On April 9, a dear friend and inspiration of mine died: former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. I traveled with him to many targets of U.S. imperialism and met heads of state. He had the clout to go anywhere and didn’t mind being vilified by the corporate media that slavishly toed the line of the U.S. State Department, impugning his integrity simply because he refused to go along with the lies of U.S. imperialism when they wanted to go to war, either overtly or covertly, against countries that insisted on their sovereignty and their orientation toward various aspects of socialism.

Clark was, and will be remembered throughout human history as, a person of principle. He turned his back on his privilege and connections to the ruling class. During the Lyndon Johnson administration, he refused to go along with the bombing of Cambodia and the Vietnam War. He turned his back on Johnson’s cabinet position and instead put his body in harm’s way to stop the U.S. war drive, whether in Sudan or Vietnam, Syria or Iraq, or anywhere he felt he could use his status to stop his country, which he often quoted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as saying, is the greatest purveyor of violence today. And he wanted to save children’s lives.

He assisted and led legal battles that were instrumental in helping to expose and hamper the FBI, CIA and State Department in their attacks against the democratic rights of workers and oppressed people here and abroad. And he still remained approachable, comforting and gentle to me and anyone he deemed as working for the good of the planet. On our trips, in spite of his notoriety, he refused to fly first class and carried with him only one outfit: a modest jacket and tie with pants to match.

I gave him a call four weeks ago — probably one of the best decisions I’ve made in life. I needed to ask about an endorsement for an anti-imperialist webinar, but mainly wanted to touch base and make sure he knew how important and loved he was to our movement even at 93 years old. He mainly wanted to talk about the right-wing riot at the Capitol, so I didn’t bring up the endorsement request, and just enjoyed hearing his reflections on it. When the call ended, I made damn sure he knew how important he was to all of us in the movement and to human history. 

Ramsey Clark, presente!

On March 11, President Joe Biden signed a “historic” relief bill for the U.S. population. This bill’s goal was allegedly to soften the social and economic blow dealt to working people as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act signed into law by Biden totaled $1.9 trillion. Included were much-needed payments of $1,400 to many working-class people, weekly payments of $300 (down from $600) added to unemployment benefits until September, and supplemental payments for dependent children.

While the stimulus checks were welcome, the CARES Act fell woefully short on many fronts. The most noticeable absence from the stimulus package was the mandatory federal $15-an-hour minimum wage that Biden promised on the campaign trail. 

Politicians often talk about the importance of “bipartisanship.” Here was a rare display of it, but not for the better: Eight Democratic senators joined 50 Republicans in voting down a $15 minimum wage amendment proposed by progressive Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. 

The failure to pass a $15 federal minimum wage will disproportionately affect the Black community in the South, particularly Black women. Among minimum-wage workers, Black women are disproportionately represented. Many live in Southern states that are among the least likely to enact a state minimum wage raise. Ironically, it was Black women in the South whose support allowed Joe Biden to become president. 

Further diluting the positive effects of the relief, the legislation failed to provide protections against debt collectors seeking to seize stimulus checks. Any private debt collector that has a judgement against an individual can directly garnish their stimulus payment. 

There is something appalling about a group of millionaire politicians telling working people they claim to champion that they don’t deserve a pay raise or protections from legal loan sharks amidst a historic pandemic. 

Band aid on a broken system

President Biden promised a federal minimum wage raise, $2,000 stimulus payments and other relief for the working class during his campaign. So far he hasn’t followed through.

Biden caved on the minimum wage. Biden caved on $2,000 payments. Biden caved on protections against debt collectors. 

Biden’s actions make it clear he has no intention of following through his campaign promises to the communities, mostly Black and Brown people, that made his election a reality. 

There’s little doubt that Biden fancies himself the reincarnation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who implemented the New Deal programs during the Great Depression. In more ways than one, FDR was no friend of the worker or communities of color. It is important we are clear on that. 

However, when compared to the New Deal’s sweeping programs that lifted millions of workers and farmers from abject poverty in order to save the capitalist system, Biden’s pittance plans seem weak at best. 

