Former Bolivian President Evo Morales meets with supporters during his campaign trail. | Photo: EFE

By Robert Roth, Haiti Action Committee

On February 29, 2004, the democratically elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti was overthrown by a violent coup.  This was the second U.S.-sponsored coup against a popularly elected Aristide government, the first one taking place in 1991 after he had served only eight months in office.

Orchestrated by the United States, France and Canada, and then sanctioned and enforced by a United Nations military occupation, the 2004 coup forced President Aristide, his wife and colleague, Mildred Trouillot Aristide, and their two children into exile, and removed more than 8,000 elected officials. Thousands more were killed, raped or forced to flee their homes.  The country has still not recovered.

The coup shattered the work of the most progressive government in Haiti’s history.  In the period of governance by Fanmi Lavalas, the party founded by President Aristide, more schools were built than the total constructed between 1804 and 1994. Twenty percent of the country’s budget was mandated for education.  Women’s groups and popular organizations helped coordinate a literacy campaign that brought over 320,000 people, mostly women, into literacy classes in over 20,000 literacy centers. The minimum wage was doubled. A powerful initiative was undertaken to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS.  Health clinics were established in the poorest communities.  The government also launched an aggressive campaign to collect unpaid taxes owed by the wealthy elite.  Aristide disbanded the notorious Haitian military, and empowered women’s and victims’ groups to bring cases against the military for its use of rape as a political weapon.

In the months after the 2004 coup, hundreds of thousands of Haitians courageously demonstrated their support for Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas political party, raising five fingers in a dramatic call for him to complete his five year term. Their resistance has never stopped.

The current upheaval in Haiti stands as a sharp rebuke to those who plotted and carried out the coup in 2004.  The value of the gourde has plunged, the price of gasoline and kerosene (used for lamps and cooking in most Haitian homes) has soared, food insecurity has spiked, and the current president, Jovenel Moise, now rules by decree.  He and his PHTK party have overseen the theft of more than 4 billion dollars from Venezuela’s Petrocaribe program, in which Haiti was able to purchase oil from Venezuela at a discount and then sell it at market price.  The resulting funds were to be targeted for infrastructure, health care, and education; instead, billions ended up “missing” or in the overseas bank accounts of government officials. The despised Haitian Army has been reconstituted, readying itself to commit yet more human rights violations….

For more information, visit www.haitisolidarity.net

For first-hand investigative reports on the Lasalin Massacre, see https://www.nlg.org/report-the-lasalin-massacre-and-the-human-rights-crisis-in-haiti/

and

Sojourner Truth Radio: Massacres in Haiti

https://www.dropbox.com/s/kjzb90ouh50lo45/REVISED_Final_9.10am.mp4?dl=0

To support the grassroots movement in Haiti, please donate to the Haiti Emergency Relief Fund at www.haitiemergencyrelief.org

Free Chrystul, Free Us All: A Liberatory Gathering

ALSO:

Kenosha, March 16, 2020: Pack the Court for Chrystul

ALSO:

Douglas County, March 16, 2020: Solidarity Picket for Chrystul Kizer

https://bit.ly/3co10sf

By Cassandra Devereaux

“….In 1969 Fred Hampton, Sr. the charismatic Black Panther Party deputy chairman was shot around a hundred times by Chicago P.D. in his home, in his bed, laying next to his pregnant partner. This murder was part of the notorious COINTELPRO, or Counter Intelligence Program used by the FBI to break Black, Brown, and progressive peoples’ movements. A charismatic orator, Hampton famously said, “Socialism is the people. If you’re afraid of socialism, you’re afraid of yourself.”

The revolution is in the hands of the people. This is why I, in the spirit of my socialist forebears, say that revolutions are won from the ground up, by the people for the people. That is why I say that candidates like myself are not, ourselves, the revolution. You are. We are. The revolution is the people. The revolution is us.

Therefore, it is with revolutionary love I speak with you today, and I know that when we leave this park and go our own ways, we will spread our revolution joining across lines that the powerful hope might divide us. Our revolutionary task today is to build solidarity. With solidarity, no system is too formidable to withstand us. We will house all, we will end the rule of fear, and we will win humane flourishing for all.

Again, my name is Cassandra Devereaux, and I am running for California State Assembly, District 14. You can find me online at cassiedevereaux.org and on Facebook and Twitter by following @CallMeCassieD

As the Spanish slogan goes, ¡Venceremos! Together, we win!”

