The 2nd National Assembly of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) was a success! From October 21-23 270 attendees from 122 organizations participated in a protest march, four plenaries, and 8 workshops; passed 12 resolutions, new country chapter by-laws, and an assembly declaration; approved 3 new member organizations; and elected a new Steering Committee. For those who participated, there’s still time to share your thoughts and assessments so we can continue to improve our work!

We opened the first two days with international greetings from ILPS formations around the globe and a keynote speaker from Kilusang Mayo Uno, Kara Taggaoa. With fierce militancy we took to the streets of Seattle, showing the strength of our forces in exposing the exploitative and oppressive business activities of multinational corporations in the Seattle area such as Boeing, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Starbucks, calling out in a united voice their superprofits at the expense of their struggling workers and their complicity in arming the US war machine.

During the General Assembly we heard from the plenaries on the global people’s movements highlighting the challenges of workers organizing and the resurgent labor movement, the relationship between anti-colonial struggle and defense of land and the environment against imperialist plunder, organizing efforts against heightening political repression and surveillance, and the key role which struggles for women’s liberation and bodily autonomy play in this time of rising fascism.

As a major step in the development of the League and the growth of the anti-imperialist movement in this country, the business portion of this General Assembly resulted in the further development of our national structure with the passing of new bylaws and successful uniting on the following resolutions to guide our work in the coming period:

• ILPS Joins Call to Release Simon Trinidad

• Resolution on Latin America and the Caribbean

• Resolution in support of medical care for Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

• El Grito De Lares

• 1898 Treaty of Paris

• Resolution to Support BAYAN USA Campaign for the “Makibeki NYC 3” and Fight Against Repression of the National Democratic Movement of the Philippines

• Solidarity with the Palestinian People on the 75th Anniversary of Al Nakba

• Resolution on opposing the use of the terror label to brand activists as terrorists

• Resolution on sanctions, blockades, and coercive economic measures

• ILPS Endorsement of 2024 March on RNC

• Free Alex Saab

Delegates from ILPS-US organizations elected a new national Steering Committee to carry out the day-to-day leadership of the Country Chapter.  The new Steering Committee consists of the following members:

• Aisha Mansour (Palestinian Youth Movement)

• Bev Tang (Chicago Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines)

• Bill Dores (Abolish the Pentagon & CIA)

• Cody Urban (People Organizing for Philippine Solidarity)

• Daniel Felde (Resist US-Led War Movement Seattle)

• Michela Martinazzi (Committee to Stop FBI Repression)

• Nina Macapinlac (BAYAN USA)

• Nyusha Lin (Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA)

• Rhonda Ramiro (BAYAN USA)

The final day of the Assembly concluded with the passing of a declaration that summarized the remarks made over the three days into a description of the current crisis of US imperialism and resolved to launch a national campaign against state repression with the calls to, “Defend freedom fighters, mass organizations and movements for peace and justice being targeted relentlessly by state forces through so-called “counter-terrorism” programs.  Stand with organized and unorganized communities alike as they experience brutalization in the workplace, in racially policed neighborhoods, in prisons and at the militarized borders.  Raise high the banner of the League and uphold the justness of all fights for national and social liberation!”

Finally, the Assembly members took part in a solidarity night with cultural performances from the many attending orgs to celebrate our commitment to continue to raise up the anti-imperialist struggle together.

The empire is desperate and dying – We Must Fight for our Rights, Lives, and Planet! Long Live International Solidarity!

First published May 31, 2022

AUSTIN, TEXAS – Elon Musk’s proposed takeover of Twitter has ruffled many feathers among professional commentators. “Musk is the wrong leader for Twitter’s vital mission,” read one Bloomberg headline. The network also insisted, “Nothing in the Tesla CEO’s track record suggests he will be a careful steward of an important media property.” “Elon Musk is the last person who should take over Twitter,” wrote Max Boot in The Washington Post, explaining that “[h]e seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.” The irony of outlets owned by Michael Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos warning of the dangers of permitting a billionaire oligarch to control our media was barely commented upon.

Added to this, a host of celebrities publicly left the social media platform in protest against the proposed $44 billion purchase. This only seemed to confirm to many free-speech-minded individuals that the South African billionaire was a renegade outsider on a mission to save the internet from authoritarian elite control (despite the fact that he is borrowing money from the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia in order to do so).

Musk has deliberately cultivated this image of himself: a real-life Tony Stark figure who thinks for himself and is not part of the established order. But behind this carefully constructed façade, Musk is intimately connected to the U.S. national security state, serving as one of its most important business partners. Elon, in short, is no threat to the powerful, entrenched elite: he is one of them.

TO UKRAINE, WITH LOVE

Musk, whose estimated $230 billion fortune is more than twice the gross domestic product of Ukraine, has garnered a great deal of positive publicity for donating thousands of Starlink terminals to the country, helping its people come back online after fighting downed the internet in much of the country. Starlink is an internet service allowing those with terminals to connect to one of over 2,400 small satellites in low Earth orbit. Many of these satellites were launched by Musk’s SpaceX technologies company.

However, it soon transpired that there is far more than meets the eye with Musk’s extraordinary “donation.” In fact, the U.S. government quietly paid SpaceX top dollar to send their inventory to the warzone. USAID – a government anti-insurgency agency that has regularly functioned as a regime-change organization – is known to have put up the cash to purchase and deliver at least 1,330 of the terminals.

Starlink is not a mass-market solution. Each terminal – which is, in effect, a tiny, portable satellite dish – has a markedly limited range, and is useful only in hyper-local situations. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, estimated that the 10,000 Starlink terminals were allowing around 150,000 people to stay online.

Such a small number of people using the devices raises eyebrows. Who is important enough to be given such a device? Surely only high-value individuals such as spies or military operatives. That the Starlinks are serving a military purpose is now beyond clear. Indeed, in a matter of weeks, Starlink has become a cornerstone of the Ukrainian military, allowing it to continue to target Russian forces via drones and other high-tech machinery dependent on an internet connection. One official told The Times of London that he “must” use Starlink to target enemy forces via thermal imaging.

