Teachers demand safety before returning to classrooms

Chicago — Students in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) stayed home and learned remotely again on Thursday, January 28. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) continued to demand that any return to in-person learning be done in a safe way. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot had ordered all teachers back to the classroom on Wednesday the 27th but was forced to backtrack and tell parents to keep their kids home again Thursday.

CPS has been demanding that 80% of school staff return in person and has refused to allow accommodations for staff who live in households with people who are in high-risk categories according to the Centers for Disease Control. CPS has also refused to provide weekly testing for unvaccinated staff and students at schools. In binding arbitration on Oct. 2, CPS was ordered to allow school clerks and technology coordinators to work remotely, but the school system has yet to comply with that order.

The Chicago Teachers Union is seeking a health metric based on CDC guidance, a phased reopening, access to vaccinations for educators, and enforceable safety standards in school buildings, which have struggled to meet even basic needs for PPE, adequate ventilation and clean facilities. Because Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s CPS team has refused to offer vaccinations to educators before ordering them into school buildings, and has not been willing to agree to a phased-in resumption of in-person learning, the Chicago Teachers Union has now publicly called for mediation to resolve the impasse.

The teachers say that they continue to teach and want to continue to teach safely. To that end, their union has proposed critical precautions necessary for a safe return to in-person learning, but all of those precautions have been rejected by the Board of Education.

CTU President Jesse Sharkey said, “We are willing to keep teaching, but CPS has said they will lock us out. We are willing to keep negotiating, but CPS has refused to back down from insisting that 80% of educators and support staff return on February 1 to serve fewer than 20% of the students. Another 10,000 of our members became eligible for vaccinations on Jan. 25. We can make schools safe with a phased reopening and enhanced COVID-19 testing for members of school communities.”

“It’s obvious to everyone but CPS and the mayor that parents aren’t sending their children back because they do not believe schools are safe or that COVID is under control,” said CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates. “This is especially true for Black and brown families. CPS does not need 80% of educators back in school to serve 19% of students. This makes no sense in a pandemic that continues to infect one in eight people in many of the Black and brown Chicago neighborhoods that have already shouldered a disproportionate burden of COVID disease and death. Our families want safety. Our educators want safety, yet CPS continues to refuse to negotiate an agreement that builds in that safety, and instead, has threatened to lock out tens of thousands of educators who have a right to safe workplaces to educate our schoolchildren.”

Only 19% of eligible students returned to pre-K and special education cluster programs on Jan. 11, and in some cases teachers are being told to come in to schools in which not one family has opted in to the hybrid model in person learning, which shows that there is broad agreement in the community that the current CPS plan is not safe.

Source: FightBack! News

January 29, 2021

For four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, the LGBTQ2S community had dealt with a near constant erosion of our democratic rights and legal protections. In tandem with this came a rise in hateful sentiment against us, with trans people in particular standing in the crosshairs of American reaction and facing the violence that comes with it.

Naturally, when the Trump administration banned transgender people from military service, the message was loud and clear: Trump and his base believe that trans folks don’t deserve to serve in an institution that is regarded with honor and respect, and must be barred from doing so. Through executive process the Trump administration enshrined this outright discrimination into law. While military service is widely considered a democratic right, it’s well known that many enlist for the sake of economic security. Given that some of the biggest challenges facing trans folks in the U.S. are access to employment, housing, and healthcare, denying them entry into an institution that guarantees these is, for many, of more immediate importance than democratic rights in the abstract.

While we stand against this blatant discrimination against our trans siblings, none of this is to say that the Anti-War Committee endorses military service. We maintain that the U.S. Military is the armed wing of U.S. imperialism whose purpose is to exercise the political and economic will of the United States by force. As such, we believe that the talents of people of conscience would be better served elsewhere.

Part of the reason for this is that the supposed stability offered by the military is paper thin. Once recruited, enlisted personnel face higher risk of suicide, chronic injuries, a culture centered around alcohol that leads to rampant alcoholism, and overwork. Women face sexual assault at astronomical rates. The military takes the desperate masses yearning for their basic needs and forces them through a grinder before discarding them; veterans of military service are often left to their own devices without adequate support for reintegration into civilian society.

