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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never forget Nat Turner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hanged for the eight-hour day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Long live the People’s Republic of Angola!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We hope to be remembered as the government in which the Bolivian people rose up to recover democracy, dignity, peace, growth, and social justice,” said Luis Arce in his presidential speech, from the premises of the Legislative Assembly. At his side were the Vice President, David Choquehuanca, the Presidents of the Senate and the House of Representatives, Andrónico Rodríguez and Freddy Mamani respectively.

At that time, the center of La Paz was a celebration in which social, indigenous, mining, union, and militant movements of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), from different parts of the country, surrounded the Plaza Murillo. The celebration had begun the night before, at the vigil of the organizations held near where the event was to take place.

The early presence of the movements was due to the permanence of threats from a sector of the right until the last hours. On Saturday night, a new concentration and march took place in La Paz under the slogan of a request for an audit and suspension of the takeover. Although at that time it was clear that the transfer of command would take place and that the social forces of the right were mostly exhausted, the alerts to possible unforeseen events were maintained until the last moment.

The political scene was one of the central points of the new president’s speech. He referred to what had happened since the coup d’état as “an internal and systematic war against the people, especially against the most humble … death, fear and discrimination were sown, racism intensified (…) the persecution of leaders of the MAS and of the social movements, there were deaths, injuries, imprisonment, persecution, isolation and exile.

There was a minute’s silence for those who had been killed and a constant acknowledgement of the massacres in Sacaba and Senkata, which took place a few days after the coup in November last year. The new president referred to them as “symbols of dignity and resistance”, he paid homage to “the fallen, to the heroes of the people who have recovered democracy”.

Several international representations were present at the inauguration, such as the government of Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia, Spain, Venezuela, Uruguay, Iran, Chile, the Arab Emirates, as well as delegations of political parties from different countries, as well as Bolivian parliamentarians and movements.

Jeanine Añez, who had announced her departure a few days before to the city of Trinidad, in the department of Beni, was not present, as expected, refuting a possible escape from the country. The one who was present on behalf of the opposition was the leader Carlos Mesa, second place in the October elections, who recognized Arce’s victory from the beginning. However, both he and his parliamentary group left the premises before the speeches.

“We must overcome the division, hatred, racism and discrimination among compatriots, no more persecution of freedom of expression, and no more judicialization of politics, no more abuse of power … no more impunity, justice brothers, but justice has to be truly independent,” stated Choquehuanca, in a message of dialogue and unity present in both speeches.

The new government takes office in a context of instability. While those who formed the de facto government are in retreat and may flee the country to avoid being held accountable, and Carlos Mesa seeks to become the main opposition, there is a sector, led in part by Luis Fernando Camacho, third in the elections, who embodies the most radical wing of the right. This sector does not recognize the validity of the results or the inauguration. What will they do from now on? This is one of the main questions.

“These minority sectors raise the flag of democracy only when it is convenient for them, and when they do not resort to destabilization, violence, or coups d’état to take power,” said Arce, who referred to the use that these sectors made of “paramilitary groups,” which carried out actions until Friday, in Cochabamba or Santa Cruz.

The government faces a triple crisis, mentioned by Arce: democratic, a product of the coup and the de facto government; health, due to the pandemic, and economic. Añez’s administration left numbers in the red, with a fall of 11.1% of the GDP, a fiscal deficit of 12.1%, a deficit of 8.7% of the Federal Treasury, and a debt of 4.2 billion dollars contracted in the last eleven months. “A day goes by without taking action, a day that complicates the situation,” the president affirmed.

The social expectation with the new government is great. Both by those who mobilized to Plaza Murillo, like the 36 indigenous nationalities, the organization of the Ponchos Rojos that were part of the presidential security, or the Central Obrera Boliviana, as well as by broad layers of the population that in less than a year faced the impacts of a recession, pandemic, and a de facto government that threatened, persecuted, and never fulfilled any of its promises.

The new president referred to the international issue and affirmed, as he had already said, that he will focus efforts on building the “political unity of the diversity of Latin America and the Caribbean” through Celac, and Unasur in the South American region, “as a space for integration and a mechanism for policy coordination, where we can all meet regardless of the political orientations of governments. The new Bolivian government emerges as a possible element for bringing together and working with different parts of progressive Latin America.