“Starlink is what changed the war in Ukraine’s favor. Russia went out of its way to blow up all our comms. Now they can’t. Starlink works under Katyusha fire, under artillery fire. It even works in Mariupol,” one Ukrainian soldier told journalist David Patrikarakos.

The reference to Mariupol alludes to the infamous Nazi group, the Azov Battalion, who have also reportedly been using Musk’s technology. Even in a subterranean cavern beneath Mariupol’s steelworks, Azov fighters were able to access the internet and communicate with the outside world, even doing video interviews from underground. In 2015, Congress attempted to add a provision to U.S. military aid to Ukraine stipulating that no support could go to Azov owing to their political ideology. That amendment was later removed at the behest of the Pentagon.

Dave Tremper, Director of Electronic Warfare at the Pentagon, sang SpaceX’s praises. “How they did that [keeping Ukrainian forces online] was eye-watering to me,” he said, adding that in the future the U.S. military “needs to be able to have that agility.”

ROCKETMAN

Such a statement is bound to get the attention of SpaceX chiefs, who have long profited from their lucrative relationship with the U.S. military. SpaceX relies largely on government contracts, there being almost no civilian demand for many of its products, especially its rocket launches.

Musk’s company has been awarded billions of dollars in contracts to launch spy satellites for espionage, drone warfare and other military uses. For example, in 2018, SpaceX was chosen to blast a $500 million Lockheed Martin GPS system into orbit. While Air Force spokesmen played up the civilian benefits of the launch, such as increased accuracy for GPS devices, it is clear that these devices play a key role in global surveillance and ongoing drone wars. SpaceX has also won contracts with the Air Force to deliver its command satellite into orbit, with the Space Development Agency to send tracking devices into space, and with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to launch its spy satellites. These satellites are used by all of the “big five” surveillance agencies, including the CIA and the NSA.

Thus, in today’s world, where so much intelligence gathering and target acquisition is done via satellite technology, SpaceX has become every bit as important to the U.S. war machine as more well-known companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Without Musk’s company, the U.S. would not be able to carry out such an invasive program of spying and drone warfare around the world. Indeed, China is growing increasingly wary of this power, and is being advised to develop anti-satellite technologies to counter SpaceX’s all-seeing eye. Yet Musk himself continues to benefit from a general perception that he is not part of the system.

From its origins in 2002, SpaceX has always been extremely close to the national security state, particularly the CIA. Perhaps the most crucial link is Mike Griffin, who, at the time, was the president and COO of In-Q-Tel, a CIA-funded venture capital firm that seeks to nurture and sponsor new companies that will work with the CIA and other security services, equipping them with cutting edge technology. The “Q” in its name is a reference to “Q” from the James Bond series – a creative inventor who supplies the spy with the latest in futuristic tech.

Griffin was with Musk virtually from day one, accompanying him to Russia in February 2002, where they attempted to purchase cut-price intercontinental ballistic missiles to start Musk’s business. Musk felt that he could substantially undercut opponents by using second-hand material and off-the-shelf components for launches. The attempt failed, but the trip cemented a lasting partnership between the pair, with Griffin going to war for Musk, consistently backing him as a potential “Henry Ford” of the rocket industry. Three years later, Griffin would become head of NASA and later would hold a senior post at the Department of Defense.

While at NASA, Griffin brought Musk in for meetings and secured SpaceX’s big break. In 2006, NASA awarded the company a $396 million rocket development contract – a remarkable “gamble” in Griffin’s words, especially as it had never launched a rocket before. As National Geographic put it, SpaceX, “never would have gotten to where it is today without NASA.” And Griffin was essential to this development. Still, by 2008, SpaceX was again in dire straits, with Musk unable to make payroll. The company was saved by an unexpected $1.6 billion NASA contract for commercial cargo services. Thus, from its earliest days, SpaceX was nurtured by government agencies that saw the company as a potentially important source of technology.

NUKING MARS & BACKING COUPS

Like Henry Ford, Musk went into the automobile business, purchasing Tesla Motors in 2004. And also like Henry Ford, he has shared some rather controversial opinions. In 2019, for instance, he suggested that vaporizing Mars’ ice caps via a series of nuclear explosions could warm the planet sufficiently to support human life. If this was done, it would arguably not even be his worst crime against space. During a 2018 publicity stunt, he blasted a Tesla into outer space using a SpaceX rocket. However, he did not sterilize the vehicle before doing so, meaning it was covered in earthly bacteria – microorganisms that will likely be fatal to any alien life they encounter. In essence, the car is a biological weapon that could end life on any planet it encounters.

Musk also attracted attention when he appeared to admit that he worked with the U.S. government to overthrow Bolivian President Evo Morales in 2019. Bolivia is home to the world’s largest easy-to-extract lithium reserves, an element crucial in the production of electric-vehicle batteries. Morales had refused to open the country up to foreign corporations eager to exploit Bolivia for profit. Instead, he proposed developing sovereign technology to keep both the jobs and profits inside the country. He was overthrown by a U.S.-backed far-right coup in November 2019. The new government quickly invited Musk for talks. When asked on Twitter point blank whether he was involved in Morales’ ouster, Musk responded, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

The South African has a long history of trolling and making inflammatory statements, so this “confession” might not be as cast-iron as it seems. Nevertheless, any hope of Musk profiting from Bolivia was shot after Morales’ party returned to power in a resounding victory one year later.

WORLD’S RICHEST MAN, FUNDED BY TAXPAYERS

In addition to the billions in government contracts Musk’s companies have secured, they also have received similar numbers in public subsidies and incentives. Chief among these is Tesla, which benefits greatly from complex international rules around electric vehicle production. In a push to reduce carbon emissions, governments around the world have introduced a system of credits for green vehicles, whereby a certain percentage of each manufacturer’s output must be zero-emission vehicles. Tesla only produces electric cars, so easily meets the mark.