Given that 1 in 5 of the rioters that broke into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 are military veterans, we can’t ignore one of the most potent sources of the military’s toxicity: the fact that the desire for military experience and skills has historically led large numbers of white supremacists to join the armed forces. These violent racist extremists are doing work shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone else in the military. The broad rise of extreme right wing ideology is much more potent within the ranks, leading to large numbers of active and former servicemembers to join militia groups and white nationalist organizations.

The repeal of the transgender military ban isn’t the beacon of opportunity for trans folks that the Biden administration makes it out to be. For those of us who would qualify, it is the opportunity to trade one set of dangerous circumstances for another. The U.S. has repeatedly shown that it that won’t bat an eye as our transgender siblings are villainized as deviants and killed in anti-trans hate crimes. They won’t guarantee us dignity and safety, they won’t guarantee access for our basic human needs, but they’ll guarantee for us the opportunity to die for empire.

The Anti-War Committee has always advocated that money be spent on human needs, and not for war. We demand that oppressed people in the U.S., including our trans siblings, be provided with the resources necessary to survive, instead of being given more opportunities to die.

Source: Anti-War Committee

On Jan. 23, we took part in a rally for the freedom of comrade Commander Ahmad Sa’adat in Hamburg, Germany. Sa’adat, who is general secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), is one of more than 4,500 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails. The rally took place as part of the International Week of Action, which was called by Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network.

During his tenure as senator, current U.S. President Joseph Biden said, “It’s about time we stop apologizing for our support for Israel, there’s no apology to be made. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. If there weren’t an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”

The stringing together of oppression, exploitation and genocide — these are the results of the U.S. settlement policy and that is precisely the goal and practice of the Israeli government. Just as the “headquarters of global democracy” in Washington, D.C., exterminated 95% of the North American Indigenous peoples, so does the so-called “only democracy of the Middle East” want to implement this policy towards the Palestinians.

Given Joe Biden’s honesty and his promise that nothing fundamental will change, we can give an equally sober reply, that there is still only one word to describe such a system and state: apartheid.

Translated by Greg Butterfield

Source: NoPasaranHamburg.com

Social media network Facebook is relied upon by millions of people around the globe for communication. But under billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow owners, Facebook serves the interests of profit, not people. Facebook launched its latest attack on leftists and people’s organizations shortly after the inauguration of President Joe Biden. 

Pages of several left organizations in the U.S. and Britain were summarily removed on Jan. 21-22. Hundreds of activists affiliated with those pages had their Facebook profiles “disabled” — that is, banned. When activists tried to appeal the decision, they were all notified that the ban was permanent and could not be appealed due to alleged, unspecified “violations of community standards.”

In the U.S., the pages of the Peoples Power Assembly, a leading anti-police brutality group based in Baltimore, and Women In Struggle/Mujeres En Lucha, a nationwide women’s organization affiliated with the Women’s International Democratic Federation, were removed by Facebook. 

Sixteen activists who perform administrative duties on those pages — many of them contributors to Struggle-La Lucha newspaper and members of the Socialist Unity Party across the U.S. — were banned. As a result, several other pages administered by these activists were silenced, including the Atlanta Peoples Power Assembly, Prisoners Solidarity Committee, Solidarity with Antifascists in Novorossiya and Ukraine, and Youth Against War & Racism.

The Socialist Workers Party of Britain, one of that country’s largest left parties, was similarly hit. Not only the party’s main page but many of its local branch pages were removed, along with activists’ profiles. This was just days before the Jan. 25 International Day of Solidarity with Yemen, an effort against the U.S.-Saudi war in which the British SWP had a significant organizational role.

Also banned were anti-fascist networks and individuals targeted as “antifa,” and pages affiliated with the World Socialist Web Site in the U.S. and in Britain, where the group has been a vocal part of the movement to prevent the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

These organizations quickly took legal actions to challenge the Facebook bans, carried out media campaigns, and urged supporters and movement allies to bombard Facebook with protests.

