https://bit.ly/2yn4uvH

As we get deeper and deeper into this Coronavirus epidemic postal employees are being forced to work and do overtime upwards of 12 hours a day. As of this present time there have been Upwards of more than 40 confirmed cases of coronavirus with-in the United States Postal Service. From dealing with the day-to-day struggles of rain, sleet snow, hail or no AC in postal vehicles limited heating in postal vehicles no innovations in carriers delivery methods no innovations in protection clothing or any other areas of the post office. Megan Brennan USPS CEO hasn’t sent any supplies such as had sanitizer or mask for employees protection, she made a very vague statement which basically read her employees should follow CDC guidelines. Blood, sweat, and tears postal employees carrier this company on there backs day in and day out at the expense of time with our families, wear and tear on our bodies, mental and emotional abuse from USPS management. We are demanding hazard pay for working during Coronavirus considering we are essential during this epidemic we should at be paid for it. The union is no help to employees during this at all they should be fighting for this hazard pay or threatening for another shutdown. We have to get louder post office!! Hopefully this is an outlet to make change happen. https://bit.ly/2yn4uvH

#unblockCuba

TAKE ACTION:

If you are authorized to sign on behalf of your organization, click here, or send an email to: AfGJ@AFGJ.org with name, title, organization name, city, country, and contact email. This letter will be open for sign-ons until April 12, 2020.

The Alliance for Global Justice, CODEPINK, and Friends invite your organization and prominent individuals in your community to sign on to the Open Letter below. The letter will be used to educate the press, public, and elected officials about the US government’s economic and political war against Venezuela at a time when all countries are struggling to combat the global pandemic, COVID-19. For more background, we invite you to read this excellent analysis, Trump’s Narcoterrorism Indictment of Maduro Already Backfires by CODEPINK’s Leonardo Flores. If you are authorized to sign on behalf of your organization, click here or send an email to: AfGJ@AFGJ.org with name, title, organization name, address and contact email. This letter will be open for sign-ons until April 12, 2020.

Open Letter to Condemn Trump Administration’s Hypocritical Indictment on Drug Charges of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and High-Ranking Venezuelan Officials

We, the undersigned organizations and prominent individuals, condemn the false claims of criminal charges by the US government against the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and other high-ranking officials with the pretext of their alleged involvement in international drug trafficking.

The US government is offering a $15 million bounty for information that would lead to the arrest of Venezuelan President Maduro. Bounties of $10 million are offered for the National Constituent Assembly President Diosdado Cabello, retired generals Hugo Carvajal and Clive Alcala, Minister for Industry and National Production Tareck El Aissami, and other Venezuelans. The US government indictments accuse the Venezuelan officials of participating in a “narco-terrorism conspiracy” with the Colombian guerrilla group FARC to “flood the United States with cocaine.”

The US has refused to recognize the democratically elected Venezuelan President Maduro and has been seeking to install one to its liking, currently Juan Guaido. What the US is doing is ordering the arrest of world leaders it does not approve of, putting a bounty on their heads.

This decision of the US constitutes a further escalation in coercive measures against a sovereign country, which has included sanctions so extreme as to create a blockade, costing Venezuela 40,000 lives in a period of just over a year and $116 billion in lost revenue.

It is well-documented that two close and long-time US allies in Latin America, the governments of Colombia and Honduras, have been heavily involved in narco trafficking. The last Latin American leader the US charged with drug trafficking was Panama’s Manuel Noriega (who was running drugs with the CIA). The US then invaded his country and later imprisoned him in Miami.

Actual evidence of Venezuela involvement in drug trafficking

The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), which is unfriendly to the Venezuelan government, finds: “CCDB [US interagency Consolidated Counterdrug Database] data does not justify many of the claims made by those who advance the ‘narcostate’ narrative to describe organized crime in Venezuela today and to argue against efforts to achieve a negotiated path to democratic governance in Venezuela. As noted, US authorities estimate that 93 percent of US-bound cocaine is trafficked through Western Caribbean and Eastern Pacific routes, not through Venezuela’s Eastern Caribbean coast.”

