On April 26, in the “Washington Declaration,” the Biden administration announced that the U.S. would be docking nuclear-armed submarines in South Korea for the first time since the 1980s. The U.S. had withdrawn its open nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1992 with the “Joint Declaration of South and North Korea on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” treaty.

Although it was widely believed that the U.S. continued to secretly deploy nuclear weapons in Korea, this move by the Biden administration is a blatant violation of the denuclearization treaty.

The deployment of nuclear-armed submarines is an escalation bringing the Korean peninsula to the “brink of a nuclear war,” the Korean Central News Agency reported on May 1.

“So far, the U.S. has staged large-scale combined military exercises and all sorts of war drills against the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea],” the Pyongyang daily Rodong Sinmun reported on May 1, referring to the mass flight of U.S. Air Force nuclear-capable B52 bombers over the Korean peninsula on April 5. Now, the U.S. is “deploying strategic nuclear bombers, nuclear carrier task forces and even strategic nuclear submarines near the territorial waters of the DPRK and makes it public.”

The U.S. has not attempted to conceal that the exercises were intended to simulate an attack on the DPRK.

Rodong Sinmun continues, “What is more serious is that U.S. President Biden dared to make frantic and reckless remarks about ‘the end of regime’ [of] the DPRK while becoming vociferous about a ‘swift, overwhelming and decisive response’ at a press conference after the talks.”

North Korean leader Kim Yo Jong said Biden’s threat should not be dismissed as simply a “nonsensical remark from the person in his dotage.”

She said, “When we consider that this expression was personally used by the president of the U.S., our most hostile adversary, it is threatening rhetoric for which he should be prepared for far too great an after-storm.”

The more the U.S. is “dead set on staging nuclear war exercises, and the more nuclear assets they deploy in the vicinity of the Korean peninsula, the stronger the exercise of our right to self-defense will become in direct proportion to them.”

Third-largest U.S. military occupation

According to data from the Pentagon, about 30,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea, the third-largest military presence outside the country after Japan and Germany. In addition, U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) operates about 90 combat planes, 40 attack helicopters, 50 tanks, and some 60 Patriot missile launchers.

The “Washington Declaration” was part of a summit between President Biden and South Korea’s far-right President Yoon Suk Yeol.

“According to the New England Korea Peace Campaign, Boston Candlelight Action Committee, and Massachusetts Peace Action, which are preparing to hold a protest on Friday, April 28, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during Yoon’s visit to Harvard, ‘Since entering office, Yoon’s right-wing administration has expanded costly and provocative U.S.-ROK military exercises, heightened tensions with North Korea, rolled back workers’ rights, threatened to abolish the ministry of gender equality, and has taken many other actions to undermine struggles for peace and justice in South Korea,’” Simone Chun reports. 

“Yoon’s state visit comes at a time when South Korea is experiencing unprecedented crises on the political, economic, and national security fronts as a consequence of the Biden administration’s unrelenting pressure on South Korea to join the U.S. anti-China bloc,” Chun adds.

The joint statement issued by Biden and Yoon Suk Yeol did not explicitly mention China, but it did make several references to the “free and open Indo-Pacific,” which is seen by many as a code phrase for “containing” China.

The statement also declared, “The Presidents reiterated the importance of preserving peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait as an indispensable element of security and prosperity in the region.”

Ending ‘One China’ policy

The U.S. is now targeting Taiwan, virtually ending the “One China” policy that recognizes that Taiwan is part of China. In recent years, the U.S. has increased arms sales to Taiwan, sent high-level officials and Congressional delegations, and conducted joint military exercises with Taiwan. In addition, the U.S. has quadrupled the number of U.S. troops on the island.

Washington is building a system of alliances throughout the Indo-Pacific as part of its war buildup against China. These alliances include the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) — Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S. — and the AUKUS pact made up of Australia, Britain, and the U.S.

On April 11, Al Jazeera reported that the U.S. and the Philippines began their largest-ever military drills, including a live-fire exercise on a ship in the South China Sea.

The drills, known as Balikatan, have about 12,200 U.S. troops, 5,400 Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) members, and representatives from other countries, including Australia. Balikatan means “shoulder to shoulder” in Tagalog.

The Philippines recently agreed to allow the U.S. access to more military bases under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA). Nine EDCA bases are planned, with four directly facing Taiwan. The Philippines is also increasing military ties with Japan.

Biden has persisted in his aggressive rhetoric on Taiwan. He told CBS News last September that he would send U.S. troops to “defend” Taiwan. Then, in a significant break with the longstanding U.S. “One China” policy, he added: “Taiwan makes their own judgments about their independence… That’s their decision.” 

Of course, Taiwan is part of China and not “independent.” Any U.S. military invasion to “defend” Taiwan would be an act of war against China.

China not an imperialist power

As Foreign Policy magazine noted recently, “China is not a superpower.” The report uses the term superpower to avoid the more direct and accurate phrase imperialist power, which the U.S. tries to deny. 