As a result, by Jan. 27 most of the disabled pages had been restored. Many of the affected activists learned of the reversal only by word-of-mouth — Facebook offered no explanation for the bans or notification of the sudden reversal. 

According to a report in the Financial Times — the British equivalent of the Wall Street Journal — “Facebook said it had mistakenly removed a number of far-left political accounts, citing an ‘automation error,’ triggering uproar from socialists who accused the social media platform of censorship. 

“Facebook did not respond to requests to clarify how the error had occurred and why it had affected the personal accounts of socialist figures.”

Power concedes nothing without demand

“It was solidarity that won the reversal,” said Sharon Black of the Peoples Power Assembly. She pointed out that there was no avenue to restore the pages until the targeted groups alerted supporters and media and threatened legal action.

“We began to hear from many other activists about unfair censorship and arbitrary Facebook decisions, without a clear appeals process. Most of those impacted have been Black, Latinx, Palestinian, BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and People of Color], women and other communities whose voices have too often been marginalized.”

For years, Facebook and other U.S.-based social media monopolies have frequently silenced left organizations and activists fighting for national liberation and opposing U.S. wars and racism, while ultraright groups allied with U.S. imperialism and police agencies were given free rein. Only in the wake of mass outrage following the Jan. 6 coup attempt at the Capitol have hatemonger Donald Trump and some of his racist allies faced restrictions.

Media outlets based in other countries that present critical views of U.S. actions are also frequently silenced. Latin America-based teleSUR, Iran’s Press TV and the Korean Central News Agency are among those routinely suppressed.

While Facebook was shutting down activists’ accounts in the U.S. and Britain, its counterpart Twitter was targeting Latin American socialists. 

The official Twitter account of the Venezuelan National Assembly, which recently elected a pro-socialist majority, was shut down Jan. 22. But the account of the previous National Assembly headed by U.S.-backed coup leader Juan Guaidó is still active. “Double standards,” declared Venezuela’s democratically elected president, Nicolás Maduro.

Meanwhile, the Twitter accounts of the Bolivarian Movement for a New Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP Second Marquetalia) were also shut down, along with the groups’ pages on YouTube (owned by Google). 

Berta Joubert-Ceci, organizer of the International Tribunal on U.S. Colonial Crimes in Puerto Rico and founder of Women In Struggle, had her profile banned. “It is appalling — the cowardice of Facebook in silencing the voices of women and progressive people who struggle for justice and a better life for all,” she said.

Solidarity turns the tide

Within hours of Facebook removing the pages of the PPA, Women In Struggle and affiliated activists, the groups had issued a statement alerting the progressive movement and the media to the attack. People’s attorney Alec Summerfield wrote a letter to Facebook threatening legal action.

The groups’ statement in English and Spanish spread across email and social networks like wildfire. It was reprinted by numerous websites, including FightBack News in the U.S., Insisto-Resisto in Venezuela and the French anarchist site Info Libertaire. 

In Puerto Rico, the Union of Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers (UTIER) took up the case. A union representative went on the radio to read the statement and denounce Facebook’s actions. 

Staff at the Philadelphia Free Press reached out to their contacts at Facebook and urged workers there to demand a reversal of the company’s decision. Labor Against Racist Terror shared the statement with its network of union activists, urging them to call, email and tweet Facebook executives.

“We want to thank everyone who took time to lend their support,” said PPA’s Sharon Black. She recalled that the PPA’s page and many of the same activists were similarly banned in late October 2020, just days before the presidential election. 

Then, too, they had to fight to get the pages and profiles restored. At the time, Facebook collaborated with the Department of Homeland Security and fascists in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C., area to try to sabotage a protest the group was organizing against Donald Trump’s threat to overturn the election.

“We’re still unsatisfied” with Facebook’s response, added Rasika Ruwanpathirana, an immigrant activist and filmmaker who was targeted. He told Struggle-La Lucha that the so-called Oversight Board recently set up by Facebook bosses is entirely inadequate.

