Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared that “of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” 

The COVID-19 pandemic is more proof Dr. King was right. Death rates from the virus are at least double in Black, Indigenous and Latinx communities.

Zip code 11369, which comprises the East Elmhurst neighborhood in Queens, New York, is a shocking example. Dr. King was a student preacher there at the First Baptist Church at 100-10 Astoria Blvd. Malcolm X and his family lived at 23-11 97th St.

One out of every 119 people in this Black and Latinx neighborhood have died of the coronavirus. That’s over three times the U.S. average. It’s equivalent to 2.8 million people having died of COVID across the United States. 

Diseases don’t discriminate, but capitalism does. The capitalist world market was born with the African Holocaust and the holocaust of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. The number-one job of the $4 trillion U.S. medical-industrial complex is producing profits, not healing.

In 2020, nurses at Mount Sinai’s flagship hospital in New York City had to wear Hefty garbage bags to protect themselves against COVID-19. Meanwhile, Mount Sinai’s CEO Kenneth Davis was enjoying his $12 million pay package. 

Ten nurses at the Providence St. John’s Medical Center in Santa Monica, California, were initially suspended for refusing to work in COVID wards without personal protective equipment. 

Big pharmaceutical outfits like Pfizer don’t foresee vaccinating a billion Africans until 2024. That’s vaccine apartheid, similar to the denial of retroviral therapies for HIV/AIDS to Africans for a decade after they were being used in the U.S.

Millions of people died as a result. Andrew Natsios – head of the U.S. Agency for International Development under President George W. Bush – thought it was useless to provide help to Africa. The drugs were to be taken at certain times of day and Natsios claimed in 2001 that Africans “don’t know what Western time is.”

Poverty and oppression kills

COVID-19 has acted like a killing machine in overcrowded housing and among essential workers. Black, Indigenous and Latinx people are concentrated in both.

High rents force families to live in cramped apartments. Families that are evicted often move in with relatives. Now the bans on evictions have been lifted and landlords want to throw millions of people onto the street.

Who is more crowded than the 2.2 million people in the prisons? As of Feb. 9, 564,451 prisoners have been infected with COVID and 2,814 have died. Why isn’t Donald Trump locked-up?

Prisons are concentration camps for the poor. In Wisconsin, Black people account for around 6% of the population but 46% of the prison inmates. In the same states Black babies are five times more likely to die than white infants.

The entire United States was stolen from Indigenous nations. In the Navajo nation there have been 1,626 deaths from COVID.

Over 59,000 meatpacking workers were infected with COVID. At least 269 workers died. Just at the JBS plant in Greeley, Colorado, six workers died. The vast majority of these workers were Black, Latinx and/or immigrants.

In the New York City area, over 150 transit workers died of the coronavirus. The Metropolitan Transit Authority there at first refused to allow workers to wear masks, claiming it was a violation of dress codes.

Socialism vs. capitalism

While the United States has a little bit more than 4% of the world’s population, it has accounted for almost one-fifth of all COVID-19 cases. 

Uncle Sam accounts for about the same percentage of the world’s prison inmates. Both statistics show what U.S. capitalist “democracy” really amounts to.

One of the reasons so many people have died of COVID-19 has been the binge of hospital closings in the U.S. This has gone hand-in-hand with the thousands of factories being shut down.

Twenty thousand of the hospital beds thrown away were in New York state, according to the New York State Nurses Association. Among them was Harlem’s Sydenham Hospital, which was closed in 1980 after a bitter struggle to keep it open.

Some of the closed health facilities, like the Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia, are being turned into luxury housing.

Thousands of nursing home patients died of COVID. A big cause was that elderly hospital patients with the virus were shoved into nursing homes due to the shortage of hospital beds.

Despite the cruel U.S. economic blockade of Cuba, not a single hospital or school has been closed in the socialist country. For every 1.9 hospital beds available in Brooklyn and Queens, there are 5 available in Cuba.

Pfizer and Moderna sold the overwhelming amount of their life-saving vaccines to richer countries. Socialist China and Cuba are sharing their vaccines with the world. 

China will distribute 2 billion vaccine doses to Africa, Asia and Latin America. Cuba has already sent 10 million doses to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and plans to distribute another 100 million doses.

No parents in Cuba have to wait eight hours with their children in crowded emergency rooms before seeing a doctor. No one in that beautiful country is turned away from a clinic because they don’t have insurance.

That’s because health care in Cuba is considered a human right, not something to make a profit from. Cuba has what we need: socialism.

Presentation by Sharon Black, writer for Struggle-La Lucha and national spokesperson of the Socialist Unity Party, at the Europe for Cuba online forum Feb. 9, 2022.

End the U.S. blockade of Cuba

It has been 60 years this month since U.S. President John Kennedy first proclaimed Executive Order 3447, prohibiting “the importation into the United States of all goods of Cuban origin and all goods imported from or through Cuba.”  

Feb. 7, 1962, marked the beginning of the U.S. blockade of Cuba. Its stated purpose was to inflict collective punishment on the Cuban people in an attempt to starve and suffocate the young Cuban Revolution.  

Every U.S. administration, regardless of party affiliation, has continued this policy, in one form or another. Not because Cuba represents a security risk for the United States, but because the Cuban socialist project is a beacon for not only Latin America and the Caribbean, but for the world’s people.  

Biden, who promised to continue the Obama administration’s loosening of restrictions on Cuba, reversed himself and expanded Trump’s draconian policies.  

The changes during the Obama administration were based on pragmatism, not ethics or principle. U.S. policies which included not only the blockade, but invasions and terrorist attacks, had not worked and only served to isolate the U.S. 

