Youth Against War & Racism condemns without qualification the Biden-ordered airstrike that murdered 22 people in Syria. While millions of people in the United States are unemployed, sick, dying, short on food, and awaiting relief payments and vaccines, the Biden Administration, in the first month of its reign, decided it was more important to establish military dominance.

The Biden Administration claims the bombing was in self-defense, or a response to attacks on the US Embassy in Iraq which killed American mercenaries. Of course, US military forces remain in Iraq despite the Iraqi parliament voting to expel them in January 2020.

One of Biden’s campaign promises was to make America the greatest country in the world again. He means to re-establish American military dominance by death and destruction, and he is starting here.

Youth Against War & Racism demands:

U.S. hands off Syria, Iran, and Iraq!
Shut down the US military bases!
Defund the Pentagon!

On Facebook

For the second time, Donald Trump has been acquitted in an impeachment trial that was doomed from the beginning.  

Both the Democratic Party elite and the Republicans refused to call witnesses during the Feb. 9-13 Senate trial, which would have, at a bare minimum, partially revealed the extent of the Jan. 6 crisis. 

Rather than invoke the 14th Amendment or jail Trump and his accomplices for treason, the Democratic Party instead took the impeachment route, which guaranteed Trump an acquittal.  

They spent many hours and wasted time engaged in this overblown charade rather than get down to the needed business of quickly mandating major relief for the people. 

Immediately after his inauguration, at a time when most of the reactionary elements of the House and Senate seemed to be in disarray, President Joe Biden could have used his powers to push through measures that would have strengthened the condition of the working-class. 

The impeachment process ultimately obscured the extent and depth of the white supremacist, anti-working-class coup attempt, orchestrated primarily to overturn the election results. 

Independent people’s inquiry into role of state

What was most needed and is still needed is an independent “people’s inquiry” to thoroughly unravel the extent of what really took place, not only on Jan. 6, but also before those events.  

Why were National Guard units blocked from securing the Capitol? To what extent were elements of the military involved? Who gave the “reconnaissance tours” of the building?  

There is enough evidence to show that the FBI and other surveillance agencies knew that there were plans to try to stop the certification of the election by force. How then could the Capitol Police, FBI, Homeland Security, Pentagon and so many others be so unprepared?  

The working class must play a leading role in an investigation aimed at weeding out all of the white supremacist, fascist elements from top to bottom in every part of the state. This includes all police agencies, from federal to local, as well as the military and all of the politicians who were complicit or participated.

Biden and the Democratic Party could have easily used this opportunity to get every Klansman, Proud Boy, Oath Keeper, etc., out of police forces and government positions by decree. Such a mandate would have had the support of the masses, especially the most oppressed.

While such an act would not eradicate the role of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state in general, it would have been a concrete measure to set back the more organized fascist forces. Who could have argued against it?

Without a thorough and public accounting, coupled with action and the intervention of the working class, the threat of the kind of fascist movement that was seen on Jan. 6 will continue to grow.  

So-called ‘transfer of power’ 

The major media continually rings with the hollow phrase “transfer of power,” referring to Trump and Biden. But it is false. There has been no actual transfer of power. The same class of billionaire bankers and bosses, what is referred to as the capitalist ruling class, still holds the reins of power.  

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, characterizing the state in the Communist Manifesto, explained, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”   

There may be differences among various factions of the ruling class, sometimes approaching violent rancor. These differences reflect the continual internecine wars and competition that are a characteristic of the capitalist system itself. But ultimately what they look for in a head of state is someone who will preferably represent them all.  

While Trump represented the gas, oil and fracking industries, which are in desperate crisis, it should be noted that he also had support from many who later dumped him and still others in the capitalist class who may not have appeared on board. 

While Trump was in office, there was much support when he delivered the multi-trillion-dollar tax cuts for the rich, destroyed key environmental regulations that stood in the way of profits, and passed a $4-trillion COVID bailout of the wealthiest, overseen by Goldman Sachs.

The Republican Party does not want to extricate itself from Trump’s base, which may prove useful for them and the ruling class at a later date. The Democratic Party leadership does not want to unleash the working class against the fascists, since doing so could considerably strengthen the movement to demand free health care, cancel rents and mortgages, raise wages, end the obscene war budget and so much more.

The unfinished revolution

The capitalist system continually erodes its own bourgeois democracy — and it will continue to do so, just as the parasitic apparatus of violent repression grows.  

The one thing that must be made clear about the Jan. 6 putsch is that it was aimed not at overturning the colossal power of the state; in fact, its aim was to reinforce the capitalist state.  

It had not one thing to do with the working class, regardless of who the white supremacist, fascist movement was capable of dragging into it. 

They did not want to democratize government for the millions of Black, Brown, Indigenous and Latinx people, or even poor people in general. Instead, they wanted to steal the election from largely Black cities like Philadelphia, Atlanta and Detroit.  

The mob was intent on disenfranchising the most oppressed.

In all of U.S. history, the Reconstruction period following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery was the most democratic, sweeping in major reforms, including universal public education and the election of representatives from the emancipated Black population. It was soon drowned in blood.

This unfinished revolution, as Reconstruction is called, continues to be fought today. Its most recent manifestation was the uprising against racist police terror that brought out millions in the streets here and around the world in the summer of 2020. The Jan. 6 mob at the Capitol was a counter-revolutionary force aimed at preserving white supremacy. 

As Black Panther leader Fred Hampton said, “Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism is gonna stop us all.” 

Socialism, which rests itself on the rule of the working class, will usher in genuine democracy for the majority of the people. Socialism is the antidote to fascism.

Feb. 20 — Millions of people in Texas are living in misery after a winter storm hit the state. For days they have been without heat, light and water. 

