesn’t get sabotaged, it would be wonderful. It would be a wonderful alternative in the world. Why does everything have to be capitalist?”

The vote on the proposed Constitution with amendments from the national consultation is scheduled for Feb. 24, 2019. The consultation included 133,681 meetings with 8,945,521 people attending. Of those, 1,706,872 speakers made 783,174 proposals, including modifications, additions, deletions and clarifications. Cubans living abroad made 2,125 proposals. (Granma, Nov. 27).

Across Canada and the U.S., Indigenous women can often be seen at marches wearing red shawls or scarves, sometimes holding red dresses aloft. Indigenous people have formed dozens of organizations and organized walks and marches of solidarity and memory as well as standouts at government buildings and universities. They have written and spoken thousands of words, made videos and created art installations.

These actions are part of an ever-growing movement to amplify Indigenous voices and to remember and bring more attention to the longstanding issue of “Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls & Two-Spirit People” (MMIWG2S), lift up the concerns of their families and demand action to end the widespread violence.

In Canada, at least 5,100 women have gone missing or have been murdered nationally, with some areas such as Indigenous communities near the “Highway of Tears” in the Canadian province of British Columbia being particularly hard-hit. Many Indigenous families have been devastated by having family members stolen from them.

One of the many reasons that Indigenous nations all over are fighting against pipelines, fracking and mining is that man camps are set up for the influx of workers. The men have huge sums of money and lots of drugs to entice Indigenous women, who often end up being addicted and trafficked. Some of these women disappear; some are killed.

Man camps are one of the many factors that lead to MMIWG2S in Canada and the U.S. Most of the men who assault or kill Indigenous women are white men, who act without fear of consequences in many jurisdictions.

But the disappearances do not just happen on reservations or in rural areas. The majority of Indigenous people live in urban areas, where Indigenous women are also targeted.

In Duluth, Minn., Indigenous women are stolen and held aboard ships to be sex trafficked on Lake Superior. In Canadian cities like Winnipeg in Manitoba, Indigenous youth, women and 2-Spirit people disappear all the time.

Bowing to public pressure, the Canadian government has undertaken a national MMIW inquiry, but that has been criticized for not being sufficiently staffed and insensitive to the needs of families and survivors.

The violence that Indigenous women experience knows no borders. During the Guatemalan civil war, tens of thousands of Indigenous women were raped as part of the genocidal government policy that also caused the killings of tens of thousands of largely Maya women and men.

In Mexico, Ciudad de Juárez and Chihuahua are infamous for their high murder and disappearance rates, with Indigenous women workers particularly targeted. Throughout Latin America, women march to demand: “¡No Más Femicidios! ¡Ni Una Más! ¡Ni Una Menos!”

Australian Indigenous women have long been under attack, too. In both Australia and the U.S., Indigenous women are at least six times more likely to be murdered than the general population.

Inadequate yet appalling statistics

It’s hard to give exact figures for the magnitude of the problem because there are no central databases in the U.S. or Canada. Even when figures are available, they may not include Indigenous 2-Spirit people. (“Two-Spirit” refers to an Indigenous spectrum of gender nonconforming people, and some include lesbian, gay and bi people within the term.)

The statistics we do have are appalling. Studies indicate that 84 to 90 percent of Indigenous women have experienced violence, and 56 percent of Indigenous women are survivors of sexual violence, although many Indigenous experts think those numbers are too low.

Indigenous organizations and individuals have been working diligently to compile more comprehensive lists than currently exist and to construct meaningful databases.

One of the problems in talking about MMIWG2S is that Indigenous people are routinely undercounted and not identified separately in many statistics. Recently, through Freedom of Information Act requests, the Urban Indian Health Institute (UIHI) identified 506 murdered or missing urban Indigenous women from the 71 U.S. cities from which they had requested data.

But that is an unrealistically low figure. Some cities, such as Santa Fe, N.M., do not even identify Indigenous people separately in their statistics, even though there is a large Indigenous population in that area. Instead they may classify Indigenous women as Black, white or “Hispanic.” Indigenous people are also not included because coroners, researchers and others make assumptions about what Indigenous people look like or where they live. It is because they do not believe that Native people count, so need not be counted. This undercounting is part of the erasure of Indigenous lives.

