Millions around the globe marched on May 31 in solidarity with the people of Palestine and oppressed people everywhere. It was a massive rebuff to the “deal of the century” that the Trump regime seeks to impose on the people of Palestine and the region.

The occasion was the International Day of Al Quds (Jerusalem), marked annually on the last Friday of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. The event began with the 1979 Revolution that freed Iran from the tyranny of the Shah, a CIA-installed puppet of the U.S. corporate ruling class.

Marchers condemned the Trump regime’s phony “deal” and affirmed the right of the Palestinian people to live in peace and freedom in all of their land. They also condemned the brutal U.S.-orchestrated war in Yemen and Washington’s war threats against Iran.

Those who’ve seen a draft of Trump’s plan say it would eliminate the Palestinian claim to Quds (Jerusalem), deny the right of return for refugees, offer money in exchange for accepting Israeli occupation of the West Bank and eliminate the possibility of a sovereign Palestinian state.

In Palestine, some 260,000 people defied the racist Israeli occupation to pray at the Mosque of Al Aqsa, a frequent target of Israeli attack. In Yemen, hundreds of thousands filled the streets of Sana’a and other cities in defiance of the U.S.-British-Israeli-Saudi axis that is bombing and blockading their country.

In Iran and Iraq, marchers burned U.S. and Israeli flags. In Lebanon, resistance leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, secretary general of Hezbollah, warned the U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia not to launch a new war in the region.

In Bahrain, tens of thousands took to the streets despite a crackdown by the regime of the U.S.-backed Khalifa family. Trump is scheduled to visit Bahrain, where the U.S. Fifth Fleet is based, later this month to unveil his “deal of the century.”

Large demonstrations also took place in South Africa.

Rallies were held in 20 cities in the U.S. and Canada, organized by the Muslim Congress. The largest was in Toronto, where thousands turned out. In New York City, hundreds came to Times Square.

In its statement, the Muslim Congress emphasized that Quds Day is a day of solidarity with all the oppressed and called for an end to wars, racism and white supremacy. Struggle-La Lucha activists took part in the New York and Washington, D.C., events.

Economic indicators reported in the business pages are grim, the outcome of a long global depression. In March, this news was characterized by Larry Summers, former U.S. Treasury secretary and professor at Harvard University, as stagnation of the world’s capitalist system.

On June 4, Reuters reported that one U.S. manufacturing index hit the lowest level since October 2016. In May, an index of factory employment was shown to have fallen 11 percent since October 2017.

Aside from a small bump in after-tax profits, induced by Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and the big corporations, the economy has not recovered since the Great Recession of 2007-2009.  According to economist  Alan Freeman, “economic growth of the industrialized North has fallen continuously, with only brief and limited interruptions, since at least the early 1960s.”  

Most alarming is the data reported by the World Bank. In areas dominated by the capitalist economy, the poverty level among people has worsened drastically since 1981, increasing from 3.2 billion to 4.2 billion. Inequality of wealth and income in these economies is widening; the gap between rich and poor countries is widening as well.

An outstanding statistical feature of capitalism in the current period is that it is failing to develop the technology and labor necessary to expand the output of goods and services that human society needs or wants.  As measured by gross national product (GNP), the system based on competition and expansion for profit is finding it more and more difficult to expand.

Try to disguise class struggle

Economic policies propounded by capitalist politicians, their academic advisers and the media are based on models like Keynesianism, and more recently, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). These models seek to disguise the antagonistic, profit-driven relationship between corporate bosses and workers.

Because these economic models are not founded in reality, their policies entail constant adjustments to try to “correct” an unstable capitalist system wracked by inherent crises.

In “Value, Price and Profit,” Karl Marx laid bare the real relationship of exploiter and exploited in a scientific analysis of economic relations:

“We find on the market a set of buyers, possessed of land, machinery, raw materials and the means of subsistence, all of them save land in its crude state, the products of labor; and on the other hand, a set of sellers who have nothing to sell except their laboring power, their working arms and brains. … One set buys continually in order to make a profit and enrich themselves, while the other set continually sells in order to earn their livelihood.” Marx comments that this ought to be called the “original expropriation.”

And again, in Volume One of Capital: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”

Government stimulus fails to revive capitalism

The U.S. economy was revived after the Great Depression of the 1930s, first by military spending on World War II, and then as it gained domination over the rebuilding of post-war world markets.