What hasn’t changed is the motive of U.S. imperialism to continue to strangle the island nation.  

The COVID pandemic and its consequent suffering became an opportunity to not only reignite the former course, but to attempt to go further.

It is no secret that National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the CIA and non-profit organizations orchestrated a highly-coordinated destabilization campaign to create chaos and promote demonstrations in the streets against the Cuban government. They were unsuccessful.

U.S.-Cuba Friendshipment Caravan

On Nov. 15, 2021, I and two other Struggle-La Lucha reporters, Ellie McClain and Lars Bertling, traveled to Cuba as part of the 31st IFCO-Pastors for Peace U.S.-Cuba Friendshipment Caravan.  

Our group was one of the first delegations to travel to the newly reopened Cuba, which had been closed to international visitors because of the pandemic. Nov. 15 marked the opening of schools and services in Cuba and was also a day celebrating the anniversary of Havana.

We are from Baltimore, Maryland, where the police murder of Freddie Gray sparked a rebellion of the people of our city who were fed up with racist police terror.

Our members also represent the Peoples Power Assembly, which does community work, including setting up weekly free food distributions because our government won’t feed the people, and also a “saving lives campaign” to demand vaccines for our community.

Among our own organizers, six people contracted COVID-19, four were hospitalized, and six other volunteers died. Only 60% of the people of Baltimore are vaccinated.

We know the Cubans like to say, “We are not perfect.” But what we saw is heaven to us in comparison to our conditions under capitalism.

Our participation was as much to learn from the Cuban people as it was to show our solidarity in demanding an end to the blockade.

We stayed close to two weeks in Cuba, spending almost every minute visiting hospitals, clinics, schools, museums and especially participating in discussions with Cuban representatives on almost every aspect of Cuban life, from trade unions, to conditions of African descendents, artists and writers, and especially the deeply-damaging impact of the U.S. blockade.  We met with Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) students and members of the Henry Reeve Brigade for international medical solidarity.

Finlay Vaccine Institute

Given our own experience with the lack of medical care in the U.S. and the sacrifice of so many lives because of the inability of the U.S. capitalist system to provide care, I wanted to underscore our visit to the Finlay Vaccine Institute.

The institute helped to produce three of Cuba’s five COVID-19 vaccines: Soberana, Soberana 2 and Soberana Plus. 

Under the most difficult conditions due to the blockade, Cuba was able to produce these three highly effective vaccines, rivaling the effectiveness of U.S. vaccines. The blockade had prevented Cuba from importing the reagents necessary for the production of the vaccine. And international patent restrictions blocked Cuban scientists from sharing important information. 

In addition, it was nearly the first time that Cuba had to produce a vaccine aimed at a virus rather than a bacterial infection – and they were able to do it in record time. So you might consider it a miracle.

So how did they do it?

One of the major reasons given was the cooperation between Cuban organizations, the lack of competition and personal profit. In fact, these were some of the same reasons, along with a few others, for the high vaccination rate in Cuba that has now reached an astounding 90% of the population. 

The people of Cuba trust the vaccines because the country has a long history of preventative health care that is steeped in education and community implementation. There is no profit motive to block health care in Cuba. 

U.S. movement in support of Cuba has grown

In contrast to Biden’s cynical and criminal attempts to choke and destroy Cuba, the sentiment of the people inside the U.S. to end the blockade has grown.

On Sunday, Jan. 30, Miami Cuban-Americans and their supporters gathered at City Hall to caravan with bikes and cars to a rally at the statue of Cuba’s national hero, José Martí. 

Over nearly two years, these monthly Miami actions have birthed a caravan movement across the U.S. and internationally on the last Sunday of the month – including in the streets of Cuba. Caravans kicked off the new year in Miami, New York City, Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Tempe/Phoenix, Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles. 

No U.S./NATO war on Russia and Donbass

We cannot end our presentation without strongly condemning U.S. imperialist attempts to ratchet up war in Ukraine. What is taking place is a deadly game that only benefits U.S. imperialism.  

The U.S. rulers created this crisis and continue to pour fuel on the fire day by day.

The global capitalist system is in crisis. While some billionaires and sectors have profited handsomely from COVID, U.S. imperialism’s overall profits and strategic dominance are threatened at every turn. 

In particular, the oil industry – thoroughly entwined with the biggest U.S. banks and the military-industrial complex – has been in crisis for over a decade. U.S. capitalists are desperate to stop the nearly completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline project slated to bring Russian gas to Europe.

Washington’s actions in the Ukraine are not only aimed at the Donbass republics and Russia, but also Venezuela and Cuba, who have cooperative relationships with Russia.

In the United States, the fear of widening war has stirred the anti-war movement.  

Struggle-La Lucha and the Socialist Unity Party, along with many other groups including Code Pink, called for national days of protest.  We have demanded no war on Russia and Donbass. It is our responsibility to energetically reach out to the workers and poor in the U.S. and explain why a war on Russia and Donbass is not in our interest. 

No U.S/NATO war on Russia and Donbass!  End the U.S. blockade of Cuba!

On Wednesday, February 9, teachers across Puerto Rico called for a national strike to protest the government and the Fiscal Control Board’s (FCB) cutting of wages and pensions. Other public sector workers, namely firefighters and police, have also joined them. Teachers are demanding a decent salary, an end to pension cuts, and the resignation of Puerto Rican governor Pedro Pierluisi.

Teachers have been protesting since February 4. That same day, the FCB imposed by the US Congress that has been in charge of Puerto Rico since 2016, was boasting because it supposedly already put the end of the bankruptcy process on track by approving a plan negotiated with the big bondholder funds. The plan contains a meager raise of $470 for teachers in the public system, divided in two stages. The “Ukrainian-American” Natalie Jaresko, Executive Director of the FCB, expressed her surprise at the massive protest that took place precisely when, for the first time in more than ten years, a salary increase for teachers was announced.