The CARES Act did provide a small level of relief for millions in the U.S. However, more than anything, this relief package serves as an infinitesimally small band aid on a broken system. The last thing working and oppressed people in this country need are more half measures. 

When the people demanded a $15 minimum wage, they meant it. When the people demanded Medicare for all, they meant it. When the people demanded total forgiveness of crushing student debt, they meant it. 

The working-class struggle must continue to make these demands in the face of the Biden administration’s attempts to frame things as “back to normal.” If “normal” means racist police terror, low wages and a bloated military budget, then we want no part of it. 

Instead, we must continue to fight for worker power and a true people’s mandate. 

“Stop the bombing, stop the war, hands off Donbass! USA, CIA out of Ukraine!”

On April 10, anti-war activists rallied at the U.S. Armed Forces Recruiting Center in New York’s Times Square to demand justice for 5-year-old Vladik Shikhov, killed April 3 by a Ukrainian drone strike on his Donetsk village. They called for an end to the U.S.-NATO war buildup against the Donbass republics and Russia.

Protesters chanted, held signs and passed out informational leaflets to people passing by on this warm spring day. Next to the U.S. military site, they displayed a large banner that read: “From Donbass to Palestine, from Chicago to the U.S.-Mexico border: Stop the U.S. war on children!”

It was a modest first step toward building a movement to challenge the next imperialist war and educate workers in the U.S. about a critical conflict that has been systematically hidden from them.

“President Joe Biden has a long history of supporting the far-right government in Kiev, dating back to his term as vice president and the 2014 U.S.-backed coup that overthrew the legally elected government of Ukraine,” said Greg Butterfield, coordinator of Solidarity with Novorossiya & Antifascists in Ukraine. 

“Biden, like Donald Trump before him, is acting on behalf of Wall Street and U.S. Big Energy companies that are determined to stop the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project from bringing Russian gas to Western Europe.

“Washington considers Donbass civilians, like 5-year-old Vladik, expendable. We do not,” Butterfield said. “We don’t believe that poor and working people in the U.S. would support risking war with Russia for Wall Street profits if they were informed of the facts.”

The New York emergency protest has inspired the Anti-Imperialist Front and other groups to call for an international day of solidarity with Donbass on Saturday, April 17. 

The call to action, “No U.S.-Ukraine war on Donbass and Russia,” has been endorsed, shared and translated by groups in several countries, and is being used as an organizing tool. Follow the link to see the latest list of endorsers and add your group.

In view of the imminent threat of war in the Donbass on the part of the right-wing Ukrainian government with the support of U.S. and NATO forces, the permanent bombing of the civilian population and anti-fascist forces, with the most recent drone strike murdering a 5-year-old child and injuring his grandmother, a petition is circulating, which speaks out against military aggression, against war, for peace in Ukraine and in the entire region.

On the initiative of members of the Anti-imperialist Front, who want to unite forces against war and militarization, an online emergency meeting was held on 8th of April to exchange information with a comrade from the political movement Borotba in Donbass. It was joined by 16 individuals and members of different antifascist organistions from USA, Italy, Austria, Greece, UK and Belarus

The situation is really serious. With the pretext of Russia pulling together troops, with the help of the mainstream media, attempts are being made to fuel and legitimize a war in the region.

The military presence and maneuvers of NATO troops from the Balkans to the Black Sea are completely hidden in the same media.

According to the information from Donbass, about 30,000 people’s militias in Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics face 95,000 Ukrainian soldiers, accompanied by an undefined number of far-right forces.

The only thing currently restraining Ukraine from attacking the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics is the Minsk agreements on a cease-fire. Therefore, the fascist Kiev junta is now looking for every possible way to “legally” disrupt the Minsk agreements, including by accusing the Donbass people’s militia of violating the ceasefire regime.

Should Ukraine, accepting all consequences, attack the Donbass, it can be assumed that Russia will also become active in defense, which in turn will call NATO to the scene to rush to Ukraine’s aid with immense military equipment. The consequences are difficult to calculate.