The 21st century “Endless War” proclaimed by the George W. Bush administration no longer has the same ability to stimulate the economy. The enormous productive resources absorbed by the military-industrial complex are used solely for destruction and as such can’t return real value to the economy.

Sanctions, like a medieval siege meant to starve the population into submission, are another cruel weapon in the current U.S. arsenal of war. The government hopes that sanctions against countries like Venezuela will destroy all resistance to the plunder of their resources. Actually, it has been found that sanctions solidify resistance and hatred of the U.S. rulers.

Donald Trump’s campaign promises to revive the economy by providing jobs ring hollow. The high employment rate he touts is based entirely on contingent, low-paying, temporary and part-time jobs. In the U.S., 17 percent of workers are only employed part time — one-third more than in the 1960s.

Many workers have been forced to join the “self-employed” gig economy. Others have fallen out of the job market because they’ve given up looking for work.

Threat of tariffs

Many pundits see Trump’s trade war on China and Mexico as a catastrophic threat to a U.S. economy already tottering on the edge.  

Manufacturers, like those producing cars, depend on importing parts from Mexico and China. Tariffs could sound a death knell on high-tech companies like car maker Tesla. China is its second-largest market, the New York Times reported June 3.

The Federal Reserve has tried to offset the potential damage caused by tariffs with a promise to cut interest rates. Some see this incentive as support for Trump’s tariffs. The Fed already dropped a plan to raise interest rates in January as the economy weakened. Interest rates are so low now that a new cut would be practically giving away money to corporations.

This economic stimulus by the government is not improving conditions for the working class because corporations are not investing in providing jobs with a decent rate of pay, job training or new equipment. Rather, they are hoarding funds or investing in superexploitative, low-paying jobs.

Corporations are finding that they can’t improve profits simply by replacing workers with robots and automation. As Marx showed, only human labor time can determine the value of what is produced. Profits are created by the exploitation of human labor.

In the eyes of the financial markets, the current lack of inflation is another dangerous indicator. Traditionally, a high employment rate coincides with inflation. The current job market of low-paying, part-time and temporary jobs appears to be causing deflation.

Proponents of Modern Monetary Theory, many of them supporting the “Green New Deal,” call for the government to print more money as a way of stimulating the economy. In feudal times this was referred to as “clipping the coin” — a practice of shaving coins to mint more of them. It doesn’t actually create more value.

The decaying capitalist system can’t be reformed or revived. It’s an outmoded system that is depending on harsher exploitation and war to sustain itself — and conditions for the working class are steadily declining.

Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But what happens when the words that the pictures are shouting out do not fit their intended use? In that case, the narrator has to supply the words, urging, “Don’t believe your lying eyes.”

An excellent example comes from the corporate media narrative of the incidents that occurred in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Once again the corporate media are dusting off their anti-communist campaign of blatant lies and misinformation to sell the U.S. government’s line about supposed massacres carried out by the Chinese Communist Party 30 years ago.

Since 1989, however, irrefutable evidence — from Wikileaks documents to eyewitness reports — has exposed the blatant falsehoods promoted as gospel truth by Western capitalist governments and their loyal media.

So this time around, the rehashing of the lie had to be tweaked a little — not with actual evidence, but through implication only, sometimes using photos to carry on the “massacre” narrative.

Let’s start with the Wall Street Journal. In the May 30, 2019, issue, the foreboding headline read: “Images Hidden for 30 Years — Liu Jian took memorable photos around Tiananmen Square in 1989. Then he tried to forget them.”

Liu Jian’s photos were taken at the end of May 1989, right before the so-called massacre in Tiananmen Square. At the time, media like the Washington Post, on May 21, 1989, were saying troops were “sent into the streets to crush the student movement.” (Archived article accessed at DC Public Library)

Here are the most (implied) haunting examples of the 11 photos presented, with captions supplied by the Wall Street Journal:

Students worked to build the Goddess of Democracy statue in Tiananmen Square, around May 28.

This caption doesn’t mention that the buses were provided by the government to shelter the protesters when it rained, along with crews to help clean up the square while it was being occupied to keep conditions sanitary.

Here are more supposedly dramatic photos taken of protesters with soldiers. However, the drama is more dependent on the creative interpretation of the caption:

I just don’t see it. Having been in many face-offs with robocops at protests here in the U.S., where the police try to look more like pitbulls than human beings — sorry, pitbull lovers  – all I see here are protesters holding hands and dialoguing rather than holding off some imminent attack by military vehicles.

