Jueves, 1 de septiembre de 2022

Mujeres Contra Luma declaramos nuestra completa solidaridad hacia todas las personas que en la mañana de ayer miércoles 31 de agosto, fueron detenidas por el simple hecho de expresar su rechazo a la violenta política de la Junta de Control Fiscal. Recordamos que fue esta Junta quien impuso la privatización de la Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica y por ende, el contrato leonino de Luma Energy.

La manifestación fue convocada por el grupo Jornada se Acabaron las Promesas, y también participaron conocidas personas de intachable reputación, respetadas por sus años de compromiso y lucha por la justicia para nuestro pueblo.   

Rechazamos categóricamente el uso de la fuerza por parte de agentes del Estado – la Policía de Puerto Rico – para acallar el creciente sentimiento de frustración y enojo del pueblo que son expresados a través de estas manifestaciones.

Enojo que va en aumento por el gran sufrimiento causado, entre otros, por el atropello de la compañía Luma que desde sus inicios ha trabajado intensamente para destruir nuestra infraestructura energética. Ha degradado a nuestra clase trabajadora experimentada como son las y los trabajadores de la Autoridad de Energía Eléctrica. Ha despojado al pueblo de los fondos que sí podrían ser usados para una verdadera rehabilitación del sistema eléctrico y la eventual transición hacia una energía renovable. 

El pueblo necesita una renovada agencia pública de Energía. Exigimos por tanto, la salida de la asquerosa politiquería con que administración tras administración han llenado la gerencia de la AEE. Una verdadera agencia que responda a los intereses del pueblo puertorriqueño y no a compañías privadas.

Rechazamos igualmente las preguntas capciosas como las de buscar la opinión de Mujeres Contra Luma sobre la “violencia” de manifestantes. Preguntas que intentan dividir y penalizar a sectores del pueblo que protesta. Le decimos a los medios, que si realmente quieren saber sobre violencia, pregunten a los oficiales de Luma. Éstos quienes incluso se han burlado de la Justicia de PR. Pregunten al gobierno que hace lo indecible por defender lo indefendible en este contrato leonino, a costa del sufrimiento del pueblo.  

La “violencia” de un pueblo insultado, degradado y diariamente abusado es realmente una respuesta a la gran violencia de un gobierno que aunque se dice de Ley y Orden, hace todo lo contrario. Anula la constitución cuando les interesa, ignora los reclamos del pueblo al que está obligado a servir y proteger, y por el contrario, ensalza, excusa y premia a los entes privados y millonarios que poco a poco nos están robando el país.

Mujeres Contra Luma nos unimos al esfuerzo para sacar a Puerto Rico adelante ante el gobierno tirano y fallido que busca invalidar nuestra lucha.

¡Fuera Luma!

According to the United States Census Bureau, 3.8 million tenants are likely to be evicted in the next two months. Comparatively, only 3.6 million eviction cases were filed in the entire year of 2018. In 2018, the Eviction Lab at Princeton University estimated that there were only 898,479 evictions in 2016, although this number may be a low estimate compared to more recent reports.

High rent, low pay

The 3.8 million facing eviction is the tip of the iceberg. The Census Bureau also estimated that 8.5 million tenants are behind on their rent as the month of August comes to a close.

Millions of people are behind on rent and facing eviction in part because of the soaring rent prices. In June of this year, median rents in the U.S. topped a staggering $2,000 per month — the highest ever recorded.

Renters across the country have seen rent increase by almost 25% since before the pandemic, with an increase of 15% in just the past 12 months, according to real estate marketplace company Zillow. Nearly half of renters have been hit with rent hikes.

Rents have increased dramatically due to high inflation, which the people of the U.S. cite as their top concern by a wide margin. High rents are also due to the highly predictable and avoidable, affordable housing shortage, and wage crisis.

Caution is necessary when analyzing the so-called “shortage.” Data is often presented as if there are not enough homes for people in the U.S., which is not true. According to the 2020 Census, nearly one in ten homes are vacant.