“The PPA and Women In Struggle are advocating for genuine change. This includes an independent people’s oversight of this giant monopoly that in this period, particularly with the pandemic, has become a necessity in much the way that power and water utilities are.

“Oversight includes full transparency, decision making on ‘community standards,’ a speedy appeal procedure and liability for damages on the part of Facebook.”

Ruwanpathirana concluded: “If Facebook won’t do right, it’s time for Facebook to belong to the people.”

Following is an open letter to Facebook:

Just yesterday, emails from an employee in the Facebook content policy regarding the company’s position on the term “Zionist” were leaked widely online. The emails revealed that Facebook is “looking at the question of how we should interpret attacks on ‘Zionists’ to determine whether the term is used as a proxy for attacking Jewish or Israeli people.” The email also stated that this evaluation was taking place in the context of Facebook’s policy of prohibiting hate speech. 

To draw a parallel between critiques of racist Israeli apartheid and racist hate speech is insulting and inaccurate. Every day, the Palestinian peoples’ rights to self-determination are trampled. The racist Zionist state of Israel constantly wages war upon Palestinian communities in a land where the Israeli government is the real trespasser. A week ago, Israeli tanks carpet bombed multiple neighborhoods in Gaza City in the middle of the night. Brutally awoken from sleep, families were forced to flee from their burning homes. This is normal in occupied Palestine. Human rights violations of this level require strong public condemnation. When Palestinian organizations and freedom fighters attack Zionism online, they aren’t attacking Judaism. They’re attacking a brutal, racist system of oppression bent on the exploitation and murder of the Palestinian people. 

On that note, it is crucial that Zionism is distinguished from Judaism. They are not the same thing. There is a common misconception that Zionism came about as a popular movement in the Jewish community. Quite the opposite is true. Zionism is an ideology of the few and the wealthy. After the horrors of the holocaust, opportunist Jewish and non-Jewish capitalists and fascists took advantage of a people reeling from Nazi persecution to establish an imperialist satellite in Palestine. Since that time, Israel has diligently served the United States and its imperialist allies.The distinction between Zionism and Judaism is further shown by the growing anti-Zionist consciousness among the younger Jewish community. For many young people, it is impossible to rationalize the values taught in synagogue and the horrific war crimes perpetrated in the name of a “Jewish homeland.” 

In reality, Zionism is bad for all Palestinians and all working-class Jewish people. This toxic ideology divides the global working-class community and creates a false mythology of inherent hatred between Jews and Arabs. The anti-Zionist Jewish authors of this letter and the entire Socialist Unity Party stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in their battle against Zionist apartheid. We wholeheartedly condemn Facebook’s attempt to thwart the discourse of that struggle. 

Signed,
Lev Koufax, Miranda Etel and Ian Shlakman

Support the “Facebook, We Need to Talk” campaign’s petition.

Source: Press TV

Bill Dores, a writer for Struggle-La Lucha and longtime antiwar activist, said in an interview with Press TV on Tuesday that “U.S. sanctions and war threats against Iran are part of a long war.”

A U.S. senator has vehemently denounced former U.S. president Donald Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran, warning that the Iran hawks, who used to champion the wrong approach, are now trying to prevent his successor Joe Biden from opting out of it.

“Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign proved a catastrophic failure,” Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) tweeted on Monday.

“It’s important to understand the actual motivation for Washington’s long hate campaign against Iran. It is not really about nuclear power or military capability,” Dores told Press TV.

“When the tyrant Shah ruled Iran — before the Islamic Revolution — the country was basically a U.S. colony. U.S. companies sold Shah massive quantities of weapons and even had contracts to build nuclear power plants there, just as they supply unending quantities of weapons to the racist state of Israel today. In return the Shah dutifully parked Iran’s oil revenues in U.S. banks,” he stated.

“U.S. sanctions and war threats against Iran are part of a long war the United States has been waging since the first Bush administration to restore the monopoly U.S. companies once had on the world’s oil reserves, energy reserves. That war cannot be won. This is not 1953,” the analyst noted.

