Because it has become widely known that Google search-results exclude any find that proves the falsehood of the U.S. government’s key allegations regarding international relations (such as the U.S. government’s allegation that Ukraine’s government is not controlled by racist fascists or “nazis” as it actually is and has been ever since February 2014), many researchers have started using other search-engines, such as DuckDuckGo, which advertises on America’s neoconservative liberal National Public Radio (NPR) network as being an alternative to Google. However, on March 9th, DuckDuckGo’s CEO & Founder, Gabriel Weinberg, issued a tweet saying “Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create. #StandWithUkraine. At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.”

There was immediate blowback from researchers who hate Google because it does what DuckDuckGo had just admitted there that DuckDuckGo ALSO does: filter out information that the U.S. government doesn’t want the public to know (such as that Ukraine’s nazis control Ukraine and are backed by the U.S. government).

So, Weinberg quickly followed up with “In addition to down-ranking sites associated with disinformation, we also often place news modules and information boxes at the top of DuckDuckGo search results (where they are seen and clicked the most) to highlight quality information for rapidly unfolding topics.”

That didn’t quell the blowback; so, on April 17 he tweeted that “there is a completely made up headline going around this weekend. We are not ‘purging’ any media outlets from results. Anyone can verify this by searching for an outlet and see it comes up in results.”

That response from him was assuming what he undoubtedly knew to be false: that the users’ concern was whether or not a given “outlet” that’s being searched-for by a user will be found if specifically searched-for on DuckDuckGo. He’s not so stupid as to actually believe that that is what users are actually rebelling against — he knows that instead they are rebelling against having a search-engine, whether Google or DuckDuckGo or any other, pretend to be able to predetermine which allegations or types of allegations that are accessible through the Web are true, and which are false (or ‘low quality’). Obviously, no search-engine can do that; any that pretend to are committing fraud. But that sadly includes every search-engine.

Any intelligent user of the internet knows that ANY censorship on the Web is dictatorial, NOT democratic. It’s at least as dictatorial if it is coming from billionaires such as Gabriel Weinberg, or Jack Dorsey, or Mark Zuckerberg, or their agents, as it is if it comes from the government itself — which the user can vote against at election-time without needing to purchase shares of stock in some corporation in order to become enabled to vote against its CEO and other officials. Corporate dictatorship is what Mussolini proudly advocated for in 1920s Italy and called alternatively “fascism” and “corporationism.” That’s what we’ve now got in the U.S. and its allied countries.

One of the U.S. government’s mouthpieces, the neoconservative liberal website Slate (owned by the neoconservative liberal Donald Graham who had sold the neoconservative liberal Washington Post to the neoconservative liberal Jeff Bezos), headlined on March 15th “The DuckDuckGo Users Furious at Its Response to the War in Ukraine”, and tried to marginalize the opponents of censorship by pretending that all of them are far-rightwingers:

More than 30,000 users on Twitter have responded to Weinberg’s post with largely negative comments about the decision, accusing the company of engaging in censorship and injecting bias into search results. Breitbart ran a piece attacking DuckDuckGo as “Diet Google,” and high-profile libertarian YouTubers have also told their followers to stop using it.

DuckDuckGo’s executives have been trying to quell the unrest. “The whole point of DuckDuckGo is privacy,” Weinberg wrote back to one of his critics. “The whole point of the search engine is to show more relevant content over less relevant content, and that is what we continue to do.” The company also released an official statement, which read in part, “It’s also important to note that down-ranking is different from censorship. We are simply using the fact that that these sites are engaging in active disinformation campaigns as a ranking signal that the content they produce is of lower quality, just like there are signals for spammy sites and other lower-quality content.”

DuckDuckGo didn’t originally set out to be a conservative-friendly “free speech” platform, even though many of its users seem to see it that way.