In fact, the massive teachers’ protest on Friday, February 4 was a surprise to more than just her. The action which saw the vast majority public school workers walk off the jobs was not called for by the union that officially represents them, the Teachers Association, nor by any nationwide organization. Thousands gathered on the south side of the Capitol in San Juan from where they marched to Fortaleza, crowding the streets of the old city, while others organized protests in different parts of the country. A large number of students joined the marches or held solidarity demonstrations in their own schools.

However, anyone who has lived in Puerto Rico during the last decade, or has been following the news during that time, cannot express surprise at the outbreak of protest on February 4, nor for those that will surely come in the coming months. The accumulation of social grievances is a process similar to the heating of volcanoes before they erupt.

During the last twelve years, no Puerto Rican public employee has received a salary increase. In the case of public corporations, which negotiate collective bargaining agreements and whose employees have the right to strike, the FCB took control of their finances five years ago. All previous negotiations between the government as employer and its employees were at the mercy of the Board. During that long period, which still persists, everyone who works for any public entity had their salary frozen.

As for the so-called “benefits”—healthcare, vacations, sick days, retirement, etc.—the situation is even worse. It used to be said that public employees earned less than others in the so-called private sector, but, unlike the latter, they were guaranteed a retirement pension, along with other benefits. All of that disappeared or changed as of 2016 and, right now, no one in the public system has any certainty about what the future holds.

Workers in the so-called private sector have not been having a better time. The minimum wage that companies must pay did not change during that long time, while legislated benefits were reduced. In 2017, mandated by the FCB, a so-called “labor reform” was imposed that limited overtime pay, made working hours more flexible, made firing workers cheaper and easier, increasing precariousness for all. At the beginning of 2021, the Legislature which was elected the previous year initiated a process aimed at restoring some of these rights, but so far nothing has been done.

While this process of dispossession is taking place, unfettered capitalism continues its course. The press informs us that inflation continues unabated and that the latest increase in the prices of the so-called “basic basket” (the products indispensable for living) is the highest in the last thirteen years. For food products, the increase was 17%, while gasoline and other petroleum products shot up to 30%. Every year we have suffered increases, but the last one has been worse. Those of us who live in Puerto Rico, and especially those who work in the public sector, have to face this continuous increase in the cost of living, while salaries stagnate or are reduced, and benefits disappear.

The government must defend teachers

Earlier this month, the Popular Front for the Defense of Public Education (FADEP) demanded that both the Legislature and the Executive Branch have the backbone to defend teachers against the Fiscal Control Board (FCB) and to approve bills that will guarantee dignified retirement, a salary increase, and compensation for professional studies.

The bills supported by the Front are PS 873, which guarantees compensation for professional studies to all teachers in Puerto Rico; P of C 513, which raises the base salary to $2,700 for all teachers in Puerto Rico, and P of C 1136 to condition the issuance of bonds in the Debt Adjustment Plan, to guarantee zero cuts and zero freezes to present and future pensions.

The Front is made up of the unions Puerto Rico Teachers Federation (FMPR), UNETE and EDUCAMOS. The unions made their demands in the midst of a caravan held last Friday, which departed from the old headquarters of the Department of Education, passed by the Teachers’ Retirement System, the Federal Court, and concluded at the Capitol. Once at the Capitol, the spokespersons of the Front were received only at the offices of Senators María de Lourdes Santiago, of the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), and Rafael Bernabe, of the Citizen Victory Movement (MVC), who are in favor of the bills, as confirmed to CLARIDAD by Mercedes Martínez, president of the FMPR. The Front will be lobbying the rest of the legislators this week.

“The legislature and the governor have clearly defined whose side they are on, and it is not on the side of the working people. They had in their hands the ability to stop the Board through PC 1003, later approved in Act 53, and they did not know how to take advantage of it. Thanks to their decision, they allowed the approval of the Debt Adjustment Plan, which will mean misery for the people of Puerto Rico and, in the case of teachers, implies draconian cuts to teachers’ pensions. That is why, beyond empty words, we demand commitment on your part in the approval of the aforementioned bills and the backbone to defend them before the dictatorial Board. The teachers are paying attention, they are organizing and will do whatever they have to do to defend their retirement,” indicated the leaders of the FADEP, composed of Mercedes Martinez of FMPR, Liza Fournier of UNETE, and Migdalia Santiago of EDUCAMOS.

From the Capitol they went to La Fortaleza, where they were received by the governor’s economic development advisors, Yamil Ayala and Yolanda Rodríguez. The advisors promised on January 31 that they would communicate with them to let them know Fortaleza’s decision on the three projects. In addition, Martínez revealed that the advisors promised to coordinate a meeting for Wednesday, February 3, with the director of the Government Retirement Board, Luis Collazo Rodríguez, to discuss the particular case of the teachers.

In addition to waiting for the governor’s response, the spokeswomen asked to speak with the governor to request “a meeting without intermediaries, with someone who can make a decision, in this case, the governor. As long as this does not happen, we will continue to escalate our efforts in the streets with the teachers of this country”.

Meanwhile, Migdalia Santiago, president of EDUCAMOS, stressed: “It is time to achieve justice for a sector so mistreated and marginalized by all the administrations that have governed the island. We will celebrate 14 years in February without a salary increase to the base scale, and now, on top of that, they are running over us with a pension of indigence. We are not going to accept this, so we are going to defend ourselves with all the means at our disposal”.

