The struggle against systemic racism and the police state in the U.S. is integral and linked to the struggle against U.S. wars of aggression overseas.

“The time has come for forging a clearer path to liberation analysis that centers on working class solidarity across race and borders.”

“We don’t think you fight fire  with fire best ; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism  not with racism , but we’re going to fight with solidarity . We say we’re not going to fight capitalism  with black capitalism , but we’re going to fight it with socialism .” — Fred Hampton Jr.

The horrific murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade and countless other unnamed and unrecorded murders at the hands of the police have galvanized mass uprisings across the U.S. and around the world under the banner call of Black Lives Matter. In a demonstration of solidarity across communities all around the world, people of color who have confronted

structural racism, disenfranchisement, and state violence have taken to the streets in these Black-led uprisings.

As first, second and even third generation Filipinos in the U.S., BAYAN USA has been actively participating and marching in solidarity with Black lives and Black self-determination. Our material basis for mobilizing our community for Black solidarity has always been for the simple reason that we share an enemy: U.S. empire (aka U.S. imperialism), and, by extension, its police and military as its tools to carry out fascism. We also share an important aspiration: liberation.

Common History/Common Enemy

We understand that the historic oppression of Black people in the U.S., beginning with chattel slavery, created the conditions for the U.S. to accrue enough wealth from slave labor to become a global imperialist power. That power would eventually wage aggressive wars for territory overseas, beginning with the invasion and brutal colonization of the Philippines in 1899.

The national liberation struggle that Filipinos and our diaspora overseas have been waging since 1899 strikes at the same beast that the Black liberation struggle has been valiantly fighting against. The Black soldiers sent to the Philippines as part of the U.S. invasion who defected to the side of Filipino revolutionary forces fighting against U.S. occupation came to this realization at the turn of the 20th century. And in the same vein, we know that every step forward of the Black liberation struggle is a victory for the Filipino people and all peoples suffering under U.S. empire.

Hundreds of years later, in 2020, Black people in the U.S. are targeted by the police and criminal justice systems of the fascist and war-profiteering U.S. state. At the same time, the Philippines remains a neocolony of the U.S. and the Filipino people remain impoverished and repressed by a U.S.-puppet fascist Philippine dictatorship. From marching together after the murder of Amadou Diallo in 1999, to the mass uprisings in the wake of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, and Trayvon Martin’s deaths in 2014, we have made it a point to link and raise our struggles and demonstrate our paths to liberation as interconnected, as Chairman Fred Hampton implied. Our struggles are distinct, but advance forward ever in step against U.S. imperialism.

Class Struggle Present Day

The global health pandemic and the unprecedented economic crisis that has ensued—a direct result of the U.S.’ militarist and neoliberal response to COVID19–has laid bare the structural economic assault of the capitalist system on poor people everywhere. The role of police as a tool of the state and white supremacy as a ruling class ideology to protect said capitalist system have been exposed. The mass uprisings calling for justice for George Floyd and growing awareness of the failures of capitalism ring of a higher class consciousness the people of the U.S. sorely need.

Simply put, now is the time to break free from the neoliberal trap of identity politics that silos struggles that are materially and historically interconnected and works in favor of preserving the racist and capitalist status quo because it fails to name and address the root problem we are trying to resolve.

As part of the larger group collectively known as people of color in the U.S., we are concerned by the ideological influence of neoliberalism on young bright minds today, which surrenders the primacy of class consciousness and class struggle, and by extension proletarian internationalism as the material basis for international solidarity[1] .

Proletarian Internationalism

Historically, Black leadership in the U.S. has drawn on proletarian internationalism and class struggle as peoples weapons for combating systemic racism and white supremacy.

In the final year of his life, Malcolm X spent time in Africa and the Middle East, where he built relationships with leaders of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist resistance movements. Prior to that, Malcolm X spoke of the need for internationalism when he drew inspiration from the Bandung Conference of 1955, uniting Black and Asian leaders in an international alliance that went beyond identifying white supremacy as the common enemy, but named colonialism and monopoly capitalism’s interest to control the natural resources and use their populations as cheap labor from the Global South.

At the same time, many leaders of Third World resistance movements expressed solidarity and connected the struggles of colonized peoples overseas with the oppression of Black people in the U.S., including Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-Tung and Fidel Castro, to name a few.