“The United States is undoubtedly a superpower, with a worldwide network of alliance agreements and overseas bases enabling it to deploy and move forces rapidly between various theaters,” FP reports. “China, however, is only a regional power. It wields global economic power and influence, but the geographic reach of its military is largely limited to the Asian and Indo-Pacific theaters.”

The United States has direct and unhindered access to the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic oceans. China has limited access to the Pacific and is mostly hemmed in by major island chains it does not control.

Imperialist “gunboat diplomacy” requires boats, and airplanes need airfields to operate in far-flung regions. China has none of them, either.

China has only one overseas base — its naval facility in Djibouti, staffed with 400 Chinese marines.

While the U.S. Navy plows the world’s oceans daily, the Chinese navy conducts missions only in its own Indo-Pacific area.

A superpower means military and economic dominance over other countries, which China has never had. The U.S., in contrast, has hegemonic dominance over countries in every continent because no other state is in a position to challenge its dominance, FP concludes.

A fundraiser was held at the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice in Los Angeles on April 23 to help with travel costs for activist Jordan Slack who will join an LGBTQ+ delegation sponsored by Women in Struggle. This solidarity trip with Cuba will give participants an opportunity to learn about Cuba’s revolutionary new family code. Delegates will return to the U.S. armed with the truth about Cuba and what we can learn from their experience.

It’s May Day – International Workers’ Day – and the United States is a tinderbox of combustible material waiting for a spark. Poor and working people who gather in cities and towns across the country on May 1 should prepare for a long, hot summer of struggle against the capitalist regime.

In a single day, April 17, grand juries in Ohio and Virginia let off killer cops who murdered Black men: Jayland Walker and Timothy McCree Johnson. 

In 2022, U.S. police killed at least 1,176 people – nearly 100 per month – the largest number ever recorded. But 2023 is on track to bust that gruesome record. The rate of fatal police shootings of Black people far outstrips any other group.

Just days before, on April 14, a 16-year-old Black honor student, Ralph Yarl, was shot by a white racist in Kansas City, Missouri, for the “crime” of ringing his doorbell. Yarl had mistaken the bigot’s street address for the location where he was supposed to pick up his younger siblings.

The critically wounded youth ran to neighboring houses seeking help – only to be ignored. Then, finally, a neighborhood resident saw Yarl lying in a pool of blood in a driveway and got help. Fortunately, he survived.

On April 13, in Brooklyn, New York’s Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, police shot and killed an elderly Black man after they broke into his building and pounded on doors “searching for a robbery suspect.” The NYPD claims the man was holding a pistol. He didn’t fire at the cops, but Caesar Robinson “was shot numerous times” before he died.

The outrages don’t stop there. On April 19, the Dekalb County Medical Examiner released its official autopsy report on Atlanta, Georgia, forest defender Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, who was shot and killed by Georgia State Troopers during a brutal raid on “Cop City” protesters in January.

The cops claimed Tortuguita shot first. The Medical Examiner’s report confirmed what everyone knew – the cops lied. There was no gunpowder residue on the hands of the Latinx-Indigenous nonbinary activist. Their hands were raised when their body was riddled with 57 police bullets.

The Biden administration and Senate’s Democratic Party majority have joined the Republican House majority and right-wing state and local governments to fork over additional billions of funding to police agencies. 

Remember how Biden rode to victory over bigot Donald Trump on the coattails of the massive Black Lives Matter movement following the police murder of George Floyd in 2020? Since taking office, Biden has only done the bidding of the bosses frightened by the Black Lives uprising.

War at home, war abroad

The police war on Black and Brown people at home is an extension of U.S. wars for empire abroad. In the last year, Biden and Congress have spent well over $100 billion funding the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia and the people of Donbass. 

As this is being written on April 28, a Ukrainian strike on the city of Donetsk has killed at least seven people and wounded 19 in a busy shopping area – the latest in hundreds of similar war crimes committed against civilians in the Donbass region since the U.S.-backed coup in Kiev in 2014. 

Ukraine’s war on civilians had already claimed more than 14,000 lives before the escalation of the conflict in February 2022. It’s unclear how many more have died since Russia was forced to intervene to protect the population of Donbass and eastern Ukraine last year, but it’s certainly in the tens of thousands on both sides, if not more.

As the conflict drags on, bringing direct U.S. military conflict with Russia ever closer, Washington is also gearing up for war with the People’s Republic of China. In fact, this is the war favored by the Republican far right and the most overtly pro-fascist factions of the U.S. ruling class. But there is bipartisan agreement on the dangerous buildup in the Pacific and Asia.

From Cuba and Venezuela to Iran and Zimbabwe, people continue to suffer the effects of U.S. sanctions and blockades – another form of warfare. U.S. wars, both proxy and open, continue to kill from the Horn of Africa and Syria to Palestine and Yemen.