However, the system also allows Tesla to sell their excess credits to manufacturers who cannot meet these quotas. In a competitive market where each manufacturer needs to hit certain targets, these credits are worth their weight in gold, and net Tesla billions in profit every year. For example, between 2019 and 2021 alone, Stellantis, which owns the Chrysler, Fiat, Citroen and Peugeot brands, forked out nearly $2.5 billion to acquire Tesla U.S. and European green credits.

This bizarre and self-defeating system goes some way to explaining why Tesla is worth more by market cap than Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, GM, Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, and Volvo put together, despite not being even a top-15 car manufacturer in terms of units sold.

Musk’s company also received significant government backing in its early stages, receiving a $465 million low-interest loan from the Department of Energy in 2010, at a time when Tesla was on the rocks and its future was in doubt.

Like many giant companies, Tesla is able to play states off against each other, each job-hungry location bidding against the others to give the corporation as much free cash and tax incentives as possible. In 2020, for example, Austin gave Tesla more than $60 million in tax breaks to build a truck plant there.

This, however, was small fry in comparison to some of the deals Musk has signed. The State of New York handed Musk over $750 million, including $350 million in cash, in exchange for building a solar plant outside of Buffalo – a plant that Musk was bound to build somewhere in the United States. Meanwhile, Nevada signed an agreement with Tesla to build its Gigafactory near Reno. The included incentives mean that the car manufacturer could rake in nearly $1.3 billion in tax relief and tax credits. Between 2015 and 2018, Musk himself paid less than $70,000 in federal income taxes.

Therefore, while the 50-year-old businessman presents himself as a maverick science genius – an act that has garnered him legions of fans around the world – a closer inspection of his career shows he earned his fortune in a much more orthodox manner. First by being born rich, then by striking it big as a dot-com billionaire, and finally, like so many others, by feeding from the enormous government trough.

Perhaps more seriously though, SpaceX’s close proximity to both the military and the national security state marks it out as a key cog in the machine of U.S. empire, allowing Washington to spy, bomb or coup whoever it wants.

It is for this reason that so much of the hysteria, both positive and negative, over Musk’s ongoing purchase of Twitter is misplaced. Elon Musk is neither going to save nor destroy Twitter because he is not a crusading rebel challenging the establishment: he is an integral part of it.

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

Source: MintPress News

Over eight million families had their dwellings foreclosed by U.S. financial institutions from 2006 to 2016. That means at least 30 million people were kicked out of their homes by the banksters. Millions more were evicted.

In eight of those years, Ben Bernanke was chair of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States. During his tenure from 2006 to 2014, some 6,665,045 families lost their homes.

While Bernanke refused to help these families, he was bailing out the billionaires. The head of the Fed pumped trillions into banks and other corporations that were “too big to fail.”

Citibank got $517 billion. 

General Electric ― which was making more money by loan sharking than by making light bulbs and locomotives ― received $140 billion.

So why was Bernanke awarded the 2022 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences along with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig?

Capitalists like to give awards to each other as well as to their trusted servants like Bernanke. The Economics prize was first awarded in 1969, 68 years after the other Nobel prizes.

It’s officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The Sveriges Riksbank is the Swedish central bank.

So the central banker Ben Bernanke got a prize from another central bank. An earlier recipient was Milton Friedman, who wanted to get rid of Social Security and advised Chile’s brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Not all of the original Nobel Prizes should have been awarded, either. The 1949 prize in medicine or physiology was awarded to Antonio Egas Moniz for promoting lobotomies, which deliberately damaged people’s brains.

Dr. Martin Luther King certainly deserved his Nobel Peace Prize.

President Teddy Roosevelt, who helped give Korea to the Japanese Empire in the Treaty of Portsmouth that ended the Russo-Japanese war, did not.

After all, the Nobel Peace Prize was named after Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist who developed dynamite and other more powerful explosives. The Nobel family also had extensive financial holdings in the Czarist Empire, including a slice of the oil fields in Baku.

That’s why the famous Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, who criticized czarist rule, never received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Today the Ukrainian regime and its fascist gangs are tearing down statues of Tolstoy and the Black poet Alexander Pushkin. 

The enchanter’s wand

Bernanke and the other two economists were given the prize this year for their study of banking.

In a 1983 paper, Bernanke pointed out that the thousands of bank failures prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s. This differed from the prevailing dogma of monetary crank Milton Friedman who claimed it was simply the result of the money supply being strangled.

The attitude of billionaires at the time was that it was a golden opportunity to gobble up competitors. According to former President Herbert Hoover’s memoirs, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s attitude was to “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers.”

Billionaire Mellon refused to lend $1 million to save the Bank of Pittsburgh in 1932. As a result 17,000 depositors lost everything. Today’s Bank of New York Mellon has $452 billion in assets. Mellon lost nothing.

Ben Bernanke is an educated person. Yet his attitude towards banks is naive.

In that 1983 paper, Bernanke wrote that “the real service performed by the banking system is the differentiation between good and bad borrowers.” 

That doesn’t explain why there isn’t any money for affordable housing while Donald Trump and other real estate sharks get billions for luxury condos.

During the so-called Great Recession, the Federal Reserve poured trillions into financial institutions in what was called “quantitative easing.” This was just a fancy name for creating more government debt.

Karl Marx described the peculiar role of national debt in Capital:

“As with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand, it endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital, without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or even in usury.” 

The capitalist media hail Bernanke for preventing the massive bank failures that happened in the 1930s. Despite the deluge of loans to banks and insurance companies, these outfits were slow to resume lending. This prolonged the economic crisis that started in 2007.

Banks rule, wrote Lenin

Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution, knew the role of banks much better than Bernanke. In “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” Lenin described how capitalist society is run by a dictatorship of the big banks.