UIHI notes that “the National Crime Information Center reports that, in 2016, there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, though the U.S. Department of Justice’s federal missing persons database, NamUs, only logged 116 cases. … No research has been done on rates of such violence among American Indian and Alaska Native women living in urban areas despite the fact that approximately 71 percent of American Indian and Alaska Natives live in urban areas.” (http://www.uihi.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Missing-and-Murdered-Indigenous-Women-and-Girls-Report.pdf)

Communities organize for self-defense

There are many proposals from Indigenous communities about what can be done. In addition to creating national databases of missing persons that identify Indigenous people, states and municipalities would need to be mandated to obtain proper data.

Other proposals include providing greater access to resources and services and providing special training to police forces. But more policing is not necessarily a viable solution. In many areas, the police have been a part of the problem, suspected of being among those who assault or steal women and also accused of being resistant to investigating when missing women are reported. Native people — men as well as women — also have the highest rates of death by police in the U.S.

Often ignored by police, Indigenous communities and families sometimes undertake their own investigations and organize for self-defense.

For instance, in the Canadian city of Winnipeg, the Drag The Red community organization has searched for remains of MMIWG2S in the Red River in order to provide some closure to heartbroken families who did not know what had become of the person who had gone missing.

The Bear Clan Patrol organized by the large urban Indigenous community in Winnipeg operates as volunteer Indigenous peacekeepers who work within the community to increase safety.

A key proposal is that no projects should happen on Indigenous land without Indigenous consent, so that the Indigenous nation can take into account the impacts that the project might have. The U.S. and Canada are both historically resistant to this concept.

Historical underpinnings of MMIWG2S

Some of the reforms that are being proposed will certainly help. But they will not entirely solve the crisis.

That is because violence against women and 2-Spirit people is a hallmark of colonialism in the Americas, started by Christopher Columbus and his men when they raped, murdered and kidnapped their way through the lands they claimed for Spain. This violence is a mechanism of domination and oppression. It is intended to terrorize, disrupt and demoralize Indigenous populations.

The violence of settler colonialism — a form of colonialism that seeks to replace the original population of a colonized territory with a new society of settlers — is not just something that happened in the past. It’s an ongoing system of power that perpetuates genocide and repression of Indigenous peoples and cultures.

And the violence stems from capitalism, the profit-seeking socioeconomic system we live under, where our social relations are based on commodities for exchange such as private property and the exploitation of labor and the land.

Settler colonialism and capitalism try to disrupt our natural relationships to the land and make them nothing more than property relationships, something to be bought and sold and exploited. The devaluation of the lives and bodies of Indigenous people, and the violence against Indigenous women in particular, are deeply intertwined with the contempt that settlers and their systems have for the land. They do not respect the sovereignty of Indigenous nations or lands, and they do not respect the sovereignty of Indigenous bodies that by their very existence stand in the way of the settlers.

These systems reduce people to property, leading to violence against the land and violence against Black and Brown bodies. White supremacy, racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia reinforce the colonial violence.

The ongoing crisis of MMIWG2S is also interrelated with the violence being enacted right now against migrant families — many of them Indigenous — coming from Honduras, Mexico and other countries. Women and 2-Spirits are especially endangered in their home countries as well as in the U.S.

This year, Roxsana Hernández Rodríguez, a trans migrant, died in ICE custody after being severely beaten and denied medical care, and Claudia Patricia Gómez González, an unarmed Maya migrant, was shot at the border by the Border Patrol, while Indigenous children are ripped from their families and caged.

Tijuana, Mexico

Sometimes as workers we forget that we’re part of a large family of working people around the world. But it’s the truth. And when your family is under attack, you want to do everything you can to help.

This spirit of solidarity fueled a people’s aid caravan from Los Angeles on Dec. 1 that carried desperately needed supplies destined for the more than 6,000 refugees — children, women, men, LGBTQ+ people, Indigenous and Afro-Latinxs – trapped in Tijuana, Mexico, by President Donald Trump’s attempts to block Central American asylum seekers from entering the U.S.