The WOLA study found that the US government data suggests that, despite these challenges, Venezuela is not a primary transit country for US-bound cocaine. The State Department reports that over six times as much cocaine passed through Guatemala in 2018 than through Venezuela. Around 90 percent of all US-bound cocaine is trafficked through western Caribbean and eastern Pacific routes⁠, not through Venezuela’s eastern Caribbean seas.

The US Department of Justice has not presented evidence to substantiate their narco-trafficking indictment. Washington’s case looks politically motivated. In the wake of over six years of US sanctions and over a year of failed attempted coups, the majority support of the Venezuelan people for their democratically elected government has not been shaken.

We the undersigned demand that the US government:

• Drop the groundless indictments against President Maduro and others.
• Lift the sanctions so that Venezuela can purchase life-giving medicines and medical equipment to fight the coronavirus pandemic that is threatening the entire world.
• Restore normal relations with Venezuela based on peace and respect for national sovereignty.

Sincerely,

Chuck Kaufman, National Co-Coordinator, Alliance for Global Justice

Terri Mattson, Latin America Coordinator, CODEPINK

A Time for Change

• The Decade of Transformation is Here: Remaking Healthcare
  • Margaret Flowers & Kevin Zeese present an optimistic overview of the changes we can make to develop an efficient and reliable healthcare system
• Boston School Bus Drivers Win Emergency Full Pay During School Closure
  • Steve Gillis talks about how this Union won big in Boston after the schools closed
• The Cost of This Pandemic Must Not Bankrupt the People
  • Vijay Prashad & Manuel Bertoldi talk about ‘efficient states’ and present their socialist plan for recovery
• US Senate’s Final Stimulus Bill: Why It Won’t Be Enough
  • Jack Rasmus gives specifics of the Stimulus Bill and talks about what it would take to recover our economy

The Naked Imperium

• China Locked in Hybrid War with US
  • Pepe Escobar looks at the propaganda war and the economic war between the US and China in the context of the covid-19 pandemic
• Why the Virus May Win in the Long Run
  • Coleen Rowley notes that viruses have been around a lot longer than we have.
• COVID-19 Covers Up War and Financial Collapse
  • Margaret Kimberley draws our attention to the big picture where the covid-19 pandemic occurs in the context of war and economic failure
• Pandemics and War Games, Solidarity As an Antidote
  • Stella Calloni looks at us troop movements in a time of pandemic and other questions that arise as we observe the transmission of covid-19 around the globe
• The Importance of Neighborhood Banks
  • Elaine Brown & Michael Hudson talk about bringing our money back to our communities
• COVID-19: The Monster Is At the Door
  • Mike Davis looks at the potential for the covid-19 pandemic to devastate the poor and disenfrachised peoples of the global south
• Late Stage Imperial Omni-Crisis: Death by Virus and Internal Contradictions
  • Glen Ford calls out the oligarchy that runs the US for the destruction of our public health system while looking at the incoherent response to the covid-10 pandemic
• French Strikes Wane, But Not the Outrage
  • Marty Goodman gives an update on the French General Strike over pension reduction which has apparently collapsed in the face of the novel coronavirus
• Anti-Asian Racism Accelerates
  • Minnie Bruce Pratt addresses the increase in racism against East Asians since the outtbreak of covid-19 in Wuhan province of China
• Colonial Domination and Racism Against Indigenous People in Canada
  • Tamara Hansen tells the story of an indigenous grandfather in Vancouver who is arrested at the bank with his granddaughter while trying to  open an account for her with some of his own money

• The COVID-19 Pandemic and Prison Populations   
  • Noelle Hanrahan focuses on the coronavirus pandemic  risk to prison populations
• Sick Palestinian Laborer Dropped of Near Checkpoint by Israeli Police
  • Suha Araff tells the story of a sick Palestinian dropped off at a checkpoint

