Sistas’ Place in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, was packed on Nov. 15 as members of the December 12th Movement reported on their trip to Zimbabwe. D12 Chairwoman Viola Plummer, along with Omowale Clay, Colette Pean and Sekou Willis, were invited guests to the Seventh Congress of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. 

ZANU-PF is the governing party in Zimbabwe. Its founders waged a guerilla war against the racist white settler regime of Ian Smith and won independence. As a teenaged freedom fighter, Zimbabwe’s President Emerson Mnangagwa awaited execution by British colonial authorities before being reprieved.

Zimbabwe is one of many nations that are being punished with economic sanctions because it refuses to surrender to U.S. and European banksters. To these colonialists, Zimbabwe’s great crime was to allow its people to take back their land from European settlers.

Despite 22 years of these harsh sanctions, Zimbabwe is moving forward! A slogan of ZANU-PF’s Seventh Congress is “leaving no one and no place behind.”

While the capitalist media claimed land redistribution was ruining agriculture, Zimbabwe had a record wheat crop of 2.5 million tons.

On Nov. 7, Zimbabwe’s first satellite went into orbit. As Omowale Clay said, “Europeans do not own space.” 

Colette Pean pointed out that the ZIM-SAT 1 satellite will help with weather forecasting, better mapping and reforestation. Zimbabwean engineers helped design it. It’s part of Africa’s fight against capitalist climate change.

Sekou Willis told of Zimbabwe’s resilience. The economy has sharply increased in the last two years. Inflation is coming down despite the U.S./NATO war against Russia that’s increased prices on many goods.

The African country is producing more of its own fertilizer and cement. Hydroelectric dams are being built. Textile plants are being opened to use Zimbabwe’s cotton.

Solar power is being harnessed in every part of Zimbabwe to help irrigate farmland. Crops are becoming more drought resistant.

Zimbabwe will never surrender

The meeting’s special guests were New York City Council Member Charles Barron and former New York State Assembly Member Inez Barron. Both have fought tirelessly for reparations.

Charles Barron invited the late Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe to speak at City Hall. The Barrons donated $5,000 to help Zimbabwe.

Viola Plummer reminded listeners of D12’s vanguard role in supporting African liberation. Its founders helped build the African Liberation Day marches in both Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

D12 Field Marshal Coltrane Chimurenga was buried in the capital of Zimbabwe—Harare’s Hero’s Acre—with a 21-gun salute. Charles Barron described D12 as “our ambassadors in Africa.”

The Museum of African Liberation is being built in Harare.

Many African countries sent representatives to ZANU-PF’s Seventh Congress. The 14 countries that belong to the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) have demanded that the sanctions on Zimbabwe be lifted.

According to Plummer, the biggest cheers were for the Palestinian delegates.

Like the people of Zimbabwe, Palestinians had their land stolen by European settlers. Among the Israeli settlers are several thousand who formerly lorded over Africans in Zimbabwe.

“There was no such thing as Palestinians,” claimed the former Zionist Prime Minister Golda Meir, who was educated in Milwaukee. White settler leader Ian Smith claimed Black people wouldn’t rule Zimbabwe for a thousand years. Palestine, like Zimbabwe, will be free.

Zimbabwe still faces many challenges. Super-pig Elon Musk eyes the country’s reserves of lithium, which are used in electric cars. Western capitalists would also like to snatch the world’s biggest diamond mine in Zimbabwe.

British colonialists hanged and decapitated Mbuya Nehanda, the leader of Zimbabwe’s first Chimurenga or liberation war. Today her statue stands tall in Harare. Zimbabwe will never surrender.

Billionaire bigot Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter, with more than half of the company’s 7,500 workers fired and locked out, along with Facebook/Meta’s subsequent announcement of mass layoffs, highlights the urgent need for worker-community control of these communication platforms relied on by billions of people worldwide.

Musk’s family fortune originated with the stolen labor power of South African mineworkers under apartheid and expanded through the union-busting Tesla auto company and military contractors Starlink and Space X. He’s now thrown open Twitter’s doors to fascist groups and far-right provocateurs after completing his $44-billion buyout Oct. 27. 

Among those terminated were the entire team of content moderators responsible for addressing incidents of hate speech and threats against people of color, women, trans people, and the queer community. 