These are workers fleeing political and economic violence imposed on Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and other countries by decades of U.S. intervention under both Republican and Democratic regimes. They are facing down the barrels of the racist Border Patrol that teargasses families, and the thousands of U.S. troops deployed by Trump, who said that these troops should shoot at the slightest provocation.

In response to what it characterized as “a humanitarian crisis,” the American Indian Movement of Southern California (AIM SoCal), along with Movimiento Cosecha L.A., initiated this solidarity caravan — one of many now being organized throughout the Southwest and across the country.

We represented the Welcome/Bienvenida Refugee Caravan Committees, along with other activists from Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York and San Diego. Participating organizations included Assistance for the Resistance, Kids Out Of Cages, the Harriet Tubman Social Justice Center-Los Angeles, the Baltimore People’s Power Assembly, Solidarity with Novorossiya & Antifascists in Ukraine, and more.

The call went out for people to donate needed supplies, which were collected at Bernie’s Coffee Shop, a long-abandoned diner in Los Angeles’ museum district that has been converted into a movement space. And so, during the last week of November, as the word spread, donations blossomed – including tents and tarps, diapers and bottles, coats and blankets, toiletries and toys, bottled water and canned food.

Workers solicited donations in their workplaces, schools and communities. It was truly inspiring to see the outpouring of people’s solidarity as it took shape day by day. Volunteers gathered nightly to unload donation drop-offs, sort items, and fold T-shirts and other clothing.

Caravan to the border

Then, on Saturday morning, Dec. 1, a multinational, multigenerational team of more than two dozen activists gathered at Bernie’s to load the people’s aid into cars, minivans and pickup trucks for the 3-hour-plus trip to the U.S.-Mexico border.

By midafternoon, the vehicles converged at a San Diego home which serves as a coordination center on the U.S. side. There, we received an orientation from local activists, who gave updates on possible border closures and a hunger strike by a group of Central American refugees protesting the alarming conditions they face in Tijuana.

We learned that aid delivery would be especially challenging this weekend due to Mexican authorities’ decision to move thousands of refugees from the Benito Juárez sports complex near the border to a shelter 11 miles away. Though justified by the government as a move to improve conditions for the refugees, many believe it was meant to discourage border protests by the refugees like the one that was brutally attacked with tear gas by the U.S. Border Patrol on Nov. 25.

Before crossing the border, it was important for us to pack our aid discretely to avoid harassment, fines or confiscation. We ended up taking about half of the aid brought down from Los Angeles. The rest was left at the house in San Diego to bring over the border the next day.

As dusk fell, the solidarity caravan converged at the Enclave Caracol activist center in Tijuana. As we carried in boxes and bags, we saw long lines of seniors, teens, parents holding babies and many others spilling out of Enclave’s entrance into the courtyard.

Inside, volunteer workers cooked and served hot meals to asylum seekers. Children sat on wooden benches reading and coloring.

We spoke with volunteers who sorted the donations. Although Enclave deals mostly with food and beverage donations, their well-organized team helped dispatch cars with clothing and other aid to distribution points around the city.

After waiting hours in long lines to cross back into the U.S., some members of the solidarity caravan returned to Los Angeles on Saturday night. Others camped out at the coordination house in San Diego and went back over the border on Sunday to deliver the remaining aid.

Organizers reported that these were the first donations to go directly to the asylum seekers with no government intervention. More than 500 people received aid.

Supporting asylum seekers

“Supporting the asylum seekers is very important to me,” explained Marco Flores of AIM SoCal. “U.S. intervention in their home countries has cause great instability, violence and extreme poverty. This has left many of them no choice but to flee.

“As a citizen of the United States, I feel a personal responsibility to help these people. This country has benefitted from their suffering and now we have a responsibility to be there for them in their time of need. Turning away would be selfish and cowardly. We can’t sit back and watch this injustice happen without doing something about it. They are human beings who are deserving of love and life just like anyone else.”

Gloria Verdieu, a community organizer from San Diego, said: “I think it’s important that the African communities in the U.S. and the asylum seekers understand that this struggle is one struggle. We are all in this together.

“I couldn’t help but recall the images from New Orleans after the Katrina and Rita hurricanes. The people evacuated, majority African American, referred to as refugees in the country of their birth, seeking asylum. I recalled 2016, when Haitians came seeking asylum. It’s all the same.