For workers here, the costs of U.S. wars have been devastating – not only robbing funds from desperately-needed social services to pay Pentagon contractors and U.S. proxy regimes but providing the rationale of out-of-control price-gouging by capitalist profiteers. 

The cost of fuel, food, rent, utilities, and health care continue to rise as wages stagnate, and the Democrat/Republican axis removes all of the meager protections put in place during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the unaddressed climate crisis devastates swaths of the country, upending lives with startling regularity.

The increasingly desperate conditions have inspired powerful strikes coast-to-coast. The bosses have taken note of the upturn in labor organizing and strike activity – led by young workers – and are positioning their politicians to crack down, even passing measures to roll back laws against child labor from Alabama to Iowa, following in the wake of Biden’s attack on railroad workers.

Trans lives, abortion rights under attack

The first big battles of summer 2023 may come during June – LGBTQ2S Pride Month. 

Florida, Tennessee, and other states have passed or will pass broad measures to crack down on Pride celebrations. In Florida, some corporate-sponsored Pride events have already been called off before the measure takes effect for fear of legal liability.

We face the possibility of mass arrests at Pride events, especially targeting trans people and drag artists. A barrage of more than 500 state bills in nearly every U.S. state since the start of this year is attempting to drive trans people out of public life – cutting off life-saving gender-affirming health care for both youths and adults; banning people from using restrooms or playing on sports teams corresponding to their gender; and even making it illegal to be trans in public. 

Across the country, astroturfed “parents groups” are working with right-wing politicians to ban books that tell the truth about queer lives, Black history, and any aspect of U.S. history. Libraries are being defunded, and teachers silenced. Even elected officials who dare to challenge the far right from Montana to Tennessee are being targeted with illegal sanctions that disenfranchise the people who voted for them.

Anti-trans legislation has been accompanied by growing threats and violence on social media and in the streets. Drag story hours and queer events of all kinds are targeted by far-right bigots from the Proud Boys to TERFS and Christian nationalists, often working side-by-side. In response, queer communities and allies from coast-to-coast have mobilized to push back the fascists.

Increasingly, the cry is heard: Pride is a protest! Stonewall was a riot! Pride 2023 is guaranteed to swell the movement of recent years that has demanded a return to the spirit of the Stonewall Rebellion and for cops out of Pride.

After robbing women and other people who can become pregnant of their right to abortion last year, allowing many states to ban the essential medical procedure, the U.S. Supreme Court may soon ban access to the abortion pill nationally. 

Make no mistake: the situation is dangerous. Members of oppressed communities are dying. Millions of workers are living on the edge of disaster.

But the workers and oppressed, the masses of the people, have not yet been heard from. The working class has the power to turn the situation around – not only to halt the fascist advance but to reverse the setbacks and expand people’s rights. It is the job of revolutionary communists and socialists to seize every opportunity to aid the masses in exercising their power. 

Yes, it will be a long, hot summer – and not just because of capitalist-fueled climate change. The bosses and their political stooges are asking for it. Let’s give them hell.

El plan para destruir a un PR que tenga la posibilidad de desarrollarse para el beneficio de las y los boricuas es verdaderamente siniestro. El mensaje de Don Pedro Albizu Campos de que los EUA quieren la jaula pero no los pájaros se está evidenciando cada vez más claro por la nueva invasión yanqui por millonarios mayormente corruptos que desplazan a la población nativa y por el avance de la privatización de todos los servicios esenciales que ayudan al pueblo.

Por ejemplo la energía. Ya la privatizadora Luma Energy que administra la distribución y transmisión, ha probado su ineficacia criminal hasta el extremo de que en estos días, en víspera del comienzo de la época de huracanes, ha suspendido dicen ellos que por falta de dinero, los trabajos de poda de árboles, que aquí es la causa mayor de interrupciones del servicio. Aparte de los apagones continuos y el alza del costo de la luz.

Por otro lado, parte de ese plan nefasto, es eliminar los sindicatos que se opongan a esos planes. Eso han hecho con la UTIER, que ha sido el sindicato más militante y exitoso del país en su defensa de los derechos laborales y en su solidaridad con las luchas del pueblo. El plan es quitar ese obstáculo de lucha por una energía pública, impidiéndoles que se honren sus derechos laborales adquiridos al pasar a la privatizadora.

La Utier es uno de los pocos que no pertenece a ningún sindicato estadounidense y por tanto tiene independencia de acciones para que se beneficie el pueblo y no a las uniones foráneas que vienen a PR para imponer sus visiones pro imperialistas y no para beneficiar a su matrícula boricua.

Pero, precisamente porque no está atada a uniones yanquis, la Utier sigue luchando por exponer la verdad ante el pueblo. Cada miércoles sus jubilados siguen esa batalla, esta vez directamente frente a la Junta de Control Fiscal que ahora es el gobierno de facto.

Desde PR para Radio Clarín de Colombia, les habló Berta Joubert-Ceci.