There is, however, a shortage of homes that are currently both usable and set at a price that working and poor people can afford. In January 2019, over three years ago, the country already had a shortage of seven million affordable housing units for low-income renters, leaving only 37 affordable rental homes for every 100 low-income tenant households.

This shows that even with years of advance notice of an ongoing affordability crisis that has now ballooned into massive proportions, the U.S. government did not take the necessary steps to provide enough affordable housing for people. The lack of available housing has caused demand to skyrocket, therefore increasing rents.

The current wage crisis was also avoidable. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the wage a worker must earn to afford a “modest” one-bedroom home in 2022 is $21.25 per hour. This means that the average minimum wage worker must work 79 hours a week to be able to live in a simple one-bedroom unit. In the most expensive (and most populous) states, the statistic is worse at 99 hours per week in New York and 83 hours in California.

President Biden campaigned on the promise of setting the federal minimum wage at $15, which some argue is long overdue and even inadequate. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 and has been since 2009 when it was last increased.

Biden had the opportunity, once he was elected, to act on this promise. He chose not to. As early into his administration as February, when the Senate Parliamentarian (an unelected position) ruled that raising the minimum wage to $15 could not be included in Biden’s “American Rescue Plan” bill, Biden gave up the fight. “It just doesn’t look like we can do it,” Biden said, despite the fact that his own Vice President Kamala Harris could have easily overruled the Parliamentarian.

Failure of social services

After waves of housing protests, including rent strikes, during the height of the pandemic, many states as well as the federal government implemented an eviction moratorium. The moratoriums fell short of the growing demand to cancel rents during the pandemic, a movement that correctly predicted that mass evictions would occur once tenants were required to pay their growing rent debts post-moratorium. Yet, the moratoriums were a victory of the massive housing movement at the height of the pandemic.

Nowhere in the United States was the call to cancel rents heeded. And now that all statewide eviction moratoriums have ended, including the federal moratorium which was struck down by the Supreme Court on August 26, 2021, tenants who had accrued rent debt are now being put through the eviction machine. A year after the federal moratorium, evictions are once again at pre-pandemic levels, although the financial security of the nation’s tenants is not.

And while most of the pandemic-related federal assistance money for rent relief has been distributed to states, some states are lagging behind in the distribution. In an especially cruel move, the conservative governors of Arkansas and Nebraska outright refused funds for renter relief.

—

Housing is a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S.. While millions of tenants now face eviction, the handful of billionaire landlords have amassed $24.4 billion in profit during the pandemic according to a 2021 report. 3.8 million tenants could lose access to a basic part of human life while their landlords make billions more than they will ever need.

Source: Peoples Dispatch

According to Prison Policy Initiative, white people are proportionately underrepresented in prisons and jails, while Black, Native, and Latino people are overrepresented. In a graph showing the racial makeup of U.S. prisons – Black people and white people each make up 38% of the prison population, while the U.S. population is 60% white and 13% Black. When Black, Latino, and Native prisoners are counted together, they constitute 61% of the state and federal prison population but only 32% of the total population. 

Socialist Unity Party supports the struggles of all prisoners; prisoners of conscience, prisoners of war, and prisoners imprisoned because of their political beliefs. We believe that all prisoners are political prisoners because of the racist, corrupt and greedy profit-based system we live in. We want to build solidarity with incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals by building coalitions, uniting all oppressed nationalities, and fighting side by side to shut down the U.S. prison-industrial complex.

We understand that the U.S. criminal justice system is flawed from the point of contact with the police to the arrest, trial and conviction. The Sixth Amendment of the Constitution guarantees citizens the right to a criminal trial by an impartial jury. But there is no requirement that the jury reflect the racial diversity of the community from which the person on trial comes. 

We can list the impediments to a jury of your peers in a capitalist society, but we must ask ourselves if there are any benefits to standing up against racist courts. When I asked formerly incarcerated author and community activist Curtis Howard about his thoughts on jury duty, his reply was:

“The experience is worth it; seeing a jury pool with people who look like me, from my community and knows some of the stuff that I’ve been through may have curved my option of taking a plea bargain or having a judge decide my fate.” 