“The banks grow from modest middlemen into powerful monopolies having at their command almost the whole of the money capital of all the capitalists and small businessmen and also the larger part of the means of production and sources of raw materials in any one country and in a number of countries,” wrote Lenin. “This transformation of numerous modest middlemen into a handful of monopolists is one of the fundamental processes in the growth of capitalism into capitalist imperialism.”

Although it’s called a “prize in economic sciences,” there’s not much science in modern capitalist economics. David Ricardo, who died 200 years ago, was the last pro-capitalist economist who sought to honestly investigate capitalism.

Ricardo popularized a version of the labor theory of value that points out that only workers can produce profits. This fact is hated by capitalists.

The railroad monopolies even told the Presidential Emergency Board in August that “capital investment and risk are the reasons for their profits, not any contributions from labor.” Tell that to the railroaders who are injured on the job.

Capitalist economists since Ricardo are apologists for a system that inevitably leads to war and hunger. Because they don’t know how capitalism works, even some very bright people can screw up big time.

That’s what happened in 1998 to the mathematicians at Long-Term Capital Management who made risky bets. The Federal Reserve bailed them out with $3.5 billion.

These math whizzes might as well have made astrology tables.

It was Karl Marx who investigated the workings of the capitalist system and how it developed. He pointed out that capitalism’s fundamental contradiction was that the socialized production by millions of workers was shackled to private ownership by a few.

Because there’s no overall economic plan, production always outstrips consumption despite the needs of billions of people. Eventually, too many things or services are produced than can be sold at a profit.

The result has been a capitalist economic crisis every decade or so since 1825. That’s a good reason to overthrow capitalism by a socialist revolution.

In order to struggle, the teachings of Karl Marx will be absorbed by millions of poor and working people. They will understand capitalism better than all the Bernankes.

New York, N.Y. – Around two dozen organizers and community members gathered in front of New York City Hall, the office of Mayor Eric Adams, to host a No Cops in Power rally.

The protest was organized by the New York Community Action Project (NYCAP) – an affiliate of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression – to call attention to and protest how Mayor Adams continues to funnel money into the bloated $6 billion NYPD budget and away from social programs. Adams, who used to be a police officer, took office in January 2022 and has quickly passed anti-people policies, from organized violent sweeps of the houseless population to being pro-Act 60. Act 60 provides tax exemptions to businesses and investors that relocate to and/or establish themselves in Puerto Rico.

The rally began with Jessica Schwartz, a member of NYCAP, leading people into chants that ranged from “One, two, three four – police crimes no more! Five, six, seven eight – Eric Adams wants a police state!” to a New York City favorite, “How do you spell racist?! N-Y-P-D!”

Schwartz gave background on why they were rallying on that day and introduced the first speaker, Collin Poirot, another member of NYCAP, who gave a background on the many crimes the NYPD has committed here in New York.

The organizations that spoke out were: Socialist Unity, Southern Solidarity, Justice for Domonique Alexander, and NY Boricua Resistance.

The action was closed out by Sharif Hall, a member of NYCAP. He began his rousing speech by elaborating on what it means to have true community control of the police and finished the speech by saying, “We know that we will never be free until we have the power, the power to take control over our communities!”

NYCAP will be hosting a Community Safety training on Saturday, October 15 to follow up on the rally and will continue to protest against Mayor Adams and the NYPD.

Source: FightBack! News

“Americans are dying younger, saving corporations billions,” ran an Aug. 8, 2017, Bloomberg headline.

It continued: “Life expectancy gains have stalled. The grim silver lining? Lower pension costs.”

That was over two years before the COVID-19 pandemic killed 6.6 million people worldwide. In the United States—where over a million people have died of the coronavirus — average life expectancy dropped by almost three years. It fell from 78.8 years in 2019 to 76.1 years in 2021. 

Nothing is equal under capitalism. White men in the U.S. lived an average seven years longer than Black men in 2021.

For Indigenous men, the gap in lifespans was over a dozen years. That’s genocidal.

Shorter lives for poor and working people helped save General Electric. GE was kicked off the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 2018. 

The former blue-chip stock lost almost $400 billion in market capitalization between 2000 and 2020. This “market cap” isn’t the real value of a corporation’s assets.

Instead, it’s the price of the stock multiplied by the number of outstanding shares. If a large stockholder, like a hedge fund, dumps a bunch of shares, the stock price and hence the market cap will fall like a rock. 

It’s a good example of why Karl Marx called stocks “fictitious capital.” There were still thousands of investors who got burned during this capitalist game of musical chairs.

Their losses don’t compare to the 112,000 workers who were fired by GE’s former CEO Jack Welch. Just in GE’s hometown of Schenectady, New York, 22,000 jobs were destroyed. (“At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric, and the Pursuit of Profit” by Thomas F. O’Boyle) 

GE workers called Welch “Neutron Jack” because he destroyed people’s jobs while leaving the factories intact like a neutron bomb would. 

Welch also turned GE into a bank. By 2007, 55% of GE’s profit came from its loan sharking arm, GE Capital. (Fortune, May 24, 2018) 

Chickens came home to roost during the 2008 capitalist economic crisis. GE was bailed out by the Federal Reserve with a $139 billion cheap loan.

Meanwhile, the 7.7 million homeowners who were foreclosed weren’t so lucky. The banksters who got billions from Uncle Sam are now howling about the small relief being offered to student loan borrowers.

COVID-19 saved GE

GE held on to its long-term-care insurance business. People bought this coverage because Medicare usually doesn’t pay for lengthy stays in nursing homes.

But GE didn’t have enough reserves to meet future insurance claims. On Jan.16, 2018, GE announced a $9.5 billion charge. Many investors thought it wouldn’t be enough. 

COVID-19 rescued GE. Governors shoved elderly coronavirus patients into nursing homes to free up hospital space. The nursing homes became deathtraps.