While speaking of non-violence in the 1960’s civil rights movement, it was Martin Luther King Jr.’s vocal criticisms against war and impoverishment (as forms of class warfare) that eventually made him a target for assassination by U.S. establishment.

“Third World resistance movements expressed solidarity with the oppression of Black people in the U.S.”

In 1969 and 1970, the Black Panther Party sent African-American delegations to North Vietnam, North Korea, and China.

As the U.S. continued its military invasion of Vietnam in the 1970’s, the BPP and other Black leaders contributed an important message to the anti-war discourse in the U.S. — that of drawing material connections between the historic state violence against Black people in the US, including lynchings, to the US wars of aggression for hegemony and geopolitical influence.

In other words, the struggle against systemic racism and the police state in the U.S. is integral and linked to the struggle against U.S. wars of aggression overseas.

Conclusion

And in this period of mass uprising against racist police terror in the U.S. and around the world, the Trump administration simultaneously pursues arms deals with other countries, including the fascist and blood-thirsty Duterte regime in the Philippines, to beef up the trillion-dollar military-industrial complex. In the same breath, it militarizes the police and deploys National Guard to “dominate” protestors in the “battle zones,” all in the time of the biggest economic crisis the American people have ever confronted, with no clear path to economic recovery.

While fighting the imminent passage of Duterte’s Anti-Terrorism Bill in the Philippines, we as Filipinos in the US draw material connections between the U.S.-backed counter-insurgency of Duterte with police brutality and all forms of state violence in the US that target and destroy Black, Brown, immigrant, and all working class lives.

One where youth of all races and creeds embrace the demands of the international working class over so-called intersectionality. One that can actually rock and threaten the status quo by holding ruling classes accountable, and dismantling the economic foundation of white supremacy and the police state. One with a fighting chance of actually freeing us all.

Bernadette Ellorin is the National Spokesperson of BAYAN USA (Bagong Alyansang Makabayan), an anti-imperialist alliance of 30 grassroots Filipino organizations fighting for genuine sovereignty and democracy in the Philippines, as well as the rights and welfare of Filipinos in the U.S. and the diaspora.
Adrian Bonifacio is the National Chairperson of Anakbayan-USA, a grassroots Filipino organization of youth and students with 26 chapters across the country. It is the largest overseas chapter of Anakbayan Philippines, and a member of BAYAN USA.

Saturday, July 25, 2020 at 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM EDT

El Barrio, East Harlem, New York

Saturday, July 25th, 2020 is the 122nd Anniversary of the Invasion and Colonization of Puerto Rico!

122 years of Colonization
122 years of Exploitation
122 years of Repression and Oppression
122 years of U.S. White Supremacy and Racism
122 years of RESISTANCE AND REBELLION!

Join ProLibertad’s Freedom March through El Barrio!

In the spirit of Rafael Cancel Miranda, Join us as we demand an end to U.S. colonialism and for Puerto Rican Independence!

Saturday, July 25th, 2020 at 1pm
We will march on the street from E.125th St and Lexington Avenue to the Julia de Burgos Mosaic on E. 106th St.

WEAR YOUR MASKS AND GLOVES! BRING WATER!

BRING YOUR FLAGS, PANDERETAS, WHISTLES, AND BANNERS!

On Facebook

Embracing the authentic meaning of “the spirit of Stonewall,” last year in New York City, the Reclaim Pride Coalition organized a huge, militant, multinational, multigender, multigenerational, youth-led march reclaiming the rebellious essence of the 1969 uprising outside the Stonewall Inn in the city’s Greenwich Village.

Demonstrating the high level of political consciousness that exists within the LGBTQ2S communities and their organizations, the Reclaim Pride marchers’ demands reflected not only issues of immediate concern to the communities themselves — in particular, the ongoing violence against trans people, especially trans women of color — but also the militaristic imperialist policies of the U.S., like the ongoing attempts to overthrow the democratically elected socialist government of Venezuela.

And now, a year later, that same high level of consciousness is visible in the magnificent mass mobilizations of anti-racist youth and their allies in every nook and cranny of this big country and, in dramatic shows of international solidarity, all across the globe. 

LGBTQ2S activists are hard at work in organizing many of these anti-racist, anti-police actions. Adjustments made necessary by the coronavirus pandemic have made Pride organizing more challenging, but the movement is not deterred. In San Diego, for example, which has a huge Pride march each July, the march itself has been cancelled in the interests of protecting the community from contagion. But, in a significant act of solidarity with the Black-led uprising against police violence, the local Pride organizers have announced a ban on the participation by “law enforcement agencies” in all Pride activities. 