“There is a struggle going on now in Washington over what course to pursue. Senator Murphy speaks for those who fear Europe and the rest of the world will go ahead and work with Iran on their own, and that U.S. companies will be shut out, will be the losers. But there are powerful forces who want to not only continue the sanctions, but escalate to war,” he said.

“Today is the world day of action against the war in Yemen, the U.S.-Saudi genocidal war in Yemen. President Biden promised he would put an end to that war or put an end to U.S. participation. So far, that hasn’t been done. He also promised he would send out, the day after taking office, stimulus checks that many desperate people need. That hasn’t happened yet,” he said.

“Right now, in my own state in New York, they have cut off vaccines. They say there are not enough vaccines in New York State. The rollout has been a disaster. Meanwhile, they have endless money for war fleets in the Persian Gulf, in the Mediterranean, to arm Israel and to keep U.S.  troops in Iraq and Syria,” he said.

“We need a mass movement here to tilt the scale,  to demand an end to sanctions against Iran, against Venezuela, against Cuba, Zimbabwe  and other countries. We need money for jobs and housing, for medical care, not for war,” he noted.

“We need to end the sanctions. We need to bring all those ships and troops and planes home. And that’s going to take a mass movement to achieve that. The interests of the majority of people of this country are the same as that of the people of Iran, for peace and working together, not endless war, either economic or military,” the analyst concluded.

‘Hedging’ used to be a way reducing the risk of selling or buying.  Farmers waiting for their harvest to come in are uncertain about what price per bushel they will get at the market: will they get a price that makes them a profit and a living for next year or will they be made destitute?  To reduce that risk, hedge companies offer to buy the harvest in advance at a fixed price.  The farmer is guaranteed a price and income whatever the price per bushel at the time of going to market.  The hedge fund takes the risk that it can make a profit by buying the harvest at a price below the eventual market price.  In this way, ‘hedging’ can smooth out the volatility in prices, often very high in agricultural and mineral sectors.

But in financial markets, hedging and hedge funds take on a whole new function.  It has become a game, with billions of other people’s money at stake, turning the market for goods and services into a casino for financial betting.  In my previous post, I explained how what Marx and Engels called ‘fictitious capital’ (stocks and bonds) and their supposed value bore little relation to the real value of underlying earnings and assets of companies.

Financial hedging takes this one step even further away from real values, as hedge funds do not just buy or sell stocks rather than invest in productive capital. Now they bet on which way the price of any stock will go. In ‘short selling’, a hedge fund borrows shares in a company from other investors (for a fee) and sells the shares on the market at, for example, $10 each.  Then it waits until they fall to $5 and then buys them back. The borrowed shares are returned to the original owner and the hedge fund pockets a profit.

Far from smoothing price changes, by betting on prices falling or rising, the hedge funds actually thrive on increased volatility.  ‘Going long’ to drive up the price and ‘going short’ to drive down the price is the name of the game.  And in doing so, ‘short sellers’ can actually drive companies into bankruptcy, with the loss of jobs and incomes for thousands.

In the year of COVID, while the ‘real economy’ collapsed, those with cash to spare and looking for a return (banks, pension funds, rich individuals) invested heavily in the stock market, often using borrowed money (at near zero rates of interest).  And these big investors put much of their money into hedge funds and look to these so-called ‘smart people’ to make them a buck.  And they have been doing so, big time.

But also in the year of the COVID, there were millions of people who have been working at home or have been furloughed sitting on savings that they cannot spend because of lockdowns and no travel.  So many have linked up through social networks like Reddit to bet on the stock market.

These small investors have recently started to combine and build up some firepower and to take on the big institutions in their gambling dens.  Since the beginning of the year, a group of amateur traders, organised on Reddit, have been playing the market against major hedge funds, who had shorted shares for GameStop: a US-based video game retailer.  This company had suffered badly during the year of the COVID and was expected to go bust.  Hedge funds piled in to ‘short’ the stock.