The president of UNETE stated, “This is shameful, outrageous and that is why we will be fighting the battle from all fronts: the Legislature, the Executive, the federal court, including the most important front: the street.”

The teacher movement leaders pointed out that their battle did not end with the caravan. They are organizing the teachers, school by school, in assemblies, consultations and other activities that they will be announcing soon.

The projects demanded by the Front should not be confused with the Control Board’s announcement that it granted a conditional raise to teachers. Martinez indicated that the Department of Education (DE) asked the Board for an increase of $1,000, for which it identified the funds. The Board cut this figure to less than half ($470).

This increase was also rejected by the leader of the Teachers Association (AMPR) recognized by the Department of Education. In a press release, the president of the Association, Víctor M. Bonilla Sánchez, said he was disappointed and assured that this constitutes a “crumb” compared to what active teachers will lose after the Debt Adjustment Plan goes into effect.

“We met with the Board and indicated to them that, at a minimum, this raise should bring the teachers’ base salary to $3,500 to at all compensate for what our educators will lose with the freezing of their retirement benefits. Today we are surprised with this proposed increase, which is very little, and, to top it off, it comes with conditions that seem absurd to us,” Bonilla Sanchez said.

The Association indicated that the FCB’s proposal would raise the teacher’s base salary to $2,220 monthly. But the proposal splits the effective date of the raise to teachers into two phases. The first phase would be granted in July of this year and the second, in January 2023, would be conditional, depending on fulfilling a 90% digital attendance record for teachers and students. The president of the AMPR indicated that the Board’s proposed increase does not even match the efforts being made in the Legislature to bring the teachers’ base salary to $2,700. Bonilla Sanchez insisted that the Board and the Government must identify sources of funding to achieve true salary justice to educators.

The English version of this article from Claridad Puerto Rico was done by Natalia Marques.

Source: Peoples Dispatch

On Feb. 5, anti-war and community organizations took to the streets across the United States in a united demand to the Biden administration: No war on Russia!

It was a crucial moment of visible opposition to the rapid U.S./NATO war buildup that has marked the first weeks of 2022. 

An ad hoc coalition of anti-imperialist organizations, including the Socialist Unity Party and Struggle-La Lucha newspaper, Solidarity with Novorossiya and Antifascists in Ukraine, longtime Minneapolis antiwar activist Alan Dale, Women Against Military Madness, the Communist Workers League and Workers Voice Socialist Movement first put out the call for “National Days of Action Feb. 4-12: No War on Russia and Donbass! U.S./NATO Out of Ukraine!”

“Biden claims that there is an imminent threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine,” says the call to action. “But the real invasion threat stems from U.S.-allied Ukraine against the independent Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, near Russia’s western border.

“Washington and its NATO partners have been pushing Ukraine’s government to invade Donbass, hoping to provoke a response from Russia that can cover further NATO expansion. Ukraine has deployed 125,000 troops [now more than 150,000] to the ceasefire zone, including battalions of neo-Nazis, armed with NATO weapons.

“Poor and working people are wracked with crisis after crisis here at home. … We need a struggle to end racism and poverty, not another criminal war abroad!”

The national call was endorsed by the Anti-War Committee, Alberto Lovera Bolivarian Circle, International League of Peoples’ Struggle – U.S. chapter, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Peoples Power Assembly, Moratorium Now Coalition, Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice and others.

Shortly after, Code Pink: Women for Peace made its own call for a national day for “negotiations, not war” with Russia on Saturday, Feb. 5. Other anti-war formations, including the ANSWER Coalition, Peace Action, United National Antiwar Coalition, Veterans for Peace and International Action Center, also mobilized. 

In many cities, the groups joined forces for united anti-war activities.

‘Bring the troops home’

In New York City, the anti-imperialist coalition organized a speak-out Feb. 5 at Columbus Circle. Hundreds of fact sheets were distributed to passersby while protesters chanted: “Hands off Russia! Hands off Donbass! Bring the troops home!”

At the speak-out, activists explained that the U.S. and NATO pose the real invasion threat to the Eastern European region. They also contrasted the massive flood of U.S. weapons to Ukraine in recent weeks with the Biden administration’s failure to provide promised N95 masks to people here during the omicron COVID surge.

Speakers included Johnnie Stevens of Parents to Improve School Transportation (PIST NYC), Michaela Martinazzi of NY Community Action Project (NYCAP) and International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS), Teri Kay of Communist Workers League and Greg Butterfield of Solidarity with Novorossiya and Antifascists in Ukraine.

The protesters then held a small but spirited march down Broadway to join the rally called by Code Pink at Times Square. The group entered chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, NATO has got to go,” helping to set a militant tone for the second event. 

Bill Dores spoke at the Times Square rally representing Struggle-La Lucha. He said, “The health care system is collapsing, millions are facing eviction, people are drowning in student debt, Congress can’t pass the Build Back Better Act – but they have endless money for war and destruction. Because only war and destruction can preserve the domination of Wall Street and the U.S. dollar in the world economy. And they’re willing to risk global destruction for that purpose.”

Other speakers included Margaret Kimberley of Black Alliance for Peace and Larry Holmes of Workers World Party.

‘Fight fascism and white supremacy’

In Los Angeles, a broad coalition of anti-war forces rallied at the downtown Federal Building. 

John Parker, candidate for U.S. Senate in California representing the Socialist Unity Party and Peace and Freedom Party, spoke about his recent visit to Honduras as part of a solidarity delegation to celebrate the inauguration of leftist President Xiomara Castro. He described the parallels between the people’s struggles against fascism and white supremacy under the U.S.-backed coup regimes in Honduras and Ukraine.