The loss of electricity caused food and medicines, like insulin, to spoil in refrigerators. Many homes and hospitals still don’t have water because the pumps froze.

Hundreds of people may have died, including at least three people in Abilene. One of the victims was a homeless man found on the street. 

Thousands of prisoners in Houston are being held in freezing cells with clogged toilets. Many haven’t been convicted of anything but are too poor to post bail. 

Gloria V. of the Socialist Unity Party reports from Dallas that “people are helping each other to survive. Some have opened their homes to neighbors.

“The utilities have rolling shut-offs without notifying residents when power will be turned on and off,” said the SUP organizer. “Internet service has also been interrupted. People trying to warm up in their cars have died of carbon monoxide poisoning.” 

How can this be happening in the biggest energy-producing state in the country? This tragedy isn’t a natural disaster. The culprit is a capitalist system on steroids that places profits ahead of human life.

Not everyone suffered. Hundreds of thousands of people living in the dark in Houston could see the downtown skyscrapers brightly lit. Eleven-year old Cristian Pavon froze to death in his family’s trailer home while U.S. Senator Ted Cruz flew from Houston to a luxury resort in Cancún, Mexico. 

The soaring gas and oil prices were “like hitting the jackpot,” bragged Robert Burns, a top executive at Comstock Resources. Comstock’s biggest investor is billionaire Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys football club who attacked Colin Kaepernick.

Blame deregulation, not windmills

Four hundred years ago the novelist Cervantes wrote about Don Quixote attacking windmills. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Fox News are blaming wind and solar power for the catastrophe. 

That’s more than a fable, it’s a lie. Wind normally produces just 10 percent of the electrical power in Texas. It was when former President George W. Bush was Texas governor that the state started harvesting wind power.

More important than frozen blades on wind turbines have been frozen natural gas pumps. Even coal-fired power plants stopped running because the coal froze. One of the state’s four nuclear reactors shut down.

Gov. Abbott is now trying to divert people’s anger by breaking contracts to sell natural gas to Mexico. That’s another colonial attack that’s forcing over four million Mexicans to go without heat. 

The old pharaohs would have been better prepared even without electric power. They planned ahead for floods and famines. Food was stored in warehouses so people wouldn’t starve ― and the rulers wouldn’t be overthrown.

The capitalist utilities in Texas refused to build enough backup power because doing so would cut into their profits. The Lone Star State has its own electrical power grid so its utilities wouldn’t be subject to the Federal Power Commission.

That also makes importing power from other states much more expensive. Homeowners are now being socked with electric bills as high as $10,000. 

Electric companies in northern states regularly operating in cold weather are forced to invest in more insulation, heated pipes and crushers to break up frozen coal. Wind turbines can be equipped with heaters and insulated gearboxes. 

Texas utilities can get away without spending money on this stuff because of deregulation. The current disaster is the result.

Another consequence was the $40-billion-plus Enron utility bankruptcy 20 years ago. This was the biggest financial scandal in U.S. history.

Among the cheerleaders of Enron’s corrupt management were members of the Bush family and their political associates. Former Secretary of State James Baker and former Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher ― both members of President George Herbert Walker Bush’s cabinet ― were put on Enron’s payroll. 

Baker was even awarded the “Enron Prize” for public service.  

Shut-offs also kill

Nobody should sneer at Texas. The millions of poor and working people who are suffering need solidarity.

Yankee utility companies are just as greedy and incompetent. Wall Street has billions invested in Texas. 

ConEd in New York City owns hundreds of miles of ancient cast-iron gas mains. Eight people died in El Barrio (East Harlem) on March 12, 2014, when their apartment building collapsed because of a gas explosion.

The cause was a century-old gas main that the utility didn’t replace. That year ConEd had a net income of $1.09 billion. Every cent of it should have been used to upgrade infrastructure.

The California utility Pacific Gas and Electric decided to boost profits by cutting back on tree trimming near its power lines. Over six years, 1,500 forest fires broke out, including the deadliest in the state’s history.

Top executives at PG&E were awarded pay raises for these crimes. 

Utility shut-offs are just as deadly. Three adults and seven children died in a Baltimore house fire on May 15, 1982, when a kerosene lamp fell over. Among those killed was a 7-month-old baby.

The family had been disconnected by Baltimore Gas and Electric because they couldn’t afford a $808 back bill.  That’s eighty dollars for each victim of BG&E greed. 

Just as all housing foreclosures and evictions should be banned, so should all utility shut-offs. We need to cancel rent, mortgages and utility bills. Our water should be safe and free!

Despite regional outages, the utility industry wasn’t even willing to upgrade its power grids. There was no profit in doing so. Billions had to be included in President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill to begin this necessary work.

Congresswoman Cori Bush, who was pepper sprayed at a Black Lives Matter demonstration, declared: “Corporations shouldn’t be allowed to profit off our suffering. Utilities need to be public goods.”

To hell with Ted Cruz! The tragedy in Texas shows we need a people’s takeover of the utilities. 

You’ve probably heard the saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

This isn’t really true, of course. The environment, people and society are constantly changing, even down to the subatomic level. And when enough small changes accumulate, they can lead to sudden, dramatic change — even a revolution.

But one month into the Biden administration, you could be forgiven for thinking of that old platitude. Because the new Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration is laying a course to continue many of Republican Donald Trump’s anti-people policies, only with some cosmetic changes.

Why? 

Politicians and mainstream media often speak of the change of presidents as a “transfer of power.” That was especially true in the case of the transition between Trump and Biden, coming after months of The Donald and his allies trying to suppress the votes of Black people and the Jan. 6 coup attempt at the Capitol.

But it’s not really a transfer of power. Only the office holders change. The capitalist system, and the super-wealthy bosses who profit from it, continue to hold real power whether a Republican or a Democrat sits in the White House or which faction has a majority in Congress. 

