Meet at Library Mall by State Street at 1 P.M. March to State Capitol
Marrch would like to welcome the college students (and everyone who would like to attend) back with a speak out and March to the Capitol for Abortion rights. We’ll start by the library for a speak out then March to the Capitol.
In 2019 a survey found 1 in 4 UW-Madison undergrad women experienced sexual assault. The number is higher for lgbtq students (63% surveyed).
Statistically for female under grades Roughly 15,640 female undergrads, 11% are raped = 1,720 students, 20% get pregnant = 344 abortions needed
People deserve agency over their body no matter what circumstance. They should have a choice whether they want to carry a child. We understand that college party culture goes hand in hand with rape (most unreported) and rape goes hand and hand with unwanted pregnancy. We understand it is your body, your choice no matter what, for your duration at Madison.
Come make your voices heard with Marrch. A group that is ready to welcome you, March with you, and support you during your time in Madison.
It is with profound sadness that we share the news of the passing of Ken Greening.
Ken was a proud member of the Plumbers Local Union 75 since 1969 and he became a life-time member (50 year member) in 2019. Ken valued his trade and the strength of a union job. Ken will always be remembered as a valued and dedicated member of the Milwaukee Area Labor Council, serving as sergeant-at-arms for many years.
From volunteering at Laborfest to his support of Latino immigrants through his activism with Voces de la Frontera, staffing and greeting delegates at monthly delegate meetings to laminating delegate cards and knocking on union member doors, “whenever the call goes out, wherever there is a need, Ken Greening was there.”
Ken Greening without a doubt was a superb human being. Throughout his life, Ken took care of those who need it without any expectation of recognition. Ken embodied solidarity and the best of organized labor.
The Milwaukee Area Labor Council remembers Ken Greening for his years of dedicated service to the labor movement and the community. The Labor Council and the greater Milwaukee Area are better for having Ken as a dedicated activist and union member.
This Black August, join a Black Alliance for Peace webinar, “Black August In Action: Local Organizing for Political Prisoners.” PLEASE REGISTER HERE: bit.ly/BlackAugust2022
SPEAKERS: * Too Black, The Defense Committee to Free the Pendleton 2 * Tone the Organizer, BLM Boston * Kamau Franklin, Community Movement Builders
While various countries such as Mexico and Venezuela were concretely assisting Cuba in overcoming the unprecedented disastrous fire consuming the Mantanzas oil storage facility, the United States cynically sat on its hands, instead asking Havana to call them. As Mexico, for example, sent 16 flights with over 45,000 litres of foam and other equipment for fighting the raging inferno, the United States provided the tremendous contribution of a telephone number for Cuba to call for technical advice! Presumably, it was Cuba who had to cover the cost of the call.
Of course, the very generous offer of help is quite familiar to workers and the ever-growing impoverished masses in Canada and the United States, who when seeking relief from looming homelessness, hunger and general immiseration are told to call a number only to begin a soul crushing, spirit destroying and emotion shattering odyssey: A dead-end that leads to no relief, succour or refuge in a dog-eat-dog society where everyone fends for themselves, so characteristic and defining of profit driven and capital centred societies.
Yes, call me is a refrain that should resonate with so many. But unlike the promise of Blondie’s 1980 song, no help will be arriving anytime soon. Here-in lies the rub, the clear connection between disenfranchisement, austerity and marginalisation at home, and imperial plunder, exploitation, and war aboard.
While, Washington may plead ignorance, saying Cuba (less than 100-miles away) never exactly stated what assistance it needed, what good neighbour just stands by and watches a house next-door catch on fire instead of immediately rushing to help?!
But, of course, Cuba has stated time and time again exactly what is required from Washington:
Remove Cuba from the arbitrary and unilateral U.S. State Department’s State Sponsors of Terrorism list! A list that makes it impossible for Cuba to obtain credits and loans from international financial institutions and economic assistance from other counties who fear U.S. reprisals and retaliations. A list that Washington uses as justification to openly intimidate and sanction international entities that already have economic relations with Cuba, pressuring them to break those relations with the island nation.
End the criminal and internationally condemned economic war against Cuba, which is the principal obstacle to Cuba’s social and economic development, causing damage exceeding $100 billion!
Cease the relentless campaign of disinformation, aggression, and subversion of Cuba’s legitimate constitutional order!
Call me, indeed! The ignominies and disgrace of the empire are writ large and know no bounds.
*Isaac Saney is a Cuba specialist at Dalhousie University, Canada, and the author of Cuba: A Revolution In Motion and the forthcoming, Cuba, Africa, and Apartheid’s End: Africa’s Children Return. From 2008-2022, he served as co-chair and national spokesperson of the Canadian Network On Cuba, with which he now serves in an advisory capacity.
*Cheryl LaBash is co-chair of the National Network On Cuba in the United States and works in Washington, D.C. on national mobilization and legislative advocacy to end the U.S. economic, financial, and commercial blockade of Cuba, and writes on current Cuba related developments.