But the small traders did the opposite and used their firepower to drive up the stock price, forcing the hedge funds, backed by the big banks and institutions, to buy back the shares at higher prices as the time ran out for their ‘short’ bets (they are fixed time contracts).  As a result, several ‘shorting’ hedge funds took a huge loss ($13bn) and one fund had to be bailed out by its investors to the tune of $2.75 billion.

Wall Street is furious.  The small investors have ‘rigged’ the market, they cry, threatening the value of your pension funds and putting banks in jeopardy.  This is nonsense, of course.  What it actually shows is that financial markets are ‘rigged’ by the big boys and it’s small investors who are usually the ones that get ‘shafted’ and swindled in this gambling den. As Marx said, the financial system “develops the motive of capitalist production”, namely “enrichment by exploitation of others’ labour, into the purest and most colossal system of gambling and swindling and restricts even more the already small number of exploiters of social wealth” (Marx 1981: 572).

Of course, in the current battle, the small investor will lose out in the end.  Massachusetts state regulator William Galvin has already called on the New York Stock Exchange to suspend GameStop for 30 days to allow a cooling-off period. “This isn’t investing, this is gambling,” he said.  No sweat! And already, small investors are seeing a hike in the charges and limits on their trades by brokers and market makers (the casino owners) to deter them from trading.  And there is talk at the top of ‘regulating’ the market to stop investors ‘ganging up’ on the ‘legitimate’ institutions of Wall Street.  The price of GameStop is now falling back.

For working people all these shenanigans may appear irrelevant.  After all, most working households have little or no shares at all.  The top 1% of households owned 53% of  US stock market wealth, with the top 10% owning 93%.  The bottom 90% own only 7%.  However, workers’ pensions and retirement accounts (if workers have them) are invested by private pension fund managers into financial assets (after deducting very nice commissions).  So what savings working households do have are vulnerable to the gambling activities of the swindlers in the financial casino – as the global financial crash of 2007-8 showed.

What this little story of GameStop shows is that company and personal pension funds run by the ‘smart people’ are really a rip-off for working people. What is needed are state funded pensions not subject to the volatility of the financial game.  The big hedge funds have been burnt in this latest skirmish by some small investors and they want to get these minions out of the game.  What working people should want is to stop this game altogether.

Source: Michael Roberts

For Immediate Release:
January 24, 2021
Contact:  Sharon Black and Attorney Alec Summerfield
Phone:  410-218-4835
#FacebookCensorship #DefendPeoplesRights #ReactivatePPA

Facebook shuts down community, women’s groups and activists’ pages without cause

Groups announce campaign to restore pages and to fight censorship

On Friday, Jan. 22, 2021, Facebook disabled the main pages of two major community organizations, Peoples Power Assembly and Women In Struggle/Mujeres En Lucha, and activists around the country who have played roles in either group, extending its purge to Puerto Rican activist Berta Joubert-Ceci; Greg Butterfield, Struggle-La Lucha writer; Cheryl La Bash, co-chair, National Network on Cuba; Maggie Vascassenno, Los Angeles Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice; and others.

It also included PPA page editor Charlene Lady J. Jenkins, a founder of “What’s Up Baltimore,” whose Baltimore grassroots network was shut down as a result.

In addition, 16 individual activists’ profiles were disabled, which means that close to a dozen other progressive pages and groups were frozen when their administrators were disabled, including the Baltimore Harriet Tubman Solidarity Center, ICE Out of Baltimore, the Prisoners Solidarity Committee, Youth Against War & Racism, and Baltimore and Maryland Amazon Workers. 

Sharon Black said: “Facebook’s disabling of pages and the accounts of major activists who have not violated community standards is meant to silence and censor our voices. The Peoples Power Assembly has played a significant role in the Baltimore Black Lives Matter protests in the summer and more recently opposing Trump’s effort to overturn the election. On Dr. King Jr.’s birthday holiday, we held a car caravan to Jessup Correctional Institute and the Howard County Immigrant Detention Center to demand justice for prisoners and detainees.” 