That’s what New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo did with over 9,000 older hospital patients. Decades of cutbacks eliminated 20,000 hospital beds in the Empire State, according to the New York State Nurses Association.

With their premiums rising and nursing homes becoming increasingly dangerous, GE’s insurance customers started to cancel their policies. GE is saving billions.

People living longer lives are cutting into corporate profits. Capitalists want to throw away older workers like they get rid of old machines.

IBM pushes out or fires thousands of older employees. The computer giant can get away with these crimes because IBM workers don’t have a union.

This illegal age discrimination goes hand-in-hand with stealing pensions. GE froze its pension plan for 20,000 salaried employees in 2019. GE also offered lump sum payments to 100,000 former employees if they gave up their pension rights.  

In the earlier days of capitalism, the wealthy didn’t have to worry about pension costs. None of the employees working 12-hour shifts in Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills had a pension.

Like weekends, it was unions that won pensions. Capitalists look back fondly to the days when they didn’t have to worry about health or pension costs.

When Haiti was the richest colony on earth in the 1780s, the average life expectancy for enslaved Africans there was just 21 years.

French slave drivers expected to get 10 to 15 years of unrelenting labor from these workers.

Working Africans to death produced super profits. These riches encouraged French capitalists to challenge King Louis and the feudal aristocracy.

There would have been no French Revolution without Haiti.

Living too long for capitalism

Capitalism’s Industrial Revolution is now around 250 years old. Workers in British cotton mills worked 12- and 14-hour days while enslaved Africans picked the cotton from “no-see” in the morning to “no-see” at night.  

The Industrial Revolution was built upon the African Holocaust and the holocaust of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. It was profits from enslaved Africans that financed James Watt’s first steam engine. (“Capitalism and Slavery” by Eric Williams)

All the inventions of the last two centuries pale when compared to the increases of life expectancy and the decreases in infant and maternal mortality.

These advances in medicine were connected with the rest of science. Wilhelm Röntgen was awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for discovering X-rays.

But as Dr. King said, “of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and inhuman.”

From 2006 to 2010 in Wisconsin, Black mothers giving birth had a five times greater death rate than white mothers. Between 2013 and 2015, Wisconsin’s Black infants were three times more likely to die by age one than white infants. 

Human beings are fundamentally equal. These shocking and unequal death rates are the products of the racist profit system.

Pfizer and Moderna delayed supplying COVID-19 vaccines to Africa, Latin America and South Asia. They did so because of the higher prices that could be charged in the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

The failure to launch a worldwide effort against the coronavirus led to the Omicron surge of infections and deaths.

Billionaires enjoy a heaven on earth and want to live forever. Why should they die like the rest of us mortals?

The world’s first billionaire — John D. Rockefeller — started New York City’s Rockefeller University, a leading research facility. A few blocks away is the Sloan-Kettering cancer hospital, named after two General Motors millionaires.

Because of the class struggle waged by poor and working people, the advances in health care were partially and unequally shared.

By 1976, GM CEO Roger Smith whined that the corporation’s health care costs were greater than what it spent on steel. (“Balancing Act: The New Medical Ethics of Medicine’s New Economics” by E. Haavi Morreim)

Smith was appalled that the well-being of GM’s workers and their families was costing more than the price of cold, inanimate steel. 

In business pages of newspapers, articles constantly appear lamenting the growth of the population that’s 65 years or older. To capitalists, retired workers are just an expense.

You’re supposed to work for them until you drop. That’s another reason to organize a socialist revolution.  

Socialist Cuba is proud of its 2,000 people who are older than 100. Members of Cuba’s Young Communist League work with and learn from older folk. 

The labor movement needs to demand “jobs not jails” and a minimum $3,000 monthly pension for seniors and disabled people.

Former U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer didn’t have to worry about student loans when she graduated from Brooklyn College in 1962. Whites then comprised over 90% of the students in the City University of New York system. Nobody had to spend a dime on tuition.

By 2019, Asian, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students accounted for 73% of the students in CUNY’s four-year colleges and 85% in CUNY’s community colleges. But CUNY isn’t free anymore. 

Current tuition is $6,930 per year for the four-year colleges and $4,800 per year in the community colleges. This doesn’t include over $200 in student fees or the cost of books and supplies. 

The imposition of expensive tuition on the much more diverse student body is racism.

Black and Latinx students accounted for 40% of New York City’s high school graduates in 1969. Yet CUNY’s student body was still 91% white.

The same year, a student strike demanded open admissions to CUNY for all New York City high school graduates. It was won in 1970.

One of the fighters for open admissions was the late Tom Soto. He was later invited to come to Attica by the prisoners who would be massacred by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

Open admissions benefited everybody. The number of first-time students almost doubled from 19,939 in 1969 to 38,256 in 1972.

Black students increased 2.7 times from 16,529 to 44,031. Latinx students almost tripled, going from 4,723 to 13,563.

The number of white students also rose by 18%, going from 106,523 in 1968 to 125,804 in 1972. Thousands of more white students were able to attend college because of open admissions.

When Asian, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people move forward, so do all poor and working people.

Illiteracy is preferable to the rich

The wealthy and powerful hated open admissions. Just the idea that poor people could attend college offended them.

“We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat … that’s dynamite,” moaned Roger Freeman in 1970. Freeman was an advisor to then-Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. The term “proletariat” refers to the working class.

“We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college],” said Freeman. Reagan and Freeman were outraged by the struggles of college students against racism and war in the 1960s.

On May Day, 1970, President Richard Nixon called these students “bums.” Three days later, four Kent State University students were killed by the Ohio National Guard. On May 15, 1970, two Black students at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University) in Mississippi were killed by police. 

The longest fight was the 1968-69 student strike at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University).

It won Asian, Black, Indigenous and Latinx study programs. Among the strike leaders were the future actor Danny Glover and future International Longshore and Warehouse Union officer Clarence Thomas.