Howard adds that the experience of going through the whole process, the orientation in the jury hall, observing the people, hearing your name called for a jury pool, and being selected as a juror is worth it.

On jury duty

I have been summoned for jury duty many times during the last 30 years. My name was called to be a potential juror three times. I reported to a courtroom and swore under oath to tell the truth when answering a series of questions. One of those times, I was selected as a juror in a case. The initial jury pool in the courtroom was full, with about 60 potential jurors. There was a laminated sheet of paper with a list of questions on one side and our juror number on the other. I was very surprised to be selected as a juror after answering all the questions from the judge and the lawyers as truthfully as I could.

It was a DUI case, which I thought was not a big deal. After we all answered the questions on a sheet, the judge and lawyers excused people for various reasons. Over half of the people were left with 12 in the jury box when the selection process began. The lawyers took turns using what I learned was called peremptory challenges — challenges used without any explanation or stated reason. 

This process was like musical chairs that began with the jurors in the jury box. The lawyers would excuse a juror, and the next juror in sequence took that seat. I was further down in the numbers and thought that the jury would be complete before they reached my number, but they kept dismissing and reseating until my number was called to take a seat in the jury box. I knew I would be dismissed, but I believe they ran out of peremptory challenges, and the judge announced this was our jury, and we took another oath. This process took two days.

I won’t go into all the trial details — opening, evidence and closing statements took one day. It took three days for 12 of us to deliberate and reach a verdict that we all agreed on. I will remind you this was a case of two counts — DUI and blood alcohol level above 0.08%. 

After we reached a verdict, we were taken back into the courtroom. As the presiding juror, I handed the verdict to the bailiff. I saw the look of relief on the face of the defendant as the judge read not guilty and then thanked the jury for our service.

The process took six days (eight, including the weekend). I felt it was worth it; some thought it wasn’t. 

The crime of all-white juries

This experience confirmed a Duke University study of a decade of criminal convictions in Florida, which found that all-white jury pools convicted Black defendants 16% more than white defendants. But when just one Black person was added to the jury pool, the gap in conviction rates nearly disappeared.

The whole experience of going into a courthouse is scary and intimidating; security checks, police everywhere, almost as if you are on trial. However, we must understand that it is our right to be on a jury and our choice whether we want to serve on a jury. We must not let this corrupt system make that decision for us.

We must remember: There is a long and ugly history of excluding Black people from juries, particularly in the South, and we haven’t figured out a way to escape this legacy.

In the case of the Scottsboro brothers in 1935, eight of nine Black youths were found guilty of raping two white women and sentenced to death. In the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were acquitted by an all-white jury of this vicious murder that they openly bragged about and later admitted to. In the 2006 case of the Jena 6, Mychal Bell, 17, was convicted by an all-white jury of aggravated battery facing 22 years.

Jury duty is not a solution to ending mass incarceration, but it may save one person, one family, one community the expense and grief of a loved one spending decades in prison. We know that Black, Brown, and poor people make up the majority of those in prison, and they are relying on us on the outside to fight for their freedom by organizing, educating and strategizing on ways of ending this system of mass incarceration by abolishing the prison-industrial complex. 

Black and poor people can be and will be impartial and are the most qualified to be on any jury. The system knows this, and that is why Black, Brown, and poor people are the first to be excluded in these proceedings, by making it difficult for us to take the time because of the economic and domestic hardships we face.

I received a check for $60 for my five days of jury service over ten years ago. Today in California, jury duty compensation remains at $15 a day. Fifteen dollars a day is a financial hardship for poor people and people living on the edge, especially today in California. Jurors whose employers do not pay for jury duty should get paid a minimum wage from the state. Single parents needing childcare should be given vouchers to cover those expenses. Employers should not penalize employees for serving on a jury, whether for one day or several weeks. The state should provide these incentives to show how valuable your service is and how much you are needed.

The solution to mass Incarceration is to abolish capitalism.

Stop locking up our people, Free our aging freedom fighters, Free our youth, Free them all! 