All the way back in 1848, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels hit the nail on the head when they wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” — that is, the capitalists.

Those capitalist politicians elected to high office, whether a Trump or a Biden, do so with the expectation that they will carry out the interests of the capitalist system. And while a large part of the ruling class tired of Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic and the economic crisis, they still love many of the policies he put in place, like deregulation of industry, tax cuts for the rich, and strengthening police powers. 

So Biden, the new “administrator,” is expected to carry on. As he told a Wall Street fundraising event during his campaign, “Nothing would fundamentally change.”

That’s good news for Big Capital. For the rest of us, not so much.

A cage or ‘overflow facility’?

In the first few days after his inauguration, Biden made a show of issuing a flurry of executive orders countermanding some of Trump’s most egregious and unpopular measures — at least on the surface. 

No class-conscious worker will miss Trump’s bigoted “Muslim ban” that prevented people from many Muslim-majority countries (and some others) from visiting the U.S. and kept families apart. Many capitalists hated it too. It was bad for their bottom line and undermined their PR for the U.S. as “champion of democracy.”

The restoration of the “Dreamer” program for undocumented adults who arrived in the U.S. as children is also welcome.

But while the president and First Lady Jill Biden announced their intention to reunite hundreds of migrant parents and children victimized by Trump’s “family separation” policy, under Biden the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol continue to deport hundreds of refugees and immigrants, including children.

On Feb. 8, amidst the mass protests and government repression in Haiti, ICE deported 72 refugees back to the country — including 22 children, the youngest a two-month-old baby. 

A Biden executive order to temporarily suspend some deportations “pending review” was halted by a Trump-appointed judge. But the deportations of the Haitian refugees would not have qualified, even if the order was in effect.

Remember the outcry in 2018-2019 over Trump keeping children in cages? Biden’s team has announced plans to reopen an “overflow facility” for unaccompanied minors (children) captured by the immigration enforcement goons. In case you’re wondering, “overflow facility” is just a polite term for “cage.”

In an op-ed published by The Hill on Feb. 13, “Biden has not done enough to end family separations at the border,” attorneys Clara Long and Elora Mukherjee wrote: “As attorneys who met with hungry, dirty, desperate children separated from their families at the southern border during the height of the kids-in-cages calamity in 2019, we had hoped President Biden would quickly fix the problem. So far, we’ve been disappointed.

“The Biden administration may be choosing to drag its feet on ending Trump border abuses because it doesn’t want to encourage more people to come. This isn’t new. For decades, the United States has justified cruelty at the border with the canard that such treatment will deter future migrants from coming. 

“But after months of mass separations of parents from their children in 2018 — the cruelest policy ever rolled out in the name of deterrence — border apprehensions surged in 2019.”

What about Breonna Taylor?

Most workers know how Biden backtracked on his promise of a new $2,000 stimulus payment. That was quickly changed to $1,400 — because the $2,000 now included the pittance $600 payment sent by Trump at the New Year. Scrooge would have applauded.

Then Biden agreed to lower the income threshold for people to receive the stimulus. What that lowered threshold will be has not been determined yet, but it will not include any adjustment for the highly varied cost of rent and other living expenses in different parts of the U.S.

The millions of workers struggling with enormous student loan debt also know that Biden has flatly refused to consider the $50,000 debt forgiveness advocated by many Democrats. He capped the amount at $10,000 max even in the midst of an unprecedented global economic and unemployment crisis. And even that is not guaranteed.

A big selling point for Biden’s administration was that he would take action to bring the rampaging COVID-19 pandemic under control and speed up the distribution of new vaccines. But he’s pushed to reopen schools in the first 100 days of his administration, increasing pressure on teachers’ and school workers’ unions that have been fighting for a safe return to classrooms and additional resources for remote learning. 

Biden’s CDC issued guidelines saying it’s okay to reopen in-person schooling — even if teachers haven’t been vaccinated. How is this different from Trump’s dangerous policy? Under either administration, Big Business wants schools open so it’s easier to force parents back into unsafe workplaces — health and safety be damned.

During their campaign, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris condemned the grand jury decision that let off the police who murdered Breonna Taylor. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron deliberately and blatantly sabotaged the case.

Given how much the Black Lives uprising contributed to mass Black voter turnout and his election success, you might imagine Biden would immediately order his Justice Department to take action to put the killers behind bars.

But no. Breonna Taylor and the epidemic of racist police terror against Black and Brown people dropped off the radar after Election Day. Sensing which way the winds were blowing, Taylor’s mother Tamika Palmer penned an open letter in December bluntly reminding Biden of his campaign promises to curb police violence. Supporters paid to have it published as a full-page ad in the Washington Post.

Danger of war

The new administration clearly wants to be compared to the New Deal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But the only explicit connection Biden has drawn is with FDR’s policy of building up for war: “American manufacturing was the arsenal of democracy in World War II. It will be so again,” he said of his economic recovery plan.

Since the Great Depression, U.S. capitalism has relied on war to pull it out of crisis. It doesn’t matter which party is in the White House. Biden’s foreign policy moves have been especially ugly:

• Support U.S.-backed Haitian President Jovenel Moïse’s illegal plan to stay in power for an additional year, until Feb. 7, 2022.
• Continue Trump’s propaganda war and military threats against China.
• Tell Iran that the U.S. will honor the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action “nuclear deal” only if Tehran goes back to observing it first — even though it was Trump that torpedoed the agreement. U.S. piracy continues against Iran-connected ships.
• Keep the U.S. Embassy to Israel in Jerusalem, where Trump unilaterally moved it despite international protests. Continue unfettered funding, arming and political support for the apartheid regime’s suppression of Palestinians.
• Continue to recognize self-appointed “president” Juan Guaido while refusing to open discussions with the legitimate Venezuelan government led by President Nicolas Maduro.
• Appoint many veterans of the Obama administration State Department responsible for far-right coups in Honduras, Libya and Ukraine.