Freeman’s sentiments were in tune with the Anglican Bishop Leonard Beecher’s 1949 report about education in the British colony of Kenya. Beecher wrote that “illiterates with the right attitude to manual labor are preferable to products of the schools.”

There were only three high schools for Africans in Kenya at the time, which admitted just 100 students annually.

Wall Street got its chance to gut open admissions and impose tuition for CUNY students during the 1975 “fiscal crisis” in New York City. 

This was a hold-up of over 7 million people by the banksters who demanded 50,000 city workers be fired. Among them were thousands of teachers.

The passing of California’s Proposition 13 in a 1978 referendum gutted funding for education and public services in the Golden State. While California residents paid a $300 yearly fee to attend the University of California at Berkeley in 1968, the tuition is now $15,000. 

In contrast, all education in socialist Cuba is free.

Also helping to drive poorer students out of college have been the attacks on affirmative action programs. California’s Proposition 209, which passed in 1996, banned these attempts to promote equality.

Black student enrollment reached 8% of the freshman classes in the California State University system in 1997. By 2018, it dropped to just 4%. 

Private schools are worse. Just 1% of the students at Caltech are Black. 

Thirty-nine lashes for teaching

Slave masters considered teaching enslaved Africans to read and write to be dangerous. If an enslaved person was convicted of teaching another enslaved African to read in North Carolina, they would be whipped 39 times.

Black people in the United States fought to build schools. Peter Humphries Clark, a co-worker of Frederick Douglass, was principal of Cincinnati’s Colored High School.

Clark was a socialist who spoke to striking railroad workers in 1877. “The miserable condition into which society has fallen has but one remedy, and that is to be found in socialism,” said Clark.

The struggle for free public education was connected to the abolitionist movement. Thaddeus Stevens fought for public schools at the 1837-38 Pennsylvania constitutional convention. 

Stevens later led the anti-slavery forces in Congress. He demanded land and freedom for Black people.

Following the U.S. Civil War, it was South Carolina’s Reconstruction government―known as the “Black Parliament”―that established the state’s first public school system. 

Capitalists need workers to have skills, yet they fear an educated working class. They want college to be reserved for “their kind.”

The wealthy also don’t want anyone else helping to educate poor and working people. The FBI hounded the labor schools operated by the Communist Party.

We agree that an educated proletariat is dynamite. All education should be free.

We look forward to helping to organize the coming social explosion that will get rid of capitalism forever.

There’s been a growing worker union movement in 2022. Workers are turning to labor unions at traditionally non-union companies like Trader Joe’s, Amazon, REI, Target, Chipotle, Starbucks, Apple, and more.

“Seventy-one percent of Americans now approve of labor unions,” Gallup announced in reference to its annual Work and Education survey, conducted between Aug. 1-23. “Although statistically similar to last year’s 68%, [labor union approval] is up from 64% before the pandemic and is the highest Gallup has recorded on this measure since 1965.

“Such support comes despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans aren’t in a labor union themselves.”

The current unionization wave is a response to the strains many workers have dealt with during the three years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Having to struggle to pay for goods and services

due to rising costs and stagnant wages while reflecting on ongoing conversations about the need for everyone to have a better work-life balance, has pushed workers to strike out for the positive features—i.e., better wages, health, and work-rule benefits—that being part of a union can bring.

“Among major race and ethnicity groups,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics said when it released its annual report on unionization this past January, “Black workers continued to have a higher union membership rate in 2021 (11.5%) than white workers (10.3%), Asian workers (7.7%), and Hispanic workers (9.0%).”

Generally, the Black community’s allegiance to unions comes as an inheritance from the Civil Rights Movement. Initially, when trade union organizations were created in the 1860s, white members voted to exclude Black workers. So, Blacks created their own labor organizations.

Black women were the first to establish a union less than a year after the official end of African enslavement. On June 20, 1866, the Washerwomen of Jackson, Mississippi sent a letter to the city’s mayor, making it known that they would be establishing a set price for their laundry work. There’s little information on how their statement was received in Jackson, but other unions of now free Black laborers were also quickly established. Two of the most famous were the “Colored” National Labor Union (CNLU) where Frederick Douglass was elected president in 1872, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), the first all-Black labor union in the U.S., established in 1925 by A. Philip Randolph.

Randolph organized the men hired to work as sleeping car porters with the Pullman Palace Car Company because he knew they had been specifically hired to cater to the wishes of white railroad car travelers. “[George] Pullman was open about his reasons for hiring Black porters;” Jennifer Hasso writes in an article for Ferris State University’s online “Jim Crow Museum.” “[H]e reasoned that formerly enslaved people would best anticipate and cater to his customers’ needs and would work long hours for cheap wages. By the 1920s, 20,224 African Americans were working as Pullman porters and train personnel. This was the largest category of Black labor in the United States and Canada at the time.”

Under Randolph, members of the BSCP were considered some of the best-paid Black workers in the country. BSCP was later chartered by the American Federation of Labor (AFL)—and the organization’s strength and ability to promote and formulate agendas (Randolph’s threat of a march on Washington, D.C. in 1941 pushed then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802, which banned racial discrimination by federal agencies and all unions working with the defense industry), made it vital in working with Civil Rights Movement activists. Alongside the BSCP, Randolph established the Negro American Labor Council (NALC) in 1960. The NALC was never as powerful as the BSCP, but it is recognized for having initiated the call for 1963’s famous “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”

But aligning itself with the African American Civil Rights Movement was what doomed U.S. labor unions. In her book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” Heather McGhee points to a conservative talking point that tied unions to support for Black rights. “[P]riming white voters with racist dog whistles was the means; the end was an economic agenda that was harmful to working- and middle-class voters of all races, including white people. In railing against welfare and the war on poverty, conservatives like President Reagan told white voters that government was the enemy, because it favored Black and brown people over them—but their real agenda was to blunt government’s ability to challenge concentrated wealth and corporate power.”