Solidarity! As it should be right now, the focus of decent revolutionary people all around the world is on stopping the racist killer police of the U.S. from murdering people of color. But that struggle also raises basic issues of racial and class injustice: the need for free education through college for all; free quality health care, the lack of which has been exposed by the high level of deaths from COVID-19 among Black and Brown people; decent, affordable housing; and the right to good paying jobs for all. Deserving the special attention of all who seek a just world are the call for reparations for slavery and recognition of the settler-colonial status of the United States entity on Indigenous land.

The LGBTQ2S liberation movement and the Black liberation movement are natural allies. They were both born out of the same fury. They both began as a rebellion against continuous police brutality on an oppressed community.

In a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court has just ruled that LGBTQ2S folk are covered under Civil Rights protections against being fired.  This is a great victory and it’s no accident that two right-wing justices broke with Trump on this issue right now. It’s because of the Black-led rebellion. The struggle of the most oppressed elevates the struggles of the whole working class!

The Socialist Unity Party/Partido de Socialismo Unido salutes the growing unity between the LGBTQ2S communities and the Black Lives Matter movement. The goal of abolishing the economic, political and social injustices that plague the capitalist world can only be overcome by continuing to build these inspiring bridges of solidarity and struggle.

June 15 — Today, protesters shouting “No justice, no peace, no racist police!” surrounded and blocked Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ car from leaving City Hall. This came after a weekend of rebellion in response to the murder of Rayshard Brooks by two white police officers in the city’s southwest, a poor working-class community. 

The community’s militant response has already forced the resignation of Police Chief Erika Shields and the firing of the cop who fired the killing shots at Brooks. Like the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Rayshard Brooks’ death was captured on video which went viral. 

Brooks fell asleep at a Wendy’s drive-through on Friday night, June 12. After being given a field sobriety test, a scuffle ensued when police tried to arrest him for allegedly driving under the influence — a law disproportionately enforced against Black and Latinx people in Atlanta.

The cops used a taser on Brooks and put him in a chokehold, similar to the one that killed George Floyd and sparked nationwide resistance. In fear of his life, Brooks grabbed the taser, broke out of the chokehold, and ran.

As Brooks ran, he was shot three times. Two of the shots went into his back and killed him. This has forced the Atlanta medical examiner to declare his death a homicide. 

Even if Brooks was aiming the taser at the cops, as they claim, police in Georgia often testify in court to the fact that a taser is not a lethal weapon. They can’t now claim that Brooks allegedly pointing a taser at them, while he was running away and at a long distance from them, justified his murder. 

Abolishing this institutionalized racist police system is the rallying cry of the most oppressed. It has never been about our safety, but instead about protecting the property and capital of the ruling class. It must be replaced with community-controlled public safety departments, specifically in the Black, Brown and Indigenous communities. Abolish the police, prisons and ICE!

On Monday, June 1, Donald Trump called Attorney General William Barr, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley to the White House, where he got on the phone with the country’s governors and proceeded to demand that they “dominate” the streets, saying, “Most of you are weak.” He told them that he was putting Gen. Milley in charge.

Trump said: “We’re going to take care of it. And we’ve got a number of people here that you’ll be seeing. Gen. Milley is here, who’s head of Joint Chiefs of Staff, a fighter, a warrior, had a lot of victories and no losses. And he hates to see the way it’s being handled in the various states. And I just put him in charge,” according to a transcript of the recorded talk.

The White House announced that Trump would give a speech later in the day. Although he didn’t mention this on the call, there were numerous reports that the president intended to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 — used by President Andrew Jackson to deploy federal troops to literally massacre a major slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia’s Southampton County.

The Insurrection Act gives Trump the authority to use the military to put down protests. 

The afternoon of June 1 saw the unprecedented sight of Gen. Milley in battle fatigues, with Attorney General Barr, on the White House grounds in advance of Trump’s speech in the Rose Garden. They appeared to be reviewing the troops which were lined up facing the protests in Lafayette Park across the street.

Thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers

Suddenly, the whole nation witnessed the aggressive and violent action by 5,000 National Guard troops and federal agents, decked out in full body armor, to move the protesters out of the way just before the president came out to speak about dominating the streets, saying, “As we speak, I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel and law enforcement officers.”

