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Presente:

Tragically, Donald J. Trump is the president-elect of the United States of America.¹ As we watched state after state turn red, we could not escape the realization that the country was taking a sharp turn for the worst.

To be clear, we’re under attack and we’re scared for our families and loved ones. And we know we must resist, and change the culture that allowed Trump to rise to power.

The stakes have never been higher. We have work to do and we need to be powerful enough to organize and refuse to support Trump’s regime and its heinous agenda.

Pledge to resist Trump, defend those who will be targeted by his hate, and please ask your friends and family to do the same because no one should go it alone.

Our nation faces one of the greatest threats we’ve ever known. Trump represents a clear and present danger for our communities that must be confronted urgently. If left unchecked, Trump will continue to create a hostile and dangerous environment for all immigrants, Muslims, Latinxs, Asians, Native Americans, women and Black Americans—an environment which will result in tragedy.

Join the resistance.

For those building a movement for social justice, the real question is not what went wrong in the election, but what do we do now? In the face of a government that will force deportations, engage in rabid sexism, cultivate overt appeals to white nationalism and enforce brutal crackdowns on protesters, we have a duty and responsibility to act, to build, and to resist hate, fear, and violence. Planning, discussions, and details will come soon, in the meantime, we will not share your information.

We call on you to pledge to resist the agenda Trump promises his supporters — fascism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and hate.

Thank you for all you do and ¡adelante!

– Matt, Favianna, Oscar, Erick, Reetu, Erica and the Presente Action team.

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By: teleSUR, http://bit.ly/2eid0kI

teleSUR reached out to several young activists around the U.S. to hear their views on why elections don’t really change things.

The U.S. elections have left millions out of the equation. Many people, especially young people, vow to continue organizing after Nov. 8 and refuse to settle for the antics of the 2016 presidential campaign. Hailing from the East, West, Midwest and South of the U.S., these youth talk about fighting the whole rotten system.

Rebecka Jackson is a Los Angeles-based artist and activist. She works in multimedia, film, theater and dance. She is a member of Workers World Party. Rebecka is currently in production for “Up.Rise. The Film,” a documentary investigation of Baltimore’s police violence.

Nov. 8 brings up a series of questions for voters with good intentions. What is the greater evil — a rapist or a person who has sent armed militants to rape and murder thousands all over the globe? Who is more dangerous — a person who would allow Muslims in the U.S. to be profiled and degraded or a person who gives Israel funding to enforce apartheid?

IN DEPTH:
US Election

We have the progeny of the Klu Klux Klan against a flag-waving war hawk. Ultimately, anyone with the slightest bit of foresight knows the inevitability of either presidency: corporations win, more poor people die.

Under either candidate, the loss of life will likely be in the millions. Neither candidate has hinted at trying to terminate police brutality, oil or coal production, factory farming, cobalt mining or deforestation. In order to keep these industries booming it cost millions of lives and more abject slavery. On top of that, both candidates would need to continue to fuel the war economy. This will cost the world countless lives as the imperialist invasion through the Middle East and the Global South continues.

Activist and organizers are left with one choice — socialism. Both at the ballot box and in the streets. Socialism rises naturally from the people when they have been pushed to the edges of their humanity when they realize how inherently broken the current system is. The elections should only be a tool used to push awareness for socialism through third party candidates. Nov. 8 can only serve as the last mock exercise of a broken oligarchy in its attempt to cover yet another spurious election.

It is critical to join together and reach out to the oppressed around the world who suffer from U.S. imperialist rule. U.S. organizers must learn how to be strong, supportive allies, they must be fully aware of the destruction the next president will indubitably cause. They must learn how to combat and deflect this destruction.

The elections are a meaningless passing of the baton between cronies — all playing for the same team but fighting over the machine’s spoils. The destination is the same.

This leaves activist to clean up the mess from this little pageant. It means standing on the frontlines to defend immigrants, going face to face with their police goons, disrupting business as usual, divesting from their products and showing that we are growing and unafraid.

—

Lamont Lilly is the 2016 Workers World Party, U.S. vice presidential candidate. In 2015, he was a U.S. delegate at the International Forum for Justice in Palestine in Beirut, Lebanon.