Cassandra Devereaux speaking at a press conference in front of the Vallejo Police Department on Jan. 22, 2020. | Photo: Terri Kay

Medical team in Wuhan. | Photo: Cheng Min/Xinhua

https://fighting-words.net/2020/03/01/coronavirus-and-medicare-for-all/

By Chris Fry

The current COVID-19 pandemic, better known as Coronavirus, as of Feb. 27, has infected more than 82,732 people worldwide, causing the deaths of some 2,813 people. First detected in Wuhan, China, it has spread to at least 52 countries on six continents, including the U.S. with 60 confirmed cases. With Boss Trump having slashed public health funding and firing hundreds of workers, it is clear that the U.S. is unprepared to deal with this crisis that medical experts say is bound to explode.

Currently testing for the virus can only be done at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta. Today a person in California who suffered for several days and who was not tested because she did not meet Trump’s testing criteria of having travelled abroad or being in direct contact with someone who has, finally was diagnosed with Coronavirus. This means that she caught it from a “community contact”.

The Trump’s regime’s response to this emergency, based on protecting stock prices on Wall Street, has been a dismal failure. An article in the Washington Post revealed:

“A whistleblower at the Department of Health and Human Services is seeking federal protection after complaining that more than a dozen workers who received the first Americans evacuated from Wuhan, China, lacked proper training or protective gear for coronavirus infection control.”

As this crisis unfolds in this country, where millions of poor and working people avoid seeing a physician because of the high cost, it is clear that enhanced Medicare for all, making health care a human right, is absolutely essential to deal with epidemics like Coronavirus. As an article in the New Republic put it:

Leaving 27.5 million people uninsured is a public health crisis that will only worsen as temperatures rise. Medicare for All won’t solve the structural inequalities making people sick, which will require a far broader array of policy and investments in everything from housing to social services. But to protect public health in a warming world, universal health care is a no-brainer.

Bernie Sanders and his supporters should be commended in their call for enhanced Medicare for All. That proposal should be supported by every progressive. Free medical care would provide everyone the opportunity to report their symptoms and be tested for this dangerous microbe. Even outside of the current Coronavirus crisis, a study in the medical journal Lancet reported that Medicare for All would save 68,000 lives per year. But universal health insurance is only the first step to fight an epidemic like Coronavirus.

China first encountered this infection last December. Workers throughout the country were mobilized in sanitation and food distribution campaigns to quarantined households. Thousands of health care workers heroically cared for tens of thousands of patients, many sacrificing their lives to do so. Workers labored for the speedy construction of hospitals and the production and distribution of drugs and protective gear. As a result, the rate of new infections has declined sharply.

Why has China been able to organize this effort? It is because the PRC is a workers state, a term coined by Karl Marx 150 years ago to describe the Paris Commune, where the workers rose up and established a government run by and for the working class, not the capitalist class. That is why workers in China, like those in Cuba, Korea and Vietnam, operating within a planned economy that is designed to meet the peoples’ needs rather than amassing profits, are motivated to work together to deal with natural disasters like hurricanes, earthquakes and epidemics like the Coronavirus outbreak.

The failure of the Trump regime and U.S. imperialism to deal with this threat is clear for all to see. Panic has gripped Wall Street while bigoted evangelical VP Mike Pence is placed at the head of the “team” to deal with this crisis. Testing kits, protective gear, drugs, and most of all, effective strategies are in woefully short supply….

After being in the vaults for many decades the martyred scholar’s lectures in Tanzania provide a glimpse into his thinking on socialist transformation – African American History Month Series Number 4 Book Review

https://bit.ly/39hFGmi

By Abayomi Azikiwe

Title: The Russian Revolution: A View From The Third World

Author: Dr. Walter Rodney

Publisher: Verso Books, 2018

During the late 1960s and the 1970s, the University of Dar es Salaam in the East African state of Tanzania was a center of Marxist thought on the continent. After the overthrow of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) of Ghana on February 24, 1966 which was founded and led by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the ideological thrust of the African Revolution shifted to other geo-political regions. Nkrumah’s emphasis on African unification and socialism had drawn the ire of United States imperialism and its allies.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was able to coordinate and facilitate a military and police led coup against the CPP installing a pro-western regime which brought Ghana back into the sphere of world capitalist system both ideologically as well as politically. During that same year, Dr. Walter Rodney, having completed a Ph.D. in historical studies at London University, took a teaching position at University of Dar es Salaam where he researched and wrote his most famous work, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, published in Tanzania in 1972.

With so much interest in Socialism and Pan-Africanism, the origins of the world movements against capitalism and imperialism would be an important topic pursued by young scholars and their students. Consequently, a coterie of intellectuals and students in Tanzania debated fiercely the character of the struggle for socialism during this period and the character of the Ujamaa system inside the country itself.