Shortly after that, Trump led Barr, Milley, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and others over to a church where he famously held up a Bible.

A white National Guard commander called the standoff in Lafayette Square “the Alamo,” implying that the White House was under siege. The Alamo was a fort in the colonial territory of Texas, then a part of Mexico, where, in 1836, white slave-traders from the U.S. fought the Mexican government for the right to own slaves. Mexico had abolished slavery.

The Washington, D.C., National Guard is sometimes called the “Praetorian Guard” because of their unusual chain of command almost directly to the president. 

A secret federal police force also appeared on the streets of Washington. Heavily armed and dressed for combat, this force had no identifying insignia. The Washington Post reported that the unidentified forces were under the command of Attorney General Barr.

The next day, perhaps symbolically, the Lincoln Memorial was occupied by a National Guard unit dressed for battle. 

The 82nd Airborne, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., along with a military police unit from Fort Drum, N.Y., was headed to Washington.

It was stunning enough that the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. military was walking around the White House in battle fatigues, a man at war. That message was confirmed that night with the general walking around the streets as if he were commanding the troops in battle.

Trump didn’t invoke the Insurrection Act, but according to a June 10 New York Times report, it was a very close thing. 

In a press conference the next day, June 2, Secretary Esper said he did not support using the Insurrection Act. When he ordered the 82nd Airborne to stand down and return to base, Trump countermanded it. 

What followed over the next few days was a counter move. One high-ranking retired military officer after another, led by former Defense Secretary James Mattis, said they did not support military intervention. Mattis compared Trump’s response to Nazi tactics. 

By Thursday, June 4, Milley himself apologized for his participation.

Trump responded with a threat to send the military to break up the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) in Seattle, a threat he repeated on following days. The threat remains in place.

All of the military officers who spoke out were careful in what they said, making their objections to only this specific instance of military intervention. 

Dictatorship of capitalism

Because the state is based on armed bodies — the military and police — and its auxiliaries, the prisons, courts and so on, even the most democratic bourgeois government has a hidden dictatorship of capitalism. This is not necessarily a military dictatorship. But military dictatorships are sometimes brought in to rescue a capitalist government in crisis, especially when there is a popular uprising.

Karl Marx wrote on bourgeois military dictatorships and the 1851 coup by Louis Bonaparte in France. Bonapartism, as the term was used by Marx, refers to a situation in which the military seizes control in a country sharply divided, with the military introducing selective reforms to co-opt the demands of the working class and peasant farmers. In the process, Marx said, Bonapartists preserve and mask the power of the bourgeois ruling class.

Mattis said of Trump that he “does not try to unite the American people.” He then compared Trump to the Nazis, sowing divisions. 

A military dictatorship, even one led by Donald Trump, is not fascism. Mattis invoking Nazis was a blur, not meant to be clarifying.

What is characteristic of fascism, as opposed to a military dictatorship, is the complete destruction of all working-class organizations — labor unions, civil rights groups, socialist and communist parties, and all the rights that go with them — the right to strike, to organize, to vote, free speech, free press and the other rights which have been the by-product of the class struggle of the workers and oppressed peoples. It is all of this as a whole that characterizes fascism, not just a single part of it.

The U.S. is in the midst of a great crisis, an economic and political crisis. Unemployment is in the tens of millions, at levels not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Homelessness has reached record levels. For those workers who have jobs, pay is at record lows, income inequality at record highs. 

Before the coronavirus shutdown, 44 percent of all U.S. workers were in poverty, not even a living wage. Almost 120,000 have died from COVID-19, with the spread of the infection and the daily death toll continuing. All of these have hit the Black and Brown communities the hardest, exposing the devastating conditions of racism in the U.S.

On top of that came the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, the police murder of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., and the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. In response, an uprising for justice, against police terror, defending Black lives and rights has swept the country.

Trump could order U.S. troops to occupy U.S. cities to put down the uprising. But what he didn’t consider was that those troops could say no. In fact, most of the soldiers probably support the uprising. Many of the soldiers come from the Black and Brown communities that are leading the protests. More than 55 percent of the whole population of the country say that the burning of the Minneapolis police station was justified.

General Mattis made a veiled reference to the problem of the troops. The soldiers could refuse to follow orders if they believed those orders were illegal. 