The U.S. presidential elections are just a day from being over. The bad news is that many people in the U.S. are finally coming to grips with our feelings of disillusionment, distrust and discontent. On one hand, there’s Donald Trump, an openly racist misogynistic bigot. On the other, there’s Hillary Clinton, a renowned warmonger whose foreign policy decisions have brought death to millions, particularly throughout Central America, Africa and the Middle East. Both are agents of Wall Street and the U.S. corporate elite.

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In North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee, early voting numbers have declined drastically. Several counties and local municipalities in North Carolina are currently being sued by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for voter suppression. North Carolina is the same state that was just fighting against stiffer voter ID laws back in July.

In the city of Charlotte, N.C. community members are still seeking justice for the police murder of Keith Lamont Scott. On Sept. 20, Scott was murdered by the Charlotte Police Department as he sat waiting in his car to pick up his son from school. The shooting, featuring three armed police officers and unarmed Keith Scott, was captured on live video.

There was also North Carolina’s repressive House Bill 2, which isn’t just a “bathroom bill” that discriminates against LGTBQ people; it also prevents local municipalities from increasing the minimum wage.

It’s so important to have all of these struggles represented with compassion and understanding. What is happening here in the U.S. South is not an isolated regional phenomenon. Such disregard for justice, human life and human need, is unfortunately, occurring worldwide. Mass solidarity is the only way that the poor and marginalized are going to create the change we need. That change, starts right here, in the United States.

We know that no matter who wins this upcoming election, we’re going to have to stay in the streets and continue organizing. Nov. 8 will come and go. Unfortunately, state-sponsored violence and police brutality will still be here. Poverty and unemployment will still be here. Racism and anti-Blackness will still be here. Fuck the elections! As activists, we have to stay vigilant and keep organizing.

—

Jefferson Azevedo, a Brazilian immigrant, is a student at Los Angeles Trade and Technical College, where he is the president of the Black and Brown Student Club. He was an organizer with the Southern California Immigration Coalition and is a member of the International Action Center.

This Tuesday, Nov. 8, millions of people will briefly come out of their routine to cast their votes in another U.S. presidential election. Latinx voters — like Black voters — are being used and led to think that the winner of the election will make a significant change in their lives for better or for worse. This event — which Donald Trump, in violation of the rules established by the U.S. oligarchs, declared was rigged — is nothing but a popularity contest to decide who will be the general director of U.S. imperialism and thus continue the exploitation and oppression of people of color, and all people, at home and abroad.

Although many voters and non-voters may disagree, the situation of Latinx people or any other people of color will not improve regardless of who wins this election. If the elections were good for people, they would not exist or be allowed in the U.S. It is a system created to give the impression of an impartial democracy that represents the will of the people, but the question is: What people? Certainly not the economic refugees who come from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the world devastated and destroyed by Western imperialism and its agents on the pretext of promoting freedom and democracy.

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Certainly not the unemployed youth in inner cities who, instead of filling a job, are filling the prison cells under the schools to prisons pipeline. Certainly not undocumented workers who are forced to leave their homes, risk their lives crossing the desert and suffer many types of physical, emotional or sexual violence, to find a way to make ends meet for their loved ones. It only benefits one type of people: the rich.

Thus, with all the facts pointing to the farce known as U.S. presidential elections, Latinx and all other people must realize that their vote is useless. Instead, the energy and time devoted to this symbolic gesture can be used to build and organize a movement aimed at combating the causes of the problems and injustices that are making their lives miserable.

It must be a grassroots movement in association with all oppressed, poor and marginalized people. Students, trade unions, community organizers, progressive organizations, prisoners, undocumented workers, LGBTQ people and all those that fight against the brutality of the elite security forces, commonly known as the police or armed forces.

The demands of the movement should undoubtedly include a decent wage, amnesty for all migrants, an end to the death penalty, free education, universal health at all levels, housing, an end to all wars and military occupation and an end to the police and their brutality. Will Clinton or Trump do any of these things if elected? If your answer is no, I have another question for you: what’s holding you back from organizing?

—

Danielle Boachie, 28, is from Ghana in West Africa, currently living in Chicago. She’s a graduate student in Women’s and Gender Studies/African Diaspora Studies. As an activist, she focuses on anti- capitalist and anti-imperialist work and is particularly invested in lifting the voices of queer and trans women of color, and Africans both in the diaspora and on the continent.