Twitter’s protections were always inadequate and poorly enforced. But all of the measures forced on the company in the wake of the Black Lives uprising and the Jan. 6, 2020, attack on the Capitol have been swept away.

However, Twitter’s “warnings” targeting media and officials from countries targeted by U.S. imperialism – including Cuba, Iran, China and Russia – remain firmly intact.

Attack on workers

Business Insider reported: “Five of those laid off filed a class-action lawsuit against Twitter on Nov. 3, accusing Twitter of breach of contract and violating the WARN Act, which requires companies to alert workers prior to mass layoffs.

“An emergency motion added to the lawsuit on Wednesday alleged that, by promising that the workers would get at least a severance package if laid off after the acquisition, Twitter ‘had persuaded employees not to seek or obtain employment elsewhere during the uncertain time period prior to Musk’s purchase of the company.’

“After Musk’s plans to buy Twitter were first announced in April, ‘many Twitter employees’ asked management about the changes that this would bring to the company, ‘in particular about mass layoffs,’ the former workers said.”

Those who initiated the lawsuit were among the first fired by Musk. But overnight on Nov. 3-4, up to 3,700 more Twitter workers found out that their jobs were gone – not from an official announcement, but because they were locked out of their Slack accounts and other company platforms.

The ripple effects have just begun.

“After laying off half its staff earlier this month, Twitter on Saturday [Nov. 12] started culling its vast ranks of contract staff, sources confirmed to Axios.

“Like many companies, Twitter’s staff is made up of a mix of full-time employees as well as contract workers who work for a third party. Twitter has cut an unspecified number of contractors in various fields, including content moderation, sources confirmed. …

“Some contractors, meanwhile, are concerned about getting paid for the last two weeks as a number of contractors ended up on teams with no full-time Twitter employees, leaving no one to sign off on their time cards, sources tell Axios.”

Tech industry mass layoffs

Musk’s theatrics have gotten the lion’s share of headlines, but the entire tech industry is in the midst of a deep crisis that it is taking out on the backs of its workers and users dependent on their platforms.

“Tens of thousands of tech workers have been laid off within days, as tech giants including Meta, Twitter, Salesforce and others shed headcount going into the final stretch of the year,” CNBC reported Nov. 10. “At least 20,300 U.S. tech workers were let go from their jobs in November, and more than 100,000 since the beginning of the year, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks layoffs in the field.”

On Nov. 9, Meta – the parent company of Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform with 2.9 billion users, Instagram and WhatsApp – announced more than 11,000 layoffs, about 13% of its global workforce. 

Facebook has been losing ground to Twitter, TikTok, and other social media platforms. Mark Zuckerberg, chairman, and CEO of Meta, sunk enormous amounts of capital into developing virtual reality software that has been ridiculed for being inferior to widely-available VR gaming systems.

On Nov. 14, the New York Times broke the news that Amazon plans 10,000 layoffs, or 3% of its global workforce, in “Amazon’s devices organization, including the voice-assistant Alexa, as well as at its retail division and in human resources.”

Although known primarily as the world’s biggest online store and for the sweatshop conditions of its warehouse and delivery workers, Amazon has its hands in many pots – from grocery chain Whole Foods to the robotics industry to a major social media platform, Twitch. AWS (Amazon Web Services) has tens of billions in contracts with the Pentagon and the National Security Agency.

“As per [a] Bloomberg report, Amazon became the world’s first public company to lose a trillion dollars in market value as a combination of rising inflation, tightening monetary policies and disappointing earnings updates triggered a historic selloff in the stock this year,” Mint reported.

Ride-share app company Lyft plans to cut 13% of its workforce. And the list goes on.

Tech workers aren’t the only ones who will be affected. The ripple effects will hit manufacturing, delivery, restaurant and healthcare workers, to name just a few, as the U.S. economy spirals toward a new capitalist recession.

Workers, communities unite!

Already some of Musk’s schemes have laughingly backfired – such as his plan to do away with the Twitter verification system for public figures and companies by charging $8 a month for a “blue check” verification. 

Within hours of implementing the system, Twitter was flooded with bogus “verified” accounts, such as one for pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. The company’s stock crashed after a parody account tweeted that the company would hereafter make its lifesaving insulin free. (Insulin should, of course, be free.)

