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April 14, 2020: Fight Covid-19 Not Donbass: Online Day of Action
Fight Covid-19 Not Donbass: Online Day of Action
April 14, 2020, marks the sixth anniversary of Ukraine’s war against the people of the Donbass mining region. The war began after the people of this multinational, mostly working-class region of eastern Ukraine rejected the U.S.-supported, far-right coup that overthrew the country’s elected government in February 2014. After Ukraine began its murderous assault, the people of Donbass voted for independence and formed the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. According to the United Nations, more than 13,000 people have been killed in Ukraine’s war, including over 3,500 civilians.
TAKE ACTION:
On April 14, 2020, join people all over the world to demand #StopWarOnDonbass. Take a photo with a sign calling for an end to the war and blockade of Donetsk and Lugansk. (You can print out a sign here or make your own!) Post on social media with the hashtags #StopWarOnDonbass and #FightCovid19NotDonbass. Send a copy of your photo to <solidarityukraineantifa@gmail.com>
Send emails to Ukrainian Ambassador to the U.S. Volodymyr Yelchenko <emb_us@mfa.gov.ua>, U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Kristina Kvien <kyivacs@state.gov>, former Vice President Joe Biden <https://go.joebiden.com/page/s/contact-us> and President Donald Trump <https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/>.
Sample text:
April 14 marks six years since Ukraine’s illegal war on the people of Donbass began with U.S. assistance. More than 13,000 people have been killed. These war crimes must end! I demand an immediate end to U.S. financial, political and military aid to the Ukrainian government and its allied far-right groups. End the bombing and blockade of the Donbass region immediately. Recognize the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and adhere to the Minsk agreements.
BACKGROUND:
The largest battles ended in 2015, but the war has never ended. The Ukrainian Armed Forces and neo-Nazi “volunteer batallions” continue to routinely violate peace agreements, encroach on the borders of the DPR and LPR, and target civilian homes and infrastructure, wounding and killing innocents.
In recent weeks, as the world has struggled against the threat of the Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic, Ukraine has escalated the war once again. While the people of Ukraine suffer from austerity and the destruction of the country’s health care system, President Vladimir Zelensky continues the war in defiance of the international Minsk agreements and UN Secretary General António Guterres’ call to end military conflicts in order to combat the virus that threatens all countries.
With assistance from Washington and NATO, Ukraine carried out its first murder-by-drone on April 9, 2020, killing a 25-year-old civilian woman, Miroslava Vorontsova, in the town of Gorlovka. An elderly resident was wounded in the same attack.
The alliance of pro-Western politicians, right-wing oligarchs and fascist gangs that seized power in Kiev in 2014 received massive aid and support from the U.S. administration of Democratic President Barack Obama and Congress led by Republican Senator John McCain. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden, served as the unofficial colonial governor of Ukraine from 2014-2016, presiding over many atrocities against the people of Donbass and Ukraine, including the cold-blooded murder of more than 40 antifascists at the Odessa House of Trade Unions on May 6, 2014. The far-right Donald Trump government has continued to prop up and aid the Ukrainian regime and its war against the people of Donbass.
FURTHER READING:
This initiative is part of the international day of action called by the Communist Party of the Donetsk People’s Republic:
http://wpered.su/2020/02/19/obrashhenie-kompartii-dnr-ko-vsem-bratskim-partiyam-i-organizaciyam-v-svyazi-s-neprekrashhayushhimisya-boevymi-dejstviyami-na-donbasse-2/
We support the statement of the German Communist Party (DKP):
https://www.facebook.com/renate.koppe.50/posts/2556714561312719
For more information, contact <solidarityukraineantifa@gmail.com>
April 13, 2020: Live: Corona & Black People; Bernie’s Out; Venezuela Resists
Live: Corona & Black People; Bernie’s Out; Venezuela Resists
Join us for a Livestream Forum with special guests from around the country and world. We will be discussing the following and more:
1. Racism, jails and the Coronavirus
2. Bernie’s out, what do we do now?
3. Venezuela resists U.S. imperialism and the Coronavirus
4. Why are some countries better than others at combating the pandemic and why is the United States, the richest country on the planet, the current center of the pandemic?