The inauguration begins a new moment in the process of Bolivian change: “we are committed to rectifying what was wrong and deepening what was right,” said Arce. Within this new stage, challenges of the internal order appear, such as requests from movements for a change of leadership, as well as threats from destabilizing forces that have already indicated that they will not return – or so it seems – to a democratic path.

Sunday was a celebration in La Paz, with Evo Morales now in the country, Bolivia leaves behind one of the darkest pages of its recent history with a democratic victory and a new popular government.

Source: Internationalist 360°

The MAS spokesperson questioned whether there is an inter-institutional agreement that TSE President Salvador Romero signed with the armed forces and the police, keeping the details confidential.

La Paz, Oct. 12, 2020 — The spokesperson of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), Marianela Paco, charged before the international community and the country that a “second coup” against democracy is underway with several aspects that she detailed.

She said that her party fears a total absence of transparency in the quick count of the votes of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), the return of the same observers from the Organization of American States (OAS), the declaration of a “curfew” for six days and the custody of the voting records by the military and police who participated in last year’s “coup d’état”.

“To date (the TSE) has not shown the Bolivian people whether the rapid count system is internationally certified, as was the case with last year’s count system; it has not shown what changes have improved this count system from last year. If the results are shown by minutes and with photographs, if the results are shown by table or enclosure, they have not shown us how that system is going to work. Therefore, there is no transparency”, denounced Paco on behalf of MAS.

The MAS spokesperson questioned whether there is an inter-institutional agreement signed by the president of the TSE, Salvador Romero, with the Bolivian Armed Forces and Police, the details of which are in reserve.

“Those who have ordered the burning of the minutes and the electoral tribunals again want to guard our votes; then the population is unprotected. For that reason, I denounce before the international community this lack of transparency and lack of guarantees to the claim,” she said in a press conference.

She assured that with these solid arguments the international community is alerted to take a stand and prevent these people from returning to Bolivia because they were responsible for taking away democracy, peace and development from the country.

The elections will take place on Sunday, October 18. Six candidates are qualified; Jorge Quiroga, from the Free Alliance21, has just declined, and earlier Jeanine Áñez, from Juntos, had withdrawn.

Source: Internationalist 360°

Boeing’s rush to sell its 737 Max aircraft ignored design flaws and other safety concerns, according to a Sept. 16 report from Congress. Three hundred and forty-six people were killed in crashes of the plane in Ethiopia and Indonesia.

Former Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg was aided in a coverup by the heads of the Federal Aviation Administration.

“Boeing — under pressure to compete with Airbus and deliver profits for Wall Street — escaped scrutiny from the FAA, withheld critical information from pilots and ultimately put planes into service that killed 346 innocent people,” said House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairperson Peter DeFazio. “What’s particularly infuriating is how Boeing and FAA both gambled with public safety in the critical time period between the two crashes.” 

Even after the Oct. 29, 2018, crash of Lion Air Flight 610, in which 189 people were killed, the FAA refused to ground the 737 Max. The tragedy occurred 13 minutes after the plane left Jakarta, Indonesia.

Only when Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed on March 10, 2019, in which 157 people were killed six minutes after leaving Addis Ababa, did the FAA take action.

Capitalist competition led to corporate murder. Boeing’s archrival Airbus had announced plans in 2010 to bring out a new plane — the 320 Neo — that would be more fuel efficient. Airlines’ profits are tied to fuel prices.

Boeing executives were confronted with the prospect of American Airlines placing a big order with Airbus. So they cancelled plans to build a brand-new aircraft that would have taken a decade to accomplish. 

Boeing instead launched a frenzied program in 2011 to bring out an updated version of its 737 model that first flew in 1967. Bigger, less fuel hungry engines would be attached to its wings. 

The problem is that the larger engines would have scraped the ground if they were put below the wings. Boeing’s solution was to place the jet engines higher and more forward on the aircraft.

This remedy changed the aerodynamics of the plane, making it liable to stall in flight and then crash. Boeing created a defective software program called the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System that was supposed to address this danger.