The fact is that if you scour the mainstream media, you can find not one photo or video of anyone shot or trampled by a tank in Tiananmen Square.

Fabrications exposed, narrative changes

Journalists who helped perpetuate the massacre myth began confessing in 2009. Two years later, Wikileaks exposed cables showing the U.S. government, just a few days after June 4, 1989, had evidence of the fabrication. So the narrative began to evolve.

However, up until that point — for a period of 20 years! — the story of the “massacre in Tiananmen Square” was carried as one unified declaration of truth coming from the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, the BBC and other Western corporate media — and, unfortunately, repeated by folks on the left who shouldn’t have been so gullible.

Once the truth began leaking out, some journalists, feeling the weight of what was finally being exposed, started admitting that they had lied or withheld the facts about Tiananmen Square.

Here’s one such admission, reported on CBSNews.com on June 4, 2009, from Richard Roth. In 1989, Roth was the CBS News correspondent covering events in Beijing on June 3 and 4. He had been briefed by anchor Dan Rather about the approved narrative of events at Tiananmen Square before Rather went on to broadcast these fabrications to the world:

“Dawn was just breaking. There were hundreds of troops in the square, many sitting cross-legged on the pavement in long curving ranks, some cleaning up debris. There were some tanks and armored personnel carriers. But we saw no bodies, injured people, ambulances or medical personnel — in short, nothing to even suggest, let alone prove, that a ‘massacre’ had recently occurred in that place.

“Later, being debriefed on-air by Dan Rather, I recall making an effort to avoid using the word ‘massacre.’ I referred to an ‘assault’ and an ‘attack.’ I reported what I saw; I said I hadn’t seen any bodies. Admittedly, I’ve never made a point of trying to contradict a colleague on the air; I’ve simply stuck to my own story, because I’ve believed it’s true.”

And if he didn’t make a point of “trying to contradict a colleague on the air,” it was undoubtedly because he cared about his career over any journalistic ethics regarding the truth.

What inspired Roth’s outbreak of journalistic conscience two decades later? It may have been another recanting that occurred two days earlier by BBC correspondent James Miles, who said: “We got the story generally right, but on one detail I and others conveyed the wrong impression. There was no massacre on Tiananmen Square. …

“Towards midday on 4 June, amid reports of widespread casualties, I wrote in another draft that ‘many of the deaths occurred at Tiananmen Square, not only from gunshots, but also from being crushed by tanks, which ploughed relentlessly through any obstacle in their way.’”

That “one detail” was a doozy. Let’s just say you out and out lied, James. Miles tries to cover this up with: “There was no Tiananmen Square massacre, but there was a Beijing massacre.”

So, after 20 years, the story goes from absolutely, for sure, being a massacre in Tiananmen Square, to now being a massacre outside of the square in Beijing.

This new take has become the latest unified tale evolved to fit the uncooperative facts that came to light.

WikiLeaks publishes U.S. cables

There were, in fact, shots fired outside of the square, and there were hundreds killed according to Chinese government and medical sources. But not all of those shots fired were from soldiers and not all of those killed were protestors. No photos, videos or any evidence exists of a massacre or of soldiers firing indiscriminately on civilians.

The document published by WikiLeaks, dated July 12, 1989, was leaked to the media in 2011. It’s a cable from James R. Lilley, then U.S. ambassador to China, and puts events in a different context:

“During a recent meeting, a Latin American diplomat and his wife provided Poloff an account of their movements on June 3-4 and their eyewitness account of events at Tiananmen Square. …

“Gallo [a diplomat from Chile] said that he essentially was allowed free passage around the square, even when sighted by troops. …

“He said although he was seen, the troops paid no attention to him and he eventually passed back and forth across troop lines a couple of times. Another Chilean diplomat who stayed around Xinhuamen at Zhongnanhai had a similar experience. …

“He said that most of the troops which entered the square were actually armed only with anti-riot gear — truncheons and wooden clubs; they were backed up by armed soldiers. …

“Gallo said wounded, including some soldiers, continued to be brought to the Red Cross station. …

“Although gunfire could be heard, Gallo said that apart from some beating of students, there was no mass firing into the crowd of students at the monument. When Poloff mentioned some reportedly eyewitness accounts of massacres at the monument with automatic weapons, Gallo said that there was no such slaughter. Once agreement was reached for the students to withdraw, linking hands to form a column, the students left the square through the southeast corner.”