You heard that right. No one in Cuba is living in the streets, in tents, or sleeping in cars at Walmart parking lots — scraping by without health care, regular showers, clean water, food, or even toilets.

That is not to say that there isn’t a housing problem in Cuba.  There is a housing shortage. Cuba is tackling building more housing for its people. This is extremely difficult because the 60-year U.S. blockade makes it impossible for Cuba to import needed materials. So there are instances where people live with relatives, and there is a need to improve existing housing. But housing is a right. 

But yes, even the capitalist press admits — not a single child, family, or person is living in the street in Cuba — an island as big as the state of Tennessee or Virginia with 11.3 million people, just 90 miles from Florida. 

In the U.S. homelessness is growing. Tennessee just made it a felony for homeless people to camp in parks and public property. Miami considered a plan to move unhoused people to a city-sponsored encampment on Virginia Key — next to a sewer wastewater treatment plant and away from services. The Los Angeles City Council has begun bans. 

There are now an estimated 1.5 million unhoused people in the wealthiest capitalist country in the world. Another 6.4 million face eviction as rents have skyrocketed. 

Interestingly, it isn’t that there isn’t enough housing. Unlike Cuba, there are plenty of vacant houses and apartments, many of them brand new. The problem is the opposite of Cuba. People cannot afford sky-high rents and mortgages. If you don’t have the money and landlords can’t make a profit, then they’d rather have housing lie vacant. 

And that should be a crime.

Heard the news about Jeff Bezos’ $500,000,000 yacht? I wanted to wait a little while to write something and submit it for publication — just to be sure Big Boss Jeff hadn’t slyly succeeded in buying the Rotterdam City Council and Mayor. What a downer that would be (and, of course, he may yet succeed).

Lately, I’ve been reading the writings of that young ignorant supporter of the Confederacy turned abolitionist turned anti-imperialist and world-touring Weisenheimer, Mark Twain. Herewith is my result regarding Mr. Jeffery Preston Bezos. 

Broken News 

(The latest news link I could find was this August 11 article, so it’s not breaking, it’s long broken, in fact, it’s downright stale news.): 

“Rotterdam Won’t Dismantle Historic Bridge to Let Jeff Bezos’ $500 Million Superyacht Pass” [Credit: Town and Country]  

Now there’s a magazine that I must confess I have never bought a copy of, but I’ve seen it prominently offered at many a supermarket checkout aisle. So, is it bought by bumpkins who aspire to affluence and will attain it by regularly purchasing lottery tickets and this magazine? I am ashamed to admit that this is the very first article from this fine bourgeois publication that I have ever read. In that regard, I must offer thanks to the serendipity of the search engine. “Read all about it,” as they say in the news biz, and here it is:

Jeff Bezos’s Superyacht Is Nearly Completed

A limerick dedicated to Jeff Bezos by Kermit Leibensperger

When whales get beached, the shrimp laugh*
There once was lubber named Bezos.
Who thought his big yacht would be famous,
He offered to pay off,
But Council said “F___ off
That yacht is a crime infelicitous.”

* A Bethlehem Steel blast furnace coworker of mine enjoyed repeating this with an ear-to-ear smile: “When whales get beached, the shrimp laugh,” so I must credit him with my limerick’s title. He religiously repeated this whenever the news reported that some big cheese who thought they were beyond the law had come in contact with the law — in a big, big way, as big cheeses rarely do.  

(By the way, this coworker liked to steal sporty cars for fun before he technically qualified as an adult —  not that I think he ever could grow up because after working with him for over a decade, I knew the fellow well, and he was too intelligent to do much in the way of grownup things, the “Awfuler… things that ever were,” I concur with him wholeheartedly and like to whistle that song from the musical “Peter Pan” occasionally. The entire lyric is a masterpiece to me. But back to my digression …

This worldly-wise USW brother claimed to be a Mensa member, but I didn’t fall for that yarn because, as a youth, he got caught purloining a car. You know, quite a fair percentage of them never do get caught. I learned this firsthand when my ’66 VW vanished. I contacted officers of the law, and they have been clueless to this day, as those who enjoy this newspaper are well aware. 