In this sense, today every voice against this dirty war of interests is vital for the people of the Donbass to take a stand together to preserve peace against this aggression…

In view of already planned large rallies in Greece on 17 April, where nationwide demonstrations against wars and military bases are to be held, the date was seen as an option to stand up against the immense military mobilization and war threats towards the people in Donbass in different countries.

We urge you to join the international action on April 17 against the war in Donbass and to hold events available to you on that day in your countries. Please give us a response to this letter about whether and in what form you can organize anti-war actions in your countries. Also, initiatives and suggestions for our joint anti-imperialist work are always welcome.

Source: anti-imperialistfront.org

TUESDAY AT 5 PM EDT
Fuera LUMA No contract for Fossil Fuel companies
Union Sq S, New York, NY

Join us in a protest against the LUMA ENERGY contract in Puerto Rico that will continue fossil fuel and increase electric costs to the people of Puerto Rico. LUMA will cancel union contracts with the electrical workers of Utier. #EndPROMESA #endColonialism
#FreePuertoRico #Independent and Sovereign Puerto Rico
#PalCarajoLUMA #fueraluma #lumaantiobrero #lumaanticapitalista

April 9 — We just received the sad news just that a dear friend of workers in the U.S. and around the world has died. Gilda Chacon Bravo served for many years in the International Department of the Cuban Workers’ Central Union (Central de Trabajadores de Cuba) and the World Federation of Trade Unions.

Workers who traveled from all parts of the globe to celebrate May Day in Havana met Gilda in the hallways of the Convention Center at the May 2 International Solidarity Conferences. She often attended the U.S.-Cuba Labor Exchange Conferences in Tijuana, Mexico.

In spring 2011, the U.S. labor movement vibrated with the massive upsurge in Wisconsin to defend workers’ rights. Although CTC representatives couldn’t directly get visas to tour the U.S., Gilda also represented the WFTU. Together with Pipino Cuevas Velazques of the Sindicato Mexicano De Electricistas — the Mexican Electrical Workers’ Union — she traveled to Los Angeles, San Diego, Pittsburgh, Detroit and other cities. 

In Madison, Wis., she met with Voces de la Frontera, organizers for immigrant rights. In Washington, D.C., the AFL-CIO International Department met with her. 

Arriving by car in Baltimore from New York shocked her. She intently videoed real-life conditions of life under U.S. capitalism as she traveled. Gilda intended to share these hard images with her son and other Cuban youth bombarded by the false glitter of capitalist life. 

In addition to her role as a Cuban union leader, Gilda was also an elected representative from her neighborhood in Havana. 

We remember Gilda Chacon Bravo with much love and respect, as a strong, capable leader — a revolutionary Cuban woman.

The past year has seen several lockdowns as a result of the pandemic, which have had a deep impact on education, employment and the way we work globally. These factors have had an especially stark effect on women.

For more than 168 million children worldwide, schools have been closed for almost a year, forcing them to resort to online learning from home, according to UNICEF. In most households, it is women who have borne the majority of the burden of home schooling during the lockdowns.

Meanwhile, even as working from home has become the “new normal,” the pandemic has resulted in the loss of 24.7 million jobs, according to an estimate by the International Labor Organization. Economic inequality is likely to worsen, the ILO warns, as the jobs crisis disproportionately affects women and migrants.

In Latin America, the frequent lockdowns have come to define life during the pandemic, the social impact of which has unequally been borne by women. This has led to many women having to leave the workforce due to the mounting pressure of looking after their families, especially since the gender pay gap means they might not be the primary earning members of the household.

In cases where women try to retain their jobs while taking on the major burden of the housework as compared to men, sometimes, the only option available — if they can afford it — is to hire a domestic worker to do the various forms of care work like cooking, cleaning, child-rearing and eldercare that cannot be done easily by a working woman. According to data provided by U.N. Women in 2016, one in six domestic workers is an international migrant; of these workers, 73.4% are women. So, the domestic worker is typically a migrant woman.

Due to the precarious nature of domestic work and the insufficient political power among women domestic workers, their working conditions are appalling. According to data provided by Alliance for Solidarity, 57 percent of domestic workers have no fixed working hours. That means that these domestic workers do not control how long they work for in a day and when they can leave their workspaces, nor do they control their breaks and their meals.