Why was force used by the Chinese army? After all, weren’t the students all nonviolent and unarmed?

If fact, there were plenty of photos supporting the Chinese government’s statements that soldiers were being attacked and killed and weapons were being taken by the so-called “peaceful” protesters. None of those photos were given prominence, if published at all, by mainstream media TV, radio or news publications. Photos like these:

Or these, showing the use of Molotov cocktails and other methods by “peaceful” protesters to set tanks, buses and soldiers on fire after beating and stripping, then hanging them:

The pictures of stripped, hung and burned soldiers are too graphic to show without a warning, but here is where they can be seen at this article from Voltaire Network.

Working toward regime change

Knowing that the Voice of America had made technical and staffing arrangements allowing broadcasts to be repeated frequently over Chinese airwaves, U.S. officials may have believed that giving an impression that a civil war had started in China would further the overall aims of regime change.

That would explain the unusual and very temporary coverage of violence by the students in the Washington Post on June 5, 1989 (from the archive at DC Public Library):

“An indication of what may lie ahead for China can be seen in the venom with which Beijing residents turned on a people’s army that had moved against the people. … As columns of tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers approached Tiananmen, many troops were set on by angry mobs who screamed, ‘Fascists.’ Dozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten and left for dead.

“At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had been beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus. Another soldier’s corpse was strung up at an intersection east of the square.”

Today, you won’t find any mention of that violence in the commemoration articles by the Post or any other corporate media, since now the unified “truth” is that the protesters were peaceful and unarmed.

Next: CIA influence — not all protesters were the same

Thursday, June 13 – 12:30 to 1:30 pm
Permanent Mission of the Republic of Moldova to the United Nations
35 East 29th Street, New York, N.Y. 10016

Join us on June 13 for a lunchtime rally outside Moldova’s UN Mission. We will deliver an international statement calling for Pavel Grigorchuk’s freedom and a letter of protest against the latest repressive measures taken against him.

Anti-fascist Pavel Grigorchuk has been imprisoned for three months following a minor altercation with a politician of the Democratic Party of Moldova (PDM). The PDM, headed by oligarch Vlad Plahotnic, dominates Moldova’s economic, political and legal system.

Grigorchuk is being held in isolation in the basement of a decrepit prison colony in Chisinau. In early June, additional repression was piled upon him, including a ban on messages, parcels and packages (including food), as retaliation for speaking to the media during a court hearing.

Plahotnic and his allies have benefitted from the support of Washington and the European Union, which profit from the privatization of Moldova’s resources and want to station NATO military forces in this strategic Eastern European country. Grigorchuk has been a thorn in the oligarchy’s side for years. He was one of the “Petrenko Group” of protesters who were imprisoned for several months in 2015-2016 and whose case is now being heard by the European Court of Human Rights.

We demand: End the retaliatory measures. Free Pavel Grigorchuk and all political prisoners of the Plahotnic regime. Free all political prisoners of the U.S. empire, from Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier and the MOVE 9 to Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange.

More info:
http://redstaroverdonbass.blogspot.com/2019/06/moldova-new-repression-against.html
http://redstaroverdonbass.blogspot.com/2019/03/add-your-name-freedom-for-pavel.html

Saturday, June 15, 2019 at 12:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT
Hosted by Peoples Power Assembly

Join us at Baltimore PRIDE MARCH for the “Chelsea Manning and Marielle Franco Contingent” in honor of both Chelsea and Marielle. Bring signs and banners.

For those who might not be extremely familiar with Marielle Franco, she is the LGBTQ2S Afro-Brazilian — active in the fight against police brutality who was murdered. It is a way of showing solidarity with the people of Brazil who are suffering under the fascist regime of Bolsonaro.

We want to link our contingent this year to the anti-war struggle in light of Trump’s war threats on Venezuela, Iran, Palestine and around the world. It is important we honor the courage of whistle blower, Chelsea Manning who exposed Pentagon war crimes and who is presently in jail for refusal to testify against Julian Assange.

It is important that there is an anti-war presence at this year’s pride March.

We also want to highlight migrant trans women like Johana Medina Leon who died in ICE custody, Roxana Hernandez, and the scores of Black trans woman who have been murdered.

All groups and individuals are invited to bring signs and to participate. Let us know if you are interested!

Initial endorsers include: Peoples Power Assembly, Black Alliance for Peace, Baltimore chapter, Baltimore Peace Action, Youth Against War & Racism. Please let us know if you would like to endorse. But most importantly show up and March.