The Pentagon has plans in place for a military occupation of U.S. cities. And a little more than a year ago they did a practice run. A Pentagon war game called the 2018 Joint Land, Air and Sea Strategic Special Program, or JLASS, offered a scenario in which members of Generation Z, “anti-capitalist extremists,” launch a “Zbellion” in the U.S. in the mid-2020s.

The JLASS war game was recently revealed because the Pentagon had played a visible role in Trump’s move for military occupation of major U.S. cities. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper had said on June 1, “I think the sooner that you mass and dominate the battlespace, the quicker this dissipates and we can get back to the right normal.” 

Apparently, the words “dominate the battlespace” came right out of the JLASS war game script.

As the COVID-19 death toll in the U.S. approaches 120,000, the Trump administration is relying heavily on anti-China propaganda — including wild accusations, right-wing conspiracy theories and racist anti-Asian rhetoric that greenlit physical attacks and racist assaults against Asian Americans.  

Trump and his ilk need to distract from their own disastrous response to the deadly pandemic, the deep capitalist recession, the epidemic of violent police racism and murder, and the brutality against protestors demanding justice for George Floyd. Slandering and attacking China became their chosen distraction.

But the animosity toward China isn’t limited to mere rhetoric. There are calls to make China pay reparations, lawsuits against China by several U.S. states, investigations of the origins of the virus by intelligence agencies in Australia, Europe and the U.S., an effort by the Trump administration to forge an international alliance to further sabotage China, and a cutoff of funds to the World Health Organization.

The heightened animosity from the White House has prompted establishment media to reference the Cold War, when imperialist hostility meant the USSR, China, Cuba and other socialist countries were under constant threat of nuclear attack. And, in fact, the Pentagon is preparing for a war against China. The possibility of a military confrontation can’t be ignored by anti-war forces in the U.S.

Pentagon pivot to Asia long planned

The shift in U.S. military strategy toward targeting China precedes the pandemic and the Trump administration. The reorientation began when the Obama administration embraced then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “pivot to Asia,” which called for a stronger military presence in the South China Sea to challenge China and gain access to Asian markets. But the right-wing coup in Ukraine and Crimea’s refusal to be part of the U.S. orbit, along with the war on Syria, ended up taking precedence. 

Pentagon war planners are now going full-throttle to make up for lost time. As generals and admirals came to Congress in March to demand more money for war in the 2021 budget, it came to light that they were already thoroughly invested in preparations for all-out war against China. On March 5, Gen. David Berger, commandant of the U.S. Marines, outlined for the Senate Armed Services Committee a 10-year transition for the Marines that is already underway. 

The Marine Corps is retooling for war against the People’s Republic of China. For decades, the Marines have provided ground troops in the longest reign of imperialist death and destruction in U.S. history, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now the plan is to leave that to the U.S. Army, and for the Marines to become a high-tech maritime force to operate more vigorously in the South China Sea and to augment the U.S. Navy.

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) ended in August 2019, and the U.S. shunned efforts to replace it. Without that treaty in place, the Pentagon is preparing the first phase of the Marine’s transition — stocking up on previously prohibited, land-based cruise missiles. 

A May 6 Reuters article reports that “having shed the constraints of a Cold War era arms control treaty, the Trump administration is planning to deploy long-range, ground-launched cruise missiles in the Asia-Pacific region. … The Marines will join forces with the U.S. Navy, using small mobile units armed with anti-ship missiles dispersed along the so-called first island chain — the string of islands that runs from Japan, through Taiwan, the Philippines and on to Borneo, enclosing China’s coastal seas.”

The transition means tanks and heavy weaponry are being dispensed with, and fewer F-35 aircraft for the smaller mobile Marine units. V-22 tiltrotor aircraft, helicopter units and shore-assaulting amphibious vehicles will be cut. According to a report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the radical reshaping of the Marine Corps will transform it into a naval expeditionary force. 

The Marine Corps will be redesigned to fight “within an adversary’s (read China’s) bubble of air, missile and naval power,” according to Gen. Bergen. It will require small groups of less visible, newly designed warships, armed with drones currently in development — essentially jet-powered unmanned fighter jets — to function in small units with the ability to move independently and deploy in and around the South China Sea.