“The regime created by the coup in Ukraine in 2014 with U.S. support bans communist and socialist organizations, but they allow Nazi collaborators to be lauded. The FBI finally admitted that some of the white supremacists who were in Charlottesville in 2017 went to Ukraine for training. Then they come back here and attack us. That’s the link, and we have to explain it to people here.”

Organizers from Parker’s Senate campaign said they plan to distribute more fact sheets about the U.S./NATO war danger as they hold neighborhood outreach events.

In San Diego, Socialist Unity Party activists visited several locations to distribute fact sheets and talk to organizers about the importance of building the anti-war struggle, including at San Diego State University, Malcolm X Library, Black Resource Center, World Beat Cultural Center, City Heights Library and the Centro Cultural de la Raza.

A rally and car caravan drew about 30 protesters in Baltimore. Bright green signs declared, “Banks and Big Oil profit from Pentagon wars” and “Money for healthcare, not for fascists and war profiteers!”

Despite frigid temperatures, 70 people came out in Minneapolis to demand “No war on Russia” at the call of Minnesota Peace Action Coalition, Anti-War Committee, Veterans for Peace, Women Against Military Madness and others. 

The protesters then joined with hundreds of others marching to demand justice for Amir Locke, a young Black man slain by Minneapolis police days before.

Two actions were held in New Orleans. The Workers Voice Socialist Movement held a mass leaflet distribution. “Whether it’s at bus stops, grocery store parking lots, or barber shops, we need to get the word out: We workers have no interest in another bloody war for the rich,” the group explained.

At Congo Square, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, ANSWER Coalition, the Communist Party of Louisiana and others rallied against war on Russia.

Protests were held in dozens of other cities Feb. 5, including Washington, D.C.; Des Moines, Iowa; Topsham, Maine; Kansas City, Missouri; and Missoula, Montana. 

In Detroit, the Moratorium NOW! Coalition and Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice are planning a rush-hour protest on Friday, Feb. 11. Visit the Facebook event page for details.

With reports from Sharon Black in Baltimore, John Parker in Los Angeles, Greg Butterfield in New York and Gloria Verdieu in San Diego.

SLL photos: Sharon Black, Maggie Vascassenno, Greg Butterfield

A common sign in sweatshops back in 1900 was “If you don’t come on Sunday, don’t come on Monday.” At the Sparrows Point steel mill outside Baltimore, employees worked 84 hours a week. Their only days off were Christmas and July 4th.

Fast forward to 2022. The Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway is trying to impose a harsh new attendance policy. It could get workers fired for taking off just five holidays during their entire decades-long career.

Workers will be punished for being absent no matter what the reason. Every BNSF employee will be assigned 30 points. 

Except for vacation days, two points will be deducted for being absent on any day from Monday through Thursday. Three points will be taken away for taking off on a Sunday.

Workers will be fined four points if they don’t come in on Friday or Saturday. Federal holidays are the grand prize. Being sick those days will get a worker seven points.

Many days of overtime will be required to regain any points.

What makes this new policy all the more outrageous is that it’s being pushed through during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 900,000 people have died of the virus in the United States.

Even the capitalist courts that railroad poor people to jail claim to consider people innocent until proven guilty. The BNSF will automatically penalize workers who “mark off” even if they or their children are ill. 

People get sick on holidays, too. Most transportation workers don’t have Monday through Friday work weeks. Neither do millions of workers in hospitals, restaurants and other 24-7 workplaces.

Railroad workers aren’t covered under Social Security. They get benefits from the Railroad Retirement Board instead and have to work 30 years to get the maximum. Some work 40 years or more.

BNSF executives want to be able to fire workers anytime during their careers, even for those with a 25-year good work record. Their new attendance policy will allow them to do it.

Under collective bargaining, such a drastic change in attendance policy is supposed to be subject to negotiation – not just imposed by management.

A union grievance – which on railroads is called a time card – would describe it as being “arbitrary and capricious.” Those words describe BNSF’s dictator-like change of policy.

Federal Judge Mark Pittman, who was appointed by Trump, ruled that unions can’t strike over this issue. That’s also an act of a dictator.

Job cuts = death

BNSF is one of six giant railroad outfits in the United States and Canada. It operates more than 32,000 miles of track in 28 western and midwestern states as well as British Columbia and Manitoba in Canada.  

Yet there are only 35,000 workers that make the system’s trains go from Chicago and Texas to California and the Pacific Northwest. The number of U.S. railroad workers has fallen from 1.5 million in 1947 to just 145,000 today.

That’s a 90% cut in employment. And it’s why billionaire Warren Buffett invested in BNSF, as he told Bloomberg Businessweek magazine in a 2010 interview. The money bags smelled profits from railroads killing over a million jobs.  

BNSF is now a subsidiary of Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway financial empire. With his $114 billion fortune, Buffett doesn’t have to worry about calling in sick.

What does it mean when nearly 1.4 million railroad jobs are destroyed? Hundreds of thousands of Asian, Black, Indigenous and Latinx men and all women were denied a chance to get jobs from which they were excluded. Charles Hamilton Houston, who mentored U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, fought court battles against apartheid hiring by railroads.

Hamlet, North Carolina, was an important center of the old Seaboard Railroad. It still has a yard for CSX Transportation, which like BNSF is the result of mergers. Hiring opportunities are slim because of massive job elimination. 

Instead of getting railroad jobs, local workers got low-paying jobs at Emmett J. Rowe’s chicken plant. Twenty-five workers were murdered there on Sept. 3, 1991, because of an avoidable fire and locked doors.

Rowe locked the doors because he thought workers, many of whom were Black, would steal chickens. White and Black workers were killed by Rowe’s racism. Eighteen women died. Forty-nine children were orphaned.