As a result of Musk’s verification scheme and the proliferation of hate speech, advertising giant Omicron – representing huge brands like McDonald’s and Apple – urged its clients to pause Twitter advertising, Reuters reports. So far, General Motors, Volkswagen, and United Airlines are among the companies that have pulled their advertising. 

Social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (owned by Google) have become the most important form of communication for billions of people worldwide. Workers, their families, and oppressed communities – especially young people – rely on them not only to stay in touch with each other but often as their main source of news and information.

The current wave of union organizing efforts at Starbucks, Amazon, and other giant chains has used Twitter and other social media to build public support and spread the word to workers around the country. Likewise, Black and Brown-led groups and antifascists have used them to get out the word about right-wing attacks and to organize resistance.

Elon Musk has made a special target of oppressed communities on Twitter, such as the trans, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and intersex community. For years, many vulnerable and isolated groups and individuals have used the platform to build community and seek support and affirmation. Musk has blamed them and “civil rights groups” for the hit to Twitter advertising revenue since his takeover.

The impact goes far beyond U.S. shores. The importance of these platforms for the world’s population is reflected in the emphasis Washington has put on appointing censorship boards to silence the voices of media and organizations critical of U.S. sanctions and military adventures worldwide.

Elon Musk’s takeover and impending mass layoffs across the tech industry show that it is long past time that Twitter, Facebook and similar platforms were made publicly owned utilities under the control of their workers and the communities they serve, here and worldwide. Let’s raise the demand: social media by and for the people!

We strongly support the Korean National Workers’ Rally which will bring down the hammer on the Yoon Soek-Yeol administration’s anti-worker and anti-democratic actions!

We mourn the tragic loss of life in the Itaewon disaster.

“We cannot live like this anymore!”

Soaring inflation and the destruction of the social security net, unstable employment and low wages: This is the anguish of working people who are shackled to long hours and murderous conditions in their workplaces. 

Working people who suffered in the last foreign exchange crisis continue to face the brink of disaster in an unstable economic climate within a country where the profits of the wealthy always come first.

Recently a young woman working for Paris Baguette, part of the SPC group, and a construction worker in Anseong both lost their lives in terrible accidents. Miners in Bonghwa are still trapped after a tunnel collapsed, 14 hours after it was reported. Even though 2,400 workers lose their lives at their worksite annually, no companies are punished. 

The Yoon Seok-Yeol administration is trying to dismantle the Workplace Accident Penalty Act, which is already incredibly weak. Ignoring the working conditions that put workers to death is a form of murder. The Workplace Accident Penalty Act, which currently allows for the pockets of companies to be lined by the blood of workers, should be strengthened to include workplaces with less than five employees.

Strengthening the public sector, such as expanding public medical facilities and caring for the underprivileged, is a social demand and a responsibility of the state. However, as we experienced throughout the pandemic, with each crisis the wealth of the rich grows daily while working people sacrifice and suffer. The Yun Seok-Yeol administration, which gave special favors to the wealthy through deregulation and tax cuts, is planning on the privatization of railways, medical care and education. 

By drastically reducing the budget for jobs, public rental housing, youth, the disabled and social welfare, they are destroying the quality of life for working people and by reducing personnel in the public sector they are endangering the safety of all. They cannot stand to breathe and live with working people. The privatization of the public sector, which places suffering upon working people to fill the coffers of the wealthy, must be stopped.

Temporary employees and subcontracted employees are not recognized as employees, so they are not protected by the Occupational Safety and Health Act in case of industrial accidents.  They are also denied the right to collectively bargain with their employer. Subcontracted workers work under the supervision of an employer, but employers hide behind the contracted company and mobilize public authorities to oppress the workers, making it illegal to fight against unfair treatment and dismissal. 

And as we see in the recent struggle of subcontractors of Daewoo Chosun, a company which demanded 47 billion won in financial damages from workers who earn 2 million won a month, employers demand absolutely unrealistic amounts of financial compensation from workers. 

Unless everybody who works is recognized as a worker, and unless the justified right to strike is restored, this vicious cycle will continue.

The pain and anguish of workers who have protested against this system, going as far as self-immolation and death, is hard to describe with words.

It is a terrifying reality in which workers must fight to defend their constitutionally guaranteed right to collectively bargain and take collective action.

There is an urgent need to revise Articles 2 and 3 of the Labor Union Act, which deprives workers their rights to unionize, bargain and go on strike, squeezing dry the blood of workers to fill the stomachs of corporations.