This past Labor Day, Andre Powell, an AFSCME leader and long-time Baltimore, Maryland community activist, spoke at a Starbucks Workers United panel about the importance of understanding the role race and racism have played in trade union organizing in the United States: “Labor unions are…doing workshops around race. … More and more in the past two decades, the number of workers of color and women is growing,” Powell said as part of the  “Same Struggle, Same Fight: The Importance of Intersectionality Within the Labor Movement,” panel.

“So, it’s good to see them doing the workshops, but we need to just keep in mind that this country, here we are 160 years after the end of the Civil War and during Reconstruction, it was a little easier for Black people in the South. But then one of the presidents—I’m thinking Andrew Johnson or Andrew Jackson––withdrew federal troops from the South and that allowed these little renegade bands of racists to come back and take control and harass and terrorize Black people. But they didn’t do it wearing regular clothes, they put on these white sheets with these hoods.

“That legacy of racism has continued in this country: there were movements to beat it back in the 1960s and 1970s and we certainly pushed it back. But then again looking at the latest guy that used to be president, Trump, now the racists have come forward again and are emboldened to come out.

“Labor unions continue to stand against racism because we’ve got to remember the history, we must begin to teach the legacy of racism that started in this country. …We’ve got to link all of these, the intersections that we’ve got…and keep it solid, we’ve got to stay together and stay unified against racism, against sexism, against homophobia, and LGBTQ2-spirit oppression. This country was developed on a racist basis: the killing of Native Americans and stealing their land. And that legacy, some of it is trying to come back today. It’s going to take a strong united movement from the labor force and the non-labor force together to fight back.”

Source: Amsterdam News

Originally published at Censored News on March 1, 2011. 

A Special Report by Kevin D. Annett
March 1, 2011
William Combes
Eyewitness, 1952-2011

Update: William Combes died of lethal injection at St. Paul’s Catholic hospital in Vancouver on February 26, 2011. Genocide survivor, an eyewitness of killings and of the abduction of ten aboriginal children by the Queen of England and Prince Phillip on October 10, 1964, at the Kamloops Catholic residential school.

VANCOUVER, Canada — The aboriginal man who claimed to witness the abduction of ten fellow residential school children by the Queen of England and her husband in October 1964 at the Catholic school in Kamloops, B.C. has died suddenly at the Catholic-run St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver.

William Combes, age 59 and in good health, was scheduled to be a primary witness at the opening session of the International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State (ITCCS) on September 12 in London, England. I last saw William ten days ago, on the eve of my departure for a European speaking tour, and he looked better than I had seen him in years.

According to his partner Mae, William was in stable health and was assigned a new doctor at St. Paul’s Hospital this past week. William was then committed to the hospital for “tests”, and his health began to immediately deteriorate. He died suddenly yesterday of a still-undisclosed cause.

The Vancouver Coroner’s Office refuses to comment on William’s death. William was the sole survivor of a group of three aboriginal boys who claim to have witnessed the abduction of ten children during a royal visit to the Kamloops residential school in mid-October 1964 when both the Queen and Prince Philip were in Canada.

“They took away those ten kids and nobody ever saw them again” described William, in several public statements made over the airwaves of my former Vancouver Co-op radio program, and in the following signed and witnessed declaration made on February 3, 2010:

William Combes statement:

“I am an Interior Salish spirit dancer and am 58 years old. I live in Vancouver, Canada. I am a survivor of the Kamloops and Mission Indian residential schools, both run by the Roman Catholic church. I suffered terrible tortures there at the hands, especially of Brother Murphy, who killed at least two children.

“I witnessed him throw a child off a three-story balcony to her death. He put me on a rack and broke some of my bones, in the Kamloops school basement, after I tried running away. I also saw him and another priest burying a child in the school orchard one night.

“In October 1964 when I was 12 years old, I was an inmate at the Kamloops school and we were visited by the Queen of England and Prince Phillip. I remember it was strange because they came by themselves, no big fanfare or nothing. But I recognized them and the school principal told us it was the Queen and we all got given new clothes and good food for the first time in months the day before she arrived.

“The day the Queen got to the school, I was part of a group of kids that went on a picnic with her and her husband and some of the priests, down to a meadow near Dead Man’s Creek. I remember it was weird because we all had to bend down and kiss her foot, a white laced boot.

“After a while, I saw the Queen leave the picnic with ten children from the school, and those kids never returned. We never heard anything more about them and never met them again even when we were older. They were all from around there but they all vanished.

“The group that disappeared was seven boys and three girls, in age from six to fourteen years old. They were all from the smart group in class. Two of the boys were brothers and they were Metis from Quesnel. Their last name was Arnuse or Arnold.

“I don’t remember the others, just an occasional first name like Cecilia and there was an Edward. What happened was also witnessed by my friend George Adolph, who was 11 years old at the time and a student there too. But he’s dead now,” Combes said.
—

I believe that William Combes died of foul play and that his murder was arranged by those who stood to lose from his speaking out about his witnessing of the child abductions and other crimes of murder and torture at Catholic Indian residential schools.

I am writing a soon-to-be-issued eulogy for my friend and fellow fighter, William Arnold Combes. Like another murdered front-line Native activist, Johnny Bingo Dawson, who was killed by the Vancouver police in 2009, William will never be forgotten – and those who killed him will, like the system that caused the death of so many children, be brought to real justice.

His murderers have not won. William’s videotaped statements, including his witness of the 1964 abductions, have been registered in the archives of our ITCCS, and will be made public at our opening session on September 12, 2011. I will be proposing to the ITCCS executive that William Combes and Johnny Dawson both be named post-humous Honorary Elders of the Tribunal. In his name and memory, and for all the children.

See the evidence of Genocide in Canada at www.hiddennolonger.com and on the website of The International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State at www.itccs.org . Watch Kevin’s award-winning documentary film UNREPENTANT on his website www.hiddenfromhistory.org

The entire student loan program amounts to loan sharking. Forty-five million people owe $1.7 trillion. Every cent should be wiped off the books.