Dozens of other railroad towns were devastated. They included Paducah, Kentucky, where the Illinois Central shops were closed, and Livingston, Montana, home to the former Northern Pacific shops.

Thousands of railroad jobs were lost in the New York City area. Among them were workers on the many ferries that used to carry freight cars from Hudson County, New Jersey, to terminals on the west side of Manhattan. 

The elimination of these ferries and docks forced more trucks into New York City streets. It allowed luxury housing to be built at Battery Park City on Manhattan’s waterfront. Donald Trump sold condos at Riverside South on top of the former 60th Street yards.

Reparations not strikebreaking 

These massive job losses don’t mean railroads are going out of business. In 2018, U.S. railroads carried 13.6 million carloads of freight. Trains carrying shipping containers from seaports are a vital part of the global supply chain.

BNSF isn’t going broke either. In 2019 it collected $5.5 billion in net income, another term for profit. 

So why are BNSF and the rest of the railroads increasing their attacks on workers? They want to go back to the days of the 19th century railroad tycoon Jay Gould, who bragged he could hire one-half of the working class to shoot the other half.

Today’s railroad kings want to reduce railroad crews to just one person. Having a one-person crew resulted in the 2013 Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, train wreck in which 47 people were killed.

Instead of attacking workers, BNSF should be paying reparations. 

The U.S. Army massacred Indigenous people on behalf of western railroads. General Custer died for the Northern Pacific Railroad, which was one of the rail lines that became the Burlington Northern Santa Fe.  

Nine thousand miles of track were built by enslaved Africans in the South before the Civil War. Thousands more miles were built afterwards by imprisoned Black people being used as slave labor.

Among them was John Henry, the “steel-driving man” who was worked to death building the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, which is now part of CSX.

Railroad monopolies think they can steamroller workers. The 1926 Railroad Labor Act makes it difficult for workers to fight back. 

Today’s Congress can’t pass a bill to protect voting rights. But in 1991 it broke the last coast-to-coast strike within 24 hours.

An Amtrak yardmaster told this writer that when he worked for the Norfolk Southern Railway, a trainmaster demanded that he do stretch exercises. It was like the worker was still in kindergarten.

The arrogance displayed by the trainmasters is despised by workers. Union members are demonstrating with their families against the BNSF anti-family policy. Railroad workers will fight back.

The writer is a retired Amtrak worker.

This week, Cuba began a historic process as Cubans started to going to more than 78,000 meeting points to discuss the new draft of the Family Code, a broad, complex, but very important process for Cuban families.

The document is the result of many people who have studied the Cuban social landscape for a long time. It is not a text fabricated by a single-family or a single person, and it did not just show up over night as a fait accompli.  “We did not shut ourselves in around a table to invent non-existent realities. Here all Cuban families reflected in one way or another,” the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE) Alina Balseiro Gutierrez explained.

These meetings, which will last until April 30, are not to disagree or discuss any issue, but to gather information and process it. It is a search procedure that will allow the legal authorities to detect if anything has been left unsaid.

We are facing a revolutionary document, which includes changes of perspective in many aspects of our society’s daily life. It addresses family plurality and the right of people from the LGBTQ community to marry, opens new horizons to labor relations, and refers to the urgent attention that should be paid to the aging population.

“This will be a Code of affections. Good behavior, attention, and care in the family environment will have their reward. Likewise, abandonment, negligence, and emotional and economic neglect will also have their consequences in the Code,” Alvarez-Tabío added.

One of the most transcendental changes in the text will be around the family plurality issues. Everyone will have the right to form a family united by the affection of its members.

The norm clarifies that affiliation is the relationship established between mothers and fathers with their sons and daughters. However, it adds that this affiliation has been radically transformed. It is no longer just consanguineous parentage.

Affiliation can also be determined through the use of an assisted human reproduction technique, or it can also be defined by socio-affectivity (that bond of love, of feelings that unites two people, grandparents, and grandchildren, nieces and nephews…) There is a plurality of sources that can give rise to legal parentage.

“It is important to read carefully each letter of the Family Code to discover that there are many benefits for many people in the family space, and not only in the aspect of marriage,”  added Balseiro, who is a Doctor in Legal Sciences.

The text also opens new horizons to labor relations. It proposes regulations related to unpaid licenses for family responsibilities, which will benefit those people who are dedicated to the care of family members in vulnerable situations. This decision was taken into account due to the accelerated population aging in Cuba, and the shift of the main caregiver roles to women, who sometimes, by family decision, leave their jobs to devote themselves to this task.

Each proposal in the Code shows how it will benefit all legal relationships in Cuban society. No one will be left behind. Families will be viewed in the plural, in accordance with the current diverse, plural, and democratic scenario. The text will add rights and will make visible family models that were not recognized until now, in a country that does not stop looking inside itself and thinking about its people, despite the adversities.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English

For 40 years, former American Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier has been in the clutches of the U.S. prison system –The Iron House of the whites, as indigenous people call them – on trumped up murder charges. Now, as he suffers poor health and an abdominal aortic aneurism, time is no longer on his side.

The aneurism, diagnosed just weeks ago, threatens his very life, so supporters of Leonard are demanding his freedom, so he doesn’t perish in the Iron House.

Decades ago, when Bill Clinton was president, he visited Pine Ridge, South Dakota (once Peltier’s home) and told people there: “Tell Leonard I won’t forget about him.”

A promise from Clinton proved as empty as any politician’s promise: gas, air, wind. (He musta forgot, huh?)

So Peltier languished in the Iron House as decades passed. He wrote. He painted – and he awaited white justice.