They say that the Vigilant Storm War Exercise, which preemptively targets the North, will continue. These nuclear war exercises target North Korea by land, sea and sky. North Korea has launched missiles in response.

The risk of the recurrence of war is increasing endlessly due to these exercises that the Yoon Seok Yeol government is engaging in with foreign powers.

In conclusion, we cannot live like this anymore. There is only one way to achieve national peace and reunification and restore the legitimate rights of the working people, and that is to win the struggle against the forces which are anti-unification and anti-democratic.

Stop privatization of the public sector!

Strengthen the Workplace Accident Penalty Act!

Amend Articles 2 and 3 of the Labor Union Act!

Stop the ROK-U.S. Combined War Exercises!

Dismantle the ROK-U.S. Alliance!

Korean American Support Committee for KCTU (Korean Confederation of Trade Unions)

November 5, 2022

Nov. 13: The “Walk to Justice” to demand freedom for Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier culminated in Washington, D.C. this weekend. Organized by the American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council, its participants trekked 1,103 miles, beginning on Sept. 1 in Minnesota, AIM’s birthplace. 

Peltier, who is now 78 years old, was framed by the FBI and wrongfully convicted for a shooting at Oglala, South Dakota, in 1975. His case has garnered international support from such notable figures as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. 

A highlight of the closing rally at the Lincoln Memorial was a special letter from Leonard Peltier read by organizers. Participants pointed out that President Joe Biden can and must use his power to grant Peltier executive clemency. For full details on Leonard Peltier’s case, go to WhoIsLeonardPeltier.info. For information on the walk to justice, visit AIMGrandGoverningCouncil.org/LeonardPeltier.html.

SLL photos: Sharon Black

The 27th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 27) is underway in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Delegates from all over the world are gathered to try to agree on proposals to slow down and eventually eliminate rising atmospheric temperatures from the emission of greenhouse gasses (GHGs).

At its conclusion, the White House and faithful media will speak in glowing terms of the U.S. role. This practice of issuing a rosy, self-serving assessment each year has masked the contentious deliberations that have taken place since the conferences began in 1995.

In reality, the U.S. has bullied its way through the annual conferences. In 1997, when the 3rd COP took place in Kyoto, Japan, Vice President Al Gore led the U.S. delegation. Already posturing as a leading figure on battling climate change, his team still insisted that the U.S. be allowed softer requirements than the rest of the world. They shoved an agreement down the throats of the other delegations to exclude most military emissions from agreed-upon calculations. 

This was huge and continues today. The U.S. is by far the largest and most active military in the world and the number one institutional emitter of GHGs. U.S. emissions per capita are among the worst in the world — even excluding the millions of gallons of jet fuel and diesel fuel needed to keep the Pentagon’s tanks, jet fighters, and aircraft carrier groups threatening and brutalizing the world.

But the U.S. is now on the hot seat over another long-simmering issue – climate finance. 

In 2009, at COP 15 in Copenhagen, industrial, developed countries were backed into a corner over the damage that rampant capitalism has done to the Global South. Under pressure, they were committed to a pledge of $100 billion annually beginning in the year 2020.

The payments are lagging. The U.S., Australia and Canada have provided less than half their share. Often, instead of outright payments, government figures and financial institutions have been trying to count already agreed-on aid funds and loans as part of the payments.

The terrible consequences of climate change worsened in 2021 and 2022. All around the world, extreme weather events took thousands of lives, left millions homeless, and destroyed infrastructure and agriculture. Normally temperate regions in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. and many parts of southern and central Europe became ovens. 

Historic droughts continued to plague East Africa and the Western U.S. China suffered a 70-day heatwave, and one-third of Pakistan was left underwater from floods – the severity of which has never occurred before.

This torrent of destruction has pushed the issue of climate finance to front and center at COP 27. President Joe Biden will attend on Nov. 11 and plans to boast about his legislative success. His Inflation Reduction Act grants billions to cherry-picked, profitable projects that cost the energy industry absolutely nothing, doesn’t do enough to curtail the use of fossil fuels and ignores potential planet-saving projects among the landscape of innovations and technologies that have emerged.