On March 10th, a thread was started at Reddit titled “Whelp no more DDG for me” and users were asking there for recommendations of search-engines that are NOT being controlled by agents of the U.S. government. Allegations were made there that the Brave Browser’s Brave search-engine isn’t censoring its finds. However, I have consistently found that the Brave search-engine is just as cleansed of finds that are in sites that America’s billionaires and the government they control blacklist as is Google and DuckDuckGo. Someone instead recommended — and it was seconded — “Yandex.” That is a Russian search-engine, but — at least in America — it rides on the back of Google and thereby excludes finds that U.S. billionaires and their agents blacklist. I have tried other search-engines as well, but never yet found one that doesn’t censor-out almost all of the sites that publish (or have published) my articles. In fact, I know that some excellent sites that publish or did publish my articles were closed down by the FBI, and that others have told me that they received warnings from Google to stop publishing articles from me. Almost all of the sites that publish my articles fail to show up in any search-engine when the article’s title is web-searched. Instead, mirror-sites that automatically republish from sites that publish me show up, and sometimes ONLY such mirror-sites show up in a web-search for an article from me. You can try it yourself (such as by web-searching the title — including the quotation-marks surrounding it — of the first linked-to source in the present article, “Zelensky’s Secret CIA-Nazi Ukrainian government”). Most of the finds are mirror-sites, not sites that actually accepted and published the article that I had submitted. The U.S. regime doesn’t seem to be trying to crush mirror-sites, but only to crush independent publishers. And, so, independent publishers, in U.S.-and-allied countries, tend not to last very long, because they are blacklisted, by the billionaires and their government.

Source: Pressenza

The New York City subway shooting in Brooklyn on April 12 miraculously resulted in no deaths, although about 30 people suffered injuries, including 10 from gunshot wounds. Within hours, a massive manhunt for the shooter was underway, but in the end it was the suspect who tipped police off and turned himself in. Still, that has not stopped politicians and corporate media outlets like the Washington Post and others from using the shooting to shore up police talking points and implicitly make the case for more police funding.

Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, has followed the politics of law enforcement for years. The author of The End of Policing—a book that Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) inadvertently helped turn into a bestseller during the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson—explained to me in an interview that “we’ve seen a big increase in the number of police on the subway with the new mayor, Eric Adams, and that did not play a role in preventing this [shooting] from happening.”

Indeed, New York police, with all the resources of modern technology, surveillance and weaponry at its disposal, had to embarrassingly turn to the public for help. “We routinely overestimate the effectiveness of policing as a solution to our problems,” said Vitale.

Across the country, Democratic Party leaders like Mayor Adams are taking “tough-on-crime” stances, forgetting the horrors of racist police brutality that had seemed so apparent to the entire nation only two years ago when millions of Americans protested, angered by the videotaped police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who in 2020 suggested cutting $120 million from her city’s police budget, ultimately decided to increase police funding. Earlier this year she again requested millions more in supplemental police funding but then quietly withdrew her request after gleeful coverage by right-wing news outlets about her “stunning” reversal on the issue.

In Los Angeles, mayoral hopeful Karen Bass, known as a staunch progressive, has also decided to change her tune on police funding. Bass is running neck and neck with billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso and may be feeling pressure from Caruso’s overt pro-police position.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot last fall also proposed increased police funding after having earlier taken a position to cut funds.

And, President Joe Biden, who has stated more vociferously than most of his fellow Democrats that he does not agree with the idea of defunding police departments, has unsurprisingly proposed a massive increase in police funding in his federal budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

Biden, Adams, Breed, Bass, and Lightfoot, all Democrats, are citing rising crime levels as reasons for increasing police funding, perplexing left-leaning voters. The Intercept’s Akela Lacy says that this pivot is the result of Democrats’ failure to make progress on gun control.

But there is no evidence that increased policing actually reduces violence. Indeed, it is quite the contrary. Most researchers and journalists attempt to correlate increased policing with a reduction in crime. But few ask whether increased policing reduces violence. If police are the perpetrators of violence, then increased policing results in increased violence, as a 2021 study by Community Resource Hub and Interrupting Criminalization found.

Crime is related to many factors, and policing is not one of them. Vitale draws a connection between wealth disparities and the criminalization of poverty, saying that Democratic mayors “continue to insist that all local government can do is subsidize the already wealthy in hopes that they’ll be competitive on the global stage.” In turn, he says, “this has just produced tremendous inequality and budget cuts for essential social services.” The issues that “have resulted from that have been turned into ‘policeable’ problems, and this has just created a vicious cycle.”

Studies have shown that when there are ample resources for community services such as mental health care, crime goes down. Indeed, in the case of the New York subway shooting, the suspect has a history of mental health struggles. If cities responded to mental health episodes with counselors instead of police, we might well see a reduction in overall violence.