He’s still waiting.

His supporters want people to write to the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), demanding his health care and release. The International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee needs you to write and call on Leonard’s behalf.

Contact:www.bop.gov/inmates/concerns.jsp.

Refer to Leonard Peltier #89637-132 and his home jail, USD Coleman I.

And while you’re at it, contact the White House and demand Leonard’s executive clemency.

Leonard Peltier needs freedom now; and Native Peoples need him to return home.

Source: Prison Radio

In the early 1990s, barely a decade after rejoining the Olympic movement, Beijing launched a bid to host the 2000 Games. Unfortunately by then, U.S. policy had begun to shift perceptibly from the honeymoon years of rapprochement. Gone was the incentive for even arch-reactionaries like U.S. Presidents Nixon and Reagan to embrace the People’s Republic of China (PRC) effusively in the name of hard-nosed anti-Soviet realpolitik. With the end of the first Cold War, anticommunism also receded as a guiding framework for U.S. imperial rhetoric, in favor of a universalized (if richly hypocritical) weaponization of neoliberal “human rights.” This was a discursive terrain tilted heavily toward bourgeois democracies in the imperial core, on which China was hardly more equipped to compete than it had been in the Mao era.

Sure enough, the U.S. mainstream press united in opposition to Beijing’s bid, with the New York Times anticipating the facile and now-omnipresent analogies with Nazi Germany, as University of Hong Kong historian Xu Guoqi quotes in his 2008 book Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008: “The city in question is Beijing in the year 2000, but the answer is Berlin 1936.” Bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress vehemently urged the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to reject the bid on human rights grounds. In the event, Beijing led in every round of voting until the last, when it narrowly lost to Sydney 45-43. It later emerged that the Sydney organizing committee had not only secured the two-vote margin via outright bribery (par for the course for the IOC), but had secretly commissioned an anti-China smear campaign laundered through a London-based human rights group. The bonds between white Anglo settler colonies prevailed, and the Sydney Olympics became the stage for a truly noxious whitewashing of Australia’s genocide against Aboriginal peoples.

Still smarting from its defeat and the naked hypocrisy of Western powers around the “politicization” of the Games, Beijing nonetheless forged ahead with a bid for the 2008 Olympics. This time it won with ease, aided by widespread sympathy for the circumstances of the 2000 loss, as well as a slick PR campaign designed to neutralize the attack lines that had sunk its previous attempt. Bid committee official Wang Wei assured the IOC that “with the Games coming to China, not only are they going to promote the economy, but also enhance all the social sectors, including education, medical care and human rights.” Despite strenuous efforts to weaponize large-scale unrest in Tibet in the months leading up to the Games, even limited boycott appeals from Western campaign groups went nowhere. The 2008 Beijing Olympics went down in history as China’s “coming-out party” and a seminal moment in its growing self-confidence as a rising world power.

It is telling that Jules Boykoff, the outspoken critic of the Olympics whose book Power Games I have relied on heavily in my research for this and other articles on this topic, makes no mention at all of this widespread popular perception of the 2008 Games or their significance in the broader arc of Chinese history. Instead he treats them as an exclusively elite project and focuses entirely on critical narratives, a tendency he has doubled down on in his most recent commentary on the 2022 Beijing Games. Possibly the most revealing line is his response to Beijing’s assurances from the 2008 bid: “This human-rights dreamscape never arrived. It’s telling that today, neither China nor the IOC are vowing that the Olympics will spur democracy.” It does not seem to occur to Boykoff to see this as a positive development: that China’s growing confidence in its own model frees it from the need to address Western imperialists in their favored (and deeply hypocritical) discursive terms. As the New York Times put it succinctly, “Where the government once sought to mollify its critics to make the Games a success, today it defies them… China then sought to meet the world’s terms. Now the world must accept China’s.”

This reflects a broader analytical lacuna in campaigns that take the Olympics themselves as an undifferentiated political target: they fail to account for the positions of different host countries vis-à-vis the imperialist world system. To flatten “the Olympics” or “human rights” as universal categories is effectively to privilege normative Western understandings of both. In practice this leads to the grossly uneven and asymmetrical treatment of Olympics hosted by self-styled democracies in the imperial core—historically the overwhelming majority—versus the few that are not. To be sure, local anti-Olympics campaign groups are undoubtedly justified in fighting the social dislocations they bring to host cities everywhere. (Full disclosure: I have previously worked with one such group, NOlympics LA, which does valuable work connecting the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics to gentrification and racialized policing.)

But where was the outrage over the illegal U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, when Salt Lake City hosted in 2002? Over Britain’s war crimes there and in Iraq, when London hosted in 2012? Over Japan’s continued refusal to acknowledge its colonial crimes against humanity, when Tokyo hosted in 2021? The indictment of entire host countries as “human-rights nightmares” (Boykoff’s crude label for China and Kazakhstan, when Beijing and Almaty wound up as the only finalists for 2022) seems to be reserved for nations outside the imperial core. The nascent transnational anti-Olympics movement needs to overcome these ideological blinders if it is ever to match the coherence of the great anti-racist mobilizations that shook the IOC in the 1960s and ’70s. Presently there seems little cause for hope, with leading figures like Boykoff and his fellow “left” sportswriter Dave Zirin uncritically propagating U.S. State Department lines on both Xinjiang and Peng Shuai in their coverage leading up to the 2022 Games.

New Emerging Forces

What, you might ask, was the People’s Republic of China up to in the world of international sport during its more than two decades in the Olympic wilderness (​​from 1952 to 1980)? The story of “ping-pong diplomacy” with the United States and other Western powers is already well-documented, reflecting an obvious Northern historiographical bias. But in an age of growing calls for “decoupling” between China and the West, and for South-South cooperation via the Belt and Road Initiative among other projects, the buried history worth uncovering is that of the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO).