It will be interesting to see how Biden glosses over the real issue at hand. Global South countries are no longer only demanding the fulfillment of the $100-billion annual pledge. There is now discussion of further transfer of funds referred to as “loss and damage” payments. Any funds that the capitalist robbers are forced to pay should be seen in the context of the trillions of dollars robbed during the colonial period. That process of exploitive theft continues today in the period of modern imperialism.

When President Ranil Wickremeshinghe of Sri Lanka spoke at the conference, he said, “The practice of colonialism transferred the rich resources of Asia and Africa to Europe to industrialize their countries, which is also the root cause of climate change — the consequences of which we, the poor countries, are forced to suffer.” 

The issue of climate finance, and loss and damage payments, has to be seen in that context by all those who want to leave a livable planet for future generations.

But for the U.S. capitalist class and their representatives, this treads dangerously close to a demand for reparations to all those brutally oppressed in the development of U.S. capitalism.

Paul Bledsoe, who was the communications director of the White House Climate Change Task Force during the Clinton administration, was candid when he told the New York Times, “America is culturally incapable of meaningful reparations. Having not made them to Native Americans or African Americans, there is little to no chance they will be seriously considered regarding climate impacts to foreign nations. It’s a complete non-starter in our domestic politics.”

U.S. delegates may be made to feel uncomfortable in Sharm el-Sheikh, and it remains to be seen whether or not the rising anger of those delegates from the Global South will be enough to pressure the U.S. and others to come up with more funds or even to meet previously agreed on obligations. In any case, the global progressive movement, and particularly activists in the U.S., must unite around the issue of reparations for the Global South.

Once again, the oligarchy allied with the U.S. government and the Yankee transnationals are waving in Bolivia the banner of division, rupture and regression to the past of exclusion, inequality and oblivion.

Camouflaged under the cloak of “rights,” the narrative of the soft coup seeks to destabilize the country, tear down the pillars that support the plurinational State and bring about chaos leading to a new coup d’état.

It is not surprising that, recently, the governor of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, took up again his proposal for a “federal Bolivia,” a project that aims “to confront the plurinational State model” established in the Constitution.

The plurinational State was consecrated by the 2009 Constitution, Magna Carta promulgated by President Evo Morales (2006-2019), which proclaims a “decentralized and autonomous” Bolivia.

The conservative sectors of Santa Cruz defend the idea of federalism, even with a proposal for autonomy that did not prosper in the Constituent Assembly of 2007-2008.

The national strike called in the department of Santa Cruz (east) to demand a census in 2023 is going on without its organizers listening to reason, despite the government’s constant commitment to dialogue and understanding.

The President of Bolivia, Luis Arce, presented, this past Friday night, the work of the technical table that will have the purpose of defining the date of the new national census.

At the opening ceremony, held in the city of Trinidad, capital of the department of Beni, the Bolivian president denounced the attempts of the ultra-right to overthrow him.

“This view of the census, unfortunately, generated a political approach, since it was not only used as an instrument of destabilization of the government, but also seeks to overthrow it,” said the Bolivian Head of State.

The Population and Housing Census, established in the Bolivian Constitution to be carried out every ten years, was announced for November 16, 2022, but was postponed for technical reasons to 2024.

The results from the population registry are used for the reallocation of parliamentary seats in each region and the redistribution of public resources, which is based on data from the last census in 2012.

Recently, President Arce exposed the true coup intentions of the opposition, which are hidden behind destabilizing actions, such as the indefinite departmental strike called by Governor Luis Fernando Camacho in Santa Cruz on October 22.

According to Bolivian political analyst and sociologist Eduardo Paz Rada, this is an action that seeks to bring about the fall of the government. “For the great majority of the people of Santa Cruz, this is an action of the oligarchic elites of Santa Cruz, who want to generate a political conflict,” said the analyst to Telescopio.

Meanwhile, the leader of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) and former Bolivian president, Evo Morales, asked the militancy of that organization to avoid the provocations of those who want to generate violence in the country.

Who pulls the strings that rocks the cradle

The social researcher and writer Marcelo Colussi, born in Argentina, wrote: “we must never forget that the enemy is not the master’s bodyguard: he is still the master.”

The United States is losing ground, and its projected dream of an American 21st century is fading. It is no secret to anyone today that the People’s Republic of China, with its booming economy, is on its way to becoming the world’s number one power by 2030 at the latest, and Russia is not far behind.