In fact, the city of Denver, Colorado, did just that. Over a period of six months, Denver city authorities dispatched mental health teams instead of police in situations that warranted such intervention. The experiment was judged a success given that 750 such calls resulted in zero arrests. In one incident, a man who was hallucinating had no shoes on in extremely cold weather. The team that was dispatched gave him a pair of shoes as a simple first step toward helping him.

Sadly, the corporate media has relentlessly fed the notion that rising crime is an indication that more police are necessary. The fact that recent robberies of high-end luxury stores have gotten so much publicity—from disproportionate media coverage—has fueled the myth that crime is out of control and that more police are needed, even though overall crime levels are not as high as they are being made out to be. Critics have dubbed this sort of media coverage as “copaganda,” or pro-cop propaganda.

“There are a lot of factors that drive this conflation of policing and public safety” and the idea that “policing is the only tool that’s available to keep us safe,” said Vitale. One factor is that covering crime and policing offers “sensationalism” in headlines that drives up corporate media ratings. Additionally, according to Vitale, “The news media have always cozied up to police to be a source of information.”

But, the most important driver of copaganda is what Vitale calls “a shared worldview” between corporate media, liberal elites, and police. This view is that “the problems of American society… [are] problems of individual and group moral failure that are best addressed through punitive interventions.”

A stark example of this can be found in Politico, once a digital upstart and pioneer of “new media,” today squarely part of the corporate media landscape. A story about the Los Angeles mayor’s race, headlined “Crime upstages progressive priorities in Los Angeles mayor’s race,” featured a large photograph of a homeless encampment by the beach. The photo made it clear that unhoused people, in the outlet’s view, are a source of crime.

Instead of seeing the large spike in homelessness as a symptom of an unequal economy, the phenomenon is being used by politicians and the media alike to justify increased policing. In fact, as Politico points out at the very bottom of its story, “crime rates are far below historic lows and actually dipped in 2020 before the current uptick.” Shouldn’t that have been the story’s leading point?

This sort of coverage is a far cry from the nearly unanimous mainstream media support for the Black Lives Matter movement two years ago. That movement called for, and continues to support, a redirection of police funding toward community services for the unhoused, those struggling with mental health, unemployment, hunger and other social problems caused by the current capitalist system.

“The mainstream media, once they had an understanding of what it was we were really talking about in the summer of 2020,” said Vitale, “quickly realized that they were diametrically opposed to it and have sort of systematically excluded these ideas from mainstream media conversations.”

To admit that social problems are caused by the failures of capitalism would undermine the credibility of the very system that political and media elites rely on. A police-centric worldview preserves a system that is designed to produce unequal outcomes.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute.

On April 2, about two dozen activists gathered in New York City’s Herald Square shopping district for an action called “Stop the War Lies.” The protesters raised signs declaring “No war on Russia and Donbass,” “Stop supporting neo-nazis in Ukraine,” “Money for jobs and schools – not NATO,” and “Roll back gas and food prices.”

Given the overwhelming war propaganda broadcast by the White House, Congress and the media demonizing Russia’s intervention in Ukraine to aid the Donbass republics, no one was quite sure how it would be received.

The action was called by Solidarity with Donbass & Antifascists in Ukraine, the Socialist Unity Party and Struggle-La Lucha newspaper. Several anti-war organizations were invited, but declined to participate. However, individual activists who heard about the protest came.

Notably, none of these groups have called street actions in New York or other major cities since the Russian Federation recognized the independent Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics on Feb. 21 and the U.S.-NATO war propaganda reached full-throttle. 

Over a mobile sound system, protesters chanted: “Stop the U.S. war machine from Ukraine to the Philippines” and “Hands off Russia, hands off Donbass, bring the troops home!” They distributed hundreds of fact-sheets and newspapers to passersby. 

The reception was, significantly, overwhelmingly positive. People were eager to hear a different perspective from the war propaganda that has been drummed into their ears for months. 

Many were openly skeptical of the U.S. government’s motivations for drawing the country into confrontation with Russia. Some even took up seats in the plaza where the event was held, including an Iraq War veteran with first-hand knowledge of U.S. war crimes.

Seeing Black and white people standing together to denounce the U.S. war lies encouraged many workers of color to stop and listen to the speakers and take informational leaflets.

Over the course of the nearly two-hour street meeting, several passersby, including parents with children, stopped to listen, hold signs and take selfies with the anti-war demands.

Get Pentagon off our backs!

