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31,000 Grocery Workers Win Strike in New England Save Health Coverage and Get Raises

Image Credit: UFCW Local 328
By Gregory William

Thirty-one thousand Stop & Shop workers went on strike in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island and beat back company cuts to health care, pensions, and wages. The work stoppage carried out by unionized employees of the grocery store chain shut 240 stores. The scale of the strike rivals that of the West Virginia teachers’ strike last year and is the largest private sector strike in the entire U.S. in three years. Stop & Shop workers are organized with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.

Cashiers, stockers, bakers, deli clerks, butchers and others walked off the job on April 11, after the company presented a “final offer” in contract negotiations which included higher health care premiums and deductible, and replacing proposed pay raises with bonuses. The company intended to cut pensions and roll back overtime pay.

Employees considered this a slap in the face when the grocery chain’s parent company, Ahold Delhaize, is worth $44 billion; they have also saved millions over the past couple years because of Trump’s corporate tax breaks.
One associate, who was picketing outside a Stop & Shop in Middletown, Connecticut said, “They’re a billion-dollar company because of us. We’re out here striking and protesting to show what’s fair and what’s right.”

Many Stop & Shop shoppers have shown solidarity by boycotting the stores that have remained open during the strike. Some posted to Twitter and other social media sites. Twitter user, Hester Prynne, wrote, “#Solidarity well done. I’ve never crossed a picket line, I’m not about to start now!” On the same platform, a shopper by the name of Julias, said, “Good for you. All of you. Our country is moving backwards in many ways. I work in an entirely different industry, but like most, ours is putting profit before employees. We are stressed, overworked and fed up.”

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U.S. Military is the World’s Biggest Polluter

By Nathalie Clarke

Our planet is being sacrificed to corporate greed. As the rich get richer, the rest of us must deal with poisoned air, water, soil, and food. But one major actor in the current environmental crisis gets to walk away blameless time after time: militarism. In order to continue to make a profit in a system where most of us struggle to make ends meet, the super rich have expanded the military so they can go steal resources and workers from foreign countries and maintain business as usual at home. Whether in France, the United States, Germany, or Norway, all capitalist countries have built up military forces geared towards invasions of other countries, costing tons of money and countless lives.

The U.S. military admits to using 395,000 barrels of oil every day and produces about 38,700,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO²) every year (a typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of CO² per year)—which doesn’t even take into account all the emissions they won’t admit to. The military’s fossil fuel consumption drains our landscapes and drives coastal erosion. If you’re asking yourself why Louisiana loses a football field of land every hour, why our city risks going underwater in the next 100 years, you need look no further than the military.

The U.S. military admits to using 395,000 barrels of oil every day.

The Paris Agreement, and other international accords made by politicians have time and time again EXEMPTED military operations from even trying to reduce their carbon footprint. While poor people get told to recycle, become vegan, stop using straws, reduce our plastic bag use, the crooks in Washington continue to expand the military. Individual actions are not enough! We need to oppose rich men’s wars and unite with working-class people across the world. If we don’t oppose militarism, climate change will continue to devastate the lives of working people across the world.

In spite their supposedly “progressive” stance on environmental issues, Democrats are unwilling to challenge the U.S. military, which not only drains resources from the budget each year, but also causes significant environmental harm. Multi-millionaires like Nancy Pelosi don’t oppose the bloated military budget because they profit from the arms industry and the drive to war.

Our politicians, the monsters who vote to bomb children in Iraq, destroy forests, pollute landscapes, and build more and more nuclear weapons, will not be swayed with words of encouragement, votes, or polite calls and emails. The working-class is under attack—our communities are being destroyed by climate change, our families are sick from the poison in our food, air, and water, our children are sent off to fight in unjust wars, and our future is at stake. United, as one band, one sound, we have the power to take back what is already ours and build a better world.

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Free All People Jailed for Marijuana!

End the Bail System!

By Tina Orlandini

Our families and communities need an immediate release of all those incarcerated for marijuana related offenses and an end to money bail as part of the broader movement toward prison abolition in this country.

Hundreds of thousands have been arrested and imprisoned for minor marijuana related offenses. In 2017, approximately 659,700 people were arrested in the United States for marijuana law violations and of that number, about 91 percent were charged with possession only. Unsurprisingly and in keeping with the discriminatory practices of the police through campaigns and policies like the War on Drugs, Stop and Frisk and Broken Windows theory, about 47 percent of the above-mentioned arrests were of Black or Latinx people (drugpolicy.org), and the rest were poor whites. The rich are not arrested.

Louisiana has its own fraught history with strict marijuana laws, criminalizing the use and possession of the drug in nearly every occurrence with the exception of medical marijuana, which was legalized in 2017. While 11 states in the U.S. have legalized recreational use of marijuana, Louisiana continues to lock up its people for the same activity. As Louisiana’s marijuana laws currently stand, penalties include up to 15 days in parish jail and/or up to $300 in fines for possession of up to 14g; up to 6 months in jail and/or $500 in fines for over 14g; and the time and fines go up from there to double-digit-year prison sentences and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines (findlaw.com).

Here in New Orleans, in 2016 the city passed ordinance 31,148, decriminalizing marijuana possession and allowing for ticketing rather than arrests, but police can still make arrests for possession under state law (Marijuana Policy Project). On top of all this, New Orleans’ antebellum money bail system keeps the accused in jail without the ability to “buy their freedom” even before a trial. This system with clear roots in slavery is now employed as modern-day institutionalized bondage for people of color, poor whites, immigrant and queer folks.