Getting back to the background story, qualifying as a youth offender at the time of his grand theft auto conviction (Note to readers, not geezers like me: Video games did not exist in the 1960s and 1970s if you are one of the unfortunates, sadly addicted to the game with the same name), the only effect my friend’s juvenile arrest and detention had on him by the time that I came to know him was bragging rights. I fondly remember his grand theft auto saga whenever I see the scene in the prequel movie “Star Trek” where teenager James T. Kirk sends his mean stepfather’s antique Corvette over a cliff …  after the joyride of a lifetime. That movie is a favorite, like my old blast furnace brother. 

The following statement was issued on August 25. 

ProLibertad Allies and Supporters,

It is with great sadness that we, in the ProLibertad Freedom Campaign, announce the passing of one of our founders and longtime coordinators, Francisco Velgara Valentin, known affectionately to the movement at large as Franky.

Franky was a dedicated independentista, revolutionary socialist, and internationalist. He fought for Puerto Rican independence, supported Revolutionary Cuba, stood with the Vietnamese revolution, gave his unyielding support to mass movements in Latin America, helped to found revolutionary formations in Puerto Rico and the Diaspora, and worked to Free All U.S.-Held Political Prisoners.

This is but a sliver of the work Franky did. His dedication to creating a socialist revolution was unyielding and far-reaching. Franky will always be remembered. We will draw strength from his life and legacy.

A more detailed account of his life and work will be published by his family and close friends at a later date. Details on his viewing will be announced in later posts as well.

¡Franky Velgara Valentin PRESENTE!

August 24, 1949 − August 25, 2022

Sept. 1 was the last day to campaign for the Constitutional referendum to be held on Sept. 4 in Chile. In this vote, Chileans will decide whether to approve the country’s new Constitution, closing over a decade of social struggles, whose final stage began with 2019 people’s massive protests in the subways and streets.

The first step of this constitutional process was the entry (first) referendum, in which 78.28% of voters decided it was necessary to overrule the Pinochet Constitution from 1980. In only 72 hours, this process will end, but tension and uncertainty grow as time goes by.

Many opinion polls point out that the Constitution won’t be passed. It has been something repeated to exhaustion. This prediction never withstood any analysis of the Chilean political context. Today, after irrefutable evidence came out, it can only be considered coarse propaganda.

Propaganda playing its role

Until August 20, mainstream media pointed out that the “I Reject” option might win by a 4 to 15% margin. A quick Google search does not show a single headline differing from this discourse. At most, some analyses conclude there is a lot of indecision, although rejection still prevails in the neoliberal narrative.

In a moment of coming back to solid ground to reflect, it is necessary to ask where are the 80% who voted for a new Constitution elected a progressive Constituent Assembly, and later, a progressive president instead of the right-wing candidate. One has to wonder where does the sudden change come from?

The right-wing propaganda machine has bet on confusion to achieve its objectives. Both traditional media and opinion pollsters played a fundamental role in this strategy, which included fake news, manipulations, and lies.

For example, the “I reject” campaign was built on the false image of a citizen movement instead of right-wing political parties to avoid a defeat like the one they had in the 2019 plebiscite. They want us to believe they have nothing to do with the Chilean right-wing, which bears on its shoulders the gloomy management of the country for decades. That’s why the “I Reject” campaign spokesman stated there wouldn’t be any politicians attending the closing activity. He even went so far as to say his coalition was only made up of civil society organizations not connected to any political parties.

At this point, it is impossible to lie in such an obvious manner. For example, the advertising segment of “I Reject” on public TV was supported by several NGOs in alliance with the “Chile Vamos” coalition and other right-wing parties.

However, despite the efforts to set their media agenda, the poll numbers are not adding up in their favor. Two research teams, Espacio Político (Political Space) and Daoura, recently published two social media-based investigations forecasting the referendum results. Both issues agree that “I approve” should win with around 55 or 56% of the votes.