Get PDF here

• MAY DAY 2023: Prepare for a long, hot summer of struggle
• Grand juries issue more licenses to kill Black people:
  Justice for Jayland Walker & Timothy McCree Johnson!
• Fred Goldstein ¡presente!
• Socialist Unity Party condemns indictment of Black liberation activists
• Alton Maddox Jr. fought for the people inside and outside the courtroom
• How to free Mumia? Shut it down!
• San Diego mobilizes to bring Mumia home
• Lessons for all workers from Tennessee expulsion of Reps. Jones and Pearson
• #LetHerSpeak: Rep. Zooey Zephyr and supporters defy anti-trans bigots
• Tucker Carlson and the U.S. war on China
• Al-Quds is the capital of Palestine!
• Ben Dupuy, quintessential Haitian revolutionary leader, dead at 91
• En Puerto Rico, la lucha continúa contra privatización de energía
• Gobierno de PR, lacayo sumiso del neoliberalismo

On April 26, the far-right-dominated Montana state legislature in Helena censured the state’s first elected trans representative, Zooey Zephyr, after silencing her for several days and threatening her with expulsion. 

Zephyr will not be allowed to enter the chamber or speak for the remainder of the legislative session, disenfranchising her 11,000 constituents from Missoula.

The unconstitutional, transphobic, and misogynist silencing of an elected representative by the Republican majority follows in the footsteps of the Tennessee legislature’s recent expulsion of two young Black representatives, and the censure of Oklahoma Rep. Mauree Turner, who is Black, Muslim, and nonbinary, after they defended a trans rights protester from police abuse.

Zephyr was attacked because she dared to condemn state legislation restricting gender-affirming care for trans youth. “You will have blood on your hands,” she said, referring to the greatly increased suicide risk for trans people who don’t have access to care and the stoking of anti-trans violence by similar bills across the U.S.

Zephyr’s stand was in stark contrast to national Democratic Party leaders like Joe Biden, who have refused to condemn, much less take action against, increasingly Draconian anti-trans measures.

House Speaker Matt Regier first silenced Zephyr, refusing to acknowledge the representative or turn on her microphone during discussions. Republicans threatened and misgendered her in official documents. 

Days later, on April 24, when protesters responded by chanting “Let her speak!” from the gallery, Zephyr symbolically raised her silent microphone. Montana State Troopers in riot gear marched onto the floor of the legislature in front of Zephyr, then arrested seven people in the gallery. The Republican majority canceled the next day’s session.

When they resumed on April 26, the right-wing majority voted to punish Zephyr (and those she represents) with censure for the show of people power in their “hallowed hall.” The charge was “breaching decorum.”

Among those who spoke in support of Zephyr was Indigenous Rep. Jonathan Windy Boy: “The community that I represent does have trans. Some tribes, we call them two-spirit people. My late uncle, one of my teachers in my way of life … told me no matter who you are, we are all equal under the eyes of the almighty.” 

The ACLU and other groups plan to challenge the censure in the courts.

Right to representation under attack

The attacks on Zooey Zephyr in Montana, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson in Tennessee, and Mauree Turner in Oklahoma go far beyond the scope of electoral politics. They are attacks on the right of oppressed people to be represented or even speak on matters that directly affect their lives. 

It’s vital to see these anti-democratic measures in the larger context of the capitalist anti-trans panic. Missouri’s attorney general ordered a ban on all gender-affirming care, including for adults. Texas, Florida, and other states are poised to enact similar bans. 

At the direction of presidential hopeful Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s legislature has passed bills allowing the state to kidnap trans children from their parents and the children of trans parents and threatening to ban Pride parades and celebrations.

Meanwhile, on Elon Musk’s Twitter app, the billionaire’s fanbase is openly calling for public executions of trans people, their families, and their health care providers. 

People are organizing and fighting back from Montana to Nebraska, from Ohio to Tennessee. Women in Struggle-Mujeres en Lucha has announced plans for a National March on Florida to Protect Trans Youth and Trans Lives. It’s a fight for the whole working class and progressive movement.

The fascist right and its capitalist backers are already expanding the attack to include the entire LGBTQ community, Black and Brown communities, women, and all workers – even pushing to roll back child labor laws from Iowa to Alabama. 

If you haven’t spoken up, if you haven’t joined a protest, if you haven’t paid attention –  the time to change that is now.

Why was Tucker Carlson fired from Fox News? Not for any of his known offensives, even though that’s a very long list.

Carlson is the millionaire (net worth $420 million) son of the director of the CIA’s Voice of America and Radio Marti directed at Cuba as well as the U.S. Information Agency, whose racist, misogynist, homophobic, anti-immigrant views take 27,407 words to chronicle on Wikipedia. Obviously not a friend of the working class.

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who started his career as a lawyer for a white supremacist and has been a second banana on Carlson’s Fox News show in recent years, suggests that Carlson was fired because “the removal of Tucker means the elimination of the only real, sustained dissent on U.S. militarism.” Greenwald claims Carlson “opposed the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine.”