On Sunday, June 16, @ the Druid Hill Festival, we will have a joint table for groups to advertise upcoming activities and distribute literature. Look for the “Harriet Tubman Solidarity Center” table.

For more information call or text: 410-218-4835

The Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Cuba repudiates, in the strongest terms, measures announced by the United States government on June 4, 2019, reinforcing the economic blockade imposed on Cuba for more than 60 years, at a cost to the Cuban economy that in 2018 exceeded $134 billion at current prices, or $933 billion, when considering the depreciation of the dollar as compared to the value of gold on the international market.

As is known, this new escalation, effective June 5, further strengthens the stringent restrictions U.S. citizens face in order to travel to Cuba, and adds full prohibitions on travel by sea from the United States, of all types, and prohibits cruise ship stops in our country immediately. The objective continues to be pressuring the Cuban nation to make political concessions, by strangling the economy and causing damage to the population. In this particular case, the measures also seek to prevent the people of the United States from learning about Cuba’s reality, and thus undermining the slanderous propaganda campaigns against our country that are fabricated on a daily basis.

These actions are contrary to the majority opinion of U.S. citizens, whose interest in seeing Cuba, and exercising their right to travel, is made clear by the 650,000 who visited us in 2018, along with half a million Cubans resident in the United States.

This past April 17, National Security Adviser John Bolton, on the occasion of an anti-Cuban show that featured the presence of mercenaries defeated at Playa Girón and relatives of the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship’s henchmen, announced that his government would restrict non-family trips to Cuba. It is clear that this individual has managed to take possession of U.S. foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere, which constitutes the main threat to peace and stability in the entire region.The United States promotes the Monroe Doctrine without reservation, with which it seeks to deny sovereign equality and the right to self-determination of each and every one of the hemisphere’s nations.

The recent attacks on Cuba are justified with new pretexts. The most notorious among them is the slanderous accusation that Cuba is intervening militarily in Venezuela, a lie that has been publicly and consistently refuted by the Cuban government.

They go to the unscrupulous extreme of proposing that Cuba betray the convictions and principles that guide the Cuban Revolution’s foreign policy, in exchange for promises of negotiations or easing of the draconian and criminal measures that make up the blockade.

Cuba’s solidarity with constitutional President Nicolás Maduro Moros, the Bolivarian Chavista Revolution, and the civic-military union of its people is not negotiable. The more than 20,000 Cuban collaborators, who in a voluntary and disinterested manner offer their social services in the country, the majority in health care, will continue to do so, as long as the Venezuela people want, cooperating with this sister country.

For Cubans, betrayal is not an option. We are not naive: we have already struggled 150 years for our independence, obliged to confront the hegemonic ambitions of U.S. imperialism since the first day. Cuba will not be intimidated, nor distracted from the essential, urgent tasks of developing our economy and the construction of socialism. Closely united, we will be able to face the most challenging adversities. They cannot asphyxiate us, nor can they stop us.

Havana, June 5, 2019

El Gobierno Revolucionario de la República de Cuba repudia en los términos más enérgicos las medidas anunciadas por el Gobierno de Estados Unidos el 4 de junio de 2019, con las que refuerza el bloqueo económico impuesto a Cuba por más de 60 años, a un costo para la economía cubana que en 2018 superaba los 134 000 millones de dólares a precios corrientes y la cifra de 933 000 millones de dólares, tomando en cuenta la depreciación del dólar frente al valor del oro en el mercado internacional.

Según se ha podido conocer, esta nueva escalada, con efecto a partir del 5 de junio, refuerza aún más las duras restricciones que ya sufren los ciudadanos estadounidenses para viajar a Cuba, agrega prohibiciones absolutas para embarcaciones de todo tipo procedentes de Estados Unidos y prohíbe de inmediato que buques cruceros visiten nuestro país.

La pretensión continúa siendo arrancarle concesiones políticas a la nación cubana, mediante la asfixia de la economía y el daño al nivel de la población. En este caso particular, las medidas buscan también impedir que el pueblo de Estados Unidos conozca la realidad cubana y derrote así el efecto de la propaganda calumniosa que a diario se fabrica contra nuestro país.

Son acciones que desprecian la opinión mayoritaria de los estadounidenses, cuyo interés por conocer Cuba y ejercer su derecho a viajar se demostró en los 650 000 que nos visitaron en 2018, junto a medio millón de cubanos residentes en Estados Unidos.