Last Thursday, August 4, untrained, unlicensed, third-party security providers contracted by OUSD violently assaulted parents and community members at Parker School, injuring at least eleven people and sending four to the ER. Meanwhile, the district has fired at least two educators who are active participants in the fight against school closures, including the Parker Liberation in East Oakland.
Click here to read more about OUSD’s continued pattern of repressing teachers’ political speech.
If you don’t think a public school district should be sending private security after community members or firing teachers for protesting school closures, make your voice heard! Send a letter directly to OUSD leadership demanding they stop firing teachers and attacking the community! Use the pre-written letter, or edit it however you see fit.
Thank you for support and stay tuned for more updates!
Protests in Taiwan as U.S. escalates tensions with China using Pelosi visit.
By Fighting Words Staff, August 6, 2022
Let’s be perfectly clear! Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s trip marks a huge step towards the Pentagon reestablishing nuclear armed U.S. military bases in Taiwan, an island just 100 miles off the mainland coast of China.
Yet the corporate media here is blasting the People’s Republic of China (PRC) for its strong reaction to this huge provocation, including China suspending meetings with the U.S. military and sanctioning Pelosi.
Just as the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine is meant to place NATO military bases there, including replacing the Russian Federation naval base in Sevastopol in Crimea with a U.S. base, so it is with Taiwan.
The arch-militarist website, “GlobalSecurity.org”, provides a history of U.S. military presence in Taiwan:
In the 1950s, after the Korean War and before Vietnam, Taiwan was an important naval and air base for the United States. In 1958 President Eisenhower deployed 20 Matador TM-61 nuclear cruise missiles to Tainan Airbase as tensions in the Formosa Strait smoldered. The 17th TMS on Taiwan (Formosa) was the first TM-61A missile unit deployed in Asia. Numbers deployed, operating locations, and operational history for this unit are unknown. The Matador, a winged guided missile that travels a distance of 600 miles at a speed of 650 miles an hour, was capable of sending an atomic warhead to the key Communist coastal air bases opposite Formosa. Only in 1960 did the United States first base nuclear warheads on Taiwan; by 1970, about 200 nuclear weapons under US sovereign control were in place on Taiwan.
Taiwan was also a major center for gathering intelligence on Communist China. Pilots of the Nationalist Air Force flew U-2 missions out of Taiwan and the information gained from agents and other sources on events in mainland China was turned over to American intelligence units on the island. The first two U-2Fs were delivered to the ROCAF in July 1960, another two in December 1962. During 15-years of reconnaissance operations code-named Project Razor, ROC pilots flew 102 missions that penetrated the bamboo curtain, including overflights over North Korea and Northern Indochina. Surface-to-air missiles shot down five U-2s over Mainland China.
The number of United States Taiwan Defense Command troops stationed on the island of Taiwan gradually rose to 30,000 from 1968 to 1969. Americans provided support and communications facilities for forces in Vietnam and the western Pacific. By 1971, there were about 9,000 Americans in Taiwan. The majority of these serve several squadrons of transport aircraft at two American bases. Other units include staffs at the Taiwan Defense Command, United States Air Forces Taiwan, and an Army Communications unit. There was a small naval contingent on the island.
Taiwan is the same distance from the mainland as Socialist Cuba is from the U.S.. In 1962, Kennedy set up a naval blockade around Cuba when the Soviet Union established a nuclear deterrent there to prevent the invasion of that country, which brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. What gives Biden the right to do that now in Taiwan, which historically has always been part of China?
In the early 1970s, the PRC became embroiled in conflicts with both the Soviet Union and Socialist Vietnam. Sensing an opening for sharpening this conflict, Nixon and his main henchman Kissinger began to draw down the U.S. military presence in Taiwan. The U.S. stopped blocking China’s entry into the United Nations.
By 1979, under the Carter administration, all large U.S. military bases in Taiwan had been removed. The U.S. accepted the “One China” policy, meaning that Taiwan was recognized as part of China. U.S. corporations flooded into China to extract riches from its huge labor force. There were imperialist dreams that China would turn away from socialism altogether and adopt capitalism like Russia did, with the U.S. holding supreme hegemony.
But that never happened. So, the Obama-Biden administration adopted a policy of resuming “containment” of China, sending the Seventh fleet in the area and creating anti-China trade alliances in the region.
The Trump regime stepped up the anti-China strategy, with massive tariffs on Chinese goods (which are paid for by the workers and oppressed here and aggravate the rate of inflation that we are now confronting). Trump’s advisor Sterve Bannon announced that the U.S. and the PRC would be in open war in a few years, during the second Trump term.
When Biden took over, instead of rolling back these anti-China policies, he has escalated them. The tariffs continue despite this new wave of inflation. Chinese scientists and researchers continue to be harassed and arrested on false charges for supposedly stealing secrets. Technical advances from not only the U.S. but other countries are arrogantly forbidden to China by the U.S.
Biden “let it slip” that if the Taiwan regime declared independence, the U.S. would offer direct military support, ending the 40-year policy of “deliberate ambiguity”.
China’s “Silk Road” trade and development policy has caught favor by developing countries around the world, and very few continue to recognize the Taiwan regime, much to the chagrin of the U.S. State department.