Concealing risk

Boeing hid the existence of this MCAS software that could override a pilot’s decision. It wasn’t even mentioned in the pilots’ manual.

Doing so would have forced pilots to undergo training, an expensive undertaking for airlines that might have ordered from Airbus instead. 

That’s criminal and Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg should have been jailed. Instead he took home $23.4 million in 2018, although he was fired the following year because of public outrage.

The FAA is now trying to rush the grounded 737 Max aircraft back into service. In a Trump-like stunt, FAA administrator Steve Dickson is scheduled to fly the plane over Seattle on Sept. 30. 

That’s reminiscent of the late New York Gov. Hugh Carey offering to drink a glass of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyl) in 1981 to “prove” the toxic chemical used in fracking wasn’t really dangerous to human health.    

Such theatrics won’t impress pilots and whistleblowers. Former Southwest Airlines pilot Gary Woolman said, “The caution and warning system in the 737 is as archaic as the airframe design. I flew jets made far earlier than the first 737 with a better system.” 

Boeing whistleblower Curtis Ewbank stated that the FAA’s proposed Band-Aid type fixes don’t tackle the problems that led to the two crashes. Even the FAA’s own engineers don’t believe the agency’s proposed changes to the aircraft are sufficient.

A crisis for U.S. imperialism

Over 400 of the grounded 737 Max airplanes are being stored around Seattle. So much space is needed that some of Boeing’s parking lots are crammed with the aircraft. 

That $40 billion plus of dead inventory isn’t just a financial crisis for Boeing. It’s also big trouble for U.S. imperialism and its military-industrial complex.

That’s because Boeing is the biggest U.S. exporter. Its long dominance of world airliner production was based on decades of lush war-profiteering contracts with the Pentagon.

It was Boeing that built the B-29s that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incinerating hundreds of thousands of people, including at least 30,000 enslaved Korean workers.

Boeing’s B-52s dropped huge quantities of bombs on Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, each of which destroyed a football field-sized plot of land. Thousands of Laotian people had to live in caves to survive.  

As the backbone of Gen. Curtis LeMay’s Strategic Air Command, nuclear armed B-52s threatened the world. Only the development by the Soviet Union of a nuclear deterrent, at great cost, saved humanity from World War III.

The first commercial jet plane wasn’t built in the U.S. The British-made de Havilland Comet made its first scheduled flight in 1952. Starting in 1958, France’s Sud Aviation sold 282 of the Caravelle jetliners to companies including United Airlines. 

It was Boeing bringing out its 707 jetliner that was a game changer. Its development costs were largely paid with tax dollars since it’s basically the Air Force KC-135 tanker with seats.

European big business responded to the virtual U.S. monopoly on passenger aircraft by setting up Airbus in 1970. By 2005, it was selling more planes than Boeing.

Boeing is a union-busting outfit that has forced International Association of Machinist members out on strike six times between 1948 and 2008. These struggles included a 140-day strike in 1948 and a 57-day strike in 2008. 

Management has also set up a nonunion plant in Charleston, S.C., and fought off a union organizing drive there.    

The 737 Max disaster endangers the jobs of 150,000 Boeing workers. The people need to take over Boeing to put safety first instead of profits.

People are outraged that Trump nominated right-wing zealot Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Especially endangered are women’s reproductive rights, rights that enable women to control their own bodies.

Revolutionaries don’t sneer at these concerns. The courts are the most reactionary part of the capitalist government. Supreme Court justices have upheld jailing children in cages because they are migrants.

Hundreds of poor people have been executed because of racist judges. Troy Davis was strapped to a gurney while he waited for a stay of execution on the evening of Sept. 21, 2011.

The Black man had been framed for the killing of a Savannah, Ga., police officer. Seven of the nine witnesses recanted their testimony. Even Pope Benedict and former FBI Director William Sessions pleaded for the execution to be stopped.

That didn’t bother the handful of Supreme Court judges who ordered Georgia’s legal lynching to proceed. The racist execution was the real start of the 2012 presidential campaign. 

The torture of Troy Davis — watching him die — was shared by his sister Martina Davis-Correia. She was fighting metastatic cancer while witnessing her brother being killed.  