“I realize it can be hard for us — working-class people — to see how important it is to show true solidarity, because we are struggling every day to survive. We need all the support we can get right here in our depressed communities. Yet we must continue to push for unity and peoples’ power.”  

Members of the solidarity caravan promised to continue the struggle demanding that all the refugees be allowed into the U.S., and to carry out further aid drives in the weeks to come.

In the words of a banner unfurled by the Welcome/Bienvenida Refugee Caravan Committees: “There are no borders in the workers’ struggle!”

People around the world were outraged by video and photos showing small children and their families fleeing clouds of tear gas on the Tijuana side of the U.S.-Mexico border on Nov. 25. U.S. Border Patrol agents used this chemical weapon, banned for use in warfare under international law, against civilians on Mexican territory.

“We ran, but when you run the gas asphyxiates you more,” said Ana Zúñiga, who fled with her 3-year-old daughter. (Associated Press, Nov. 25)

The brutal attack came during a demonstration by hundreds of refugees trapped on the Mexican side of the border while the Trump administration blocks their asylum requests. They were protesting not only Trump, but also the inhumane conditions they face in Tijuana.

“We are not criminals, we are international workers,” read one banner carried by the marchers. Others carried homemade Honduran and U.S. flags.

At one point, some refugees rushed the barbed-wire barricade on the border fence. A woman was impaled trying to scale the fence. The Border Patrol used this justified act of defiance as an excuse to terrorize everyone.

It was just the latest escalation of Trump’s racist war against the Central American exodus. Many thousands are fleeing the wars, violence and poverty caused by decades of U.S. imperialist intervention in the region — just as refugees are fleeing to Europe from U.S.-EU military and economic warfare in Syria, northern Africa and other parts of the world.

In late October, Trump ordered thousands of U.S. troops to the border. He said that soldiers could shoot at any protesters who threw rocks or other objects. Later, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly signed an order authorizing U.S. troops to use “lethal force” at the border. (Military Times, Nov. 21)

There are currently 5,600 troops at the border. Trump said that that number could increase to as many as 15,000.

NBC News reported on Nov. 28: “The Pentagon is now actively planning for the U.S. troops deployed to the southern border to become a rotational force, meaning their mission would be extended and fresh troops would be rotated in, according to two U.S. officials and one former U.S. official familiar with the planning.”

Armed white supremacist militias, which have long worked hand-in-hand with the Border Patrol, are also mobilizing against the refugee caravan. (AP, Oct. 26)

Who are the real criminals?

While flouting both domestic and international law, Trump continues to claim the asylum seekers are “criminals,” as he attempts to whip up racist divisions among working-class and oppressed people.

Nor are the Democrats innocent. Their leaders have been largely silent as Trump steadily builds up repressive forces on the border. In fact, previous Democratic administrations laid the basis for Trump’s anti-migrant, anti-refugee campaign. President Obama earned the nickname “Deporter-in-Chief,” and tear gas was used against migrants while he was in office, too.

None of this, however, is deterring most of the asylum seekers, who have already endured numerous hardships on their long and arduous walk through Mexico from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and other countries.

The Los Angeles Times reported Nov. 27: “The dusty complex where more than 5,700 migrants are staying was crowded with tents and makeshift homes made of cardboard boxes, towels and plastic trash bags. Hundreds lined up for food, while others hung their wet clothing to dry on trees. Some bathed in outdoor showers, armed Mexican federal police circling the camp in armored trucks.

“Henry José Juárez, 16, was hit in the head by a teargas canister during Sunday’s border clash and suffered several second-degree burns when the canister exploded. On Monday, he limped around the sports complex on a single crutch, bandages wrapped around his head, left foot and right shoulder.

“Despite his wounds, Henry, a migrant from El Salvador who has been in Tijuana for a week, said he didn’t plan to go back.”

Another asylum seeker, Dennis Martínez from Honduras, told the Times reporter that he thought about staying in Tijuana to find work, but realized the city wasn’t safe for foreigners. “I’m escaping a dangerous situation,” he said. “Why would I then put myself in danger again?”