In the Midwest, the heroic struggle of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, along with other Indigenous peoples, against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline is rooted in the fundamental right of the self-determination of oppressed nations. This fight for access to land and clean water mirrors the dark history of colonial violence on this continent. The U.S. was founded on land stolen from Indigenous nations, and created by the labor of enslaved Africans.

The U.S. government waged a relentless genocidal campaign against native peoples through mass forced migration, broken treaties, and slaughter. Even today, Native Americans are seven times more likely to be killed by police than whites. Current ruling class propaganda simply erases Indigenous people, pretending they do not exist. The Standing Rock struggle has shown that nothing could be further from the truth.

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It is no surprise that neither presidential candidate of the U.S. capitalist two-party system has shown solidarity with Standing Rock. The Democrats and Republicans will protect the interests of the capitalist class until they are forced by revolutionary struggle to do otherwise. Furthermore, Donald Trump has personal funds invested in the oil companies involved in DAPL, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign has received millions in donations from the same banks that are funding the pipeline. In this election, there is only a “lesser evil” if Native Americans are lesser people, with a lesser right to water and life.

After a cop gunned down 23-year-old Sylville Smith in the North side of Milwaukee, a historic center of the Black community known as Sherman Park, eyewitnesses state that youth in the immediate area rebelled in self-defense against this latest atrocity of police terror.

The Coalition for Justice, a Milwaukee community organization, released the following statement at the time: “What happened last night was not the result of greed or an ignorant display of anger as some have called it, but rather pain and frustration built up from over 400 years of oppression … We are one of the most segregated cities in the United States. We are the worst city for Black children to grow up in. We are a city of inequities, of under-education, of unemployment, of oppression, of drug abuse, of violence.”

Capitalism has left the Black youth in Milwaukee, Madison and elsewhere in the state — along with other oppressed people and a growing number of poor and working-class whites — with bleak futures and low-wage or no jobs. Black communities are occupied and beloved family members are gunned down by the police.

As the Coalition for Justice wrote on Aug. 14: “What happened last night was a revolt and an uproar, not just a disturbance. The media has no problem to classify us at thugs … The people are angry. The people are fed up, and the people are demanding their freedom.”

—

Scott Williams is a high school teacher, a social justice union activist, and an organizer with Workers World Party. He organized demonstrations against the Republican and Democratic National Conventions this summer.

Philadelphia is the poorest major city in the U.S., with its majority Black and Latinx communities the casualties of gentrification, police terror, mass incarceration and poverty. Over 200,000 Philadelphians live on less than US$5,700 per year. Thirty-six percent of children live in poverty — a number which has skyrocketed since 2008. Over 30 schools have closed in the last three years, meanwhile, the 11,000 members of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers have gone over 1,200 days without a raise.

The Democratic Party runs Philadelphia. They have a virtual one-party dictatorship over local politics. Yet the politicians have no answers for the endless crises facing our people.

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Clinton or Trump: America Heads Further into the Abyss

As a young teacher and activist, I am constantly facing a barrage of Clinton supporters who tell me of the horrors of a Trump presidency. Trump certainly represents racism, fascism, and sexism. My union tells me about how “Hillary shares our values.”

I assume that means that our shared values include the importance of dropping thousands of bombs on independent countries like Libya, only to sum up the experience by saying “We came, we saw, he died.” Or perhaps we share her values expressed during her six years on the Board of Directors of Walmart. Clinton loves Wal-Mart, saying in 1990, “I’m always proud of Wal-Mart and what we do and the way we do it better than anybody else.” I assume that she means she is proud of how effectively Walmart exploits its workers here and abroad. To be clear, I don’t share any of these values.

Mass solidarity and struggle is the only way out. On Nov. 1, 4,700 transit workers in Philadelphia launched a massive strike, fighting for dignity, respect and safety at work. These workers have promised to continue striking through the election, damaging the Clinton machine’s voter turnout in a city which votes over 90 percent Democrat. This is the type of independent struggle which is needed. These courageous workers inspire me to keep talking to my coworkers, my friends, and my community members. No matter who is elected, our fight against the racist billionaire class must go on without pause.

http://pflp.ps/english/2016/10/29/pflp-salutes-native-and-indigenous-struggle-at-standing-rock-nodapl/

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine extends its strongest support and solidarity to the indigenous resistance at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline and the settler colonial project of genocide and plunder in North America.