The history of these laws clearly shows the intent was to push mass incarceration and slave labor in prison. In 1971, President Nixon held a press conference announcing the War on Drugs and declaring drug abuse “public enemy number one.” Painted as a “law and order” stance on the proliferation of drug activity in the United States, the media frenzy that followed—as well as related policies and carceral tactics—at their core were simply strategies to neutralize and destroy radical movements burgeoning at the time, in particular those lead by Black revolutionaries. These policies and the War on Drugs were expanded by Ronald Reagan in 1982, and again, validated and proliferated by mainstream media which elevated racist stereotypes in poor Black communities.

Bill Clinton carried the torch with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, most famous for its implementation of habitual offender laws or three-strikes laws which require a person found guilty of a violent felony and two other offenses (such as drug possession) to serve a mandatory life prison sentence. This law led to bottlenecked courts, the overcrowding of prisons and our current state of mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex. Many of these policies were inherited and maintained by the Obama Administration and the current, outwardly racist administration bares no signs of reform, so here we are today, in the most incarcerated country in the world and the second most incarcerated state, with a large percentage of arrests due to minor offenses like marijuana possession.

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60 Biggest Companies Paid No Taxes on $79 Billion in Profits

The companies included IBM, Netflix, General Motors, Chevron, and more. Despite reporting profits of $11.2 billion without paying a cent in taxes, Amazon actually applied for a refund of nearly $129 million.

Companies that claimed tax cuts would create jobs have laid off thousands.

A partial list of these mega greedy companies include AT&T, Capital One, Cox Enterprises, Ford, General Dynamics, Intel, Kimberly-Clark, Lockheed Martin, Macys, Northrop Grumman, T-Mobile, Verizon, Viacom, Walmart, Walt Disney, Union Pacific, CSX, Toys R Us, Sears/Kmart, and JC Penney.

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Support Assange and Manning, Defend the Right to Truth!

WHO ARE JULIAN ASSANGE AND CHELSEA MANNING?

Manning was a former army private who exposed the deliberate killing of civilians in Iraq by the U.S. army. Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, an online journal that lets the public know what the government is really doing, like spying on U.S. residents or committing horrific war crimes. They were both recently arrested when they should be given medals for telling the truth.

While Manning and Assange are being persecuted, the Trump administration is issuing orders to cover up CIA drone killings of civilians and shutting down investigations into U.S. war crimes by threatening the judges of the International Criminal Court with arrest.

NUREMBERG TRIALS ASKED WHY NAZIS OBEYED ORDERS

Manning took the incredibly brave step to expose U.S. war crimes while in the army. After the Nazis were defeated and put on trial at Nuremberg the message was clear “You have the right to resist an illegal, inhuman order.” This is what she did.

PENTAGON PAPERS AND WIKILEAKS EXPOSED PENTAGON CRIMES

Daniel Ellsberg is a former state department official who released hundreds of pages of internal memos showing the horrors of the Vietnam War. These were called the Pentagon Papers. He was arrested but later exonerated. He is considered a hero. Assange simply released the same type of information digitally.

WHAT DID WIKILEAKS REVEAL?

In April of 2010, Wikileaks published the infamous ”Collateral Murder” video which showed the horrific 2007 U.S. Army massacre of more than a dozen people in Baghdad including civilians, journalists, and children.

Later in 2010, Wikileaks published the “Iraq War Logs” covering the period from January 1, 2004 to December 31, 2009. Manning helped to reveal that in that time 109,032 men, women, and children had been directly killed by the U.S.-led coalition. 66,081 of those people-—nearly two-thirds—were civilians. Wikileaks documents revealed 15,000 deaths that had previously gone uncounted.

The war logs also revealed widespread torture and rape by coalition forces as well as routine civilian killings by U.S. mercenary forces such as Blackwater.

In 2011, after being denied legal immunity for their crimes, U.S. forces were forced to withdraw from Iraq. Had it been earlier that the people of the world—and particularly those in the U.S.— learned the truth about this terrible war, many thousands of lives might have been saved.

Manning and Assange also helped bring to light U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, revealing more than 92,000 documents related to the war over the same period as the “Iraq War Logs”. The previously covered-up Granai massacre stands as one of the most brutal crimes of this war: nearly 100 people—overwhelmingly women and children—lost their lives in a U.S. airstrike on May 4, 2009. Over 100,000 Afghans have been killed in this longest running U.S. war.

Wikileaks also brought the Guantanamo prison to the attention of the public, exposing the systematic and routine torture of over 800 prisoners. Among the prisoners were an 89-year-old Afghan villager with dementia and a 14-year-old boy who had been kidnapped from his family. More than 150 of these people were detained for years without charge.

ASSANGE AND MANNING ARE THE REAL PUBLIC SERVANTS. TRUMP, OBAMA, AND BUSH ARE THE CRIMINALS.

We deserve the right to know the cost of imperialist wars—especially since it’s our working class brothers and sisters that are under the gun. Because so many lives are on the line, we have a duty to counter the lies that U.S. wars are fought for “freedom” or for “democracy” or for any other noble sounding ideas. To counter these lies, we must arm ourselves with the truth. Wikileaks revealed the business dealings of the war profiteers and it revealed the devastating human toll of the arms that made these billionaires so rich. Wikileaks revealed the truth and for that, Assange and Manning deserve our support.