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Millions of Yemenis Celebrate National Day of Steadfastness – They Will Not Be Defeated!

Despite the bombings, starvation, and the blockade of medical supplies, millions of Yemenis marched across the country on the fourth anniversary of the Yemeni resistance against US-Saudi aggression.

Sultan Al-Samei, a leader of the Houthi resistance, delivered a speech stating that “we are launching today the epic of legendary steadfastness, full of unity and cohesion of the internal front against enemies.” He also denounced the US decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Golan Heights, and pledged to stand by Syria to liberate its territory, and to stand with the Palestinian people in their resistance to the fascist Israeli government.

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40,000 Palestinians Honor the Anniversary of the Great March of Return

On March 30, thousands of Palestinians demonstrate at the Israel-Gaza border.

40,000 Palestinians gathered on March 30 to commemorate the one year anniversary of the “Great March of Return” demonstrations at the Israel-Gaza border. The demonstrations commemorate Land Day, which marks 43 years since six Palestinians were killed by Israeli police as they protested the Israeli state’s seizure of their land. Since the beginning of the demonstrations last year, the Israeli military has killed more than 200 demonstrators and injured thousands more. Despite this, the Palestinian people remain steadfast in their fight for their homeland which was stolen from them and from which they were forcibly expelled.

The Palestinian people stand tall in the face of increased attacks by the fascist Zionist government of Israel and its military supplier the U.S. Israel has declared permanent annexation of the Golan Heights which is part of Syria. The Golan Heights has oil, water and access to the sea.  Israel is also talking about annexing the illegally occupied West Bank.  At the same time, they are raining down bombs on Gaza, all while depriving its residents of water, electricity and medical supplies.  This shows that Israeli Zionism is nothing more than a Nazi-like racist ideology with imperialist designs.  Every worker needs to stand with and show solidarity with the beleaguered Palestinian people.

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Indian Child Welfare Act Under Attack

Chairman Tehassi Hill of the Oneida Nation, outside the Federal Courthouse in New Orleans.

By Sasha Irby

On March 14 a delegation of leaders from a coalition of 325 tribal Nations came to New Orleans’ Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to defend the Indian Child Welfare Act against a legal challenge from the Goldwater Institute, a right-wing legal organization that works for ultra rich capitalists like the Koch brothers and the DeVos family. The Goldwater Institute supports lowering workers’ wages, privatizing schools, denying workers healthcare, and opposing any regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Now they have the audacity to claim to be champion of civil rights. They allege that ICWA is a form of ‘race’ based discrimination because the federal law privileges the rights of Native people to adopt their own children over the adoption rights of non-Native families. This “civil rights” challenge is a cynical smoke-screen: by attempting to reduce the people of the many Indigenous Nations to a mere race, they aim to diminish Native people’s sovereign claims to their own children, their own governments, and their own land. The capitalists who are heading up the challenge to ICWA are eager to get their hands on the land and resources currently under the political control of Indigenous Nations.

The idea that right-wing advocacy groups are fighting against ICWA because they feel that it is ethically unjust is an insult to those who know the painful history that necessitated the law’s creation. IWCA was passed in 1978 to help stop the widespread kidnapping of Native children from their families by state and federal agencies. These children were then “adopted” into non-Indigenous households. For over a century the United States government operated according to the genocidal philosophy of “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Governmental policies sought to assimilate Native children into white society by removing them from their families, elders, and communities and placing them with white families or forcibly sending them to boarding schools to be stripped of their language, culture, spiritual practices, and identity. Even after the boarding school era, Native children were torn from their families at an alarming rate. Before the passing of ICWA, up to 1 in 3 Indigenous children were adopted into non-Native households.

ICWA is vital for the future of Indigenous Nations, and attempting to dismantle the law is a direct attack on the sovereignty of our peoples. Children remaining in families of their own tribal membership allow them access to their culture, their lifeways, and – key for maintaining tribal sovereignty – their tribal citizenship. The destruction of Indigenous sovereignty has always been the goal of imperial project of the colonizers.  By leaving our children vulnerable to forced removal from their Nations, you strip that child of access to their identity and their part in their Nation’s future.  By stealing the children, you drain the lifeblood of our Nations.  Our tribal cohesion crumbles and eventually our numbers dwindle and we die out.  Without our children, our future is written in sand.

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Gordon Plaza Residents Confront Mayor’s Office

Shannon Rainey, President of Gordon Plaza Residents committee, confronts Beau Tidwell, Cantrell’s PR mouthpiece.

By Star

On March 7 at 9 am, the Residents of Gordon Plaza went to City Hall to meet with Mayor LaToya Cantrell.  For 7 months residents have attempted to meet with Cantrell following a decades long struggle to be relocated off toxic soil.  They hoped she would honor her campaign promise to use city resources to ensure that residents have a safe and healthy environment to call home. Before going to City Hall, residents tried many times to get a meeting and were rebuffed. Despite the mayor never listening to the residents, she approved a statement from her office indicating that “due to pending litigation, the Mayor’s office is unable to make specific comment at this time. Mayor Cantrell has heard from the residents and will fully explore the possibilities in working toward a positive resolution.”