Andre Powell of the Socialist Unity Party emceed the speak-out. 

“This weekend marks the anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968,” Powell reminded the crowd. “Just one year before his death, Dr. King spoke out strongly against the Vietnam War. We have chosen this weekend to honor his memory and his stance against wars around the world, to raise our voices in support of the people of the Donbass region – the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. 

“U.S. corporations and banks don’t have the right to decide that the people of the Donbass region should not be independent of Ukraine. But since the Donbass region made its declaration, they have been continuously bombed by Ukraine. And you heard not one damn word in the U.S. media. None of them mention the eight years of killing in the Donbass region by the neo-Nazi Ukrainian government. 

“Now they’re crying crocodile tears because Russia intervened at the request of the Donbass people for help. Russia did not invade; it intervened to protect the Donbass people who were being slaughtered by the Ukrainian government.”

“The U.S. has one of the highest death rates in the world from COVID-19,” said Lallan Schoenstein of Women in Struggle/Mujeres en Lucha. “That is no natural disaster. It is because the U.S., with all its wealth, does not provide for a national health care system. Now the U.S. Congress has withdrawn funds for fighting COVID in order to spend another $13.6 billion for the U.S. war machine in the Ukraine.

“Will the U.S./NATO military funds bring peace to Ukraine — and improve our lives as well? No! It is dragging the Ukrainians into catastrophe and threatening the well-being of the entire world.”

Struggle-La Lucha reporter Bill Dores explained: “The media and the corporate flunkies on Capitol Hill and the White House want you to believe that one day Russia just up and attacked Ukraine. They don’t tell you that this war has been going on for eight years, since a CIA-led U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014. The Kiev regime has been waging war against its own people, who don’t want to live under NATO, who want to live in peace with their neighbors.

“For the past 30 years we have watched the U.S. military destroy country after country – Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Yugoslavia – for no other reason than to enrich giant corporations, particularly the oil monopolies that want to control the world’s energy reserves. And now we’re supposed to believe the U.S. government is pouring weapons, money and advisers into Ukraine to support democracy.”

‘Can you afford a war for Big Oil?’

Sharon Black of the Unemployed Workers Union saluted the victory of the pro-union vote by Amazon workers in Staten Island. She declared: “It’s the billionaires like Jeff Bezos and the military industry that are benefitting from the war. When you go to your food market, can you afford food right now? Can you afford a war that’s being waged on behalf of the bankers and the oil industry? I don’t think so! 

“This is part of a series of educational actions around the country to ‘Stop the War Lies.’ Because that’s what’s happening. When we go to fill our gas tanks and we can’t afford it, they want us to blame it on Russia instead of the oil oligarchs who live right here in this country. It’s their greed that’s responsible. No one has a gun to their head to raise prices. It’s capitalist greed, plain and simple. They created this disruption so they can increase their profits.

“As much as it hurts us here, it’s the people of eastern Ukraine, of the Donbass region, that are paying with their lives.”

Other speakers included Greg Butterfield, Solidarity with Donbass & Antifascists in Ukraine; 

Lee Patterson, Peoples Power Assembly; Heather Cottin, longtime teacher and activist; Andrew Mayton, Youth Against War & Racism; Johnnie Stevens, Parents to Improve School Transportation (PIST); and Julius Kroll, one of a group of visiting University of Pennsylvania students who came upon the protest by chance.

Organizer Greg Butterfield told SLL, “Some groups have abandoned their professed anti-imperialist principles, condemning Russia and belittling the heroic resistance of the Donbass people, downplaying the role of neo-Nazi and white supremacist forces in the Ukrainian state, and giving backhanded support to the U.S.-NATO war drive. Others, while taking a better position on paper, are keeping their heads down, confining their opposition to statements and webinars. 

“For us, the most important thing is to reach the working class and oppressed communities. We want to see what our class is feeling, and figure out the best ways to reach them with an anti-war message. That means getting out into the streets even at the risk of being confronted by right-wingers or even hostility from confused workers. 

“Hopefully, the success of this initiative and the positive response will help the rank-and-file of the larger anti-war organizations push their leaders to be less timid and encourage more street actions. Visible, vocal opposition to the U.S. war drive, boldly exposing the lies it’s based on, is what is most urgently needed right now.”

During rush hour on March 25, anti-war protesters in Baltimore held a banner drop and street meeting to demand “No U.S.-NATO War on Russia & Donbass.” 