Livestream links (April 13, 7 pm Central)
* https://www.facebook.com/events/2683711235239269/permalink/2684405748503151/
* https://www.facebook.com/JohnDBeacham
Guests:
** Dr. Lashawn Yvonne Littrice, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Women of Faith and Protect the Frontline: Regional Director of the National Congress on Faith and Social Justice
** Jim Kavanagh of the The Polemicist
** Jesus Rodriguez Espinoza, former Venezuelan diplomat and editor of Orinoco Tribune
** John Beacham, founder of MASS ACTION and Revolutionary Socialists for Bernie
The forum is free, and whether or not you attend, we really hope you can make an optional but very important donation to MASS ACTION at our GoFundMe (https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-mass-action) to aid all our efforts. The more support we have, the more we can do. Thanks!
Open Letter to the Government of the United States and the United Nations
Open Letter to the Government of the United States and the United Nations
Mr. Donald J. Trump
President of the United States
Mr. António Guterres
Secretary General of the United Nations
The global spread of COVID-19 has exposed the illegal and immoral practice of imposing unilateral coercive measures (economic sanctions) by the United States government against more than thirty nations. The government of the United States is now using the public distraction caused by the pandemic to intensify its military actions against the targeted nations.
The economic war against those nations had already resulted in unimaginable suffering of the people in the targeted nations even before the COVID-19 pandemic.
With the devastation of the global pandemic, the targeted countries — especially Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Syria and Zimbabwe — are finding it prohibitively difficult to protect and save the lives of their citizens in the face of the ongoing global emergency. These sanctions constitute crimes against humanity.
As a concerned citizen of the world, I call upon the United States government to:
1. End its economic sanctions against all targeted countries immediately.
2. Unfreeze the financial assets and bank accounts of the targeted countries so that they can purchase and receive the necessary food, medicine and medical equipment and supplies needed to combat the pandemic.
3. Stop all military threats and actions against the targeted countries, including the removal of U.S. Navy warships dispatched to Venezuela under the false pretense of “War on Drugs.”
4. Drop the baseless charge of “Drug Trafficking” against President Nicolás Maduro and other officials of the government of Venezuela.
5. Respect the call issued by the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, for a global ceasefire.
I call upon the Secretary General of the United Nations and the leading bodies of the United Nations to invoke the articles of the UN Charter to demand respect for international law by the government of the United States.
I also call upon the UN Security Council to lift all UN-imposed sanctions against those countries as well.
Food Workers Have Always Been Essential—Give Them What Is Theirs
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed how an economic system dependent on low-wage labor creates as many issues as it purports to solve. When profit determines every outcome of social and economic life, working people lose. This reality is on full display in our food system. The novel coronavirus and our food economy are bound together in every regard. As a result, the social and economic aftermath of the virus will have grave implications for our food system—particularly for the workers who keep it in operation. However, as made increasingly evident by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is labor that keeps our food system going. CEOs may keep their salaries and self-isolate in their homes, but it is workers from grocery stores to farm fields who have been revealed to be truly essential. By leveraging their power in a time where the entire country is looking to them for survival, food workers can build the movements that will improve their working conditions well into the future. These changes are not only necessary; they benefit us all.
Free market Food Systems and Exploited Labor
Our capitalist model of food production promotes the low wages that characterize the US labor market, and render American wage workers exceptionally vulnerable to the economic and social effects of pandemics. Since the late 1970s, unmitigated deference to the interests of the market on the part of politicians and policymakers have created the conditions for the disastrous fallout currently on display. Before the virus came roaring onto the scene, 78% of American workers were already in crisis, living paycheck to paycheck, and around 12% were already food insecure. Rev. William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, recently pointed out that “The underlying disease… is poverty, which was killing nearly 700 of us every day in the world’s wealthiest country, long before anyone had heard of COVID-19.”
The free market, profit-driven structure of our global food system depends on keeping labor costs low, resulting in companies continuously exploiting workers and denying them basic rights and protections. In these conditions, the production of lucrative commodities will always come before ecological and human health, enriching the privileged elite at the expense of the rest of us. As long as we allow the “free market” (code for corporations, shareholders, and billionaires) to dictate what is and is not tenable for our food system’s workers, the exploitation of human labor will persevere.