Unusually heavy rains during the last week of November provided an excuse for the local authorities to push refugees out of the Benito Juárez sports complex near the border to a shelter some 11 miles away. Tijuana officials cut off food, water and bathroom services, forcing many to leave the stadium. (San Diego Union Tribune, Nov. 30)

Growing solidarity

While the refugees are standing strong against powerful enemies, they need the aid and solidarity of workers and all progressive people in this country. Many networks are already mobilizing to bring aid of various kinds.

The New Sanctuary Coalition, based in New York, is organizing for a Sanctuary Caravan, including training students to provide various kinds of legal support. Along with Al Otro Lado, the NSC participated in a faith-based contingent that held a news conference at the border on Nov. 27 to condemn the Border Patrol’s attack.

The School of the Americas Watch held a “Border Encounter” solidarity gathering from Nov. 16 to Nov. 18 at Ambos Nogales on the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona.  On Dec. 1, a coalition of groups including the Alliance for Global Justice held a “Troops Off the Border” protest at Arizona’s Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

Chicago’s Little Village Solidarity Network has set up donation sites in several parts of the city. “The situation is urgent. We know that families aren’t leaving their homes by choice. People only leave when they have to, in search of safety and a better life for themselves and their children.” (Block Club Chicago, Nov. 19)

In Los Angeles, where this reporter spent the last week of November, there are numerous solidarity campaigns and aid drives underway. On Nov. 30, Centro CSO held a rally and donation drive in the Boyle Heights community. The following day, a solidarity caravan initiated by the American Indian Movement of Southern California and Movimiento Cosecha L.A. took donated aid across the border to refugees in Tijuana. And on Dec. 10, International Human Rights Day, Unión del Barrio has called for a march in support of the refugee caravan.

Throughout southern and central California, many groups and individuals are soliciting donations and taking aid across the border.

This is just a small sampling of the solidarity efforts that are underway. But much more is needed to organize the workers and oppressed to shut down the U.S. government’s repressive measures and open the border to all who seek asylum.

Imagine if the labor movement became involved in a serious way. Union halls could become centers for a massive people-to-people aid effort. Workers could be mobilized for demonstrations across the country to demand that Washington meet its international obligation to welcome asylum seekers and use the money slated for repression at the border to instead provide housing, food and jobs.

What if unions provided buses for hundreds of thousands of workers, organized and unorganized, to travel to the border and welcome the caravanistas? Such an effort would spark the imagination of people everywhere — churches and mosques, block associations and community centers, women’s, LGBTQ+ and disabled rights groups, as well as the left — into an unstoppable tide of workers’ solidarity.

One hundred thousand schoolchildren in New York City are homeless. Lead paint contaminates thousands of apartments in the city’s housing projects.

But both New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo want to give Amazon.com over $3 billion for setting up a headquarters in the New York City borough of Queens.

People are furious. Over 60 people marched inside Amazon’s 34th Street bookstore in Manhattan on Nov. 26. Labor leaders protested the giveaway to viciously anti-union Amazon on Nov. 28 in City Hall Park.

The same day, community groups, including Make The Road While Walking, protested in Long Island City near the proposed site for the headquarters. One hundred people came out in the pouring rain. (Queens Chronicle, Nov. 29)  

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world, with a $138 billion fortune. Let him keep a billion dollars and his remaining stash could still give $500 to every family in Africa.

De Blasio and Cuomo claim that Amazon will bring jobs to New York City. Is Bezos going to set up a hiring hall in the nearby Queensbridge Houses, the largest housing project in the U.S.?

Don’t bet on it. In 2014, 24 percent of Amazon’s “laborers” in its warehouses were Black and 12 percent were Latinx. But only 10 percent of its “nonlaborer workforce” ― which includes almost all the headquarters jobs ― were Black or Latinx. (Seattle Times, Aug. 14, 2015)

What Amazon is guaranteed to bring to Queens is more jacked-up rents, which are already a median $2,450 per month in Long Island City. (Gothamist.com)

Over 700,000 jobs lost

Long Island City was once a center of light industry with 50,000 factory workers. When the Swingline company shut down its stapler plant there in 1999, close to 500 members of Teamsters Local 808 lost their jobs, despite a valiant struggle led by the local’s secretary-treasurer, Chris Silvera.