Women workers and the pandemic

During the pandemic, the situation for domestic workers has worsened. They are presented with tough choices: either they stay in their employer’s house for the duration of the lockdown and therefore neglect their own families, or they choose to commute and risk losing their jobs because their employers fear that they could bring the virus into their households. Domestic workers’ unions have protested against this terrible choice. But their voices are not presented in the media, largely because these women are marginalized and treated as invisible parts of society.

Women domestic workers are part of a large community of informal workers, many of whom have held society together during this pandemic. It is these informal workers who have been attending to food distribution, cleaning public spaces, and working in small grocery stores and other shops. They bear the high risk of being infected not only due to the nature of their work but also because of their long commutes using public transport. In South America, such jobs are held largely by migrant women, many of whom have insecure residency status.

‘We don’t have labor rights in a pandemic — only working conditions’

Angélica Venega left Peru for Chile to earn more money so she could support her daughter’s education. A relative put her in contact with Sinducap, a trade union for workers in private households and those who work in related activities. Sinducap is part of the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Domestic Workers, founded in 1988. 

Sinducap, Venega told me, allowed her to bargain for clearly-defined working conditions in the home where she is employed. These terms of employment include working hours, provision of meals and money for transportation, payment of social security, a uniform requirement or lack thereof, and limits to what is expected during working hours.

Emilia Solís Vivano, president of Sinducap, told me that there are more than 300 people in the union. The union members are not only domestic workers but also include cleaners, caterers, gardeners and window cleaners. These workers help to sustain a better way of life for their employers. Unfortunately, the same is not possible for them.

Already precarious before the pandemic, the situation for the workers has become worse in the past few months. “Because of the stigmatization of domestic workers as possible [carriers] of the virus,” Venega told me, “many employers ask us to live in the house to avoid using public transportation. This is not exactly an offer. If you don’t accept this offer, you are fired. You are dismissed, but because they make you an offer which you refuse, they call it a resignation. If you resign, there are [no] legal benefits. In a pandemic, we have no labor rights. We only have conditions.”

The demand that domestic workers live in their place of employment, Venega said, is not just about the pandemic, fear of disease and the protocols of health. The pandemic, she said, is being used by employers to extend the working day for less pay. 

When you live in the same house where you work, working hours can end up being dictated by the convenience and working conditions of the employers, who may demand more attention once they come home from work, during weekends when receiving visitors, and according to the schedule of their children.

These are conditions, Venega told me, that the employers of domestic workers would not tolerate in their own workplaces, where they are employed, but they are not afraid to impose such terrible conditions on the domestic workers. Employers often reduce the wages of the domestic workers, saying that their own salaries have been reduced due to the pandemic.

If a worker is infected by the COVID-19 virus, then they are summarily fired. Workers are responsible for paying for their treatment and where they spend a quarantine period in these cases. This is even more terrible for a migrant, who might not have a house to go to or a family to shelter with. Being fired could mean deportation.

The “new normal,” Venega told me, is not so “new.” It is part and parcel of how things were even before the pandemic. “What is being made normal,” she said, “is greed.”

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Taroa Zuñiga Silva is the co-editor with Giordana García Sojo of Venezuela, Vórtice de la Guerra del Siglo XXI (2020). She is a member of the Secretaría de Mujeres Inmigrantes en Chile. She also is a member of the Mecha Cooperativa, a project of the Ejército Comunicacional de Liberación.

Sunday will define who will be the new president of Ecuador and polls predict a close runoff. The candidates in dispute are oil and water: on one side the country’s biggest banker, representing the elites and the neoliberal creed; on the other a leftist economist, heir to former president Rafael Correa, currently in exile. Will the indigenous movement tip the balance? Is there any guarantee of a fraud-free election? One thing is certain: the outcome will have a major impact on regional geopolitics.