Activists handed out fact sheets and Struggle-La Lucha newspapers to drivers at red lights. They reported many honks of support for the slogan on the banner. 

New York ― A rally in Brooklyn’s Cadman Plaza on March 19 demanded better school transportation. They were sick and tired of school bus routes that guarantee children having to wait for and stay on school buses for too long.

The rally was organized by Parents to Improve School Transportation (PIST) and the Comité Timon. These groups are demanding a school bus bill of rights to ensure respect for the riders’ civil rights, the workers’ job rights and everyone’s safety.

It’s not the bus operators or matrons’ fault. They want to do the best job in getting children needing special education to school.

A delegation of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181-1061 members came to support the fight for transportation inclusion, equity and reform for students.

New York City spends over $1 billion a year on transportation but the system is all screwed up. Many school bus routes are misdesigned.

Children often have to spend more than an hour on a bus each way with no bathroom breaks. This is especially rough for kids with disabilities.

The problems started when billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to break ATU Local 1181-1061. Mayor Money Bags ripped up the Employee Protection Provisions that guaranteed living wages and work conditions.

The EPP were removed from a significant fraction of the route packages that private companies bid upon. This drove down the companies’ bids overall. The bus outfits took the difference out of newly hired workers’ wages and benefits.

As Tomas Fret, Recording Secretary ATU Local 1181-1061 said, we want to make the job a career again. Mothers spoke of their children dreading the long bus rides.

“The Department of Education, the bus companies, the state and city officials, lie about the crisis of school buses in New York,” said Greg Butterfield, whose two daughters attend Brooklyn public schools. “They lie about the safety of conditions for students with special needs, drivers and aides. They lie about the safety of all students, teachers and school workers.”

“And at the national level they lie about U.S. wars,” Butterfield added.

“The budget measure signed by President Biden this week cut money for COVID public health measures in order to send billions of dollars more in deadly weapons to Ukraine. U.S. sanctions on Russia are driving up gas prices that not only hurt drivers today, but will be used as an excuse by the bus companies and the DOE for why they can’t afford to make the changes to protect children and workers.” 

After the rally people marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to the Department of Education headquarters on Chambers Street. It’s located in an old courthouse whose construction 150 years ago Boss Tweed used to loot $20 million.

That sort of corruption and neglect causes misery for thousands of schoolchildren today. Stop violations of access to education!

I am not a Republican (if I were, these days that would make me a supporter and/or enabler of white supremacy and the ideology of fascism). 

I am also not a Democrat (a party that now mimics Republicans because it seems the only thing that matters is winning those Trump supporters in the next election).

That conservative trajectory led President Biden to chanting during his State of the Union address, that in the context of the reality of racist police murder, conjured images of lynchings and cross burnings to me – and I’m sure I’m not alone among many Black people paying attention. The chant was in opposition to the very moderate demand of taking some funds from the police. “Fund the police, Fund them, Fund them” he exclaimed as if he was preaching the gospel. And, it looked in fact like he was preaching to the choir since he got a standing ovation in the House chambers.

Biden is not worried about Black voters. He thinks we as Black people have no choice. During the last election he said if we didn’t vote for him we weren’t Black. He joins Joe Rogan in thinking he knows what it is to be Black.

His version of being Black is like being Eric Adams, the right-wing mayor from New York City who uses his African American ethnicity and willingness to push racist policing policies as a means to further his political career. Mayor Adams is now reviving the plainclothes crime units that were responsible for 31% of fatal police shootings in 2018, despite being only 6% of the police force in the city, according to a study by the Intercept.

Many will remember that in 1999 an unarmed 23-year-old Guinean immigrant and student named Amadou Diallo was also shot by four plainclothes NYC cops and killed, simply for reaching for an identification card.

Then there is Vice President Kamala Harris, another person of African ethnicity preferred by Biden, and one of the people to stand up immediately in that standing ovation for the “fund them” chant. Vice President Harris, before becoming vice president, was the top cop in California as the Attorney General — who would not allow a reform to go through that would have forced prosecutors to finally prosecute killer cops.