After that statement was issued, Cantrell texted the residents’ representative to say that if she needed anything, to call her office or e-mail to set up a meeting. As the mayor requested, the residents sent an e-mail in advance of their arrival. At the mayor’s office they were met with her communication director who made it clear that the mayor was not going to meet with the residents of Gordon Plaza.

Since being in office, white supremacists continually state that the mayor meets with them to discuss elevating monuments of white supremacy, and the mayor never denies it. It is not acceptable that the mayor refuses to meet with the residents of Gordon Plaza, while she listens to the cries of white supremacists as they mourn the loss of their monuments to oppression.

The fully funded relocation of the residents Gordon Plaza is long overdue and is the only acceptable resolution.  Residents will continue to organize until this is achieved.

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We Need a Tenants Movement for Rent Control, Tenants’ Rights

Inclusionary Zoning Speeds Gentrification, High Rents, Destroys Neighborhoods

By Gavrielle Gemma

Eviction Crisis in New Orleans:

  • One in every 19 renter households in New Orleans faced a court-ordered eviction in 2017.
  • One in four black renter households faced a court-ordered eviction between 2015 and 2017.
  • The overall eviction rate in New Orleans is nearly double the rate of evictions nationally.

Study done by Loyola law professor Davida Finger and the Jane Place Neighborhood Sustainability Initiative

Working class New Orleanians, especially in the Black community, know that rents are too high and wages too low, and that we have no security in our homes. We are being driven out of many neighborhoods like Treme, the Marigny, the Bywater, Mid-city and more. Black homeownership is way down and the price of buying a house in Gentilly is out of reach. Long time home owners are being forced out by higher taxes in gentrified areas or by newly discovered code violation fines. We travel longer distances to jobs where there is no parking and we suffer with an underfunded bus system. There is no question that city policies favoring developers and landlords have fostered this gentrification.

An independent movement of working-class renters needs to fight for rent control, against exemptions for developers, against evictions and fines and the racist policies these all entail. Long time home owners in Black communities should pay pre-Katrina taxes, not gentrification taxes which push them from their homes. We are told that the state controls tenant issues. Yet a militant movement could win change. In the 1930’s workers blocked evictions and moved people back into their homes.

Politicians and even some housing nonprofits favor the supposed remedy known as “inclusionary zoning” which gives developers “incentives” (millions of dollars in tax exemptions) to build if they set aside a few so-called moderate-income apartments. This scheme only furthers gentrification. Once the new development is built, all the rents in the neighborhood go up and people lose more housing than was gained. The racial composition and cultural character of the neighborhood changes as well.  This scheme provides a cover for politicians to seem as they are doing something about the housing crisis while still allowing gentrification to continue unchecked.

The example of the American Can apartments shows how “inclusionary zone” fails lower income renters and the broader community. This former factory was renovated with tax exemptions on the condition that the developers set aside a few apartments.  The city agreed that the developer could end this arrangement over time so the owner proceeded to evict these tenants immediately on that date.  Meanwhile this speeded up gentrification, displacing many other tenants and homeowners from the neighborhood.

While former mayor Mitch Landreiu was traveling the country preaching civil rights, he boasted in 2017 in a speech to business owners that the real estate market was booming, and that New Orleans was “becoming the city he always wanted.”  He bragged about the influx of new professionals moving into the city. Wages stayed low and racist income disparity grew. These new, mostly white professionals basically treat Black workers as if they exist to serve them while they party.

We know landlords and developers are greedy. But it is the complicity of city and state officials—upon whom they lavish campaign contributions— that enables them to run amok with their greed. These real estate developers donated not only to the campaigns for Landrieu but also to Mayor Cantrell and the council members (see State Ethics Commission reports). The policies that these campaign donations buy include favored zoning changes, tax exemptions, special loans and a pledge of silence regarding the racist impacts that these policies encourage. They are aided by the non-elected Planning Commission, which is appointed by the mayor and city council, and currently made up of a majority of rich white real estate developers.

Across the country, tenants’ movements are fighting back.  A united fight for rent control, anti-eviction laws and safeguards for working class homeowners is needed now.

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Erase the Board Coalition

Armtrice Cowart of the Erase the Board Coalition speaks at the New Orleans International Working Women’s Day March, March 16.

To the Orleans Parish School Board,

We have made our demands plain on several occasions, and here they are again.

First, we would like to acknowledge the attempt to implement two of our demands, which was the School Improvement Plan as well as the issue of TRAUMA—although they were not done as we originally stated. A part of the reason these demands were not implemented correctly is the same reason we are in this position in terms of education in the city of New Orleans. Your work is being done without including several other very important stakeholders such as parents, community members and local experts.