But then New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ― now a Trump lawyer ― wasn’t sad at all. “The city comes out of this quite well,” he declared. (New York Times, Jan. 17, 1989)

Sixty years ago there were 980,000 manufacturing jobs in the Big Apple, many of them in union shops. At least 750,000 of them were destroyed.

It wasn’t just automation and runaway businesses that committed this crime. Zoning changes also cost jobs. Landlords and the banks that own their mortgages can charge much higher rents for office space and luxury housing than for manufacturing lofts.

Amazon wants zoning changes, too. Under the act setting up New York State’s Urban Development Corporation, Jeff Bezos, the 138 Billion Dollar Man, can ignore city zoning laws.

The UDC was supposed to build affordable housing. It was passed by the Empire State’s Legislature in 1968 after Black rebellions erupted coast-to-coast following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.

Andy Cuomo’s daddy ― the late New York governor and liberal saint, Mario Cuomo ― spent billions of UDC money to build more prisons than any other governor in U.S. history.

De Blasio’s and Cuomo’s giveaway deal with Amazon has found almost universal condemnation, even from other elected officials.

Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose district is located in Queens and the Bronx, isn’t an Amazon fan either. She tweeted, “From Minnesota to NYC, everyday people all over the country are organizing to resist Amazon’s predatory practices on working-class communities.” (Politico, Nov. 22)

Tens of thousands of Black voters in Florida and Georgia had their ballots destroyed in the recent midterm elections. The proposed Amazon giveaway being railroaded by Cuomo and de Blasio is just as anti-democratic.

We need the $3 billion going to billionaire Bezos for housing, schools and transit. Let the people vote on this giveaway in a referendum. The fight against the rotten Amazon deal has just begun.

The writer was employed for years at Amtrak’s Q interlocking tower, on the west end of Sunnyside Yard, behind the Swingline plant.

First, a little bit about my background. I worked at a garment sweatshop when I was a teenager, piecing together pockets on raincoats, and later on a General Motors assembly line installing power window regulators until the energy crisis layoffs in the 1980s.

I worked at a food producing plant for 15 years — first as a packer on the assembly line, then as a machine operator, and at one point as a forklift driver.  All of the jobs there were unionized.

I’ve recited this history to illustrate my familiarity with physical labor, speed-ups and assembly lines to contextualize my experience with contemporary conditions.

Why work at Amazon? For two reasons: first, I was retired and trying to live on just Social Security, so I really needed the money; second, to better assess the potential for organizing. Frankly, I also missed feeling of camaraderie that comes from being on the job with other workers.

It’s one thing to read about Amazon life or talk to friends who are working at Amazon; it’s another to walk, talk and breathe it.

First observations  

I was hired at a Fulfillment Center (Amazon’s fancy name for a warehouse) that formerly was a GM auto plant where more than 1,100 workers had relatively good-paying jobs until it closed in May 2005.

This Amazon warehouse now employs over 3,000 workers. Approximately 1,500 additional workers were hired in October 2018 at another Amazon warehouse in the area, formerly the site of the historic Bethlehem Steel plant, as big as 13 football fields and once the largest steel mill in the country.

Approximately 5,000 Maryland workers labor at these huge sites along with two other Amazon warehouses: one where mostly part-time workers finish the last step of sending out products, and a smaller facility near BWI airport.  

Mass hiring: The cattle call process

Younger workers would probably laugh at me for noticing this: the hiring process is faceless and driven by the Internet. There is no human resources department in the commonly understood sense. You apply online and take a kind of aptitude test, with no past work experience asked for or needed.

Qualifications? You must be able to walk six to 10 miles a day and lift 50 pounds —  they mean that, too. The only time you face off with a human being is when you take your saliva drug test with 40 to 50 other people.  If you pass the test, your start date arrives via email.

Waiting for the test and orientation gave me a chance to talk to other workers and make friends.  

The majority were young. I believe only 3 of us, out of the 40 people in my group, looked over 50 years old. I was the oldest. About 80 percent were Black youth. The rest of those applying were white and a mixture of other nationalities: Latinx, Arab, Asian, etc. At least half were women. In other words, we looked like Baltimore. This cattle scene was repeated every hour as new hires went through the process.