According to the prestigious international scientific journal, the Lancet, in a study examining fatal police violence by race and state in the U.S. from 1980–2019, the unwillingness to consistently prosecute criminal murder by police is what maintains this systemic nightmare: “Accountability and transparency in policing are lacking, as evidenced by ongoing problems with under-reporting. Police officers who kill civilians are rarely charged with a crime; Mapping Police Violence reports that in 2017, of 1,147 deaths, officers were charged with a crime in 13 cases, or 1% of the time. Police violence and racism in policing in the USA are not new or unexplained problems; they are the current manifestations of a system that was built to uphold racial hierarchy for most of the USA’s history.” [my emphasis -JP]

On the other hand, the type of Black people Biden doesn’t like would be Assata Shakur, former Black Panther who was exiled to Cuba due to a racist frameup by police. In fact, Biden’s administration has a bounty on her life. Or George Jackson, a Black Panther and political prisoner who was assassinated by prison cops in 1971. And Claudia Jones, a Black communist born in 1915 and deported from the U.S. as an adult due to her powerful activism and, like Fred Hampton, skills at uniting our class and advocating solidarity with the most oppressed.

Claudia Jones and Fred Hampton especially understood that real solidarity with the oppressed is only possible when our working class has a scientific understanding of how this capitalist society works. In considering the entities of capitalism, for example, the military and police – what are their functions in keeping capitalism alive. For those answers they also studied another revolutionary – Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, a revolution that allowed, for the first time, working people – our class – to take control over the factories, land and machinery to utilize them for their benefit. And, it’s a good thing because it was the only country capable of stopping Nazi Germany during World War II because of its because of its non-privatized and centralized method of production and its anti-fascist ideology.

But before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution could happen, it would take the working people, agricultural workers and unemployed, to understand who were their friends and allies and who were their enemies. Lenin understood that the legislators, military and police were in place to protect the capitalist system of exploitation by any means and at all costs, especially including the taking of life, whether by the denial of basic social services or through a bullet. This is why the police keep us in fear and target the most exploited as the system pushes us further into poverty.

That right arm of capitalism – the police who protect the haves from the have nots – will never be negotiated or voted away as long as capitalism exists, unless the ruling class is forced to disband them by a mightier force than their cops and military.

We have the potential to become that force by understanding our power and ability to make their system come to a halt. There are many more of us than there are of them. And, it’s only our labor that is fundamental to the creation of their wealth – we just need unity and solidarity.

We also need to understand that our Black, Brown and Indigenous communities must have the right to banish these cops from our neighborhoods and the right to the resources to train and develop our own community entities of safety and protection. We must do more than defund – WE MUST DISARM AND DISBAND the police.

If not, we will be sentenced to hearing the endless nonsense from President Biden and others as solutions, which actually encourage more police terror and murder – so more Amadou Diallo tragedies will occur. By the way, Diallo’s killers, the four cops, remain free and after the incident were even offered their jobs back.

And, on March 2, the day after President Joe Biden delivered that State of the Union speech, Thomas Siderio, a 12-year-old boy was shot and killed by Philadelphia police.

Don’t give Biden and the enablers of genocide a pass – let’s build a militant movement with a clear understanding of what’s needed and the dedication to building real working-class solidarity, with our friends and allies – not our enemies.

John Parker, of the Socialist Unity Party, is on the ballot as a candidate for the U.S. Senate from California in the June primary of Election 2022. He is part of the Left Unity Slate of the Peace and Freedom Party and has been endorsed by the Green Party.

Press TV
https://www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/104503

John Parker responds on Press TV in a report on the racist police attack in New Jersey. Parker, of the Socialist Unity Party, is on the ballot as a candidate for U.S. Senate from California in the June primary of Election 2022. He is part of the Left Unity Slate of the Peace and Freedom Party and has been endorsed by the Green Party.

The chant “money for war, can’t feed the poor” best describes the $1.5 trillion spending package passed by Congress and signed by President Biden on March 10.

An astounding $782 billion went to the Pentagon and military spending, while $715 billion will go to “domestic” spending areas. Domestic is in quotes because that doesn’t always mean spending on people’s needs.

Billions in extra aid to US/NATO war in Ukraine 

Congress added $13.6 billion in aid to Ukraine. This is not part of the Pentagon budget; it is above and beyond. 

It includes $3.5 billion in military equipment and $3 billion for deploying U.S. troops to the region. This aid also gives $2.65 billion to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), of which $120 million is slated for so-called activists, journalists, and so-called independent media to promote anti-Russia messaging. 