Sanctions Kill

• End Sanctions on Iran Petition
  • Corona2plus presents an international petition with over 150,00 signatures so far
• Lift Syrian Sanctions Before Coronavirus Creates a Perfect Storm
  • Steven Sahiounie shows a decade of war in Syria translate into vulnerability in the face of pandemic
• Why Sanctions During a Pandemic are Cruel and Mean Spirited
  • Vijay Prashad & Paulo Estrada talk about international solidarity in the face of an imbalance of a system that allows some states to deliberately  undermine the health and sovereignty of others
• To Help Stem Coronavirus, Lift Sanctions on Iran
  • Medea Benjamin & Ariel Gold talk about the suffering US sanctions cause to the Iranian people
• Media Struggle to Defend Washington’s Cruelty Toward Venezuela and Iran as Coronavirus Spreads
  • Joe Emersberger demonstrates western media bias towards Iran and Venezuela
• US Should Lift Economic Sanctions to Avoid More Deaths From Pandemic
  • The Center for Economic and Policy Research strongly recommends that the US drop sanctions on Iran and Venezuela because of the covid-19 pandemic

Coronavirus and the Antiwar Movement

UNAC Administrative Committee, 3/18/20

The coronavirus is serious, and our movement needs to take it seriously.  We must protect ourselves and each other.  These are the sentiments that brought us to the movement in the first place.  For a coalition like UNAC, which has always supported street demonstrations, face-to-face meetings and mass actions, we need to rethink our activity during this period.  This means for now we need to rely more on social media and other non-contact forms of communication and protest.  A good example of this was the recent Sanctions Kill panel that was organized from the San Francisco Bay Area by the International Action Center, the Alliance for Global Justice and co-sponsored by UNAC.  We had projected a public forum as part of the weekend of actions to protest the unilateral sanctions that the US has imposed on countries that will not submit to the dictates of Washington and Wall Street.

To not spread the virus and to keep our movement safe, the public forum was changed to an on-line webinar that was also livestreamed on Facebook and viewed by thousands and had over 100 shares.  The panel speakers were all able to speak from their homes through the Zoom platform, and people were able to ask questions and make comments.  You can view the panel here.

Additionally, some people have started to use twitter hash tags to demonstrate and get noticed by a growing social media user community as more and more people are spending more time in their homes.  These are models that our movement should copy during this period and many of us may also learn how to use social media more effectively.

Although, we may need to make some changes in how we work for peace and justice, this is a time when we must re-double our efforts, because the coronavirus has laid bare many of the problems of this capitalist system of war and injustice.  We must use this opportunity to expose this, and help people draw the lessons from the period we are going through.  The Sanctions Kill actions are an example of this.

The US has sanctions on 39 countries.  To many of these countries, the US is denying medicine and medical equipment that could be used to save people’s lives during this pandemic and arrest its spread.  The coronavirus recognizes no borders and has spread around the world in a matter of weeks.  Sanctions are used to make people of a given country suffer in the hope that they will turn against their governement and build an opposition that US agencies and NGOs like the National Endowment of Democracy and US AID can take advantage of, attempt to turn them violent, and use as a vehicle for regime change.  These sanctions are nothing short of war by other means, and because they are aimed at civilians, they should be considered war crimes. Sanctions have killed millions and have been the preferred form of warfare in recent times as the US population turns more and more against outright invasions and occupations which has cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives….

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Please make a contribution to  UNAC:  https://www.unacpeace.org/donate.html

If your organization would like to join the UNAC coalition, please click here: https://www.unacpeace.org/join.html

For years, the criminal government of the United States has attempted to remove the democratically elected president of Venezuela and discredit the peoples’ movement in that country that has been so successful in lifting millions of Venezuelans out of extreme poverty. Under the corrupt Trump administration alone, the United States has conducted multiple illegal attacks against President Nicolas Maduro and the people of Venezuela, including: failed assassination attempts by drone, poorly orchestrated military coups, the random declaration of political-nobody Juan Guaido as president of Venezuela, and the continuous use of deadly, multilateral sanctions (even in the midst of a global pandemic).

On Thursday March 26th, in yet another desperate move, the Trump administration announced charges of narco-terrorism against the two-time democratically elected Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and a host of other top Venezuelan officials. US Attorney General William Barr and Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo declared a $15 million reward for any information leading to the arrest of Maduro. With zero evidence to support their bold claims, the US is alleging that Maduro and other government officials oversaw the use of Venezuelan territory and resources to help the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to move cocaine to the US. [read more]

Read the UNAC Blog for articles by UNAC members and friends
https://unac.notowar.net/