Even Biden’s heralded decision to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen is deceptive at best. The U.S. will continue to arm and aid the House of Saud for so-called “defensive” purposes and build up the anti-Iran, anti-Yemen alliance in the region.

On Feb. 5, while millions of people were desperately waiting for the promised stimulus check (and are still waiting today), the Pentagon announced its first big arms sale of the Biden era — a combined $150 million in spy tools for the NATO military alliance and missiles for the right-wing regime in Chile.

Break with the system

Nothing the Biden regime has done is new or surprising. Every Democratic administration of the past 30 years has continued and deepened the anti-people policies of the prior Republican government, and vice versa.

Bill Clinton continued and deepened the anti-poor austerity and racist repression of the Reagan-Bush years, escalating mass incarceration of Black and Brown youth — with help from then-Senator Joe Biden. Clinton continued murderous sanctions against Iraq, wearing the country down in the decade between the first and second Gulf Wars.

Barack Obama continued and expanded George W. Bush’s militarization of the U.S. police, mass spying at home and abroad, and drone assassinations. Picking up Bush II’s anti-immigrant baton, Obama earned the epithet “Deporter in Chief.”

Office holders come and go. Capitalism remains the real power behind the throne. And as capitalism continues to decay, it becomes more repressive, more racist, more hungry for war, and unable to respond to the most urgent needs of the people it rules.

We must organize and fight to make the Biden government meet the people’s demands. But that’s not all.

Capitalism is the continuity between Trump and Biden. Let’s build a movement to fight the rotten profit system and replace it with one that can serve the needs of the people: socialism.

Chicago — At 11:15 p.m. on Thursday, February 4, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot walked away from the bargaining table again after instructing her Chicago Public Schools (CPS) leadership team to submit a “last, best and final offer” to the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).

The union and the school system have been bargaining in an attempt to reach a deal over conditions for schools to reopen for in-person learning. The mayor has repeatedly issued ultimatums threatening to lock out teachers if they did not return to school in person. The teachers have instead defied those orders and continued to teach from home. So far, Mayor Lightfoot has backed down twice from her ultimatums and distanced learning has continued.

Now that CPS has walked away from the bargaining table it is unclear what the future holds. CTU has said that the offer is unacceptable and that they are continuing to fight for an agreement that will provide maximum safety for students, educators who serve them, and every family in their school’s communities.

Among many issues which the union says are unacceptable, the “last, best and final” offer that CPS made would pause in-person learning districtwide only if there are COVID-19 outbreaks in 50% of Chicago Public Schools buildings at the same time. The proposal denies remote work accommodations to 75% of educators with household members at high risk for COVID-19. Educators, school clerks and other CPS employees have continued to struggle to access COVID-19 vaccinations, and under the mayor’s plan CPS commits to vaccinating only about 1500 workers per week, with no prioritization of workers who are forced to return first, or who are in the hardest-hit communities. CPS will not make any improvement in remote learning, despite four out of five students remaining remote, and continues to refuse to bargain with the union on the safe reopening of high schools.

CTU leaders say they remain ready to bargain until they land an agreement that allows schools to reopen safely, with real equity for our students and school communities, and that they will continue to remain remote until an agreement is reached, because what they are fighting for is right and necessary.

Social media network Facebook is relied upon by millions of people around the globe for communication. But under billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow owners, Facebook serves the interests of profit, not people. Facebook launched its latest attack on leftists and people’s organizations shortly after the inauguration of President Joe Biden. 

Pages of several left organizations in the U.S. and Britain were summarily removed on Jan. 21-22. Hundreds of activists affiliated with those pages had their Facebook profiles “disabled” — that is, banned. When activists tried to appeal the decision, they were all notified that the ban was permanent and could not be appealed due to alleged, unspecified “violations of community standards.”

In the U.S., the pages of the Peoples Power Assembly, a leading anti-police brutality group based in Baltimore, and Women In Struggle/Mujeres En Lucha, a nationwide women’s organization affiliated with the Women’s International Democratic Federation, were removed by Facebook. 

Sixteen activists who perform administrative duties on those pages — many of them contributors to Struggle-La Lucha newspaper and members of the Socialist Unity Party across the U.S. — were banned. As a result, several other pages administered by these activists were silenced, including the Atlanta Peoples Power Assembly, Prisoners Solidarity Committee, Solidarity with Antifascists in Novorossiya and Ukraine, and Youth Against War & Racism.

The Socialist Workers Party of Britain, one of that country’s largest left parties, was similarly hit. Not only the party’s main page but many of its local branch pages were removed, along with activists’ profiles. This was just days before the Jan. 25 International Day of Solidarity with Yemen, an effort against the U.S.-Saudi war in which the British SWP had a significant organizational role.

Also banned were anti-fascist networks and individuals targeted as “antifa,” and pages affiliated with the World Socialist Web Site in the U.S. and in Britain, where the group has been a vocal part of the movement to prevent the extradition of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

These organizations quickly took legal actions to challenge the Facebook bans, carried out media campaigns, and urged supporters and movement allies to bombard Facebook with protests.

As a result, by Jan. 27 most of the disabled pages had been restored. Many of the affected activists learned of the reversal only by word-of-mouth — Facebook offered no explanation for the bans or notification of the sudden reversal. 

According to a report in the Financial Times — the British equivalent of the Wall Street Journal — “Facebook said it had mistakenly removed a number of far-left political accounts, citing an ‘automation error,’ triggering uproar from socialists who accused the social media platform of censorship. 

“Facebook did not respond to requests to clarify how the error had occurred and why it had affected the personal accounts of socialist figures.”