The extra $13.6 billion is in addition to the $300 million for allies and partners in the region. This $300 million includes $180 million for the Baltic Security Initiative, $30 million for Poland, $30 million for Romania, $20 million for Bulgaria, and $40 million for Georgia.

$23 billion to ICE and CBP

While the State Department will spend $1.4 billion to fund migration and refugee assistance to Ukrainian immigrants, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) treatment of Haitian refugees on the southern border is starkly different. There was also no mention of African students and refugees trying to get out of Ukraine.

In this $23 billion, $1.06 billion will go toward Customs and Border Protection (CBP) processing facilities and transportation to immigrant detention camps — a boondoggle for the private prison industries. In addition, $72.4 million is being allocated in new aircraft and aircraft sensors to hunt down Black and Brown refugees.

$15.6 billion COVID relief fund cut

Those communities still languishing from the COVID pandemic will not see funds. It was stripped from the budget! 

In addition, if you thought that working and poor people were getting any relief from staggering price increases at grocery stores and the gas pump. Think again. 

Yes, “Money for War, Can’t Feed the Poor!” is real.

President Biden wants to be seen as a dragon slayer of wealthy Russian oligarchs. But he praised immensely richer and more powerful U.S. oligarchs in his March 1 State of the Union speech.

While conducting the “Hate Russia” war rally before Congress, Biden called out Intel’s CEO Patrick Gelsinger and asked him to stand. Most of the assembled flock of representatives and senators applauded. They envy the boss with his $116 million pay package.

The president hailed computer chip maker Intel, saying it was “the American company that helped build Silicon Valley.” Biden claimed the outfit was going to invest at least $10 billion “20 miles east of Columbus, Ohio” and will employ 10,000 people there.

One thing is certain: none of them will be union jobs. Intel fights organizing drives as viciously as Amazon does.

Why isn’t Intel building the facility inside Columbus itself or at least within Franklin County, where Columbus is located? The company with revenues of $79 billion last year is instead investing its money in adjoining Licking County. 

Part of the reason could be that while Franklin County is 24% Black, African Americans in Licking County account for just 4% of its population. 

High Tech in the United States is a racist and sexist cesspool. Back in 1998, Joel Dreyfuss described Silicon Valley’s discrimination in Fortune magazine as the “Valley of Denial.” 

Intel’s hiring practices haven’t improved much since then. Even though many of the corporation’s U.S. plants are located in areas with large Latinx populations, just 10% of its U.S employees in 2019 were Latinx.

Only 4.9% of its U.S. workers were Black. Women were a mere 27.4% of Intel’s global workforce.

Despite this bias, Black scientists and inventors were pioneers in the computer field. Roy Clark set up Hewlett-Packard’s first software development lab in 1965. Marc Hannah’s Ph.D. thesis was the basis of starting Silicon Graphics.

Dr. Mark Dean – who became IBM’s director of advanced technology development – holds three of the nine patents which made desktop computers available for personal use. Dean designed the ISA systems bus, which allows the linking of printers and modems with computers.

Dr. Sandra Baylor helped develop the prototype for “Deep Blue,” IBM’s chess machine.

More auto workers fired

President Biden also praised Ford and GM for investing billions in electric cars. The man in the White House didn’t mention that electric vehicles will require fewer parts, which means fewer jobs.

GM is no hero in Flint, Michigan. When the Black-majority city was the center of GM’s manufacturing empire, Flint had the highest median income in Michigan. But since GM shut down nine of its 10 local plants, Flint became desperately poor.

It’s now the poorest of all U.S. cities with populations over 65,000. Sixty percent of Flint’s children live in poverty.

GM is just as guilty of poisoning Flint’s children with polluted water as is former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder. It was the loss of Flint’s tax base because of GM’s cutbacks which was the excuse to pump filthy water from the Flint River.

GM’s flight from Flint reflected the determination of U.S. heavy industry to get away from their dependence on Black labor. Back in 1968, Black workers accounted for a quarter of the employees in auto plants and steel mills. (“Organized Labor and the Black Worker 1619-1973,” by Philip S. Foner.)

These workers were a vital part of the liberation movement. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers was formed in Detroit. The Black Panther party had a caucus in Fremont, California’s GM plant, which is now a non-union Tesla factory.