State of emergency in Ecuador: the news was confirmed minutes after I finished interviewing Andres Arauz. The candidate is confident and thoughtful. He is greeted and hugged in the street, pictures are taken with him. Each day of campaigning means touring one or more provinces and, at the same time, defusing threats. The presidential ballot of April 11 is very close. It is the moment of desperate, dangerous maneuvers, something that, it was known, was going to happen. I bid him farewell. Night falls in Quito and little can be seen, there is no fog but clouds, mountains, volcanoes, the almost three thousand meters of the city.

For the second time the government of Lenin Moreno decrees a state of emergency. The previous one occurred in October 2019, when the indigenous and popular uprising took place to confront the adjustment decided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Quito was then a battlefield, columns arrived from Cotopaxi, Amazon, neighborhoods of the capital, confronted with a response with gunfire, police, military, eleven dead, loss of eyes, and a negotiation at the last minute agreement that the government did not respect.

A lot of crisis and political persecution has happened since then. The country is worse, the pandemic devastated Guayaquil in 2020 with corpses in the houses, streets, morgues, hospitals. Three health ministers have succeeded each other in the last month, and hardly any vaccines have arrived. Moreno, meanwhile, seeks to culminate the conflagration with a wave of privatizations that will reach the main target: the Central Bank of Ecuador (BCE).

The state of exception, under the argument of the pandemic, has two objectives: to privatize behind the scenes and to build an even more unfavorable scenario for Arauz in the elections. It prohibits “the realization of all events of massive affluence and congregation” in the eight provinces where it is in force -they are the principal areas of the country, which means that the campaign in the streets is limited, where Arauz has strength and the valuation of his closeness with the people is great.

The decree is also a threat for election day in the event that some event occurs before which mobilization is necessary. In 2017, for example, Lasso, facing Moreno, was proclaimed winner in advance and falsely by the hegemonic media apparatus. There was then an institutionality in which confidence could be placed. Correism was a government and a movement with structure, now it is a persecuted force.

Dreams of banishment

Moreno’s political time has expired. He fulfilled his objectives: he carried forward the agenda of financial capital, of the US State Department, and persecuted those who brought him to the presidency. He earned his place in history as the one who executed one of the deepest betrayals within a political movement. Now he is looking, like others before him, for a place to spend the rest of his years, most likely outside the country.

The process of dismantling Correaism was carried out in stages. The first target was Rafael Correa, who moved to Belgium with his family after leaving the presidential palace of Carondelet. As in Brazil, Bolivia or Argentina, the first target was the leadership of the process, on whom a combination of media, judicial and political attacks were unloaded until the objective was achieved: to prevent his return to Ecuador and his electoral participation.

The persecution continued on the second and third lines, with charges of corruption or the crime of rebellion. The result was jail for Moreno’s vice president, Jorge Glas, exile for Correa’s former foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, a permanent threat of sentence for the current prefect of Pichincha, Paola Pabón, who wears an electronic anklet to be located at all times.

Simultaneously, and often invisibly, there was a multiplication of cases for those who were part of government teams during the Correa years. Young people, for example, who had joined the government attracted by the possibilities of a state that was open to all. These actions impacted a large part of a generation that had its first political experience in the Citizen Revolution.

The persecution also reached the Alianza País party, which was left in the hands of Moreno and those who accompanied him in the betrayal were numerous. The strategy was not only to dismantle Correism, but also to prevent its electoral participation. That is why when Arauz achieved the presidential registration in the National Electoral Council (CNE), there was already, in that act, a victory.

The operations were designed by those who knew the process from the inside, which added impact and blocked any reaction. The weaknesses of the citizen revolution did the rest, two of them in particular: the absence of a strong party, and the scarce popular organization (both in the territories and in the world of work). The capacity for pressure in the streets was weak, sporadic, and without the possibility of alliance with the only movement with structure and capacity for mobilization: the indigenous movement.

Lenín Moreno’s political time expired. He fulfilled his objectives: he carried forward the agenda of financial capital, of the U.S. State Department, and persecuted those who brought him to the presidency. He earned his place in history as the one who executed one of the deepest betrayals within a political movement.