U.S. rulers threatened by China’s example

Military contractors like General Dynamics and Raytheon have made billions equipping the Marine Corp and drained funds from the U.S. Treasury that should have been used for people’s needs. No doubt there will still be lucrative contracts for them, in addition to the billions that will likely be handed over to AeroVironment for the “lethal unmanned” drones and to Kratos Defense and Security for their jet-powered drones. General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Huntington Ingalls will all be vying for the billions it will take to build the new warships.

But this shift by the Pentagon is fueled by more than the usual siphoning off of Treasury funds by giant criminal corporations. 

Regardless of concessions made to capitalism by the People’s Republic of China over the years of its development, the Chinese Communist Party and the people of China set an example in the “People’s War” against COVID-19. Their successful struggle against the disease trumpeted amazing advances in science and medicine, the superiority of centralized planning and how humanity is prioritized over profit. It is a victory in the battle for the consciousness of the worldwide working class. 

A famous quote by the beloved leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, goes: “A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.” Our people’s movement, strengthened enormously by the working-class explosion against police racist murders, has to be ready to defend socialism in China — the future.

Every evening for the past two-and-a-half months, the people of Cuba have come out on their streets and porches to applaud and cheer for the 3,000 members of the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade who are fighting the COVID-19 pandemic on the front lines in 28 countries with 34 brigades. For the Cuban people, these medical professionals are not just doctors going abroad, but representatives of a society where health and human life are considered an absolute priority.

After two-and-a-half months, the first brigade that had been in Lombardy, Italy, returned home and was met at the airport by President Miguel Díaz-Canel via a video conference. He told them: “With your noble gesture and your brave disposition to defy death to save lives, you have shown the world a truth that Cuba’s enemies have tried to silence or misrepresent: the strength of Cuban medicine! You represent the victory of life over death, of solidarity over selfishness.”

In the last 55 years, 600,000 Cubans have provided medical services in 160 countries. And that entire time, the U.S. State Department has done everything in its array of dirty tactics to discredit them and undermine their purpose of administering health to poor people, most especially in Latin America. This included the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program (CMPP) from 2009 to 2017, whose whole reason to exist was to lure Cuban doctors away from their mission with promises of passage to the U.S., where there would be green cards and lucrative jobs waiting. 

It never stops. Last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — the agency that provides funds for subversion programs against Cuba — allocated $3 million specifically for projects directed against the medical brigades abroad.

The example of Cuba’s model of health care for all and sharing that view with the world sends the U.S. and the champions of neoliberalism into some kind of frenzy. It is the antithesis of the U.S. model of health that excludes millions and sends others into bankruptcy to pay doctor and hospital bills. Imagine a model like that minus the parasitic insurance corporations and pharmaceutical giants who want to control all medicine and legally sell it at any price they wish.  

It is no wonder they will stoop to any depth to smash the prestige that Cuba maintains with the world. Can anyone think of just one sustained humanitarian mission made by the U.S. that did not have strings attached?

The Trump administration did not start this attack, but has escalated it by sweeping sanctions that now include an end of all remittances from Cuban Americans to their families on the island. Over and over, Trump has denounced Cuba’s medical brigades as constituting forced labor, ignoring the fact that in Cuba they have many more volunteers to go on these missions than positions to be filled, and that the biggest heroes to the Cuban people are their doctors.

As Cuba’s example shines, the anti-Cuba crowd acts more desperate. Florida’s lead anti-Cuba senator, Rick Scott, called for more punishment for Cuba’s “human trafficking” by sanctioning any country that participates in Cuba’s Medical Mission Program.

This period of crisis offers a great possibility for international cooperation between nations when it comes to medical assistance, as illustrated by the Cuban COVID-19 brigades. One of the criticisms from detractors of the program is that Cuba is receiving billions of dollars in revenue while only paying a fraction of that to the medical professionals. It is hard for some to look outside of the prism of capitalist relations because they can only see the medical industry in terms of profit to be made. 

Why is it a crime that blockaded Cuba makes mutually beneficial agreements with countries that can pay for its services? The mindset of these brigadistas is quite the opposite of being oppressed, because they are fully aware that their contribution helps ensure that the payments contribute towards the entire Cuban population being afforded universal health care.  And in practically all the countries the patients receiving the care of the Cuban doctors pay nothing.  Their accommodations are not luxurious like that afforded to many doctors; they live with just the basics, because these are emergency missions in the pandemic focused on saving people’s lives.