Just one more liberal judge on the high court could have saved the life of Troy Davis. But Georgia was also allowed to murder the Black man because of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. 

This law severely restricted the right of Troy Davis and other prisoners on death row to file “habeas corpus” petitions in order to introduce new evidence. Joe Biden voted for it in the Senate.

Democratic President Bill Clinton signed this vicious act on April 24, 1996, which was political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal’s 42nd birthday. Abu-Jamal’s scheduled execution had been stopped the year before by the power of the people.

It was President Clinton who nominated both Ruth Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court. In one of her last court decisions, Ginsburg joined Breyer and the five most reactionary judges on the tribunal in denying asylum to Vijayakumar Thuraisingam, a farmer from Sri Lanka.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, of the American Immigration Council, described the June 25 ruling as “a devastating blow to the due process rights of asylum seekers who arrive at our border seeking protection.”   

Justice Sonia Sotomayor denounced this decision in a dissent joined by Justice Elena Kagan. Sotomayor wrote that it “handcuffs the judiciary’s ability to perform its constitutional duty to safeguard individual liberty.”  

Rights are won in the streets

Nothing was ever given to us by the wealthy and powerful.  Every right has had to be fought for.

Why did a unanimous Supreme Court outlaw school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education? It wasn’t because nine white guys in black robes had a change of heart. As California governor, Chief Justice Earl Warren had supported the racist deportation of Japanese Americans from the state.

This historic, yet limited, 1954 decision was issued as the capitalist economy increasingly needed Black workers. It was also five years after the triumph of the Chinese socialist revolution, which was a tremendous victory against racism.

Against a backdrop of anti-colonial revolts in Africa, Asia and Latin America, U.S. big business and its courts couldn’t openly defend white supremacy.

Every progressive law and court decision was the result of struggle. It was Black children fearlessly confronting police dogs and firehoses in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 that led to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Demonstrators beaten by Alabama state troopers in Selma won the Voting Rights Act.

Part of that struggle was in the courtroom. We honor the memory of those lawyers who were freedom fighters.

Charles Hamilton Houston worked himself to death preparing human rights court cases while dean of the Howard University Law School. He mentored Thurgood Marshall, who argued against segregation in Brown and later became the first Black Supreme Court justice.

Florynce Kennedy was the second Black woman to graduate from Columbia University Law School and fought record companies for ripping off jazz artists Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. She was one of the lawyers who successfully defended 21 members of the Black Panther Party in New York City facing 156 absurd charges of plotting to bomb buildings.

Ramon J. Jimenez led the fight to save Eugenio María de Hostos Community College in the South Bronx from closing. His law office was always open to help poor people.

Many more attorneys could be mentioned who fought for the people. Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela and V.I. Lenin — the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution — had been trained as lawyers.

Thousands of attorneys belonging to the National Lawyers Guild and other organizations defend the poor. NLG members working as legal observers have been arrested and brutalized during Black Lives Matter demonstrations. 

The work of all these advocates in the courtroom has depended on how strong the people’s movement has been at any particular time.

The legal magician Johnnie Cochran could not have saved Ethel Rosenberg’s life at the height of the anti-communist witch hunt. She and her husband Julius Rosenberg were framed on made-up charges of giving “atomic secrets” to the Soviet Union and were burned to death in the electric chair on Juneteenth, 1953.

Billionaires control the courts

The communist leader Vincent Copeland emphasized how profoundly anti-democratic the Supreme Court is. Nobody elects the court’s nine judges, who can serve for life, like Ruth Ginsburg did.

Copeland also pointed out that these judges were the direct representatives of the biggest capitalist families. They are groomed and monitored during their careers.

Most of the U.S. Supreme Court judges that upheld Eugene Debs’ conviction for ignoring an injunction during the 1894 railroad strike had been lawyers for the rail lines. How about that for a conflict of interest?

As a socialist leader who had won the votes of hundreds of thousands when he ran for president, Debs would later be jailed for giving a 1918 anti-war speech. He compared a five to four decision by the high court throwing out a law banning child labor to a craps game. That act of free speech was considered blasphemy.