El pasado 17 de abril, el asesor de Seguridad Nacional John Bolton, en ocasión de un show anticubano que contó con la presencia de mercenarios derrotados en Playa Girón y familiares de los esbirros de la tiranía de Fulgencio Batista,había advertido que su Gobierno restringiría los viajes no familiares a Cuba.Se conoce que este individuoha logrado adueñarse de la política exterior de Estados Unidos hacia el hemisferio occidental, lo que constituye la principal amenaza a la paz y la estabilidad de toda la región.  

Estados Unidos promueve sin recato la Doctrina Monroe, con la que pretende negar la igualdad soberana y el derecho a la libre determinación de todas y cada una de las naciones del hemisferio.

Las recientes arremetidas contra Cuba se argumentan con nuevos pretextos. El más notorio entre ellos es la calumniosa acusación de que Cuba interviene militarmente en Venezuela, mentira que ha sido rechazada pública y sostenidamente por el Gobierno cubano.

Llegan al extremo inescrupuloso de proponer a Cuba que traicione sus convicciones y los principios que han acompañado a la política exterior de la Revolución Cubana, a cambio de promesas de negociación o alivio de las medidas draconianas y criminales que componen el bloqueo económico.

La solidaridad de Cuba con el Presidente Constitucional Nicolás Maduro Moros, la Revolución bolivariana y chavista y la unión cívico-militar de su pueblo, no es negociable. Los más de 20 000 colaboradores cubanos que de manera voluntaria y abnegada prestan servicios sociales en ese país, la mayor parte de ellos en el sector de la salud, seguirán allí mientras los acoja el pueblo venezolano, cooperando con esa nación hermana.

Para los cubanos, la traición no es una opción. No somos ingenuos, son ya 150 años de ardua lucha por nuestra independencia, teniendo que enfrentar desde el primer día las ambiciones hegemónicas del imperialismo norteamericano.

Cuba no se dejará amedrentar, ni distraer de las tareas esenciales y urgentes del desarrollo de nuestra economía y la construcción del socialismo. Estrechamente unidos, seremos capaces de enfrentar las adversidades más desafiantes. No podrán asfixiarnos, ni podrán detenernos.

La Habana, 5 de junio de 2019

Queens, N.Y. — Chanting “Stonewall still means fight back! Free Chelsea Manning!” activists from Struggle-La Lucha and the Socialist Unity Party kicked off LGBTQ2S Pride month by marching in the Queens Pride Parade on June 2.

They carried signs demanding freedom for Manning, the trans whistleblower who is back in jail for her role in exposing U.S. war crimes. Other signs honored slain Brazilian queer activist Mariella Franco and transgender communist Leslie Feinberg.

Tens of thousands of people, young and old, turned out to watch the parade in Jackson Heights, Queens, a multinational neighborhood of New York City. The city’s second-largest annual Pride event honors Julio Rivera, a gay Puerto Rican man who was murdered by white supremacists in a nearby schoolyard in 1990.

Student groups, unions, community organizations and churches were among those who marched, many of them flying rainbow, trans and pansexual flags. Queens is a borough of immigrants, and marchers also flew the flags of the many of the countries they hail from.

A memorable contingent of Latinx marchers wore orange prison jumpsuits and held up bars symbolizing the cages asylum-seekers are held in by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol. One held a sign that read: “Say it loud! Say it clear! Roxana was killed by ICE!” in memory of trans asylum seeker Roxana Hernández, who died in custody in May 2018.

Also marching were representatives of the Reclaim Pride coalition, which is sponsoring a Queer Liberation March in Manhattan on June 30 to mark 50 years since the Stonewall Rebellion of trans, gay and lesbian youth against police repression.

Reclaim Pride is challenging the “official” Heritage of Pride Parade, held annually on the last Sunday of June. Over the years, that event has become increasingly dominated by corporations, police and capitalist politicians. For more info, visit reclaimpridenyc.org.

The capitalist media have crowned Joe Biden as the likely candidate to win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. This isn’t just because the former vice president is leading in the early public opinion polls.

Biden was brought into the race to stop Bernie Sanders. The billionaire class can’t tolerate someone calling themselves a socialist going to the White House. The wealthy and powerful consider it a threat to their system that millions of people in the U.S., including fifty percent of youth, have a favorable opinion of socialism.