Berta Joubert-Ceci, founder of the Women’s Fightback National Network/Red Nacional de Mujeres en Lucha and Women In Struggle, said, “It is appalling — the cowardice of Facebook in silencing the voices of women and progressive people who struggle for justice and a better life for all.”  Joubert-Ceci is also an organizer of the International Peoples’ Tribunal on U.S. Colonial Crimes in Puerto Rico.  Her personal page used to connect with the Puerto Rican movement was deleted along with Women In Struggle.

Attorney Summerfield concluded, “We intend to fight this!  This includes waging a public campaign to demand that the pages of all activists and the groups they represent are reactivated.  We intend to use every avenue at our disposal, including legal remedies, to stop the censorship of voices that are too often marginalized.”

Groups are urging people to contact Facebook at

Twitter: @_Finkd (Mark Zuckerberg); @Facebook @guyro (VP Integrity @ Facebook)
Email: ZUCK@FB.com; info@support.facebook.com and zuckerberg@fb.com
Phone: 650-543-4800 or 650-308-7300
press@osbadmin.com

Tell Facebook:  Stop silencing the voices of community, workers, anti-racists, BIPOC, women’s, anti-war and socialist groups. Restore all the pages: Peoples Power Assembly, Women In Struggle/Mujeres En Lucha, and all of the activists impacted and the pages they administer.  This includes Sharon Black, Berta Joubert Ceci, Cheryl LaBash, Greg Butterfield, Maggie Vascassenno, Rasika Ruwanpathirana, Andre Powell, Elizabeth Toledo, Steven Ceci, Lallan Schoenstein, Charlene Lady J Jenkins, Alec Zomerfeld, Andrew Cancon, Miranda Etel, David Card and Ian Andrew Schlakman.

Donald Trump made racism the core of his campaign and encouraged the recent coup attempt at the Capitol in order to negate especially the votes of Black people, who suffer a history of voter disenfranchisement in the U.S.

The electoral victory of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was seen by most to be a rejection of Trump and racism. The election has removed Trump and put Biden in the office of president. And it’s understandable that people would feel a sense of relief. 

However, Trump’s freedom to continue as president until the end of his term, after a myriad of violations of law and hate speech, helps expose the fact that this is a change of executive, much like when a corporation replaces its CEO. It’s not a change in power — capitalism is still in power.

Workers — especially from the Black, Latinx, Indigenous and Asian communities — gave Biden the votes needed to win. This was also a vote not just against Trump, but for health care, to end the pandemic, and for jobs and housing. That’s what’s expected from the Biden presidency.

The U.S. economy is in a crisis. Some 19.5 million workers are officially unemployed, four times as many as last year at this time. At least another 10 million are unemployed but not included in the official count. Over one-third of the adult population in the U.S. faces eviction or home foreclosure in the next two months.

In some states, food bank lines stretch for miles. An estimated 13.7 million households go hungry every day.

Yet stimulus money has mostly gone to big corporations. Over 160,000 small businesses have permanently closed.

Whatever promises Biden has made regarding stimulus and help to combat the pandemic thus far are not nearly enough to combat the economic devastation and certainly won’t reverse it. For example, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, which Biden says will be done slowly, is not a living wage. 

The federal minimum wage of $7.25, which hasn’t risen since 2009, does not provide a living wage. At that time, many workers fought for a $15 minimum wage, but this is no longer enough. A living wage right now, according to the Living Wage Calculator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is $30 to $35 an hour.

Inadequate policies by Biden will only lead to resentment and dissatisfaction, and an opening for the possible return of Trumpism.

How did we get here?

In the first place, the road to Trump was paved by the record deportations and endless wars from the previous Obama administration, which included Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. They and their Democratic Party, like all previous administrations before them, continually and increasingly legitimized the racist, anti-immigrant poison that Trump was able to exploit. 

The drones that dropped bombs on the continent of Africa under both the Bush and Obama administrations helped legitimize the international terrorism of lethal drone strikes by Trump, who flirted with war against Iran.

It was Biden and Clinton in the Obama administration who supported the fascist-like forces that organized pro-U.S. coups in Honduras and Libya, negating the will and self-determination of the people in those countries.