The U.S. ruling class is united on this anti-China policy, even though they are still amassing huge profits from Chinese labor. They fear the PRC’s ability to control inflation, to not fall into the Great Recession, to enhance the growing prosperity of the Chinese working class. They fear this successful example of socialism by the second most powerful economy in the world.
It is time for the anti-war and entire progressive movement to recognize this danger, and to mobilize our forces to take the streets.
No U.S. military in Taiwan!
Remove the U.S. fleet from China’s coast!
Remove the tariffs on Chinese goods!
Stop the sanctions against the PRC!
Stop the racist attacks on Chinese and other Asian people!
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched several, coordinated, pre-dawn raids on the offices of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and its Uhuru Movement affiliate in St. Petersburg, Florida and St. Louis, Missouri. The home of Omali Yeshitela, chairperson of the APSP, was also targeted at 5 AM in St. Louis, marked by the use of flash grenades and drones. Computers, phones and other records were confiscated but no arrests were made at this time.
The APSP was founded in 1972 at the height of the anti-Vietnam war and Black Liberation movements. It has been active since in many struggles against racism and imperialism, publishing the “Burning Spear” newspaper.
The FBI is trying to link the APSP with a Russian national who isn’t even inside the United States at present and who is accused of being an agent of a foreign government. APSP leader Yeshitela had traveled to Moscow in 2014 to participate in an international conference against U.S. imperialism.
But it is the strong opposition to the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine that the APSP has taken that appears to be a main reason for the attack on this organization. Of course, many left and progressive organizations have also blamed the U.S. and its puppet NATO alliance for provoking the outbreak of hostilities between Ukraine and the Russian Federation.
Many fear that this targeting of the APSP may be only the beginning of attempts to silence growing opposition to Biden’s Ukraine military adventure.
“Scores of FBI and local police agents broke down doors, broke windows, used flashbang devices and drones and threatened residents with automatic weapons. They stole computers, hard drives, phones, office equipment and files—both business and personal. They temporarily detained APSP Chairman Omali Yeshitela, APSP Deputy Chair Ona Zené Yeshitela, APSP AgitProp Director Akilé Anai, APSC Chairwoman Penny Hess, and APSC members Kitty, Jesse and Amanda.”
In the days following the FBI raid many organizations issued solidarity statements condemning the repressive actions by the government. These included the Black Workers for Justice, the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, the United National Antiwar Coalition, The National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice among others.
The actions of the U.S. government and its Federal Bureau of Investigation should come as no surprise. For many decades the FBI played a leading role in persecuting socialist and communist organizations, as well as trade unionists and anti-racist/national liberation groups.
It is well documented that the FBI, under its fanatical director, J. Edgar Hoover, made every effort to undermine, smear and destroy militant leaders of the Black liberation movement in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was especially targeted by the FBI as was Malcolm X. Many believe that the FBI was involved in the assassination of both leading figures.
The FBI Cointelpro operation was directed against the revolutionary Black Panther Party. The tactics used included sophisticated campaigns to turn organizations against one another as well as numerous mass arrests and frame-ups. Straight out murder of Panther leaders, as in the case of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in Chicago in 1969 were not uncommon.
The anti-Vietnam war and anti-imperialist movements were also regular targets of the FBI’s dirty tricks.
Current efforts are underway to suppress the growing opposition to the U.S. role in causing and continuing the Ukraine war. Now, over 5 months after the start of the Russian Federations Special Military Operation public support is waning, especially after Congress passed authorization to funnel $50 billion in military aid to the right-wing Ukraine regime that was installed in 2014 by a CIA/State Department coup d’etat.
U.S. mass media have become willing tools of the Pentagon giving out totally one-sided and often erroneous reports in an effort to rally support for this proxy-war. Knowledgeable military analysts, such as former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, are not allowed on major networks due to his views contrary to the Pentagon and White House. Ritter was briefly banned from Twitter in an attempt to keep the public from hearing him.
The German government is targeting anyone who may publicly support Russia’s attempt to protect the ethnic Russians in the Donbas region and keep Ukraine from allowing NATO bases on Russia’s border. According to Aljazeera.com the Interior Ministry announced “The Russian war of aggression on the Ukraine is a criminal act, and whoever publicly approves of this war of aggression can also make himself liable to prosecution,”
“German reporter Alina Lipp faces criminal charges and three years imprisonment because she reported on the situation in the Donbas region, where she sympathized with Russia. Currently living in Donetsk, Lipp saw her bank account frozen and raided for €1.600 without further explanation. German authorities say that she may not defend herself in court as that may thwart the investigation.”
The deteriorating military situation for Ukraine and the escalating confrontation with China are intensifying the frustration of the U.S. ruling class. It is entirely possible that the attack on the African People’s Socialist Party is only the opening shot in a broader offensive to stifle the voices of the workers and oppressed peoples here at home. That type of thinking will, no doubt, lead to broader resistance and revolutionary struggle.
Wisconsin Bail Out the People Movement 