If Greenwald was honest, he wouldn’t say that Carlson dissented on U.S. militarism; he dissented only on the U.S. proxy war on Russia.

What Carlson says is: “Russia is not America’s main enemy … Our main enemy is China. The U.S. ought to be in a relationship with Russia, aligned against China”.

In another broadcast, Carlson said: “The biggest threat to this country is not Vladimir Putin; that’s ludicrous. The biggest threat obviously is China.”

When Jack Teixeira, the 21-year-old in the Air National Guard’s 102nd Intelligence Wing at Otis Airbase, released top-secret Pentagon documents, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene praised him as “white, male, christian, and antiwar … he told the truth about [U.S.] troops being on the ground in Ukraine and a lot more.” 

Really? This guy, who was known for his racist and anti-Semitic postings, was never antiwar, though he may have opposed the U.S. proxy war on Russia. That’s what Tucker Carlson said, that Teixeira’s leaks “prove U.S. troops are fighting in Ukraine.”

Actually, that part is true. The U.S. and NATO started training Ukrainian forces to fight in Donbass in 2015, and while the training is now done in other countries, NATO provides six-month training courses to all of Ukraine’s forces. 

The leaked Pentagon documents revealed that in addition to military trainers and “consultants” in Ukraine, the U.S. has about a hundred special forces personnel operating there, including 14 who are part of a special forces unit made up mostly of “elite” British SAS soldiers.

The leaked Pentagon documents also show a buildup in Pentagon operations targeting China, including assessments that could be used for a U.S. military intervention in Taiwan. 

Divisions in U.S. ruling class

The documents also reveal what the Washington Post calls “the U.S.’s gloominess on the war in Ukraine.” 

“The [Washington Post] admits that Western media audiences have been misled about the course of the war, that essentially what mainstream media has been reporting about Ukraine has been a pack of lies: namely that Ukraine is winning the war and is poised to launch an offensive that will lead to a final victory,” reports Joe Lauria in Consortium News.

“Instead, the second paragraph of the piece makes clear the leaked documents show the long-planned Ukrainian offensive will fail miserably — ‘a marked departure from the Biden administration’s public statements about the vitality of Ukraine’s military,’ Lauria continues.  

“In other words, U.S. officials have been lying about the state of the war to the public and to reporters who have faithfully reported their every word without a hint of skepticism,” he concludes.

The documents show there are sections of the U.S. ruling class who are worried about the disastrous proxy war in Ukraine. The death toll has been rising steadily, and the economic costs of the war are mounting. 

The war is also having a destabilizing effect on the global economy, with the price of oil and gas rising sharply and inflation spiraling in the U.S. and Europe. It could disrupt the U.S. war buildup against China.

That’s the fear being voiced by Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, Representative Greene, the Pentagon leaker, and their kind.

The U.S. war on China is dominant in Washington now. As Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman noted on April 24: “Visiting Washington last week, it was striking how commonplace talk of war between the U.S. and China has become. That discussion has been fed by loose-lipped statements from American generals musing about potential dates for the opening of hostilities. …

“They are a reflection of the broader discussion on China taking place in Washington — inside and outside government. Many influential people seem to think that a U.S.-China war is not only possible but probable.”

On the weekend of his 69th birthday celebration, the San Diego Coalition to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal and All Political Prisoners held a meeting to honor the world-famous political prisoner, revolutionary journalist, and author. The San Diego Black Panther Party co-hosted the gathering of community organizations at the Malcolm X Library on April 22.

We joined in solidarity with activists in many cities nationally and internationally under the theme of “Mobilizing to Bring Mumia Home.” We demand that the United States government free Abu-Jamal and all political prisoners, prisoners of conscience and prisoners of war. We acknowledge that all prisoners are political prisoners of the corrupt, racist, for-profit prison-industrial complex.

The meeting began with a slide presentation of a partial list of current incarcerated political prisoners, released and exonerated prisoners, and prisoners who have joined the ancestors. Most on the list were compiled by the Jericho Movement. 

We encouraged everyone to do some research and learn the names of political prisoners who were organizers in the Black Panther Party, other Black Liberation organizations, the American Indian Movement, and other movements for freedom and justice. 

Learn the names of those elders who have spent decades in prison, like Mumia Abu-Jamal, Jamil al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown), Ed Poindexter, Kenny “Zulu” Whitmore, Veronza Bowers Jr., Leonard Peltier, Alvaro Luna Hernandez, Byron Chubbuck (Oso Blanco), Kamau Sadiki, Rev. Joy Powell, longest-held U.S. political prisoner Ruchell Magee, and exiled liberation fighter Assata Shakur.

Justice in the hands of the people

Wolf, organizer with the San Diego BPP and chair of this gathering, welcomed everyone and spoke of the importance of supporting all political prisoners with emphasis today on Mumia Abu-Jamal. “They sacrificed their lives for us – now is the time for us to stand up and fight for their lives. We must not let our freedom fighters die in prison.”