The return of the indigenous movement to the center of the political stage occurred in October 2019. The uprising was centrally led by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (Conaie), the main national organization, which maintained roadblocks and an encampment in Quito for more than a week. The action had great social legitimacy, which was translated into banging pots and pans, provision of food, lodging, medical care for the wounded.

Two leaders had high visibility during those days: Jaime Vargas, president of Conaie, and Leonidas Iza, who emerged as a leader because he was at the head of the main column, with about 50,000 people, coming from Cotopaxi. The former has now seven judicial processes against him, the latter eight, and several regional leaders have precautionary measures. Criminalization also hit those who, within the indigenous movement, confronted the government.

The uprising meant the definitive rupture with Moreno after an initial stage of agreements, which were manifested, for example, in the appointment of a Conaie leader as Minister of Environment. Those days also revealed the distance between Conaie and the Citizen Revolution, the depth of the rift and the apparent impossibility of a rapprochement between the parties.

The disagreements between Conaie and Correism were over various issues, such as indigenous justice, organization in the territories where the communities are located, the so-called millennium schools, and water management. And there were conflicts regarding mining and oil exploitation, demands that did not receive the necessary answers, according to leaders such as Iza, who is also an authority of the Panzaleo people.

We talk about it near his home, in the community of San Ignacio de Toacaso in the Canton Latacunga. Everything there is green, the rain and the Andes. The land where he was born belonged to a landowner and was recovered in a process of struggle where his parents were involved. Iza comes from an indigenous, leftist background, and explains the map of the movement, composed of a peasant sector -to which he belongs-, traders, transporters, financiers, and the respective influences in the politics of alliances and interests.

The disagreement with Correism is explained by other factors. The citizen revolution did not consider the Conaie an essential alliance, due to a majority political conception that denied an important place to the construction of popular organization. That is why, after the exit of the government, there were no places of withdrawal and rearticulation to confront Moreno’s betrayal.

There is another element: the path of the Conaie, particularly a sector permeated by the entry of national and international NGOs, linked to U.S. foreign policy, and their progressive influence on the leadership. At the same time, there are those who confront this current within the movement. The translation of this debate today is the dispute within the Conaie and its electoral instrument Pachakutik, between leftist sectors -internationally close to Evo Morales- and those who maintain alliances with the right wing and adopt the anti-correista discourse to justify the rapprochement with Lasso. Yaku Perez, who was designated candidate without respecting the internal mechanisms of the movement, third in the first presidential round, is one of the main figures of this second tendency.

This dispute had a first resolution before the April 11 ballot with the Conaie’s call for an “ideological null vote”. That agreement was modified in the final days of the campaign when Pérez’s vice-presidential candidate called to vote for Lasso, Iza announced that he would never vote for the candidate of the right, and Vargas made an unexpected turn: the public support to Arauz, in an event held in the Amazon. “Andres achieved what I could not,” Correa tweeted after the agreement reached. The Conaie later ratified the call for a null vote. How much impact will this agreement have in terms of votes? And what will be its implications in a possible Arauz government? These are some of the questions still without clear answers.

The last days

The polls favor Arauz, with a difference of almost four points and there is more than 30% of the electorate that would vote null or blank. The final days of the campaign occupy a central place within this framework: they may be decisive to obtain the necessary majority, particularly because of the almost one third of voters in dispute. The warning signs of threats are even greater for the Arauz campaign.

This was never a level playing field election. The Ecuadorian institutions were transformed into a device against Correism, such as the Prosecutor’s Office for the legal persecution, and the National Electoral Council which hindered Arauz’s candidacy from the very first hour. It is a context reminiscent of the Bolivian election in 2020 where last minute operations could take place during the campaign, the night of the election, the days after, until the inauguration. The difference in Ecuador is that the government was democratically elected.

This set of threats occurs while, at the same time, a dirty campaign with known elements is taking place. One of them is the use of Venezuela as an accusatory method to instill fear in a country where Venezuelan immigrants are numerous. The maneuver went as far as hiring migrants for ten or twenty dollars a day to carry signs at traffic lights such as: “For voting for socialism I am here begging for alms”.