In fact, the mob of well-connected white supremacists who met no real opposition to their entering the Capitol in Washington, D.C., had aims that mirror those of Joe Biden and the Democratic and Republican parties abroad. 

Biden’s support for pretender Juan Guaidó in Venezuela and the earlier-mentioned coups is an attack against the votes and self-determination of working people abroad, especially when they are Black, Brown or Indigenous peoples.

This is why we understand that we cannot rely on those who will tolerate fascist-minded actions and ideas to stop white supremacist groupings and ideology from gaining strength. Those forces in the ruling-class parties are okay with fascism as long as it helps to crush working-class movements, like the movement for Black lives and the struggle for im/migrants — as long as it weakens the power of our class.

History instructs us here. An attempted fascist coup occurred before the Nazis came to power in Germany. In Munich in 1923, Hitler attempted a takeover — but failed. Although Hitler was jailed, he was allowed to continue his ideological poisoning and political organizing and influence over the middle classes and workers, allowing the Nazi Party to eventually take control.

We must unify our progressive organizations, and unify our working class, in order to continue the struggle for what is the only real solution to the crisis of capitalism: that is, socialism.

We must build the working-class movement, independent of the ruling-class parties. Therefore, we must build solidarity between all sectors of our working class with its oppressed nationalities, women, LGBTQ2S members and Indigenous peoples. That can only come through an intolerance of racism and sexism, with the principle of solidarity.

The ruling-class parties have failed and will continue to fail in that regard. But we must not.

As early as April 24, 2020, information that nebulized interferon prevented COVID-19 infection and also produced better outcomes if administered early in COVID-19 infection was known and available in the U.S. 

According to Prensa Latina, as of Jan. 7, 2021, Nasalferon interferon nose drops are being administered to international travelers arriving in Havana and the Cuban families that plan to receive them. International flights from the U.S. resumed in mid-November, causing a sharp spike in COVID-19 infections. 

The Nasalferon drops add to the protocol of a PCR test at the airport, and five days quarantine after arrival plus a negative PCR test, before international visitors depart for Cuban destinations. 

The Saving Lives Campaign initiated by the U.S.-based National Network on Cuba and the Canadian Network on Cuba advocates and organizes for opening medical and scientific collaboration with Cuba. It was formed to respond to the staggering number of pandemic deaths, publishing reliable information and documents.

A document by Cuba’s Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, “Potential Effect of Interferon and Treatment Recommendations Against COVID-19,” describes in detail the use and effectiveness of nasal interferon. It is available for download at the National Network on Cuba website.

An early report from China shows these results: “Among the 2,944 subjects in our study, 2,415 were included in the low-risk group, including 997 doctors and 1,418 nurses with average ages of 37.38 and 33.56 years, respectively; 529 were included in the high-risk group, including 122 doctors and 407 nurses with average ages of 35.24 and 32.16 years, respectively. 

“The 28-day incidence of COVID-19 was zero in both the high and low-risk groups. The 28-day incidence of new-onset clinical symptoms with negative images for pneumonia was also zero in both the high and low-risk groups. As control, a total of 2,035 medical personnel with confirmed COVID-19 from the same area (Hubei Province) was observed between Jan. 21 to Feb. 23, 2020. No serious adverse events were observed in our trial during the intervention period.”

The unilateral U.S. economic war against Cuba known as the blockade or embargo ruptures mutually beneficial collaboration and exchange between the U.S. and Cuba. Additionally, the racist demonization of China obscured the positive outcome reports by that country’s medical experts. 

On March 24, 2020, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine researchers registered these preliminary results with ClinicalTrials.gov, making it known to U.S. researchers.

We continue to ask: Why has this not been tried in the U.S.? More than 3,000 health care workers have died from COVID-19. The U.S. death toll is nearing half a million people. More than 1 in every 1,000 residents of the U.S. has died. Could it have been prevented? 

It isn’t too late. 

For more information about the Saving Lives Campaign, write to SavingLives [at] US-CubaNormalization.org or this writer at Cheryl [at] NNOC.info.