The Supreme Court during the 1920s was just as reactionary. Its anti-labor decrees were overturned by the working-class upsurge of the 1930s.

The courage of Colin Kaepernick in protesting police brutality is more important than all the judges put together. Judge Ruth Ginsburg attacked Kaepernick for his actions although she had the decency to later apologize. 

It’s the Black Lives Matter movement with more than 20 million people who have joined in the demonstrations that is changing U.S. politics. As dangerous as Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court will be, the people can fight back.

Both the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate are undemocratic and need to be abolished. Only by bringing millions of more people into the struggle will we defeat all the Trumps.

On Wednesday, Sept. 9, the U.S. chapter of the International League of Peoples’ Struggles (ILPS) as well as the U.S. chapter of the International Migrants’ Alliance (IMA) held a webinar titled “The U.S. vs. the People’s Platform: Building an Alternative to the Two-Party System.” As a response to both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, the ILPS and IMA exposed the rotten, corporate, anti-people character of both the Democrats and Republicans and presented their own People’s Platform and Migrants’ Agenda. 

The livestream can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=357757965398449&extid=MXPVQDdRjDlqaUgn

The webinar includes a keynote speech from Margaret Kimberley of Black Alliance for Peace as well as a report from the ground in Kenosha, Wis., from Victor Garcia of Students for a Democratic Society.

The People’s Platform and Migrants’ Agenda are below: 

[pdf-embedder url=”https://struggle-la-lucha.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/ILPS_IMAWebinarSlidedeck.pdf”]

[pdf-embedder url=”https://struggle-la-lucha.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/IMAMigrantsAgenda.pdf”]

On Sept. 14, activists with the Peoples Power Assembly and delegates of the Baltimore public housing Resident Advisory Board marched and rallied for housing justice. The demonstrators demanded increased funding for public housing and an end to attempted privatization of Baltimore city public housing. For several years, the government of Baltimore City and Johns Hopkins University have been working to pave over public housing developments and replace them with condominiums for young professionals. 

In the meantime, funding for public housing maintenance and upkeep have been slashed significantly. Most egregiously, the city has refused to provide COVID-19 relief money to Baltimore residents of public housing. When the Resident Advisory Board spoke out against this failure, it was met with attacks from the city government. The Resident Advisory Board is a group of individuals who advocate on behalf of tenants of the 7,000 public housing units in Baltimore City. 

For these reasons, the demonstration outside City Hall demanded “Hands off!” the Resident Advisory Board, no more sales of public housing units, the cancellation of evictions and rent during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the delivery of 10.7 million dollars in relief funds to the Resident Advisory Board! 

Struggle-La Lucha newspaper and the Socialist Unity Party/Partido de Socialismo Unido send our heartfelt condolences to Kevin Zeese’s family, loved ones and friends, especially his life partner Margaret Flowers. His sudden death on Sept. 6 is a loss for the entire anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movement.

Zeese and Flowers co-founded Popular Resistance. Zeese will be also remembered for his sacrifices and the role he played in the Embassy Protection Collective in 2019. 

When the U.S. government under Donald Trump was poised to illegally seize the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, D.C., and hand it over to its puppet Juan Guaido, who declared himself president of Venezuela, Zeese put his body on the line and became a protector of the embassy and international law. This was in the immediate aftermath of a failed U.S. coup against democratically-elected President Nicolás Maduro.

For 37 days, Zeese, along with other protectors both inside the embassy and in the streets, faced off with the Department of Homeland Security and all sorts of other vile, racist, homophobic, violent right-wing Guaido supporters and police agencies. The state tried to starve the protectors, then turned off electricity and, at one point, even water.  But it took the forcible removal and arrests of the four protectors who remained inside, including Zeese, to end the standoff.  

The Embassy Protectors faced heavy federal charges. After a major defense campaign was mounted, the U.S. government was forced to drop the charges on all four defendants.

This became a pivotal part of the struggle in the United States to defend the sovereignty of Venezuela and to fight against imperialist war.

Before his sudden death, Zeese was working on a program around the case of imprisoned journalist Julian Assange, whose extradition trial begins this week.