In many countries, including Argentina, where there is no Cuban medical brigade, unemployed doctors and professional medical associations have expressed varying levels of opposition. But this doesn’t easily equate because one aspect of the Henry Reeve Medical Brigades, which were developed in 2005, is that they are specialized and trained to hit the ground running to work in emergency triage situations, like natural disasters and quick-moving viruses. They come as a team made up of family physicians, epidemiologists, biostatisticians, health technology engineers and biotechnology experts, and many have the experience of being on previous international missions. 

The Cuban brigades are not the long-term solution to the shortcomings in a country’s health care system, but rather a stop-gap solution to an immediate need, as in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010, where they provided care for 40 percent of the victims, or in Western Africa in 2014 after the Ebola outbreak. Once again, it was Cuban doctors leading the fight with over 600 medical professionals, while Western governments watched. In 2015, a Henry Reeve Brigade went to Nepal after the earthquake there and treated 4,600 patients — many of whom, as the doctors reported, had never heard of the country of Cuba before.

In the fight against COVID-19, each country makes its own contract, its own timetable and its own area of need with the Cuban Ministry of Health. Some pay, while others only cover the cost of transportation and accommodations in their countries. The basis of these agreements is not about commercial transactions but rather cooperation, and importantly, every country that has applied to Cuba for a medical brigade during this pandemic has gotten one.

In the conclusion of his remarks to the returning medical team, Díaz-Canel said: “Witnessing the growing world clamor for our brigades to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize has filled us with healthy pride these days. With the mission you have completed, you have made a solid contribution to advancing this movement.”

Díaz-Canel was referring to a blooming international campaign to nominate the Cuban medical brigades for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, which will be officially launched in the U.S. on June 16 in a webinar with actor Danny Glover and Cuban Ambassador to the U.S. José Ramón Cabañas. To sign on to the campaign, go to www.cubanobel.org.

Source: Resumen

In a month of extraordinary rebellions following the police execution of George Floyd, one of the most significant is the takeover of a six-block area around the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct, where the local community and activists have established a police-free Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ).

“Hundreds of protesters have taken over several blocks of Seattle and transformed it into the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone … helping to amplify nationwide protests while offering a real-world example of what a community can look like without police,” the Guardian reported.

“Protesters have filled several blocks and at least part of a park in the artsy Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, after police abandoned their east precinct, following dangerous clashes between protesters and law enforcement.”

The people’s takeover of a small area of Seattle has sent panic through the halls of power, starting with the White House. President Donald Trump has made several threats to “retake” the city from the community, whom he labels “domestic terrorists.” Trump implied he will use military force if Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee and Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan don’t move swiftly to crush the CHAZ. 

Trump’s threats have been echoed by right-wing media slandering Seattle Black activists with racist terms like “warlords” and warning about imaginary “antifa” violence. Fox News was exposed for using doctored photos in its rabidly hostile coverage of CHAZ.

In light of Trump’s attempted military coup in Washington, D.C., on June 1, when the president ordered the clearing of protesters from Lafayette Square by the National Guard and appeared publicly with Pentagon brass to threaten using the U.S. military to put down anti-police terror protests, the movement must take these threats seriously and not dismiss them as Trump’s usual empty boasts.

Demands of Black collective

A statement of demands from Black leadership in the CHAZ, “Collective Black Voices at Free Capitol Hill,” explains, “This is no simple request to end police brutality. We demand that the City Council and the Mayor, whoever that may be, implement these policy changes for the cultural and historic advancement of the City of Seattle, and to ease the struggles of its people. This document is to represent the Black voices who spoke in victory at the top of 12th & Pine after 9 days of peaceful protest while under constant nightly attack from the Seattle Police Department.

“The Seattle Police Department and attached court system are beyond reform. We do not request reform, we demand abolition. We demand that the Seattle Council and the Mayor defund and abolish the Seattle Police Department and the attached Criminal Justice Apparatus. This means 100% of funding, including existing pensions for Seattle Police. At an equal level of priority we also demand that the city disallow the operations of ICE in the city of Seattle.”

The collective’s demands are broken into four categories: the justice system, health and human services, economics and education. They call for de-gentrification of the city and rent control; for hospitals and care facilities to employ Black health care workers to serve the community; for Black and Indigneous history to be elevated in the state’s education curriculum; and many other urgent needs of the city’s workers and oppressed.