Power concedes nothing without demand

“It was solidarity that won the reversal,” said Sharon Black of the Peoples Power Assembly. She pointed out that there was no avenue to restore the pages until the targeted groups alerted supporters and media and threatened legal action.

“We began to hear from many other activists about unfair censorship and arbitrary Facebook decisions, without a clear appeals process. Most of those impacted have been Black, Latinx, Palestinian, BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and People of Color], women and other communities whose voices have too often been marginalized.”

For years, Facebook and other U.S.-based social media monopolies have frequently silenced left organizations and activists fighting for national liberation and opposing U.S. wars and racism, while ultraright groups allied with U.S. imperialism and police agencies were given free rein. Only in the wake of mass outrage following the Jan. 6 coup attempt at the Capitol have hatemonger Donald Trump and some of his racist allies faced restrictions.

Media outlets based in other countries that present critical views of U.S. actions are also frequently silenced. Latin America-based teleSUR, Iran’s Press TV and the Korean Central News Agency are among those routinely suppressed.

While Facebook was shutting down activists’ accounts in the U.S. and Britain, its counterpart Twitter was targeting Latin American socialists. 

The official Twitter account of the Venezuelan National Assembly, which recently elected a pro-socialist majority, was shut down Jan. 22. But the account of the previous National Assembly headed by U.S.-backed coup leader Juan Guaidó is still active. “Double standards,” declared Venezuela’s democratically elected president, Nicolás Maduro.

Meanwhile, the Twitter accounts of the Bolivarian Movement for a New Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’s Army (FARC-EP Second Marquetalia) were also shut down, along with the groups’ pages on YouTube (owned by Google). 

Berta Joubert-Ceci, organizer of the International Tribunal on U.S. Colonial Crimes in Puerto Rico and founder of Women In Struggle, had her profile banned. “It is appalling — the cowardice of Facebook in silencing the voices of women and progressive people who struggle for justice and a better life for all,” she said.

Solidarity turns the tide

Within hours of Facebook removing the pages of the PPA, Women In Struggle and affiliated activists, the groups had issued a statement alerting the progressive movement and the media to the attack. People’s attorney Alec Summerfield wrote a letter to Facebook threatening legal action.

The groups’ statement in English and Spanish spread across email and social networks like wildfire. It was reprinted by numerous websites, including FightBack News in the U.S., Insisto-Resisto in Venezuela and the French anarchist site Info Libertaire. 

In Puerto Rico, the Union of Electrical Industry and Irrigation Workers (UTIER) took up the case. A union representative went on the radio to read the statement and denounce Facebook’s actions. 

Staff at the Philadelphia Free Press reached out to their contacts at Facebook and urged workers there to demand a reversal of the company’s decision. Labor Against Racist Terror shared the statement with its network of union activists, urging them to call, email and tweet Facebook executives.

“We want to thank everyone who took time to lend their support,” said PPA’s Sharon Black. She recalled that the PPA’s page and many of the same activists were similarly banned in late October 2020, just days before the presidential election. 

Then, too, they had to fight to get the pages and profiles restored. At the time, Facebook collaborated with the Department of Homeland Security and fascists in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C., area to try to sabotage a protest the group was organizing against Donald Trump’s threat to overturn the election.

“We’re still unsatisfied” with Facebook’s response, added Rasika Ruwanpathirana, an immigrant activist and filmmaker who was targeted. He told Struggle-La Lucha that the so-called Oversight Board recently set up by Facebook bosses is entirely inadequate.

“The PPA and Women In Struggle are advocating for genuine change. This includes an independent people’s oversight of this giant monopoly that in this period, particularly with the pandemic, has become a necessity in much the way that power and water utilities are.

“Oversight includes full transparency, decision making on ‘community standards,’ a speedy appeal procedure and liability for damages on the part of Facebook.”

Ruwanpathirana concluded: “If Facebook won’t do right, it’s time for Facebook to belong to the people.”

For Immediate Release:
January 24, 2021
Contact:  Sharon Black and Attorney Alec Summerfield
Phone:  410-218-4835
#FacebookCensorship #DefendPeoplesRights #ReactivatePPA

Facebook shuts down community, women’s groups and activists’ pages without cause

Groups announce campaign to restore pages and to fight censorship

On Friday, Jan. 22, 2021, Facebook disabled the main pages of two major community organizations, Peoples Power Assembly and Women In Struggle/Mujeres En Lucha, and activists around the country who have played roles in either group, extending its purge to Puerto Rican activist Berta Joubert-Ceci; Greg Butterfield, Struggle-La Lucha writer; Cheryl La Bash, co-chair, National Network on Cuba; Maggie Vascassenno, Los Angeles Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice; and others.

It also included PPA page editor Charlene Lady J. Jenkins, a founder of “What’s Up Baltimore,” whose Baltimore grassroots network was shut down as a result.

In addition, 16 individual activists’ profiles were disabled, which means that close to a dozen other progressive pages and groups were frozen when their administrators were disabled, including the Baltimore Harriet Tubman Solidarity Center, ICE Out of Baltimore, the Prisoners Solidarity Committee, Youth Against War & Racism, and Baltimore and Maryland Amazon Workers. 

Sharon Black said: “Facebook’s disabling of pages and the accounts of major activists who have not violated community standards is meant to silence and censor our voices. The Peoples Power Assembly has played a significant role in the Baltimore Black Lives Matter protests in the summer and more recently opposing Trump’s effort to overturn the election. On Dr. King Jr.’s birthday holiday, we held a car caravan to Jessup Correctional Institute and the Howard County Immigrant Detention Center to demand justice for prisoners and detainees.” 