Ford’s Rouge plant was once the world’s largest factory complex, with its own steel mill and glass works. By 1974 half of the workers there were Black, including 65% of those on its assembly lines. (“Black Workers’ Struggles in Detroit’s Auto Industry, 1935-1975,” by Kuniko Fujita.) 

Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin isn’t responsible for any of the jobs that were stolen in Flint or elsewhere. When Russia and Ukraine were part of the socialist Soviet Union, everyone there had a job.

Socialist Ukraine, particularly its Donbass region, was a center of heavy industry in the Soviet Union. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund urged that it be shut down, just like what happened in the United States.

Since 2014, workers in Donbass have been fighting a Ukrainian regime that came to power with the use of fascist thugs. These criminals have killed over 14,000 people in the Donbass republics.

Our struggle isn’t against the Russian Federation but against the hundreds of billionaire oligarchs and banksters here in the U.S. 

Stop the war against the Donbass and Russia. Start more struggles against the rich.

Rents are going through the roof while a tidal wave of evictions has begun. Average rents increased by 14% last year across the United States.

Rents went up in Austin, Texas, by 40%, while in New York City and Newark, New Jersey, they rose by 35%. Rents jumped by 28% in Dallas, 26% in Phoenix, 25% in Las Vegas and 24% in Cincinnati. 

Neither broken supply chains nor rising wages – which were canceled by skyrocketing prices – can be blamed for this rent-gouging. Pure capitalist greed is the cause. Even the idiots at Fox News can’t claim the People’s Republic of China or Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin are responsible. 

In New York City during 2017, five out of twelve families devoted more than 30% of their budgets to rent. A quarter of families had to pay their landlords more than half of their income. That’s like the tribute that feudal serfs had to fork over.

Now it’s even worse and the result is increased homelessness. Most visible are hundreds of thousands of human beings forced to live on the streets of the wealthiest country on earth.

Much more numerous are the millions of families who have to double-up with relatives. Back in 2010, the Census Bureau estimated there were 4.3 million families living in these conditions.

This overcrowding is a big reason why Black, Indigenous and Latinx people were two and three times as likely to have died from COVID-19 as whites.

While rents are rocketing, so are house prices. Banksters are committing wholesale robbery by raising interest rates on mortgages. Between 2007 and 2016 these criminals foreclosed on 7.8 million homes. 

The investment bank BlackRock wants to get in the action by gobbling up homes. This outfit has $10 trillion in assets under its control to play around with. That’s more money than the economies of every country except the United States and China.

Fighting back against evictions

Landlords want to start mass evictions. Many Democrats, like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, joined with Republicans to end the bans on throwing families out of their homes.

These measures were enacted in 2020 at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Congress and state legislatures only did so because they were afraid of what 20 million suddenly jobless people might do. It was millions of people who marched demanding “Black Lives Matter” that kept these bans in place.

Congress was also forced to spend billions in rental assistance. But millions of tenants never saw any money.

In California’s Santa Clara County – home to San Jose and Silicon Valley billionaires – just 34% of households that applied for help got it. The headquarters of Apple, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook) are located there. These outfits have a total stock market value of $5.1 trillion, yet 244,000 of the county’s children live in families who can’t afford basic needs.

Most housing courts operate as eviction mills for landlords and banks. Issa Smith was evicted over a disputed lease with her landlord in Kalamazoo, Michigan. 

She now lives with her two children in a motel room that doesn’t even have a refrigerator. The $1,800 a month that Issa Smith has to pay for the tiny place eats up almost all of her disability assistance benefits.

In most places tenants don’t even have the right to a lawyer like criminal defendants do. Families can be evicted for almost any reason, with landlords trying to steal the security deposit.

In New York City, the Right to Counsel Coalition won the right for tenants to have legal representation in 2017. Baltimore and San Francisco have also passed similar laws.

Tenant and community groups also want the New York state legislature to pass the “Good Cause Eviction” bill. Families shouldn’t be evicted just because the landlord doesn’t like them. This law will give basic protections like a union contract does.

Direct action is more effective. The Crown Heights Tenants Union and other organizations stopped the Robinson family home from being stolen. For 18 days in February, activists stood guard at 964 Park Place in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.

The Robinsons were the first Black family on the block. They were victims of an attempted “foreclosure rescue scam” in which they unknowingly signed away the title to their home. 

The victory in Brooklyn must be repeated across the country. Evictions and foreclosures must be stopped. Housing is a human right!