We can best remember him by redoubling our efforts to end capitalist exploitation and imperialist war.

Kevin Zeese, rest in power!

As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo illegally addressed the Republican national convention from Israeli-occupied Jerusalem, U.S.-made Israeli planes launched U.S.-made missiles into the Gaza Strip.

Since Aug. 1, Israel’s U.S.-made, U.S.-paid for, Israeli Air Force has bombed the besieged enclave every night. Israel’s Navy has shut down Gaza’s fishing industry, stopping the people of Gaza from fishing their own waters.

Israel has also blocked fuel from entering Gaza, forcing its only power plant to shut down. Hospitals have only a few hours of power a day, and 120 babies on incubators are at risk. This is while the 25-mile Strip is on 24-hour lockdown due to COVID-19. 

The U.S., Israel and their collaborators in Egypt have turned the Gaza Strip into the world’s largest prison. Nearly 2 million children, women and men are incarcerated there. Their crime: being born Palestinian in the land of Palestine.

Most of the families living in Gaza were expelled from their land a few miles to the north in 1948. The beaches there are now dotted with condos and luxury hotels for Western tourists and settlers. Now, the U.S.-Israeli blockade, begun in 2007, has made the place they were driven to uninhabitable. 

The U.S. corporate media are completely silent about the nightly bombing and the intensified blockade. Washington continues to pour arms and money to the Israeli occupation regime while people here in the U.S. face devastating unemployment and budget cuts. The people of the U.S. and the world must demand an end to the bombing and the blockade. Lift the siege on Gaza now! 

Lauca Eñe-RKC-7-08-20.- Former Bolivian president Evo Morales Ayma, speaking to Radio Kawsachun Coca on the occasion of the 195th anniversary of the Armed Forces, denounced that according to his information, the government and the military are preparing a coup d’état to prevent the holding of general elections.

“Last minute information, I denounce that General Ivan Ortiz Bravo, head of the third department of the Armed Forces Command, on the instruction of the commander in chief of the Armed Forces, General (Sergio Carlos Orellana), has a coup d’état plan, for some two months, the military patriots informed me that they want to form a civil and military government, now, and they have that plan” he said.

He added that two US planes arrived a few days ago, bringing military equipment, “we don’t know if it’s a donation or a purchase, the army’s immediate response team has been mobilized” he added.

He also reiterated the accusation he made last week that snipers from the Challapata and Sanandita regiments were deployed, which he said were in the tropics and in the city of El Alto.

The former president warned that the government decided to remove the blockade; “yesterday the de facto government again prepared a supreme decree for the armed forces and police to intervene in blockades, especially in the tropics of Cochabamba and Yapacani, using 22 and 25 calibre weapons, and then to say that the demonstrators killed each other,” he said, alerting the organizations mobilized in the country.

“I have this information because there are soldiers who are not with the coup d’état, they are new generations, sons and daughters of the people, I call on them to be with their people, with their fathers, don’t risk the lives of the soldiers, and officers, They have so many people infected with the coronavirus, COSMIL has totally collapsed, and to obey a de facto government with the repression against the people, once again they have a decree ready, I don’t know if they have signed it, until last night it was ready, just like they prepared a decree for the massacre in Sacaba and Senkata.

Morales said that according to the report he has, they are preparing to take over the installations of Radio Kawsachun Coca. “They want to take over the media that reports the truth and that gives us coverage,” he said in time to ask the bases to organize themselves into defense committees or vigils, to defend the community radio stations in particular.

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Addressing the military he said, “To the soldiers of the country who accompanied me to guarantee the nationalizations, the economic project, I congratulate you on your day, to the patriotic military who are in the barracks who are thinking of their people the most, to liberate them and not to subdue them, not to repress them, repression is synonymous with domination, synonymous with foreign invasion, the armed forces have to guarantee the sovereignty and independence of the state, the dignity and integrity of the people, armed forces that do not guarantee sovereignty and independence, make a country a colony of the United States so that they can plunder the natural resources, which is why I conclude that the patriotic military, the soldiers of the fatherland who are at the service of their people, together with their people, have a thousand congratulations”.

Source: Internationalist 360°