One young woman, who told me she was 25 years old, was trying to get hired because of the pay. Her experience sums up why so many people are eager to get a job at Amazon.

She was still working at a Walmart warehouse for $11 an hour. Amazon was paying around $13. She didn’t really want to leave her old job, but she was taking care of her mother and desperately needed financial stability.  

Robotics

Amazon’s internal culture and the robotics end of it feel like a science fiction movie. I certainly remember as a very young auto worker being struck by the size and scope of the facility and at the same time the power of the workers who were unionized. In this case, I was struck by the power of the robots!  

We were ordered to never, ever set foot, or for that matter swing an arm, into the taped-off area where the robots reside. We were told that the robots on the special robot floor do not have eyes and can accidentally kill us. Violating this rule meant immediate termination.  Only those with special skills can go into that area. They wear vests and carry around special laptops.

I felt like I was living in the TV series “The Colony,” about to be transported aboard a giant spaceship to be taken to the factory, or in Boots Riley’s film “Sorry to Bother You.”  OK, I’m sure Jeff Bezos, billionaire CEO of Amazon, would take issue. But then he’s never worked in his facilities.

My job is as a “picker.” The robots and the coordinated computer system certainly run my life, my body, and ultimately my 10-hour shift.

No one wants to be a picker. I met several new hires who only came back if they could find work in other departments. They claimed that more workers assigned to be pickers were fired than from any other job. Usually 50 percent of the new hires don’t make it. (I’ll have more to say on this in Part 2.)

Our common refrain is that Amazon is like a big prison, only we are able to go home and sleep at night. At this time of the year, we go to work in the dark and get off in the dark. For full-time workers in the Maryland warehouses, there is no such thing as the 8-hour day — only 10-hour and 12-hour shifts.

Part 2: 21st century exploitation

General Electric had $122 billion in revenues last year. But in June it was kicked off the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

GE’s replacement was Walgreens Boots Alliance. A few decades ago, Walgreens was just a Chicago drugstore chain.

GE lost over $6 billion in 2017. Since the year 2000, the firm’s “market cap” — the price of all its stock — has fallen by a half-trillion dollars.

The jobs of 300,000 GE workers are in danger. Their pensions are underfunded by $31 billion. (Bloomberg, Feb. 1)

GE was a founding member of the Dow in 1896 and its oldest member. More importantly, GE’s founding father in 1892 was Wall Street’s biggest banker, J.P. Morgan.

This was the first time that U.S. finance capital ventured into manufacturing. Up to that time, Morgan and his fellow loan sharks speculated on railroads and utilities.

Now they got their claws into industrial production. In 1900, Morgan bought up Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills and started the world’s first billion-dollar corporation, U.S. Steel.

These new manufacturing monopolies went hand-in-hand with the bloody U.S. occupations of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. In the U.S., hundreds of Black people were lynched every year while the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed segregation in its Plessy v. Ferguson decision.

Almost every major strike was broken by police and private detective agencies shooting workers.

Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, called banking’s control of industry the basis of imperialism, the final stage of capitalism.

GE’s deepening decline

General Electric was a blue chip stock. Back in 2001, it had the highest market cap of any corporation, even greater than that of Exxon Mobil.

GE is also a major player in the military-industrial complex. Last year it sold nearly $4 billion worth of stuff, largely jet engines, to the Pentagon.

Workers at GE made 30,000 types of light bulbs, as well as power plants, home appliances, diesel locomotives, x-rays and cat scans.

General Electric’s management tried to destroy the United Electrical Workers union by red-baiting it to death. As a result, most GE workers in southern states don’t have union contracts and union protection.

Hosting “GE Theater” on television helped propel Ronald Reagan’s political career. Reagan later started his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., over the bodies of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

And it was then GE-owned NBC that made the racist clown Donald Trump a nationally known figure by having him host “The Apprentice.”

Wall Street loved Jack Welch, GE’s CEO until 2001, for firing 100,000 workers. Schenectady, N.Y., alone lost 20,000 jobs.

It wasn’t immigrants, Muslims or transgender people that stole these jobs. It was corporate greed, propelled by dog-eat-dog capitalist competition, that committed the crime.