Self-organization against the system

Earlier this year, Seattle was the site of one of the first major COVID-19 outbreaks in the U.S., devastating poor and oppressed communities and the health care system. But the city also has a history of militant struggles, from the 1919 General Strike inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution to the 1999 Battle of Seattle during the meeting of the World Trade Organization.

There are many examples in history of the people setting up their own governing bodies and defenses, free of the police and other capitalist institutions — from Nat Turner’s Rebellion to the Paris Commune to the Russian Revolution and every revolutionary manifestation since. When the people rise, and begin to understand that the whole system is their enemy, they naturally seek to create and defend these forms of self-organization, which have been called communes, soviets, people’s assemblies, etc.

Trump’s threats to unleash the military to “retake” Seattle reflects the fear in the ruling class that this modest expression of people’s power will inspire workers and youth to take similar measures elsewhere, especially coming on the heels of the burning down of the 3rd Police Precinct in Minneapolis.

The rulers are right to worry. An attempt was made to establish an autonomous zone in Asheville, N.C., though it was subsequently crushed by the police; while the governor of neighboring Tennessee issued a panicky warning against similar efforts in Nashville. 

From Atlanta to Minneapolis to Oakland, and all over the world, people are watching, learning and drawing lessons from the Seattle experience as they have from Minneapolis and all the historic events of recent weeks.

The urgent need now is for solidarity to defend the CHAZ from attack, whether by Trump and the Pentagon or the “liberal” authorities in Washington State. 

One, two, three, many Seattles!

New York — Thousands of people filled the streets of Washington Heights, Harlem and El Barrio (East Harlem) on June 14 for a militant demonstration of Black-Latinx solidarity against racist police terror. 

Puerto Rican and Black Liberation flags waved side-by-side as people in these two proud neighborhoods, historically plagued by police brutality, economic neglect and racist gentrification, once again expressed their unity with demands to “demilitarize, demobilize and defund the police.”

Sunday had earlier been slated for the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade, one of the community’s most significant cultural and political events. This year’s parade was cancelled, however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

But seeing the urgent need for solidarity with the Black-led uprising that began in Minneapolis after the police murder of George Floyd, freedom fighters in New York’s Puerto Rican community called on the community to take the streets.

Signs and banners in Spanish and English, carried by community members, remembered not only Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks, but also the many Black and Latinx victims of the New York Police Department.

The march stepped off from Mitchel Square Park on 167th Street, near the Audubon Ballroom where Malcolm X was assassinated.  It gathered force as it wound through Washington Heights and Harlem. 

As the roar of chanting marchers filled 125th Street, hundreds of people greeted them with a rally at the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building. Speakers included members of the Jericho Movement for political prisoners. A banner hung at the base of the Adam Clayton Powell statue bore the logo of the Black Panthers and the demand: “Black community control of police.”

After a long standoff with police at the intersection of 125th Street and Africa Square, the march continued on to the People’s Church in East Harlem. Supporters of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and Struggle-La Lucha carried signs in the march calling for community control and an end to cop crimes.

Saturday, June 20, 2020 at 2:00 PM – 6:00 PM EDT

20th and N. Charles Street 21218

This weekend we will commemorate Juneteenth and March for #GeorgeFloyd, #BreonnaTaylor, #RayshardBrooks, #ToyinSalau and all victims of racism and police killings!
____________________________

The March will end with a People’s Assembly 3:30 pm @ City Hall
*Special messages from Rev. Annie Chambers on Juneteenth
And Clarence Thomas former ILWU Local 10 and Million Worker March leader organizer for Juneteenth dock workers shut down.
*Testimony from the people — Share your stories about police abuse and how the money spent on repression and police terror could save your community.
*Music by: Anthony Parker aka Wordsmith
____________________________

Saturday’s March will include people on foot and a car caravan will follow our March. This way everyone will be able to participate on Saturday regardless of ability or health issues. Cars will assembly at the parking lot across from 2011 N. Charles Street.

We will have a printed route at the site. If you are joining the car caravan, you can arrive at 1:30 pm to decorate your car with signs that we are providing.
____________________________

Bring a blanket, or folding chair to the assembly.
Participants will have a chance to relax and get to know each others during the assembly.

Continue our fight for justice #BlackLivesMatter #CommunityControlofPolice #FundPeoplesNeeds #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd #DisbandRacistPolice #BaltimoreProtest

On Facebook