Both research teams have closely monitored the campaign’s development and have a good record in this type of exercise. Espacio Político predicted the first referendum would be won by “I approve” with 77.8% of the vote, while the final result was 78.28%. In the case of the March presidential election, its prediction was a victory for Gabriel Boric with 57% of the votes, compared to 55.64% of the final count. Meanwhile, the Brazilian team Daoura predicted that 75% of the voters would support the first referendum.

Politically speaking, it is clear that Chile is a country in motion away from the past. In 2019, over 7.5 million people voted in the entry referendum, which was later surpassed in the Presidential runoff, where over 8.36 million people going to the polls. The latest predictions say over 11.6 million people (77% of the electorate) should vote on September 4 since the vote is mandatory and the electoral system has been upgraded.

These statistics show some of the growing political mobilization going on in the country has favored progressive sectors in the last two electoral processes. On the other hand, it must be taken into account that this is a society deeply affected by neoliberalism and that the current constitutional process is the result of great social discontent with the management of right-wing governments.

After all this, it is unlikely that the “I reject” option can have such support as the polls suggest.

Once again, that alliance between the establishment and the corporate media plays a key role in electoral processes. The Chilean right wing is focused on preserving its privileges inherited from the dictatorship through the current Constitution. This time, they disguised themselves as supposedly regular working people opposing civil society. Although, for those who know the reality of the Andean country, it is evident that those behind the “I reject” option are nothing less than the Chilean establishment itself.

It looks like the majority is still supporting the change and are aware of the benefits of the new Constitution. For them, approving it would be a fresh start to build a new type of state, a stronger one that recognizes all the intricacies of the society, guarantees workers’ rights, gender equality, the rights of indigenous peoples, and Chile’s plurinational nature.

Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – U.S.

The year 2022 has seen so much devastation from climate change. Deadly heat waves plowed through all-time temperature records in Europe, the U.S., and South Asia.

Devastating floods from Eastern Kentucky and St Louis, Missouri, to Sydney, Australia, turned roads into rivers, washed away bridges, and destroyed thousands of homes. 

East Africa is enduring its most prolonged drought in many decades, and 20 million people are at risk of severe hunger. The death toll from all of this is elusive, but when estimates are possible, it will certainly be in the hundreds of thousands. 

Capitalist-fueled climate change is a war on the planet and all its inhabitants.

With all that, what is happening in Pakistan stands out. A monsoon season nearly double compared to “normal,” compounded by the rapid melting of glacial ice, has unleashed floods that have a third of this poverty-stricken nation under water. 

More than 1,150 people have died since the middle of June when the rains began, and 33 million others are affected. Millions of people have fled their damaged or destroyed homes, and search and rescue operations are finding more victims daily. More rain is on its way. Language describing the situation includes “epochal level,” and “nothing left.”

Capitalist-caused climate change

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made an emergency appeal for a $160-million relief fund. He warned of the perils of capitalist-caused climate change in his video to a ceremony launching the fund. Guterres said, “Let’s stop sleepwalking toward the destruction of our planet by climate change. Today, it’s Pakistan. Tomorrow, it could be your country.”

Guterres’ remarks could easily be seen as a veiled criticism of the dismal U.S. response to climate change. For more than a century, while emitting the most significant volume of greenhouse gases, the capital created by labor throughout the world flowed into the coffers of imperialist corporations and banks. Being the preeminent imperialist country, the U.S. is considered the most well-equipped and, simultaneously, the most obligated to battle climate change. But for decades, U.S. energy companies, banks, and the entirety of corporate U.S. have blocked and sabotaged actions to curb emissions.

IMF austerity imposed on Pakistan

A 2019 IMF “bailout” of Pakistan’s economy imposed austerity measures as is typical. When exploitative imperialist corporations bleed a country dry, the IMF swoops in and demands that the government lower wages, cut social services and push living standards down in exchange for funds to “rescue” the spiraling economy. After a long delay, they finally released a scheduled payment of $1.17 billion during the devastating flooding.

The government of Pakistan estimates that the recovery from the floods will cost $10 billion. However, if the U.N. appeal for $160 million comes to fruition, combined with the long-delayed IMF payment, that will provide less than 12% of the estimated needs.