The conditions for such exploitation did not emerge naturally. They were created through market-driven policy. When the Federal Reserve introduced draconian monetary policy in 1979, dramatically increasing interest rates (known as the Volcker Shock) to bring down inflation, it greatly weakened labor’s power in the process. The fallout intensified the recession of the 1970s, shuttered industries, and essentially put a halt to the labor militancy that marked the previous decades, as many workers viscerally feared job losses. The subsequent free trade policies and deregulation of industries that marked the next 30 years rapidly drove down union participation. The US food system would end up mirroring the rest of the economy. Processing, warehousing, and retail in the food sector would be transformed by these new economic policies, depressing wages and conditions. New, non-union corporations came to dominate the food system landscape, effectively undermining unionized labor forces. Low wages, debt, and few benefits became commonplace for many working people. Inequality skyrocketed, shifting enormous amounts of power from the working class towards the top, eroding infrastructure and weakening democracy…. https://foodfirst.org/
John Prine – John Prine (Full Album)
Mr. Bill Withers: As I Am
United States Continues Imperialist Policies Despite COVID-19 Pandemic
https://fighting-words.net/2020/04/05/united-states-continues-imperialist-policies-despite-covid-19-pandemic/https://fighting-words.net/2020/04/05/united-states-continues-imperialist-policies-despite-covid-19-pandemic/
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Countries throughout the globe are focusing on the eradication of the COVID-19 pandemic which has infected nearly a million people and killed over 45,000. During the early phase of the detection of the virus in the People’s Republic of China, the United States administration of President Donald Trump dismissed the threat of COVID-19 and refused to implement emergency measures on a national scale.
By early April, the crisis was evident for all to witness. Millions were rendered unemployed in the U.S. where the official propaganda of the state and corporate community is that the economy was expanding at a rapid rate with no threat of recession.
At present the threat of another Great Depression on the scale, or exceeding, the downturn of 1929-1941, which only mass resistance and the implementation of the New Deal were able to ameliorate during the 1930s, is within the realm of possibility. It was only the advent of the second imperialist war of 1939-1945 which pulled the U.S. out of the Depression.
On a domestic level with the U.S. discourse very much centered on the level of benefits being given to various sectors within the economy as relates to the $2.2 trillion stimulus package approved by Congress and the president, while the role of foreign affairs has escaped public scrutiny. Healthcare workers, rightly concerned, are demanding personal protection equipment to prevent the outbreak from further spreading among physicians, nurses and other employees….
Detroit on the Front Line in Battle to End COVID-19 Pandemic
https://fighting-words.net/2020/04/10/detroit-on-the-front-line-in-battle-to-end-covid-19-pandemic/
By Abayomi Azikiwe
More than 2,000 people working in the healthcare industry have reportedly tested positive for COVID-19 in the Detroit metropolitan area sending further tremors through the already heavily-shaken region which has been identified as a major “hotspot” in the pandemic.
A spokesperson for Beaumont Hospital system said on April 6 that 1,500 of their employees have symptoms consistent with COVID-19. These numbers include 500 nurses.
At Sinai-Grace Hospital, a group of nurses staged a sit-in demanding that additional staff be hired and assigned to their shift. The nurses emphasized that there was not enough personnel to address the needs of the patients.
These nurses were then told to go home. Another nurse two weeks earlier was terminated by Sinai-Grace for raising the same concerns in a social media post.
Henry Ford Hospital announced on April 8 that over 700 of its 31,000 employees had tested positive for COVID-19. 718 patients battling the virus are being treated in the five Henry Ford Hospital campuses across Detroit and its suburbs.
The situation has created much anxiety and anger among workers in the hospital systems….
‘A Day That Will Live in Infamy’: This Is What It Looked Like When Wisconsin Forced In-Person Voting During a Pandemic
As footage of Wisconsin’s crowded polling stations flooded the internet Tuesday, public health officials and civil rights advocates condemned the state’s Supreme Court and Republican legislative leaders for allowing in-person voting during the coronavirus pandemic and thwarting Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ last-minute efforts to address voter safety concerns.
“It’s not going to be a safe election. People are going to get sick from this,” Brook Soltvedt, a 60-year-old textbook editor who is in charge of running the polling place at Thoreau Elementary School in Madison, Wisconsin’s capital, told The Cap Times.
Soltvedt added that though she thinks “the city has done about the best that they can do,” she worries that the election will cause voter confusion and health consequences. In an effort to protect her 77-year-old husband, Soltvedt said she plans to “strip in the garage, put my clothes in the washer, and go downstairs for two weeks….”