Berta Joubert-Ceci, founder of the Women’s Fightback National Network/Red Nacional de Mujeres en Lucha and Women In Struggle, said, “It is appalling — the cowardice of Facebook in silencing the voices of women and progressive people who struggle for justice and a better life for all.”  Joubert-Ceci is also an organizer of the International Peoples’ Tribunal on U.S. Colonial Crimes in Puerto Rico.  Her personal page used to connect with the Puerto Rican movement was deleted along with Women In Struggle.

Attorney Summerfield concluded, “We intend to fight this!  This includes waging a public campaign to demand that the pages of all activists and the groups they represent are reactivated.  We intend to use every avenue at our disposal, including legal remedies, to stop the censorship of voices that are too often marginalized.”

Groups are urging people to contact Facebook at

Twitter: @_Finkd (Mark Zuckerberg); @Facebook @guyro (VP Integrity @ Facebook)
Email: ZUCK@FB.com; info@support.facebook.com and zuckerberg@fb.com
Phone: 650-543-4800 or 650-308-7300
press@osbadmin.com

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“Russian Hackers Broke Into Federal Agencies, U.S. Officials Suspect,” was the Dec. 13 New York Times headline on a report by David Sanger.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin said the hack is “virtually a declaration of war.” U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio said that “America must retaliate, and not just with sanctions.” A Reuters headline said, “Biden’s options for Russian hacking punishment: sanctions, cyber retaliation.”

What’s really going on?

1. What is the role of the media?

The report on the hack in the New York Times said that Russia did it, even though none of the agencies reporting the hack cited Russia in any way.

David Sanger’s report said the official story is that Russia hacked into U.S. government networks.

That became the story used by all the big media in the U.S. For example, NBC followed with a report that the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “has not said who it thinks is the ‘advanced persistent threat actor’ behind the ‘significant and ongoing’ campaign, but many experts are pointing to Russia.”

Sanger has written multiple pieces blaming Russia for hacking, much like what he and his colleague, Judith Miller, did leading up to the U.S. war on Iraq, insisting on the presence of weapons of mass destruction — weapons that never existed.

Sanger was also an originator and promoter of the false claim of a Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee and top officials in the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign. That accusation was used as a distraction after it was learned that WikiLeaks was about to publish emails that showed how Clinton and the DNC had intervened to block Bernie Sanders.

Too many still believe the Russia hacking and Trump campaign conspiracy story. But, like the weapons of mass destruction, it never happened.

2. What happened?

About 18,000 organizations around the world downloaded a software update for the SolarWinds Orion network management tools that contained a hidden software tool that opened a backdoor into any system running Orion. That was reported by SolarWinds on Dec. 14. 

The SolarWinds Orion software is used by nearly all Fortune 500 companies, all of the top 10  telecommunications companies, all five branches of the U.S. military, and all of the top five accounting firms. SolarWinds software is used by more than 300,000 companies and government agencies around the world. 

According to Microsoft President Brad Smith, of the 18,000 organizations that downloaded the backdoored app, only 0.02% were actually accessed through the backdoor, that is, only 40 corporations or agencies. Most were in the U.S., but not all.

Of the 40 institutions accessed through a follow-up hack, 44% were tech companies and 18% were government agencies. The rest were other kinds of private companies.

Microsoft’s Smith says that this kind of operation is typically done by private cybersecurity companies.

Smith writes: “One illustrative company in this new sector [private cybersecurity companies] is the NSO Group, based in Israel and now involved in U.S. litigation. NSO created and sold to governments an app called Pegasus, which could be installed on a device simply by calling the device via WhatsApp; the device’s owner did not even have to answer. According to WhatsApp, NSO used Pegasus to access more than 1,400 mobile devices, including those belonging to journalists and human rights activists.”

3. Who did it?

The actual security reports on the attack say no source for the hack can be identified. There is no evidence that Russia was involved. If there was, the media would have presented it instead of attributing the charge to anonymous sources.

The hack was discovered by the network security company FireEye. “The highly evasive attacker” used “difficult-to-attribute tools,” FireEye said. Neither FireEye nor Microsoft could identify any source for the “difficult-to-attribute” intrusion.

Max Abrahms, an international security professional and author of a book on terrorism, said on Twitter: “‘The U.S. government did not publicly identify Russia as the culprit behind the hacks, first reported by Reuters, and said little about who might be responsible.’

“You know this story will be retold as all 17 intel agencies 100% certain Putin is behind it.”

A second Tweet by Abrahms added:

“American Media:

“1. Punish Russia

“2. Possibly continue investigating whether the Russian government carried out the cyberattack

“3. Only report evidence corroborating the media’s priors that Moscow was behind the attack

“4. Find additional rationales to punish Russia.”

4. What was the hack?

The hack was in some ways very simple. The SolarWinds Orion software is used by companies and agencies to centrally monitor IT systems. It provides information on the internal systems being run by the company. It is a system used to monitor network and server performance. 

A SolarWinds adviser warned the company that it was an “incredibly easy target to hack.” Ian Thornton-Trump, who now works as the chief information security officer at Cyjax, told Bloomberg News that he’d warned SolarWinds in 2017 of its vulnerability. According to the Bloomberg report, access to the Orion software distribution server that delivers system updates used the password “solarwinds123,” which was publicly visible until sometime in 2019.  

The hacking software that was put on the SolarWinds Orion distribution server was newly developed, according to FireEye. It was not built using hacking tools that were developed by the U.S. Defense Department’s National Security Agency (NSA) that were leaked in 2017 and have become the primary tools used for spying operators outside the U.S.

The capability to develop these kinds of spy tools is held primarily by the NSA, along with Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and Israel. China and Russia have some capability. Microsoft’s Brad Smith suggests that it is likely a private cybersecurity company that is involved. 

Despite the lack of evidence that points to a specific actor, the U.S. media immediately blamed Russia for the spying attempt.