Since 1994 the U.N. has organized annual conferences on climate change called Conference of the Parties (COP.) In 2009 at COP15 in Copenhagen, wealthy capitalist countries were forced into an agreement to provide $100 billion annually to the Global South by 2020. The funds are meant to finance mitigation and adaptation in those countries that are not the cause of climate change but have been so exploited by imperialist policies that they are the least able to recover from the consequences of an overheated global atmosphere. 

Pakistan is a sterling example. According to CBS News, “Since 1959, Pakistan is responsible for only 0.4% of the world’s historic CO2 emissions. The U.S. is responsible for 21.5%.”

So far, not one penny of the funds promised in 2009 has been paid. Because of the explosion of climate-change-related, devastating crises around the world in the last few years, the lack of payment is anticipated to be a huge issue at the November COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt.

Climate scientists have shown that because of rising ocean temperatures due to greenhouse gas emissions, rainstorms, tropical storms, and hurricanes lose their strength and move along more slowly than before capitalist industrialization. Rainstorms hang around for days dumping water on land. Urban areas with concentrations of tall buildings slow the storms down even more. This phenomenon has been especially apparent in the last 50 years and was expressed most clearly when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Katrina also showed the world that racism and national oppression compound the problems of climate change. The experience of nations of oppressed people within the borders of the U.S. in many ways mirrors that imposed on people in the Global South.

Hoping for a solution from a capitalist government is like appointing the fox to guard the henhouse.

Writing this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, a group of scientists has called on their colleagues for activism. April saw protests by more than a thousand scientists from 25 countries. In the UK, scientists were arrested for gluing their scientific papers — and their hands — to the Department for Business building. 

The fight against climate change must be taken from the hands of the corporate class and their government. A militant mass movement in solidarity with the most impoverished and oppressed throughout the world will surely grow.

The U.S. military and its counterparts in South Korea are wrapping up a week-long rehearsal for an invasion of North Korea and the assassination of North Korean President Kim Jong Un. The Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, as they are called, are a major escalation of the already provocative “war games” that the U.S. uses to threaten the socialist republic to the north. 

The name Ulchi is borrowed from the sixth-century Korean general who is said to have defeated China in battle. Given the “New Cold War,” in which U.S. rhetoric against China has escalated along with the presence of U.S. warships near China’s coast, the name can hardly be lost on anyone. 

The election of South Korean President Yoon Suk-Yeol signaled an escalation of U.S. and South Korean threats against North Korea. Yoon pledged increased military spending, new technology, and more cooperation with the Pentagon. The heightened hostility toward North Korea is a turn from the previous administration of President Moon Jae-In, who attempted to build a rapprochement with the leadership of the North independently of the U.S.

Largest in recent history

Ulchi Freedom Shield is among the largest military exercises in recent history. It goes beyond the scope of recent years’ war games – considered Command Post Exercises that involve simulations without live fire. Ulchi Freedom Shield is comprised of what are called Field Training Exercises, which involve significant mobilizations and live fire instead of simulations. The exact number of troops taking part isn’t yet available, but the last time similar exercises were held five years ago, some 50,000 South Korean troops and nearly 20,000 U.S. troops took part. 

This particular exercise is also called “Kill Chain” by Pentagon planners and is broken into three phases. The first involves reconnaissance after infiltrating North Korea to find and strike weapons and bases. The second is called “Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation,” which involves massive destruction by land, sea, and air after rendering North Korea defenseless. Finally, the third phase is to find and execute the North Korean leadership — particularly President Kim Jong Un.

Under the leadership of its founder, President Kim il Sung, North Korea survived the brutal 1950-1953 Korean War. The U.S Air Force had carpet bombed in the first few months beginning in June and destroyed every city. The rest of the three-year war was a land war. The North Korean people forced the imperialist invaders south to Pusan at the bottom of the peninsula. The imperialists then launched a second invasion at Inchon on the West Coast but were finally driven out by North Korean soldiers, now joined by 1 million allied Chinese volunteers. Ultimately, 3 million or more North Korean people lost their lives. 