“It is no surprise that the United States and Canada, built on the genocide of indigenous peoples and the plunder of their land and resources, are today the strongest settler colonial partners of the Zionist state engaged in its own settler colonial project of destruction in Palestine,” said Palestinian leftist writer Khaled Barakat in an interview with the PFLP media office.

“The indigenous strugglers at Standing Rock are defending indigenous land and water, the resources that have been confiscated and polluted for centuries by a settler colonial capitalist project that has ravaged indigenous lives, land and resources. They are defending the very existence of their people with their valiant resistance. As a Palestinian national liberation movement, we salute these indigenous strugglers and all who stand alongside them at Standing Rock confronting the militarized forces of the settler colonial state and their privatized agents,” said Barakat.

“It is also no surprise that G4S has been involved in providing private security for the construction of the destructive, invasive pipeline through indigenous land, threatening the water and the safety of the Standing Rock Sioux and the rights of indigenous nations. This same corporation is involved in providing security to the Canadian mining corporations that plunder indigenous land for mineral wealth around the world and destroy indigenous land for the so-called ‘tar sands’ that threaten the future of the land itself. It is the same corporation that sells equipment and security services to the Israel Prison Services that imprison over 7,000 Palestinians in the service of the Zionist settler colonial project, and the same company involved in the mass incarceration of children and youth – especially youth of color – in the US, and in the deportation of migrants in the UK, Australia, US and elsewhere,” said Barakat.

“The hundreds of indigenous nations – including Palestinian participants – coming together in Standing Rock exemplify an unceasing history of hundreds of years of resistance in the face of a genocidal project,” said Barakat. “Today’s U.S. empire that bombs and threatens the lives of people around the world, especially in the Arab world, Asia, Africa and Latin America, was built on settler colonialism, the genocide of indigenous people, and the enslavement and genocide aganst Black people. Throughout its history, it has been confronted by fierce resistance.”

In the face of settler colonial genocide and destruction, the land and water defenders at Standing Rock are defending all of us. We see them reflected in the Palestinian mothers holding tight to their olive trees targeted for settler destruction; in the Palestinian farmers who resist in the so-called “buffer zones,” and the fishers who brave warship fire to preserve Palestinian fishery, in the land and water defenders of the world who resist the vicious onslaughts of settler colonial capitalism. The PFLP salutes these land and water defenders on the front line for all of our struggles around the world.

“There have been hundreds of arrests, the use of massive military equipment and the force of the state in order to enforce the Dakota Access Pipeline through sacred burial grounds and attempt to force indigenous land and water defenders from their land. The use of mass arrests and incarceration as a mechanism to confiscate land and resources and suppress liberation movements is of course not surprising. It is a technique that we see used in Palestine, keeping thousands of Palestinian political prisoners behind bars for struggling for the freedom of their people and their land,” said Barakat. “In fact, many aspects of Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine were developed in light of the colonial techniques used in the US and Canada.”

The PFLP extends its revolutionary greetings and salutes to all of the Native and indigenous peoples defending their land and water, affirming their existence and resistance over centuries of struggle. We express our strongest solidarity with Native and indigenous struggles for self-determination and liberation. We encourage all Palestinians, especially the Palestinian community in the United States, to continue to develop and build upon the efforts of Palestinian youth in support, solidarity and participation in the Standing Rock camps of struggle, and in developing long-term, sustainable, mutual joint struggle and solidarity with Native liberation movements.

We also encourage and call upon the Palestine solidarity movement to build upon the caravans to Standing Rock and cross-country actions and protests to deepen its involvement in the struggle to defend indigenous land, and note in particular the protests in New York and elsewhere linking the struggle of Palestinian prisoners and the call to boycott G4S with the defense of Standing Rock against arrests, attacks and privatized and state repressive power. It is necessary to thoroughly confront US imperialism and settler colonialism as part and parcel of standing with the struggle of the Palestinian people for liberation and return. There is a long history of connections and common struggle between our liberation struggles, together in the global movement to defeat settler colonialism, Zionism and imperialism, that we must nurture and build upon until victory and liberation. http://pflp.ps/english/

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