Erase The Board Coalition, as a group, has no interest in meeting with any entity in private. However, if there is a genuine interest in publicly going on record that this disastrous experiment has been a complete failure and you display a vested interest in course correcting, we are ready and willing to roll up our sleeves and work shoulder to shoulder with you to secure a truly equitable public school system for Orleans Parish students and families.

In closing, we would again like to show our demands:

  • Implement an immediate moratorium on charter school expansion
  • No more school closures. Orleans Parish School Board must permanently take over every failing school and implement school improvement plans using the sustainable community school model (e.g. Louisiana Legislature SR 133)
  • Conduct a series of accountability audits administered by the Erase The Board Coalition in schools that have a C score or lower
  • For the five schools set to close, Orleans Parish School Board needs to take over each school for it to remain open, and pay for private tutoring for all students impacted by the potential school closures and the instability at those campuses during the 2018-2019 school year
  • Abolish the One App and develop a more equitable centralized enrollment system that prioritizes access to neighborhood schools

We love our children and sincerely believe that these demands are not luxuries and should be the standard. We are diligent in our work and unwavering in our belief that this is both necessary and attainable. If these simple demands are not met, we have no choice but to continue to pull apart the fabric of this very unstable system and the people who have helped create and maintain it.

 

Sincerely,

Erase The Board Coalition

 

About Erase The Board Coalition: The Erase The Board Coalition is a grassroots-led effort composed of community leaders, parents, and grassroots education justice groups such as FFLIC and Step Up Louisiana, as well as Peoples’ Assembly and Take Em Down NOLA, established to remove the current Orleans Parish School Board members off of our board and to replace them with leaders who will actually listen to the demands of their community and run our schools as sustainable community schools! #EraseTheBoard #CharterExperimentNOLA #LetKidsBeKids #WeChoose #ReclaimOurSchools #SchoolChoiceScam #FollowTheMoney #NOLACharterCorruption #SchoolToPrisonPipeline #WhatsTheNameOfOurSchoolNOLA

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1.4 Million Students Hold Global Strike to Demand Climate Change Action Now!

Thousands of middle and high school students walked out of class in Sydney, Australia, kicking off a day of global youth-led protests demanding action on climate change.

By Nathalie Clarke

While capitalist politicians and billionaires twiddle their thumbs and hoard more wealth stolen off the backs of the working-class, students across the world are organizing and protesting elites’ inaction in the face of global climate change. On March 15th, an estimated 1.4 million students from across the world—from Nigeria to New Orleans—walked out of their schools. These internationally coordinated protests—the largest in 16 years—were organized entirely by the students themselves, and took place in 120 countries, 2,000 cities, and on every single continent including Antarctica.

Because our society prioritizes profit over the health and well-being of humans and our planet, species are going extinct at an unparalleled rate, and an estimated 210 million people have been displaced by rising sea levels and climate change-related disasters. Many of the students carried signs and banners directly connected the current ecological crisis with capitalism with slogans such as “Capitalism is killing the planet; kill capitalism;” or “Profit or future.”

Proposals such as the “Green New Deal,” are of great interest to many youth, but we cannot count on Congress to enact anything useful without a mass struggle—and certainly not without a militant struggle against US military spending and imperialist war. While we fight to push back to ultimately to save the planet, the humans and all species, we must rid ourselves of the capitalist system we live under. The super-rich extract every last resource from every human, animal, and plant on Earth in order to fill their pockets and maximize their profits. There’s no compromising with their greed.

March 15: Students from Lusher Middle and High School walked out of school to protest politicians’ inaction on climate change.

These student walkouts illustrate how powerful mass mobilizations of people can be. What if every single lab technician in a refinery or half the workers on the oil rigs across the Gulf South walked out of their jobs and demanded jobs in clean renewable energy? Our planet does not belong to the elites who poison our water, soil, and air. The planet belongs to us, those who have nothing to sell except our labor, those of us who toil in fields, and offices, and kitchens, and restaurants. When we are truly united—one band, one sound, despite our many differences—we win. We just need to wake up and see our power.

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Floods Devastate Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Malawi

Since March 15, the disastrous effects of Cyclone Idai have been mounting for the people of Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi. At least 750 have died because of the floods and at least 600,000 people have been displaced. The U.N. has stated that Cyclone Idai “may be the worst ever disaster to strike the southern hemisphere.”

Covering an area the size of New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Boston combined, the extent of the flooding is unprecedented in southern Africa and is another example of a disaster made worse by the capitalist-caused climate crisis.

Each of these countries would be better able organize themselves to withstand major weather events if only they weren’t still struggling to overcome the crippling effects of centuries of colonialism. Zimbabwe struggles doubly because of US/EU-imposed economic sanctions which have cost its people over $50 billion since 2001. These sanctions remain in place despite the present humanitarian crisis. The International Monetary Fund will likely provide “financial assistance” to Mozambique but it will come as a predatory loan.

Acts of internationalist solidarity show the way forward. The government of Cuba has responded by sending a “field hospital” with full staff and equipment to Mozambique. They will join the 372 Cuban doctors already providing services for the people of Mozambique.