President Julius Nyerere was given the Kiswahili name of “Mwalimu”, meaning “teacher.” This had been his occupation prior to leading the independence movement in Tanzania to independence in 1961. Nyerere realized that it was not enough to just become an independent state that the society had to be liberated from the economic and political legacies of colonialism. In 1967, the Arusha Declaration was issued by the ruling Tanzania African National Union (TANU) which outlined the need to build socialism in the largely agricultural country. (https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nyerere/1967/arusha-declaration.htm)

The Arusha Declaration was widely read and analyzed in this era. Its very existence was bolstered by the presence of organizing and educational structures established in Tanzania by the leading national liberation movements on the continent such as the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), Southwest Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), African National Congress (ANC), among others.

Rodney, who was born in the South American nation of Guyana in 1942, had grown up in a progressive working class family which was committed to educational achievement. He would attend the University of the West Indies and later travel to London to research and write his dissertation on the impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade in West Africa’s Guinea coast.

Lectures Series Addressed Broad Scope of Russian Revolutionary Historical Questions….

https://fighting-words.net/

https://bit.ly/2uPGLmk

By Abayomi Azikiwe

1969 had been a critical year for the Black Panther Party (BPP) with hundreds of its members indicted and incarcerated on trumped-up charges while numerous activists had been killed as a direct result of the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). During this year, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) J. Edgar Hoover had declared the Black Panther Party as the most serious threat to national security in the United States for decades. (https://vault.fbi.gov/Black%20Panther%20Party%20)

Such an exaggerated and clearly politically-motivated accusation required a political response from the by far most targeted revolutionary organizations working inside the country. The Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention (RPCC) was such an effort to build a broad based alliance encompassing Left-wing and progressive forces which had emerged over the previous decade.

On December 4, 1969, 14 Chicago police officers under the supervision of Illinois State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan had engineered a raid into the BPP residence on Monroe Street on the city’s west side. The attack was set-up by the Chicago Field Office of the FBI in an effort to assassinate African American leader Fred Hampton who was gaining national recognition for his organizing work in the Windy City.

The police intervention resulted in the assassinations of Peoria chapter Captain Mark Clark and Fred Hampton, Sr. Other occupants of the apartment were wounded, arrested and later charged with several felonies which were completed fabricated.

The assassination of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were an outcome of the role of the FBI in undermining and neutralizing the BPP. Informant William O’Neal, a career thief and informant, had been recruited by the local FBI special agent Marlin Johnson to infiltrate the Chicago chapter and to find any information which could be used to criminalize their work.

Fred Hampton had stated in 1969 that the BPP was committed to remaining a vanguard organization operating publically in major urban areas such as Chicago. Hampton said the Party would not be driven underground and in order to remain relevant had to enhance its outreach and community program to build support from the grassroots.

After the militarized police attacks on Party chapters around the U.S. during 1968-69, the BPP organized a National Revolutionary Conference for a United Front Against Fascism in July 1969 in Oakland, California. The event attracted thousands of activists while the Party put forward its program for ensuring that the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, the Justice Department, FBI and local police agencies would not be able to destroy the burgeoning revolutionary Left movement around the country.

In 1970, the BPP was facing extreme repression. Co-founder Huey P. Newton was serving a 2-15 years sentence for manslaughter against an Oakland police officer stemming from a shootout in October 1967. Chairman Bobby Seale and Central Committee member Erika Huggins, the wife of slain Panther John Huggins, were facing the possibility of the death penalty in a murder conspiracy case in New Haven, Connecticut.

Many within the Left were attempting to demonstrate solidarity with the Panthers. At Yale University in New Haven, students called for mass demonstrations and teach-ins in early May of 1970. In response to the atmosphere inside the country and the state, the president of Yale closed the University for the weekend in honor of the demonstrations saying that Black revolutionaries in the U.S. were incapable of receiving due process under the law.

While over 50,000 people congregated in New Haven, the U.S. administration was concerned that the BPP and other revolutionary organizations would break out of the attempts to isolate them among the youth and other segments of the populations. Therefore, the concept of the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention arose as a means to counter the Nixon program of repression and counter-revolution.

RPCC Holds Three Gatherings in 1970….

https://fighting-words.net/

Book Launch: A is for Asylum Seeker / A de Asilo

Madison Reunion de Membresia / Membership Meeting

ENGLISH BELOW

Reunion de Membresía
Centro Hispano
810 W Badger Rd
Madison, WI 53713
Abierta al público

Acompáñanos para nuestra junta de membresía mensual.
———
Membership Meeting
Centro Hispano
810 W Badger Rd
Madison, WI 53713
Open to the public

Join us for our monthly membership meeting!

Also, April 5: Madison Reunion de Membresia / Membership Meeting