The stakes of the election are high. Nationally, a victory for Lasso would be the deepening of neoliberalism under the direction of the banks, now without intermediaries: the government in the hands of those who see the country as their hacienda. In political terms, it would mean the attempt of definitive banishment of the citizen revolution, four more years of selective persecutions, of impossibility for those who are outside to return to Ecuador, with cases brought under the most profound lawfare, perhaps the deepest in the continent.

The international dimension is also central. An example has been the dirty campaign from Argentina via Clarín, with false news about Arauz. And from Colombia, through the magazine Semana and the Attorney General’s Office, on a larger scale: the accusation, fabricated without evidence, against the candidate of the citizen revolution allegedly receiving financing from the Colombian National Liberation Army.

This is, in turn, the first election that will take place in South America under the administration of Joe Biden in the United States. His positioning with respect to other agendas, such as Bolivia or Venezuela, has so far maintained more continuity than rupture with respect to Donald Trump’s foreign policy. How much of a threat does an Arauz victory represent, and what is needed to prevent it? Perhaps the answer should not be sought so much at the top in the White House, as in those intermediate zones of the deep state that deploys its agencies in the continent.

Ecuador emerges on the continental map with the possibility of a new progressive government. It would be, should it happen, the fourth victory in three years: the Mexican Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018, the Argentine Alberto Fernández in 2019, and the Bolivian Luis Arce in 2020. Arauz has placed special emphasis on the need to rebuild the instruments of Latin American integration that were dismantled by right-wing governments in a policy aligned to Washington’s strategy. And on the near horizon there are several presidential elections in the continent, in particular, Brazil in 2022, with the new possibility of a Lula da Silva candidacy.

The final days, before the vote, are passing without any electoral climate in the streets, with a great deal of campaigning in social networks, and under state of emergency. Ecuador is facing a defining moment in which Latin America can see itself as in a great mirror.

Source: Revista Crisis, translation Internationalist 360 / Resumen

Rally: Union Busting is Disgusting

Alabama unions stand with Amazon workers!

Sunday, April 11 – 5:00 p.m.
RWDSU Union Hall, 1901 10th Ave. S.
Birmingham, AL  35205

Free grill food!

Votes have been counted, and it’s clear that Amazon has stolen this election. The company broke rules every step of the way and used every dirty trick in the union-busting playbook. But we won’t be stopped.

Now, we must fight any retaliation against pro-union workers and show Amazon we’re not going anywhere. Join fellow Amazon workers, local unions, and community members to show Alabama stands united: Amazon’s Union Busting is Disgusting! #UnionizeAmazon

@bamazonunion * www.bamazonunion.org

Millions of people in Texas lost their heat, lights and water two months ago during a winter storm. The state’s profit-hungry utilities didn’t want to spend money winterizing natural gas pumps and other equipment. Over 100 people died because of capitalist greed.

The Texas tragedy is just the latest example of U.S. capitalism being unable to maintain its physical plant, which is called infrastructure. This includes utilities, roads, railroads, airports, school buildings and not the least, housing, health facilities and hospitals.

President Biden and Vice President Harris have proposed a $2.25 trillion “American Jobs Program” to fix some of these problems. Millions of jobs could be created. That sounds like a lot of money, but the funds will be spent over eight or even ten years.

That’s about $280 billion a year, or a little more than a third of the Pentagon’s official budget. It’s modest compared to the $1.6 trillion lifetime cost of the U.S. Air Force F-35 fighter planes. 

Yet the U.S. Chamber of Commerce attacked the White House plan. Writing in the reactionary National Review, David Harsanyi claims, “Our infrastructure is not crumbling.” 

Tell that to the children of Flint, Mich., who were lead-poisoned by their drinking water. Thirteen people were killed when the I-35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis in 2007. Over 45,000 bridges are considered structurally deficient in the United States. 

Eight people died in New York City’s El Barrio (East Harlem) in 2014 because of a natural gas explosion. A nearby gas main dated from 1887 but the ConEd utility was too cheap to replace it. 

This writer worked as a train dispatcher at Amtrak. Every time the 111-year-old Portal Bridge crossing the Hackensack River in New Jersey opened for boat traffic, we hoped it would safely lock up again. Two hundred thousand passengers use it daily to enter and leave New York City.