Judge Lucretia Clemons’ recent denial of a new trial for Abu-Jamal to prove his innocence left organizers angry and full of all kinds of emotions aimed at the entire U.S. criminal judicial system. 

Some of us were confident that after 41 years, Mumia would finally get his day in court. But over and over we are reminded that justice has to be in the hands of the people. It is up to us to free Mumia. We need to go to the streets in the hundreds of thousands, in the millions. 

Millions are needed in the U.S. to stand with Mumia and demand that he be released NOW!

Community solidarity

For now, we honor Mumia for his journalism, his commentaries, his support for humanity, his voice. We listened to a recorded update on his case from Johanna Fernandez and heard solidarity statements from representatives from local community organizations.

Sylvia Telefaro of African American Writers & Artists shared some inspiring words and a poem by Alice Walker. Curtis Howard, community organizer and author, spoke of his lived experience in the California prison system. 

Roberto Papeda of the Chicano Prison Project read a letter he sent to Judge Clemons encouraging her to do the right thing. He also commented on how important it is to recognize and honor Mumia on his birthday by sending revolutionary love and birthday wishes.

Matsemela Odom, organizer with the African People’s Socialist Party, spoke on how important it is to support Mumia and all political prisoners. Odom alerted everyone to the attack on the Uhuru Movement. Following FBI raids last year, three members of the APSP, including Chair Omali Yeshitela, have been indicted. The attacks on the movement to liberate African people continue to this day.

We ended our celebration with everyone picking up one of Mumia’s books for a group photo in front of the beautiful banner designed by local artist/activist Mario Torero. Participants signed a birthday card to be sent to Abu-Jamal on his birthday, April 24. The card and photo will add to the many birthday greetings Mumia will receive from his supporters nationally and internationally.

[Roberto Papeda’s comment about recognizing and honoring prisoners on their birthdays reminded me of a commentary by Mumia that I heard long ago. I downloaded it and shared the message on Youtube.]

Happy birthday Mumia! We love you!

Benjamin Dupuy, arguably Haiti’s greatest communist leader and ideologue from the 1970s to the 2010s, passed away in a Miami Beach nursing home on Apr. 23 at the age of 91. He had been extremely ill and bedridden for many months, suffering from emphysema and suspected lung cancer.

A journalist, photographer, filmmaker, diplomat, organizer, and political party leader, Dupuy was a model Marxist theoretician and man-of-action, unwavering in his life-long pursuit of socialist revolution in Haiti.

Born in Cap Haïtien on Sep. 30, 1931, the fourth of eight children, Ben grew up in many cities – Gonaïves, Aux Cayes, Port-au-Prince, St. Marc – as his father, Georges Dupuy, a high-ranking Haitian Army officer who once was in line to head the Armed Forces, was stationed in different posts around the country.

His mother, Anna Therese Anduoar Dupuy, was Dominican, making him virtually fluent in Spanish.

Having once considered becoming a priest, Dupuy instead became a civil engineer, working on projects like irrigation canals in the Artibonite Valley and a butter factory near Aux Cayes. In the latter city, an Army officer commandeered his work Jeep to pursue the “Jeune Haiti” anti-Duvalierist revolutionaries who had landed near Jérémie in 1964.

Fidel Castro’s successful insurgency in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra mountains just across the Windward Passage had inspired that ill-fated guerilla incursion just as it inspired Ben and many others of his generation.

Dupuy also worked on the U.S. government-sponsored Geodesic Survey, mapping Haiti’s topography, which took him to all corners of the Maryland-sized country and fired his imagination about the possibilities of recreating a Cuban-style July 26^th Movement.

A ham radio enthusiast, Dupuy would spend hours listening to broadcasts from revolutionary Cuba, while also working in Port-au-Prince’s Radio Haiti with people like famed journalist Jean Dominique and Ben’s best friend at the time, Herby Widmaier.

He also had several brushes with death. Tonton Macoutes, Duvalier’s infamous paramilitary corps, almost executed him and a friend when they were stopped driving a car similar to that of François Benoît, an Army marksman, whom François “Papa Doc” Duvalier suspected of trying to kidnap his son, Jean-Claude, from school in 1963.

Finally, a Tonton Macoute, who was later killed by Duvalier, told Ben he had better leave the country because he was marked for arrest for his role in organizing striking workers at the Reynolds Metals bauxite mine in Miragoâne, where he also worked.

In 1965, Ben fled to New York, later bringing his wife and three of his four children. He alighted first in Elmhurst, Queens, then moving with his family to White Plains, NY.

Quickly he became involved in New York’s growing anti-Duvalierist Haitian exile politics. Passing through a series of coalitions and organizations, he worked, often contentiously, with many prominent figures of the anti-Duvalierist struggle including Wilson Désir, Paul and Franck Laraque, Fathers Antoine Adrien and William Smarth, Edouard Petit-Homme, Paul Adolphe, Ludovic Dauphin, and Julien Jumelle.