5. Was this an act of war?

Cybersecurity and legal experts say that the hack would not be considered an act of war under international law and most experts consider it a routine act of espionage. Espionage is internationally allowed in peacetime. 

To qualify as an act of war, United Nations resolutions and other sources of international law require the use of force or destruction. In this case, there has been no loss of life or damage of any kind to the infrastructure. The hack has been for data collection only. The intrusion has not reached any systems on the specially protected “secret” networks.

The hackers gained access to the U.S. Treasury Department’s unclassified systems but really just saw what the system was doing, the applications running and that sort of thing.

“At this point, we do not see any break-in into our classified systems,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said on CNBC. “Our unclassified systems did have some access. I will say the good is there’s been no damage, nor have we seen any large amounts of information displaced.”

Breaking into unclassified government and corporate networks, reading other people’s emails — that’s spying. That’s the kind of cyber spying that the National Security Agency does 24 hours a day against Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and many more.

“Warfare implies violence, death and destruction,” said Duncan Hollis, a professor of law at Temple University specializing in cybersecurity. Hollis and other experts said the attack appears to have been carried out to steal sensitive U.S. information, and should be viewed as espionage.

“Simply stealing information, as much as we don’t like it, is not an act of war — it is espionage,” said Benjamin Friedman, a policy director at the think tank Defense Priorities.

The U.S. is the primary purveyor of espionage in the world. As Edward Snowden revealed, the U.S. Defense Department’s NSA is engaged in this kind of data collection on a global scale as well as in the U.S. 

There is a difference between espionage and war.

Take it from Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general and military theorist whose “On War” is required reading at West Point. Clausewitz wouldn’t consider this “war” either, says Tom Mahnken, a veteran of long service in the Navy and civilian Pentagon posts who now heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Clausewitz defined war as “an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will,” Mahnken noted. “What remains essential to war is that it is meant to compel an adversary — to achieve political objectives. That’s not what this hack is about: It is a classic intelligence-gathering operation.”

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Oliver Vargas traveled with Evo Morales as he made his triumphant return to Bolivia following his exile after last November’s U.S.-backed coup.

The return of Evo Morales to Bolivia on Monday, November 9, one day after President Luis Arce’s inauguration, marked the formal end of last year’s U.S.-backed coup. What does his return mean for Bolivia, and for the world? Is he just a former president who the media will turn to periodically for comment? Is he yesterday’s news to his party? The answers to those questions remain unclear, but what is clear is that his three-day return tour was a statement that he intends to provide strong leadership for social movements in Bolivia and abroad.

Corporate media, both national and international, have been promoting a narrative that Morales is somehow in conflict with the incoming government of Luis Arce. A recent piece in the New York Times stated, “Mr. Morales return now risks undermining Mr. Arce’s efforts to bring the nation together to overcome the crisis,”’ and Reuters classified Arce as being “in Evo’s Shadow.”

Of course, Bolivia’s coup government knew that Evo Morales would strengthen, not weaken, any future MAS government. They understood that he was, and is, the leader of Bolivia’s powerful social movements. They knew they had to keep him out of the country, so they piled on more than 20 criminal charges and a warrant for his immediate arrest if he ever set foot on Bolivian soil. The charges included terrorism, sedition, genocide, and more.

Morales was forced to escape to Mexico after the coup, he then moved to Argentina where he was also given asylum. The absurdity of the charges was proven when the coup regime, through its own hubris, took them to Interpol in an effort to force Morales’ adopted country to hand him over. Of course, Interpol rejected the two attempts to place a ‘red alert’ on Morales, as they considered the charges against him to be political and without any legal basis.

Thrown out by international bodies, the legal persecution against Morales also collapsed at home. Just after the October 18 election results handed a victory to MAS, the power of the regime to pressure Bolivia’s courts immediately evaporated, and his arrest warrant was lifted just days after the election.

The stage was now set for his return to Bolivia. The 9th of November was a carnival fit for a king. He crossed the border on foot, from the Argentinian town of La Quiaca to the Bolivian town of Villazon with tens of thousands of supporters ready to receive him. As one of the many reporters there, I was naive enough to believe that the crowds would be kept at bay by the union activists from the Chapare region who were the designated security, but I quickly lost my good position as the masses of assembled supporters immediately overwhelmed the burly men who were supposed to form a protective ring around Evo.

Looking to the future

Our cameras jolted about as we were dangerously squashed by the sheer weight of those trying to touch him or at least take a photo. His victory parade went from the border to the town’s central plaza, about five blocks from the bridge through which he entered.

When asking those at the rally what Morales meant to them, the answers were not describing a loved, but has-been figure, most spoke in the future tense. Juan, a miner from Potosi, said, “We have to receive him and make sure he gets here ok, because he’s our leader, at both the national and international level. I want to salute [President] Arce and [VP] Choquehuanca, but our true indisputable leader is Evo Morales Ayma and he always will be.”

BREAKING: Evo Morales has crossed over the Quiaca-Villazón international border, marking his return and the social movements’ victory over the 12 month coup. pic.twitter.com/leIi8pPHrW

— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) November 9, 2020

A union activist from Argentina crossed the border for the Villazon rally and told me that “Evo is a Latin American leader and he’ll be the key for building a unified continent that’s strong, sovereign and for the people, for workers. That’s why we’re here, this concerns us too.

Morales’ first speech in Bolivia, delivered at the plaza in Villazon, struck a similar tone, discussing the future rather than reminiscing about past glory. “We have to keep working, our task now is to protect President Arce and our process of change, because the right doesn’t sleep and the empire is always looking at our natural resources, but we use our experience to go forward even stronger.”