GE workers called their boss Neutron Jack. That’s because like a neutron bomb, Welch usually kept the factories intact while destroying the people who worked in them.

This viciousness didn’t stop GE’s stock from plunging from $60 per share in 2000 to $9.28 on Nov. 6. In 2008, GE was bailed out by the Federal Reserve with a $139 billion cheap loan.

Meanwhile, the Fed did nothing to help over five million families who lost their homes because of foreclosure.

Uncle Sam’s lavish corporate handout couldn’t prevent GE from recently cutting its dividend to a penny per share. Now it’s selling off subsidiaries in fire sales.

Longer lives endanger capitalism

Wall Street analysts consider General Electric to be toast. Bloomberg called GE an “astonishing mess” (Feb. 1).

Bankers started GE and during the Great Depression GE created a credit department to help sell its appliances. Usury became so profitable that by 2007, 55 percent of GE’s profit came from its financial institution, GE Capital. (Fortune, May 24)

Turning itself into a bank almost sunk GE during the Great Recession, along with many other banksters.

Now, GE’s high command revealed that the corporation will have to shell out $15 billion by 2024 to cover losses in its remaining insurance business. (marketwatch.com)

GE was forced to divest much of its financial business a decade ago. But it kept long-term insurance contracts bought by seniors to cover nursing home costs.

That seemed to be a sure way to rip off elderly people and help GE’s bottom line. The problem is that people are living longer because of advances in medicine. Longer lives are incompatible with capitalist profit.

GE’s troubles may be a first sign of the next capitalist economic crisis that will come sooner or later. The jobs of hundreds of thousands of GE workers — including those super exploited in GE’s plants in Africa, Asia and Latin America — are in danger.

Capitalism is driving GE into the ground. We need a people’s takeover of GE.

GE’s mess isn’t really the result of faulty boardroom decisions. Capitalism’s inner workings — whose laws were discovered by Karl Marx — guaranteed it.

Why did Jack Welch and his successor Jeffrey Immelt bet the farm on banking and insurance when it had a commanding presence in so many areas of industry? GE virtually drove General Motors out of the diesel locomotive market in North America.

Even monopolization doesn’t stop the functioning of what Karl Marx called the most important law in political economy: the tendency of the rate of profit to decline.

The real source of profit is the surplus value created by workers. The difference between the value made by workers and what they receive in wages is the surplus stolen by capitalists.

Many workers never even received wages. It was the surplus value created by enslaved Africans that jump-started the capitalist world market.

Karl Marx wrote that capital was born in blood and dirt. Reparations are due for the African Holocaust and the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.

The dead labor represented in machinery or raw materials doesn’t produce any surplus value. An individual capitalist may be able to buy low and sell high. But for capitalist production overall, surplus value can only be extracted from the living labor power of workers.

Technological progress guarantees the proportion of dead or constant capital will increase as compared to the shrinking amount of variable capital, the amount paid in wages.

The Industrial Revolution started with cotton textile spinning machines made out of wood. Today’s Intel chip plants may have a million dollars of constant capital per every employee.

Capitalists know that cutting wages means higher profits. But as much as they want to exploit workers, the moneybags are also interested in how much money can be made on their investments.

The high-tech machines that Jack Welch used to fire workers cut the wage bill but they also added billions to GE’s invested capital. There wasn’t a proportionate increase in profit.

Even the thousands of workers that GE terribly exploits in Mexico and other countries couldn’t prevent a sliding profit rate. The interest extorted from the loans made by GE Capital simply masked this dilemma.

Marx also wrote that “counteracting influences,” like cheaper raw materials, can partially alleviate the fall in the profit rate. Shipping containers cut transport costs from an average of 10 percent of commodities to one or two percent.

Massive tax cuts for the super rich are another method used to increase the profit rate.

The falling rate of profit will not by itself get rid of capitalism. We have to organize millions of people to overthrow it.

Lenin pointed out there is no impossible situation for capitalism. Wars, cutting wages and eliminating social services are all used by capitalists to prolong their rule.

Under socialism, automation will be used to shorten the working day and to perform dangerous tasks. Under capitalism, high-tech can eventually sink even the biggest corporations.