The confluence of international interests of these two powerful nations and their allies make them an influential alternative front to U.S. power, with increasing weight south of the Rio Grande.

In these circumstances, the United States believes it is more necessary than ever to control its “backyard” to subdue the restless nations of the continent in any way possible. In the U.S. geopolitical map, Bolivia plays an extremely important role due to its geographic location and the enormous wealth of its minerals in the soil.

These are the reasons this nation is in the crosshairs of the main actions of unconventional warfare to bring about a regime change that favors the interests of the empire. If we follow, step by step, what is happening today in the South American sister nation, we will see that the tactic used in 2019 is being repeated.

It is not surprising then that, in the recent U.S. report presented by the Government of Joe Biden, the farce that, in October 2019, the then-candidate and also president, Evo Morales (2006-2019), committed electoral fraud to stay in power, a version sustained by the Organization of American States (OAS), is reaffirmed.

This document constitutes an endorsement of the de facto government that the U.S. financed, supported, and defended, as well as a significant encouragement to the opposition to Luis Arce’s government.

Source: Granma, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US

Nov. 10 — After the midterm elections, it looks like the Democrats may keep running the U.S. Senate. The Republicans may take over the House of Representatives by a small margin.

Meanwhile, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier continue to be unjustly imprisoned. These two political prisoners have each spent more than 40 years in jail after being framed. 

At thousands of food banks across the United States, people will stand in line—sometimes for hours—in order to feed their families. In states that provide deposits on cans and bottles, seniors will collect them in order to eat or pay their rent. Capitalist elections won’t change this misery.

Big capitalists are the real winner of U.S. elections. Over $16.7 billion was spent on them. 

Some 465 billionaires dumped $881 million into the midterms. This dough could house thousands of homeless children. For the super-rich it’s just chump change.

While people voted for candidates, money bags were buying their employees. That’s if they don’t run for office themselves, like the billionaire Democrat J.B. Pritzker, who got re-elected as Illinois governor.

Real-estate tycoon Rick Caruso is dipping into his $4 billion stash to become mayor of Los Angeles. He’s trying to defeat congresswoman Karen Bass, who if elected would be the first Black woman mayor of the metropolis.

Despite most of the polls predicting a Republican sweep of the elections, poor and working people said no. They voted in 2020 for an end to over 40 years of political reaction and cutbacks.

President Biden deserves none of the credit for limiting Republican gains. It was hundreds of thousands of volunteers operating out of Black churches and union halls that defeated Donald Trump’s clones.

Biden could immediately free 78-year-old American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier, who has spent 46 years in jail. With another pen, he could largely normalize relations with Cuba. 

The man in the White House refuses to do either. Biden and Congress instead have shoveled over $70 billion into a war against the Russian Federation that could lead to World War III.

A sewer of hate

It’s good that the midterm elections are over. They featured a gusher of racism and bigotry that poisoned millions.

Immigrants with their children seeking asylum were described as invaders.

It was racism that Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson used to narrowly defeat the Black Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes. In a debate, Johnson claimed Barnes “incited” the anti-racist uprising in Kenosha following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. 

Some of Johnson’s ads featured pictures of Barnes that darkened his skin. Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers attacked Johnson’s racism. 

While the white Democratic governor was re-elected by an 89,000-vote margin, Mandela Barnes narrowly lost by 27,000 votes.

It was bigotry that re-elected Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis with a 1.5 million vote landslide. Voter suppression also helped.

DeSantis spent years attacking Black history—calling it “critical race theory”—and forbade school discussion of gender and sexuality with a “don’t say gay” law.

Most heartbreaking and dangerous was DeSantis forbidding medical and gender-affirming care for transgender youth.

Fox News and the New York Post propelled Trump-supporting Congressman Lee Zeldin’s campaign to be New York governor. Zeldin got 47% of the vote on a lock-em-up, pro-cop and jail-the-poor platform.

Zeldin promised that he would fire Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the first Black person to be elected to that post.

A special target of Zeldin was bail reform, which was enacted after the innocent Black youth Kalief Browder committed suicide. Browder spent three years in jail because he couldn’t afford cash bail.

Rick Caruso’s drive to become Los Angeles mayor was also a law-and-order campaign that featured attacks on homeless people. That doesn’t prevent the pop singer Katy Perry from supporting this billionaire bigot. 

Organize to fight back!

Even in conservative states where the working class is more suppressed, people will vote for progressive issues.