The compound interest collected by the banksters is strangling millions. People in their fifties and older are still trying to pay off their loans. 

Four years after graduation, Black college graduates owe almost twice as much as white graduates.

President Biden’s loan forgiveness program may help millions. But, unfortunately, it’s still modest and not enough.

That didn’t prevent The Wall Street Journal from denouncing it as a “coup.” Trying to get blood out of a stone has always been a capitalist specialty. 

Biden was forced to act despite his rotten record in Congress. As a senator from the State of DuPont ― also known as Delaware ― he helped push through the misnamed 2005 “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act.”

It prohibited anyone from getting their student loan debt wiped clean by filing bankruptcy. 

Also rooting for this bill were the plastic loan sharks. Delaware is the country’s credit card capital because it allows these outfits to charge the highest interest rates.

While they want to prevent working and poor people from using bankruptcy laws, capitalists love bankruptcies. Donald Trump filed for bankruptcy six times. 

If you owe a bank a few thousand dollars and can’t pay it, you have a problem. When billionaires owe billions, the banks have a problem. 

As Trump bragged to CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell, “I’m the king of debt.” He claimed to have told his lenders, “I’m going to give you back half.”

His daddy’s record of stiffing creditors didn’t prevent Donald Trump, Jr., from saying student loan forgiveness results in “nurturing incompetence and irresponsible behavior while penalizing hard work and fiscal responsibility.” 

When has any member of Trump’s family been engaged in hard work?

Making college unaffordable

Just as hypocritical are members of Congress. Super right-winger Majorie Taylor Greene from Georgia called forgiving student debt “completely unfair.” She had $183,504 in Paycheck Protection Program loans written off.

Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly also attacked canceling student debt. Kelly had his $987,237 PPP loan canceled. 

Possibly more repulsive was Indiana Rep. Jim Banks. He responded to the news by tweeting, “Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military’s greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments.”

According to Banks, poor people should be cannon fodder for Big Oil instead of going to college.

One of the biggest reasons for the huge student debt is skyrocketing tuition. Capitalists don’t want poor people in college.

The City University of New York was free for more than a century when its enrollment was more than 90% white. Now when a majority of its students are people of color, tuition is $7,510 per semester.

The University of California system has increased tuition 20 times since the 1970s.

Nobody in socialist Cuba has to pay tuition or medical bills. Education and health care are considered to be human rights in Cuba.

Meanwhile, medical debts are the biggest reason for personal bankruptcies in the United States. People fighting cancer or other diseases shouldn’t have to worry about whether they can pay both their hospital and landlord.

An ancient curse

For thousands of years, moneylenders have been ripping-off poor people. Many of the class struggles in the ancient world were between creditors and debtors.  

In societies divided between rich and poor, agriculture has been intertwined with money lending for thousands of years. The whole nature of farming — where months separate harvests — puts the agricultural producer at the mercy of the usurer.

Almost 3,800 years ago in Babylon (not the town on Long Island, New York), the Code of Hammurabi had to protect farmers from greedy moneylenders. It proclaimed if a “storm wipes out the grain or the harvest fails, or the grain does not grow for lack of water, in that year he need not give his creditor any grain in payment.” 

In the Bible, Deuteronomy 15 proclaims, “At the end of every seven years, you must cancel debts.” That’s a good program today.

The laws of Solon were an attempt to resolve this conflict in Athens over 2,500 years ago.

A debtors’ revolt occurred in Rome during the very first years of the republic. The Roman historian Livy wrote about how this led within two years to the “secession of the plebeians.” 

The plebeians left the city and camped out on the “sacred mount.” It may have been the first recorded general strike in history.

The “secession” only ended when the wealthy patricians agreed to the appointment of “tribunes of the people,” which had a veto over the consuls.

We need thousands of people’s tribunes to tell the banksters to go to hell. We’ll make the banks pay reparations and cancel the student loans.

December 12th Movement
Press statement
September 2, 2022

In 2022, in the richest country the world has ever seen, Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, has no water for drinking, cooking, bathing, flushing a toilet, or fighting a fire. As of this moment, the situation is predicted to continue “indefinitely.” We are calling on President Joe Biden to expeditiously authorize billions of dollars in emergency funds to address both the current humanitarian crisis triggered by the climate crisis-induced flooding and the implementation of long-term action steps to correct decades-long operational neglect of Jackson’s water systems.

The situation in Jackson is not new nor unexpected. As Jackson Mayor Antar Lumumba said. “We’ve been crying out for more than two years, saying that it’s not a matter of if our [water] systems will fail but a matter of when our systems will fail.”

Almost 17 years to the day of the Katrina man-made disaster, the citizens of predominantly Black Jackson are facing the same problem which the citizens of then-predominantly Black New Orleans had. As Jelani Cobb noted in 2005, “Katrina can be viewed as the first of a series of crises that seem to have become a referendum on Black citizenship.”

Jackson is the latest crisis in that series which now includes Flint, MI, Detroit, MI, and Newark, NJ. Clearly, the referendum has voted thumbs down on Black citizenship.

The citizens of Jackson are the victims of structural and environmental racism. And we are concerned that this latest disaster of capitalism does not become a cover to force people out of Jackson as part of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Black people around the U.S.

What Black people have learned through these crises is that we must organize to take care of ourselves. We cannot depend upon anyone else to do it out of benevolence or simply because it is the humane thing to do. We will join with other groups around the country to get aid to Jackson. But the investment needed to address the roots of the problem has to come from the federal government. We’ve got to bring that pressure to bear on Joe Biden.

Two years ago, President Biden said that Black people made his election possible, that we had his back and he’ll have ours. Well, the time to have our backs is now. Send the aid to Jackson as quickly and extensively as you have been sending it to the Ukraine.

“THAT’S OUR BLOOD DOWN THERE!”
NO MORE KATRINAS!