So how does he plan to go about doing that? Morales is not just another private citizen. He has now assumed his role as the President of the 6 Federations of the Tropico, the powerful Chapare region rural workers union that he led throughout the 1990s and from which he founded the MAS. He’s also still the president of the MAS, the Movement Towards Socialism. He’s not the leader of the state, but he is the political leader of the ruling party.

A hero’s welcome

Following the Villazon rally, Morales and his comrades, and those of us covering the tour, jumped into our vehicles and sped away for what was the beginning of a long and physically taxing three-day road trip. Gone were the days of Evo being shipped around in a helicopter. After more than eight hours of driving through the freezing Potosi highlands, we got to the rally in the mining town of Atocha, making only a brief stop before getting back in the car for another hour to the town of Uyuni, arriving at 11:30 pm. Considering the rally was supposed to take place at 6 pm, and that temperatures had now dropped to 7 degrees celsius, I assumed that the event had been called off or that everyone would have gone home. I was wrong. Thousands were densely packed, filling the entire square.

Huge crowd for Evo Morales in the town of Uyuni at 11.30pm, 7 degrees celsius. This is where Bolivia’s lithium reserves are, the people here have been fighting off the coup regimes attempts to privatize their natural resources. pic.twitter.com/cuzivibu9y

— Ollie Vargas (@OVargas52) November 10, 2020

We got to know the grueling schedule that has long been the norm for Evo. Throughout his time as president and before, he’s been famous for working from 4 am to midnight, without taking weekends off. That night, we all got to bed at 3 am and had to be up and ready before 7 am for his morning press conference, during which he addressed the issue of the country’s lithium reserves, referencing Elon Musk’s Twitter outburst regarding his participation in the coup. Morales stated clearly:

The coup was for lithium, imperialism doesn’t want us to develop value-added products within Bolivia, they want the transnational corporations to take it all.”

He then explained that just last week he had meetings with Argentina’s Science Minister to draw up a binational plan to process the natural resource. Of course, he isn’t a government official so he cannot sign off on any agreement, but his participation in such meetings is evidence of his relationship to the new MAS government, assisting where possible, but with the newly elected executive firmly in control. That approach is in accordance with what Luis Arce laid out in an interview with the BBC when he stated that “Evo Morales is very welcome to help us, but it doesn’t mean he’ll be in government.”

Those in the media desperately searching for an example of Morales overshadowing the new government, or of Morales being left out in the cold, are still seeking evidence of it. Meanwhile, Evo continues his work on what was always his stated goal, to help Luis Arce, and to strengthen the MAS from his position as a social movement leader and president of the party.

The rest of the caravan was equally taxing, driving the whole day through Potosi to Evo’s home village of Orinoca in Oruro, where he visited his childhood home constructed of dried mud and a straw roof. Orinoca, though, is not his only home.

Evo Morales went to his hometown in Oruro yesterday and danced with his people. Due to poverty, his family then migrated to the Trópico of Cochabamba where he became a union leader. He’s now back in the Trópico for a huge rally later today in his political home. pic.twitter.com/tgo4e4jVOP

— Ollie Vargas (@OVargas52) November 11, 2020

As a child, his family left the village, driven out by the extreme poverty that most rural Bolivians faced during the twentieth century. They finally settled in the Chapare region, where Morales became the leader of the coca-growers union during the struggle against the presence of USAID and the DEA in the region.

After a very short rally in the nearby city of Oruro, we drove overnight without stopping to his Evo’s political home, the Chapare, also known as the Tropico of Cochabamba. Arriving at 5 am the next day, Morales rested for just two hours before heading out at 7 am for meetings with local senators and mayors.

Giant rally in the Trópico of Cochabamba to welcome home Evo Morales. One year in exile, but now back as leader of Bolivia’s social movements. pic.twitter.com/1uKqOm2rR6

— Kawsachun News (@KawsachunNews) November 11, 2020

What came after was the giant closing rally in Chimore Airport, the airbase in the Chapare region where Morales left for Mexico last year. More than half a million people filled the landing strip where he delivered a blistering speech laying out his politics:

We are anti-imperialist, that’s not up for debate. But sisters and brothers, listen to me closely, it’s not about being ‘populist’ or ‘progressive’ or ‘in solidarity.’ If you’re not anti-imperialist then you’re not revolutionary. Get that in your head brothers and sisters.’’

What does Evo’s future hold?

The dust has now settled, with no more huge rallies nor travel by car. Evo has set up base in the town of Lauca Ñ in the offices of the 6 Federations of the Tropico and home to their union’s media outlet, Radio Kawsachun Coca.

The large crowds are no longer gathering, but the real political work has begun. Every hour has been filled with private meetings with every local leader of the MAS from each region of the country. Though, just as important, has been the international work.

Morales has been receiving delegations from the indigenous movement in Ecuador, as well as the principal worker’s unions of Argentina, where they put the call out for a Latin America wide congress of social movements, with the purpose of creating a new international indigenous organization and launching projects for regional integration on the basis of ‘plurinationalism’ and anti-capitalism. After launching the call for the international congress, Leonidas Iza, a leader of Ecuador’s indigenous CONAIE organization, said of Evo ‘’We feel represented by him, he’s not just recognized in Bolivia, but in all the continent.”

It’s clear that Morales has a future as a political leader in Latin America. Freed from the bureaucratic trappings of power, he can guide social movements at a national and international level, using the experiences he’s accumulated successfully leading social struggles to power, and helping defeat a coup after just one year. Those achievements alone make him an obvious figurehead for a project of unification of the Latin American left in particular. Those around the world looking to replicate such success could do worse than to turn to him as a figure that can orientate and provide leadership to those who need it.

Oliver Vargas is a British-Bolivian journalist covering the ongoing coup in Bolivia for MintPress News. His writing has appeared in teleSUR, Redfish and The Grayzone among others.

Source: MPN News