During the early 1970s, Dupuy also worked closely with brothers Raymond and Leo Joseph, publishers of the leading anti-Duvalierist weekly Haïti Observateur. The paper had a major cover story on the testimony Ben gave to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1974. In one testy exchange between Dupuy and Sen. Edward Brooke (R-MA), Brooke sternly asked Dupuy: “Are you advocating the violent overthrow of the Haitian government?” After a short pause, Dupuy replied: “I think you should have posed that question to George Washington about his struggle in 1776.” The witty come-back delighted Haitians.

Indeed, Dupuy by then had formed the Haitian Liberation Movement (MHL), which infiltrated many militants into Haiti and carried out several spectacularly successful clandestine operations, especially after Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier succeded his father as Haiti’s “President-for-Life” in 1971.

During the late 1960s, Dupuy worked as an engineer on the building of Route 684 through Westchester County, NY, where he met Jill Ives, who became his long-time partner. After divorces, the two merged their families and moved to various homes during the 1970s and 1980s in upstate New York’s Dutchess and Rockland counties. Each home became a collective household, with young and old revolutionaries of many nationalities engaged in political work, from secret missions in Haiti to leafleting and tabling demonstrations from Poughkeepsie to Washington, DC. They formed the Friends of Haiti, a group which raised political and financial support for the MHL by doing audio visual presentations, speaking engagements, and fundraisers at churches, community groups, and universities as well as publishing a newsletter, animating radio and television shows in NYC, and organizing demonstrations.

Ben became a pilot, flying out of Stormville Airport and working in concert on some intrigues with another Haitian airman, Frantz Gabriel, who flew out of Poughkeepsie Airport and later would become Aristide’s pilot and de facto chief of security.

For some years, the Dupuy/Ives commune became a branch of the Canada-based Liberation Support Movement (LSM), which argued that the leading edge of world revolution was the national liberation struggles then raging throughout the Third World, particularly in Africa.

In 1976, Ben then tasked his first lieutenant and Jill’s son, Kim Ives, to produce a 16mm film which could be internationally distributed and explain Haiti’s national liberation struggle. Seven years later, the feature documentary Bitter Cane was released, winning festivals and acclaim worldwide. Prominent artists like Manno Charlemagne, Georges Vilson, Nicole Levy, and Jean-Claude “Koralen” Martineau all contributed to the film. Dupuy’s historical, political, and economic analysis provided the film’s backbone.

As the film project finished in 1983, Dupuy launched the weekly newspaper Haïti Progrès, whose slogan was “The paper which offers an alternative.” Unlike Haïti Observateur, Haïti Progrès had a trenchantly anti-imperialist stance and attracted the participation of the cream of Haiti’s revolutionary intelligentsia, including the Laraque brothers, Cauvin Paul, Father Gérard Jean-Juste, Anthony Phelps, Frantz “Fanfan” Latour, Guy Roumer, Marie Célie Agnant, Jean Brière, Carl Gilbert, and Raymond Philoctète. In its heyday, it was edited by the French internationalist former school teacher Jeanie Loubet and made possible by a dedicated core including Maude Leblanc, Georges Honorat, François Pierre-Louis, Georgina Montreuil, and former Duvalierist political prisoner Jacques Magloire.

Over the same years, Dupuy’s network spawned a radical Haitian student network and publication called Idées, a Haitian workers-and-tenants organization called the Association of Haitian Workers (ATH), the demonstration-organizing mass organization, the Committee against Repression in Haiti, as well as numerous radio shows and coalitions. In the early 1980s, all these undertakings functioned mostly out of offices based on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, NY.

However, after Duvalier’s fall in February 1986, operations began to shift to Haiti. In April 1987 at St. Jean Bosco (the church of then Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who delivered the opening speech), Ben organized a conference which founded the National Popular Assembly (APN), a nation-wide “popular organization” (the U.S. Embassy called it a “pressure group”) which trained hundreds of young militants and established dozens of chapters nationwide.

The APN militants projected the French/Kreyòl version of Bitter Cane (Canne Amère) with a movie projector on walls and bed-sheets in Haitian slums and countryside hamlets, as well as distributed Haïti Progrès, whose arrival by plane from New York thousands of young Haitians anxiously awaited every week for news and analysis of the chaotic post-Duvalier years.

In early 1990, Dupuy held an APN press conference at the Hotel Oloffson where he proposed Aristide to be president. A group of thugs broke up the press conference, but, like a genie, the idea was now out of the bottle, and indeed, a few months later, just weeks before the national election, the National Front for Change and Democracy (FNCD) unceremoniously dumped their first candidate and chose Aristide, which sparked an historic outpouring of voters that became known as “the flood” or Lavalas. Aristide was elected on Dec. 16, 1990 with 67% of the vote when they stopped counting, stunning U.S. election engineers.