GANEFO emerged from a bold act of anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist solidarity by the Indonesian government of Sukarno, the visionary anticolonial leader and co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement. In 1962, Indonesia as host pointedly refused to invite Israel and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) regime to the fourth Asian Games and was summarily suspended from the IOC. In response, Sukarno proclaimed that:

“The International Olympic Games have proved to be openly an imperialistic tool… Now let’s frankly say, sports have something to do with politics. Indonesia proposes now to mix sports with politics, and let us now establish the Games of the New Emerging Forces, the GANEFO… against the Old Established Order.”

His bracing rhetoric is reminiscent of the Chinese IOC delegate Dong Shouyi’s 1958 broadside against then IOC President Avery Brundage, but shorn of any residual attachment to a mystical “Olympic spirit.” China enthusiastically jumped in to help organize and promote GANEFO in 1963, covering travel costs to Jakarta for 2,200 athletes from 48 countries, overwhelmingly based in the Global South. It left with a bumper crop of athletic victories—topping the overall medal table, followed by the Soviet second-string squad and the Indonesian hosts—and effusive goodwill from athletes across the emerging Third World.

There would never be another GANEFO, owing to the horrific U.S.-backed coup that ousted Sukarno and installed Suharto’s military dictatorship in 1965. But this piece of history remains more vital than ever to recover. Because the lesson of Beijing 2022 and the moves toward a diplomatic boycott, however farcical, is that the United States and its allies in the Global North will never fully accept China as a legitimate member of their elite club. In their current position as hosts, PRC officials may feel understandably constrained in denouncing the “politicization” of the Games. But it would be wise for them, for the Chinese people, and for the rest of the world to keep in mind the fact that politicizing the Olympics is a long, hallowed tradition for the workers and oppressed nations of the world. The People’s Republic of China has a storied place in that tradition, of which it can be justly proud.

This article was first published on Qiao Collective and was adapted in partnership with Globetrotter.

Charles Xu is a member of the Qiao Collective and of the No Cold War collective.

FRIDAY AT 4 PM – 5 PM
Detroit says: No War on Russia & Donbass! U.S./NATO Out of Ukraine!
Hart Plaza, Jefferson and Woodward, Detroit

Moratorium NOW! Coalition and the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice join the national call for actions against the threat of war.

From the national call:
We call for antiwar, workers’ and people’s organizations across the U.S. to hold rallies, pickets, mass leafleting, banner drops and other activities from Feb. 4-12. We must act now to stop another war before it starts.

Tell Biden and Congress:

No war with Russia and Donbass!

Stop military aid to Ukraine – withdraw all U.S./NATO advisors, trainers and mercenaries.

Sign Russia’s draft statement on European security – end NATO’s eastward expansion.

No new deployment of U.S. troops – bring all the troops home!

Disband NATO.

To endorse, email: solidarityukraineantifa@gmail.com
—————-
The Biden administration has put 8,500 U.S. troops on standby for deployment, on top of 64,000 already stationed in Europe. Millions of dollars in U.S. “lethal aid” (weapons) is arriving daily in Ukraine. Biden claims that there is an imminent threat of a Russian invasion. But the real invasion threat stems from U.S.-allied Ukraine against the independent Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk, near Russia’s western border.

Washington and its NATO partners have been pushing Ukraine’s government to invade Donbass, hoping to provoke a response from Russia that can cover further NATO expansion. Ukraine has deployed 125,000 troops to the ceasefire zone, including battalions of neo-Nazis, armed with NATO weapons. Donbass residents have already suffered eight years of Ukrainian war and Western blockade. More than 14,000 people have perished in that conflict.

Despite a U.S. promise not to expand NATO eastward at the end of the Cold War, the alliance has added 14 members since. Russia has made it clear that a NATO takeover of Ukraine – the largest country on its European border – is an unacceptable threat to its national security. Biden has continued Trump’s war drive worldwide, from Yemen to Syria, Venezuela to Palestine, Iraq to the South China Sea.

Why is Washington provoking Russia? The U.S. under both Democrats and Republicans has long sought to dominate and plunder the entire former Soviet Union economically, politically and militarily. Today U.S. Big Oil companies and banks urgently want to stop the flow of Russian gas and oil to Western Europe, including the new NordStream2 pipeline, so U.S. allies will be forced to buy from them. Biden, who has betrayed the urgent needs of workers and oppressed communities that elected him, is desperate to funnel people’s anger at a foreign enemy.

We say no! Poor and working people are wracked with crisis after crisis here at home: rampant spread of COVID; deliberate dismantling of public health measures to control the pandemic; wages slashed by inflation; capitalism’s climate destruction intensifying; the end of eviction moratoriums; racist police terror; bans on anti-racist education in schools; far-right attacks from the streets to the Supreme Court on people’s basic democratic rights.

We need a struggle to end racism and poverty at home, not another criminal war abroad!

Called by (list in formation):
Solidarity with Novorossiya & Antifascists in Ukraine
Women Against Military Madness (WAMM)
Alberto Lovera Bolivarian Circle of N.Y.
Alan Dale, Minnesota Peace Action Coalition*
Communist Workers League
Anti-War Committee
Socialist Unity Party / Struggle-La Lucha newspaper
Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice (Los Angeles)
Peoples Power Assembly (Baltimore)
Workers Voice Socialist Movement (New Orleans)
Youth Against War & Racism
Women in Struggle / Mujeres en Lucha
Moratorium NOW! Coalition (Detroit)