Voters in Kentucky voted against adding an anti-abortion amendment to the state constitution. In South Dakota, voters passed a referendum to expand Medicaid that will cover 40,000 more poor people. 

Many people will feel relieved that some of the worst bigots were defeated in the midterms. But the election results will be used to try to push through more cutbacks, including cuts in social security and Medicare.

That’s what happened after the Republicans won control of Congress in 1994. Then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich wanted to take thousands of Black children away from their parents and put them in orphanages.

It was 2 million Black people coming to the 1995 Million Man March, followed by another 2 million Black people in the 1997 Million Woman March, that stopped Gingrich. Not Democratic President Bill Clinton, who wanted to go along with Gingrich’s reactionary program.

Biden’s Labor Secretary Marty Walsh has already threatened railroad workers with congressional action if they go on strike. All workers have the right to strike!

We need to continue organizing. Social Security needs to be expanded. The minimum monthly benefit should be raised to $2,600. 

Whoever is in the White House, police will continue to kill an average of three people a day across the United States. It was Joe Biden, as a U.S. senator, who helped pass the mass incarceration laws in the 1990s. 

We need to bring people in prison home to their families. Workers at Amazon, Starbucks and every other workplace need union wages, protection and benefits.

Using the excuse of a looming recession, the billionaires will demand more cutbacks. The only answer is more fightback.

Even though Veterans Day is a federal holiday, only 19 percent of workers employed by private business get the day off. Originally called Armistice Day, it marks the end of World War I “at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month” of 1918.

Twenty million people were killed during this imperialist war, half of whom were civilians. It was waged between colonial powers that had enslaved hundreds of millions in Africa, Asia and the Americas.

Lenin, the leader of the socialist Bolshevik Revolution, called it a “war between the biggest slaveowners for preserving and fortifying slavery.”

The Belgian King Leopold II had killed as many as 15 million Africans in Congo for rubber profits. British capitalists made fortunes from famines in India and occupied a quarter of the planet. Fresh from genocidal wars against Indigenous nations, the U.S. army had killed a million Filipina/os fighting for independence.

Another 50 million people died in the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic that may have started at U.S. Army bases in Kansas.

Around 117,000 U.S. GIs died in the war. Three months after the U.S. entered the conflict, at least 100 Black people were murdered in East St. Louis, Ill., by white racist mobs.

Black soldiers returning from combat were among those killed in the race riots that swept U.S. cities in 1919. But World War I was swell for U.S. big business.

According to Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler in his book “War is a Racket,” “at least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.”

This was back in 1918, when the dollar was worth 16 times as much as it is now.

The du Ponts weren’t even mentioned in “The History of Great American Fortunes” by Gustavus Myers, which was published in 1909. The family’s vast profits from selling explosives during World War I catapulted them into the superrich.

Besides their chemical empire, the du Ponts controlled General Motors, which had been the world’s largest corporation, for decades.

Never forget Nat Turner

So why should poor and working people commemorate Nov. 11? Because on Nov. 11, 1831, the liberator Nat Turner was executed.

Turner led a revolt of enslaved Africans in Virginia that terrified all the slave owners. Beginning on Aug. 21, 1831, Black people marched from plantation to plantation in Southampton County fighting for liberation. Black Panther Field Marshal George Jackson was murdered 140 years later on Aug. 21, 1971, in California’s San Quentin prison.

The reaction of slave masters was merciless. They thought they were facing another Haitian Revolution.

Soldiers and sailors were mobilized to crush the rebellion. Militia members were sent from both Virginia and North Carolina.

The Rev. G.W. Powell said there were “thousands of troops searching in every direction,” with many Black people killed. The editor of the Richmond Whig newspaper admitted that “men were tortured to death, burned, maimed and subjected to nameless atrocities.” (“Before the Mayflower, A History of Black America” by Lerone Bennett Jr.)

Nat Turner was captured but never flinched. He was executed in Jerusalem, Va. It’s named after the eternal capital of Palestine, also known as Al-Quds.

The slave masters called Nat Turner a “terrorist.” That’s the same term used today to smear Palestinian freedom fighters.

Hanged for the eight-hour day

Labor leaders George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Albert Parsons and August Spies were hanged in Chicago’s Cook County Jail on Nov. 11, 1887. Twenty-three-year-old Louis Lingg was also slated to be executed, but he was either murdered or committed suicide the day before.