Korea divided by the U.S. in 1945

The Korean nation was arbitrarily divided by the U.S. in 1945 and remains divided at the 38th parallel today. The U.S. has refused to sign a peace treaty for all these decades. As a result, the war is still on, and it’s more than a technicality. U.S. guns have been aimed at North Korea ever since, and punishing U.S. economic sanctions that are among the most severe in the world are in place to try to starve North Korea into giving up its socialist agenda.

Yet, under seemingly impossible conditions, the DPRK has rebuilt its cities and, through its “military first” policy, has been able to survive against the U.S. threat of nuclear annihilation. 

The U.S. media paints a picture of two halves of the Korean nation hostile to each other and the U.S. in a position of having to defend the south from potential North Korea attacks. Actually, U.S. forces occupied South Korea when the Japanese imperialist empire collapsed at the close of World War II. The people of South Korea, just like Koreans in the north, had fought against the brutal occupation by Japan since 1910. They had sacrificed and longed for self-determination. Soon it became clear that the U.S. agenda was to take Japan’s place as colonizer. 

The people of the south had been ready to build a progressive society. They had no quarrel with the people of the north. There were no differences between them in their 5,000-year-old civilization. They all spoke the same language and shared the same history and customs.

People of the south rebelled 

The people of the south rebelled. Their struggle against the new U.S. occupiers was militant and continuous. Their movement was powerful and was met with U.S. brutality. The U.S. occupation government even called on the former Japanese colonizer’s military at times to help put down rebellions.

The people of South Korea don’t share President Yoon’s vision of a U.S./South Korea block to destroy North Korea. On the contrary, the permanent presence of U.S. troops and weapons is hated. 

This is a fact that the U.S. media works hard to conceal. Not one major U.S. publication mentioned that on August 14, tens of thousands of South Korean people demonstrated in the streets of Seoul against the U.S. military presence and plans for the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises. The demonstration was called by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, South Korea’s second-largest labor confederation. 

Anti-war and anti-imperialist organizations in the U.S. and worldwide should extend full solidarity with the people of North and South Korea. Korea is one!

Sept. 1 — We regret to inform you that one of the founders of Borotba (Struggle), Evgeny Golyshkin, died as a result of a shell shock received during the hostilities. Evgeny was a staunch communist and participated in the anti-fascist struggle from a young age. The Komsomol and the Communist Party of Ukraine, the Lukyanovsky Antifa-Patrol, the Kotovsky Red Guard, and then Borotba – these are the stages of the political path that our comrade traveled.

Evgeny was a red skinhead and an ideological Marxist. Few could compete with him either in hand-to-hand combat or in the field of communist theory. His sense of humor and optimism always supported his comrades in the struggle, and younger comrades-in-arms envied Evgeny’s inexhaustible energy. 

We believe that the hundreds of mass protests organized by Evgeny Golyshkin will forever remain in the history of the left movement of Ukraine, and his armed struggle in the ranks of the Ukrainian Red Army, and then the 9th Regiment of the Donetsk People’s Republic Marine Corps, will go down in the history of the liberation of Donbass.

Evgeny had specific party assignments, which he carried out with honor, even after a bullet wound in Mariupol and a concussion near Avdiivka. One of them was the maintenance of party information resources, so in the near future some of our platforms may be intermittent. Also, Evgeny was responsible for Borotba cells in the still-occupied territories of Ukraine, which perform an important function in our struggle.

Evgeny will forever remain in our memory as a true friend and reliable comrade. However, he is alive not only in our memory, but also in his artistic work, to which he devoted a certain period of his life, writing and performing an informal anthem of the Communist Party, as well as compositions by the “Ebalance ” music group, revealing the acute social topics of modern Ukraine.             

We express our sincere condolences to Evgeny’s father and sister, as well as to all comrades and friends who are experiencing the pain of his loss today.

However, we promise that we will continue the work to which Comrade Golyshkin devoted his whole life.

The struggle continues!

No pasaran!

Translated by Melinda Butterfield

Source: Borotba.su