Dupuy then became Aristide’s Ambassador-at-Large, traveling to countries worldwide to solicit support for the beleaguered nation. He particularly focused on African nations, of which many Haitians are descendants but which had never established diplomatic relations with Haiti. Dupuy also sought to get support from Libya, which more timorous members of Aristide’s Foreign Ministry feared would anger Washington.

However, the U.S. had already begun planning a coup d’état since the upstart president announced Haiti’s “second independence” in his Feb. 7, 1991 inaugural speech, and on Sep. 30, 1991, Dupuy’s 60^th birthday, the Haitian Army ousted Aristide in the first bloody coup d’état against his government.

(To be continued)

Source: Haiti Liberté

On April 23, a day before Mumia Abu-Jamal’s 69th birthday, protesters marched down 52nd Street in West Philadelphia to a rally at the OneArt Community Center. A glorious mural demanding Mumia’s freedom marks the entrance.

Speakers at the rally, representing a coalition of different organizations, spoke with outrage and untiring optimism about the struggle to free Abu-Jamal. He has now been imprisoned for 41 years. Speaking in Mumia’s name, they called for the freedom of all political prisoners and an end to mass incarceration.

The movement to “Bring Mumia Home” was dealt a grim setback on March 31 by the corrupt Pennsylvania judicial system. In 2019, boxes of evidence were found to have been hidden in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office. These boxes contained proof of Mumia’s frame-up that had been withheld from him and his attorneys since the dirty trial in 1982 when he was initially given a death sentence.

The new evidence, finally released after 37 years, should have provided the basis for a new trial. It included documentation that the police bribed key witnesses and that there was deliberate racist manipulation of the jury selection. 

After months of hearings and delays, Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Lucretia Clemons ruled that she would not allow this evidence to be heard, thus depriving Mumia of his right to a fair trial.

The power of organized labor

At the rally, Clarence Thomas — a retired leader of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union from Oakland, California, and co-founder of the Million Worker March Movement — told those gathered at the rally: “We need the working class, organized and unorganized, to shut it down. We will be heard. Such an action at the point of production will free Mumia, and it won’t stop there.”

Omali Yeshitela, chair of the Uhuru Movement and African People’s Socialist Party, was one of those indicted on April 18 by the U.S. Justice Department for opposing the U.S./NATO proxy war in Ukraine. He received a universal response of support when he condemned the entire U.S. system of injustice.

Rasakhan Wali from Nation Time talked about the infamous racist atrocities carried out by the Philadelphia administration at the time when Mumia became a brilliant young journalist, reporting for the Black Panther newspaper and other media. He was just 16 when Mayor Frank Rizzo ordered the brutal strip searches of Black Panther leaders on the eve of their massive Plenary Convention in 1970.

Fearlessly reported attacks on MOVE

In 1978, a police siege of the MOVE headquarters led to the imprisonment of nine African American men and women. Some were held behind bars for 40 years, while two died in prison.

Then, in May 1985, the city of Philadelphia bombed the MOVE house, wiping out 61 neighboring homes in the conflagration. Janine Africa and Janet Africa only learned that their children had been killed in the fire bomb through prison yard conversations overheard from their solitary confinement cells.

Another outrage occurred the following year when a Philadelphia grand jury cleared all city officials of criminal liability for the MOVE bombing that killed 11 people, including five children. 

At Mumia’s birthday rally, Michael Africa Jr. spoke as people wrote messages to Mumia. He was born in Debbie Africa’s prison cell a month after her incarceration. In his presentation at the rally, Mike Africa evoked the name of a child killed in the MOVE bombing, Tree Africa.

He was talking about a grotesque crime revealed in a 2021 video for a Princeton University course, ” REAL BONES: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology.” The video was a case study of the remains of MOVE victims. 

The children had not been buried, as reported in 1986. The bones of Tree Africa and Delisha Africa had been secretly held at Penn Museum and later Princeton University without the knowledge of their families.

Mumia will be freed

Much of the discussion at Mumia’s birthday rally centered on the drive to win his freedom.

ILWU’s Thomas drew rapt attention when he talked about the potential of the labor movement. He reported on the 1999 West Coast shutdown by dock workers demanding Abu-Jamal’s freedom when he was threatened with execution. In 2001, under the pressure of a growing International movement, a judge re-sentenced Mumia, a labor union journalist, to life in prison.

On Feb. 16, ILWU locals in San Francisco and Oakland shut down their ports to demand that Judge Clemons allow a retrial. Their action resonated in support for Mumia internationally. South Africa’s National Union of Metalworkers, the Japanese Doro-Chiba railroad workers’ labor union, the German IG Metal Workers, and various English unions applied to the Pennsylvania court to grant a new trial. 

Other speakers at the rally included Theresa Shoatz, daughter of political prisoner Russell Maroon Shoatz; Candace McKinley with the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund; and Keyssh from Decolonize Philly. Performers included Cleo, Antonella, New World Warrior, and hip-hop artists Spiritchild.