These martyrs died for the eight-hour work day. Most workers in those days worked 10 or 12 hours a day, sometimes even longer.

On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of workers across the U.S. went on strike to demand an eight-hour work day. Capitalists were terrified. Workers marched from factory to factory urging employees to strike.

Chicago was the center of this movement. Chicago police fired on striking workers at the McCormick reaper works — which later became part of International Harvester — on May 3, killing at least two.

The next day, a protest meeting was called at Chicago’s Haymarket Square. Police attacked the crowd, and someone threw a bomb at the cops. Eight policemen died as well as possibly some protesters.

The ruling class went berserk. Police arrested hundreds, but the bomber, who may have been a provocateur, was never found.

Instead, well-known labor leaders were put on trial for their lives because they supposedly incited the bombing. Years later, Illinois Gov. John Peter Altgeld courageously pardoned those who had been jailed.

Four of the five Haymarket Martyrs were immigrants. All were labeled anarchists. Trump wants us to hate immigrants while he calls anti-racist protesters “anarchists.”

As he was about to be hanged, Albert Parsons declared, “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

Lucy Parsons, a Black woman who was Albert Parsons’ partner, continued fighting for the working class until she died in a house fire in 1942. Chicago police said that she was “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.” Lucy Parsons’ books and papers were confiscated by the FBI.

May 1 became the international holiday of the working class. In Mexico, it’s known as the Day of the Chicago Martyrs.

Long live the People’s Republic of Angola!

The People’s Republic of Angola was born on Nov. 11, 1975. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, along with his employees Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and White House occupant Gerald Ford, sought to kill it. They had the Nazi armies of then-apartheid South Africa invade the African country.

Angola’s independence was historical justice that resonated around the world. Four million Angolans had been kidnapped in a slave trade that lasted four centuries. Brazil’s sugar plantations were fed by Angolan slave pens.

Millions of Brazilians have Angola in their blood. So do some African Americans.

The largest prison in the U.S. is in Angola, La. The sugar plantation which became the core of the prison was named Angola because that’s where the enslaved Africans working there came from.

Today, thousands of slaves work on the Angola prison’s 18,000 acres. The “Angola 3” — Herman Wallace, Robert King Wilkerson and Albert Woodfox — spent decades in solitary confinement on frame-up charges of killing a prison guard before being freed.

Their real crime was forming a chapter of the Black Panther Party. Herman Wallace died of liver cancer a few days after being released.

Five hundred years of Portuguese colonialism in Angola were 500 years of resistance. The founding of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in 1956 was a decisive step. Forced labor was halted only after 50,000 Angolans were killed during the 1961 revolts.

When South Africa invaded Angola, Cuba came to Africa’s assistance. As the Pan African educator and organizer Elombe Brath said, “When Africa called, Cuba answered.” Two thousand Cuban soldiers died fighting alongside their African comrades.

The initial defeat of South Africa helped inspire the Soweto Uprising on June 16, 1976. The total defeat of the apartheid army at Cuito Cuanavale in 1988 led to Nelson Mandela walking out of prison two years later.

So let us remember Nat Turner and the Haymarket Martyrs while celebrating Angola’s independence. And be prepared to stop any new wars for the rich.

Philadelphia: Come out for Mumia Abu-Jamal

Friday, Dec. 16 – 9:00 a.m.

Criminal Justice Center, 1301 Filbert Street, Philadelphia

Baltimore Film Screening Premiere

“Alex Saab: A Kidnapped Diplomat”

Thursday, November 17, 7 pm @

NoMüNoMü Arts Collaborative
709 N. Howard Street,
Baltimore, MD 21201

Presented by: NoMüNoMü Arts Collaborative and Peoples Power Assembly

Endorsed by Prisoners Solidarity Committee, Women In Struggle, Struggle La Lucha/Socialist Unity Party (partial list)

Alex Saab is a Venezuelan diplomat, illegally detained in the U.S.

His next hearing is on December 12 in Miami.

Demand the Department of Justice drop the charges against Alex Saab.

To learn more about his important case and why this amounts to kidnap by the U.S. government, you can go to: https://afgj.org/alex-saab-case-the-fabrication…

*Attend this important screening and find out what you can do to work toward the freedom of Alex Saab.