More is needed

As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, the real problem with the White House plan is that it’s not big enough. It was the Green New Deal championed by AOC and other congresswomen of color in “the Squad” that paved the way for any infrastructure proposals.

“Build back better,” as Biden calls it, has to include tackling toxic racism. Oil refineries and chemical plants are often built right next to poor communities. The abandoned phosphate fertilizer plant near Tampa, Fla., whose pond threatened a catastrophic flood, is just one of hundreds of dangerously polluted sites.

The Cross Bronx Expressway displaced thousands of New York families, while air pollution from trucks and cars created an asthma epidemic. The I-43 Expressway slashed through Milwaukee’s Black community, destroying hundreds of homes. 

The American Jobs Program proposes spending $85 billion on public transit and $80 billion for passenger and freight railroads. Millions of workers, students and seniors need better transit.

Big Oil, General Motors and Firestone conspired to get rid of streetcar systems coast-to-coast. The tracks of the Key System connecting San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., were ripped out of the Bay Bridge in 1958. The last passenger service on the Pacific Electric ― which once had 700 miles of tracks serving the Los Angeles area ― was in 1961.

Socialist China built 23 new subway systems between 2009 and 2019. The People’s Republic has more high-speed rail than the rest of the world. 

The $165 billion proposed for transit and rail in the U.S. over eight years is a fraction of what China is spending. Just in 2018 China invested $117 billion in railroads alone. 

That doesn’t prevent right wingers from attacking the Biden-Harris plan as extravagant. They take particular ire at spending $400 billion over eight years for home- and community-based care for seniors and people with disabilities.  

This is probably the most progressive part of the American Jobs Program. It calls for higher wages and benefits for miserably-paid homecare workers. 

Opponents claim this isn’t “infrastructure.” Helping millions of people is just as important as pouring concrete.  

The WPA and the socialist example

There’s much better mass transit and many more passenger trains in capitalist Western Europe and Japan. Meanwhile, in the United States, spending on infrastructure as a percentage of the total economy has been cut in half since the 1960s.

Why is this so? The billionaire class in the United States doesn’t see any individual profit in such investment. Wall Street as well as the British banks instead depend on a reverse blood transfusion of profits stolen from Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Private utilities refused to even update the electrical grid, which is absolutely necessary for capitalist production. The capitalist state ― via President Obama’s stimulus program ― had to spend billions on it. More billions are scheduled under the Biden-Harris plan.

Lenin ― the leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution ― called this the “parasitism and decay of capitalism” in his 1916 pamphlet, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.” Monopolies are just like landlords in their unwillingness to spend money to upgrade their property.

Why should slumlords spend any money on fixing dangerous conditions or getting rid of rats as long as they can keep collecting high rents? New York City had to pass local laws 10/80 and 11/98 to force landlords to fix their facades after Grace Gold was killed by falling debris in 1979. 

People still use and enjoy hundreds of well-built bridges and attractive parks built under the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s. Millions of workers were employed by the WPA during the Great Depression.

The Roosevelt administration was forced to set up the WPA because of a working-class upsurge. The Communist Party organized unemployment councils and fought evictions. Millions of workers joined unions and built the Congress of Industrial Organizations ― the mighty CIO.  

Another big factor was the example of the socialist five-year economic plans in the Soviet Union. These plans abolished unemployment and allowed the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler.

It’s the Black Lives Matter movement with over 20 million people demanding justice for George Floyd and all other victims of police murders that’s driving any social change in the United States. So are the campaigns to bring union wages, benefits and protection to Amazon employees and millions of other workers.

The example of socialist China doubling its economy since 2008 during the biggest capitalist economic crisis since the 1930s also put infrastructure on the political agenda. President Biden pointed to China’s success as an argument for passing his administration’s plan.

We need a massive jobs program that will build what we need. Don’t mix that up with poisonous attacks on Asian people and the war drive against the People’s Republic of China.

China has what we need: a socialist revolution that will abolish police terror and poverty.