Leading the charge against Sanders are so-called liberal publications like the Washington Post, which on May 3 attacked Sanders for taking a 1988 honeymoon trip to what was then the Soviet Union. Fox News gleefully used the Post’s article to condemn the Vermont senator’s “infamous honeymoon.”

On Feb. 20, Slate claimed that “Sanders has a soft spot for Latin American strongmen” because he praised Cuban health care and didn’t immediately condemn Venezuela’s elected president, Nicolás Maduro.   

Four years before, CNN’s Anderson Cooper had also red baited Bernie Sanders about his honeymoon.

It isn’t just about jobs

Underhanded support from the Democratic National Committee ― as exposed by WikiLeaks ― and a massive bankroll paved the way for Hillary Clinton to win the presidential nomination in 2016. But that wasn’t the whole story.

How did Hillary Clinton get to Flint, Mich., before Bernie Sanders did?

To Sanders, progressive politics, even “socialist politics,” consists of raising economic issues like jobs, health care and free education. These are all good things, and who needs them more than the over 110 million Black, Latinx, Indigenous and Asian/Pacific Islander people in the U.S.?

But the lead poisoning of Black and some white children in Flint didn’t seem like a burning political issue to Sanders, at least at first. Otherwise, he would have showed up in Flint well before Clinton did.

Sanders toured the Sandtown neighborhood in Baltimore where Freddie Grey Jr. was arrested by police and given a “rough ride,” resulting in Grey’s death. At the Dec. 8, 2015, news conference that followed, Sanders said that it “makes a lot more sense to me to be getting kids jobs than hanging out on street corners and seeing them end up in jail.”

Young people need jobs and Sanders did call for an end to mass incarceration and federal investigations of all police killings. But Freddie Grey wasn’t killed because he was jobless. He was killed because he was a Black youth.

Sean Bell had a job when police fired 50 shots on Nov. 25, 2006, killing him on what was supposed to be his wedding day. Teamsters union member Philando Castile was killed inside his car on July 6, 2016, after being stopped by police.

What Sanders needed to do was to denounce police terrorism.

Socialists must fight racism

In 2016, Sanders called reparations for the African Holocaust “devisive.” This wasn’t just repulsive; it cost Sanders the votes of many African Americans.

This is an old story in the U.S. socialist movement: If we can just avoid “divisive issues” like reparations, we can unite Black (and other oppressed) voters with white voters on economic issues.

But these “divisive issues” can’t be avoided. Socialists have to fight for justice.

It’s hopeful that Sanders is now supporting a bill to create a reparations study commission.

Bernie Sanders supports many good things, like Medicare For All. But he isn’t calling for a revolution. Revolutionary socialists know that to stop capitalism from cooking the earth we need to overthrow this rotten system. Wall Street and its military machine have to be smashed.

In order to organize this revolution, socialists need to appeal to Sanders’ supporters to stop any U.S. war against Venezuela and Iran. And to join the struggle to free U.S. political prisoners like Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Chelsea Manning.

Aurora Women’s Club is a revolutionary, anti-fascist women’s organization based in the Donetsk People’s Republic. Donetsk and the entire Donbass mining region in eastern Europe have been subject to five years of war and economic blockade by the U.S.-backed government of Ukraine, at the cost of more than 10,000 lives so far. Nevertheless, these young women and allies continue to carry out internationalist solidarity.

Struggle-La Lucha is publishing this recent statement by Aurora on the fight for reproductive rights in the U.S. and worldwide. It was translated by SLL’s Greg Butterfield.

The right to abortion is a matter of women’s emancipation, a class question.

Those who advocate a ban of abortion falsely call themselves fighters for life – “pro-lifers.” In fact, they condemn women to disease, death and a miserable existence, especially workers, and all those who face discrimination and oppression. As before, conservatives call women who have abortions immoral, crying about “those killed in the womb of the mother,” claiming authority to talk about spiritual matters.

We need the full breadth of reproductive rights. And we are fighting for a society where a woman is entitled to decide whether to be a mother or not. Where quality medicine is available to every person. Where raising children is the business of the whole society, not just the mother. Where we will not have to count the pennies from our paychecks, be afraid of layoffs and crises, and finally we will be able to live and create the future.

Women’s struggle for reproductive rights, including the right to abortion, is an important part of our common struggle for a better world.

We are united with those who defend these rights — in Argentina, the United States, Ireland, Poland and any other country in the world.