Stop Police Harassment of New Orleans Musicians
By Meg Maloney
On Sunday, July 21, musicians, hospitality workers, and community members rallied together in outrage after local musician Eugene Grant, who plays with the Slow Rollas Brass Band, was pinned to the ground and arrested. The arrest came after the owner of Frenchmen Art and Books called the cops because the band was playing outside their store. Grant and his family are calling for musicians to have the freedom to play music in the streets without being forced to pay permits to the city. Musicians should be able to play in the street without fear of police violence. The city should be paying local musicians to play in the street because they help bring in billions of dollars to the city. The Hospitality Workers Alliance stands in solidarity with musicians in their fight. Without musicians and hospitality workers, there would be no tourism in New Orleans. We must come together and organize for our long overdue rights! The time is now!
Queen Benson’s Hands in Tax Payer Pockets Again
With the death of Tom Benson, his wife Gayle became the richest person living in the state of Louisiana and the owner of the New Orleans Saints, among other properties. Like her husband before her, she has continued the family tradition of extorting millions of dollars from the city and the state.
Knowing the local workers’ love of the football team, she has coerced the state to pay her $450 million to keep the team in New Orleans for another 15 years (and an ‘option’ for 15 more, meaning another round of extortion from whichever Benson is running things by then). As previously reported in the Workers Voice, this is a common tactic of privately owned teams and something Tom Benson did in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as well, demanding a ransom of $23.5 million a year from the people in order to keep the beloved team from leaving town.
According to Gov. John Bel Edwards, Gayle’s ransom money will come from the state, from the Louisiana State and Exposition District (which is a state entity that runs the Superdome), and a portion from the Saints organization. It will be used to renovate the Dome. Already, the Benson family does not pay rent for their use of the state-owned building, claiming it to be a “small market” for sports in spite of the fact that the team sells out on season tickets almost every year for the 70,000+ seat stadium.
This money comes out of the pockets of the workers, and they will see none of it coming back to them. Improvements to the Superdome will mostly be enjoyed by those rich enough to afford tickets to see the team or the huge concerts that play there, not by the average worker, and most of the money will simply line the pockets of the Benson family. Those who work at the Superdome will continue to be paid $8 an hour while the owners of the team will walk away with millions per game.
The Green Bay Packers, on the other hand, are owned by the city of Green Bay. Given that the workers of New Orleans have supported the team for 50 years, and given that their work has made every bit of profit the Benson family has taken from the city, the people of New Orleans should own the New Orleans Saints. No more handouts to the super-rich! No more privately-owned teams! Make the Saints a true home town team!
Resistance to ICE is Growing. Stop the War on Migrants!
By Ashlee Pintos and Adam Pedescleaux
In an act of resistance against the racist, capitalist state, a Nashville community came together to protect an immigrant father when two plainclothes ICE agents in an unmarked vehicle came to arrest him. The neighborhood of Black and white workers formed a human chain surrounding the car and ensured the father and son had food and water during the whole ordeal. After four hours, the agents finally left having terrorized the immigrant father and child. Without community support, the father and son would have been separated and thrown into one of the government’s concentration camps.
Protests against anti-migrant terrorism have been taking place all over the country. Over 1,000 activists in Washington, DC, blocked the entrances and exits to the national ICE offices. Led by Jewish activists, this action blocked traffic and ended only when 11 protesters were arrested. At an earlier protest in DC, the activists staged a sit-in at the same offices. In Phoenix, AZ, 16 people were arrested in a similar protest. In Colorado, protesters replaced the U.S. flag at the ICE offices with one of Mexico in act of symbolic solidarity.
They also destroyed a racist Blue Lives Matter flag. And in Rhode Island, a protest outside a concentration camp was attacked by an ICE employee when he drove his truck into the crowd, injuring several people.
In acts of solidarity across California, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, hospital staff are being trained how to use their bodies to stop ICE agents from entering hospitals.
In recent months, there have been multiple incidents where sea captains were arrested for saving migrants’ lives in the Mediterranean Sea. Pia Klemp, a German sea captain with an organization called Sea Watch International, faces 20 years in prison for rescuing people fleeing from Libya, a country which was destroyed by U.S. bombings and a right-wing coup a decade ago. While she and her crew are being investigated by Italian authorities, the French city of Paris offered her a medal for her bravery. She declined, denouncing the hypocrisy of the Parisian city government who order their police to oppress migrant workers daily. In June, the German ship captain Carola Rackete brought migrants she had rescued into port in defiance of the Italian police. She now faces charges similar to Klemp’s.
Every act of resistance against ICE and other anti-migrant forces in capitalist countries is a victory for the working class. We must all stand together against the Gestapo-like tactics of these agencies. As attacks on workers worldwide are increasingly violent, it is easy to feel defeated. However, all throughout the world, there are countless acts of resistance that are demonstrating workers’ power.
Spend Money on Youth, Not New NOPD Headquarters
By LaVonna Varnado-Brown
The NOPD is pushing the city council for a new headquarters that would cost taxpayers $37 million. With the budget already choked, Mayor Cantrell names her top four priorities as: “Public Safety as a Matter of Public Health, Infrastructure, Economic Development, and Quality of Life Initiatives”. Claiming public health and safety as a top priority is pure hypocrisy, given the fact that Cantrell still has not drawn up an actionable plan to provide the residents of Gordon Plaza with a fully funded relocation. The police building located at 715 S Broad Avenue is old, but at least it’s not lethal.
In the Upper Ninth Ward, residents of Gordon Plaza live amidst toxic carcinogens as they fight for a fully funded relocation that is long overdue. For nearly three decades, residents have continued to file lawsuits and demand that elected officials be held accountable for selling them property on a toxic waste landfill. And to think that the NOPD, which regularly terrorizes black and brown people in the streets, is demanding that the city fund new headquarters! “We know we need a new building, and we need it fast,” said NOPD Deputy Superintendent Christopher Goodly in a budget meeting with city planning officials. “It’s basically time to consider looking at a new headquarters instead of spending the resources to repair a dilapidated building.”
The new building would have to be built on an alternate site so that the current headquarters can continue to operate during construction. Construction will likely cost an average of $350 per square foot. The money for the new headquarters is stolen money. This money belongs to the workers, who generate the revenue for the city budget. Currently, 63% of the budget goes towards cops, jails and reactive programs, while only 3% is invested in children and families and 1% in job development. We cannot stand by and watch those in power continue to repress workers and people of color. No more fully funded luxury office buildings while hospitality workers fight for a living wage!
No more high-tech police facilities while working parents drown in debt over childcare and transportation! The city of New Orleans belongs to us, the workers. We need affordable healthcare, childcare, and reliable public transport. Not a new police building!
Abolish the Death Penalty
Do Not Let the Rich Control Who Lives and Who Dies!
On July 25, 2019, the U.S. “Justice” Department reinstated the federal death penalty after a 16 year break. This comes at a time when people are being held without trial in concentration camps, states are trying to make abortion and miscarriage a capital crime, the government is criminalizing protest, and workers’ rights are being stripped away one by one.
Under the capitalist state, the death penalty is a weapon against the working class. The rich should not be deciding who lives and dies.
The United States has nearly 3,000 people on death row. Most of them are working class whites and working class people of color (41% of death row inmates are Black, while only 13% of the population of the U.S. is Black). Many of them are women who stood up for themselves against abusers, many are disabled. Some of them were sentenced as children. Since 1973, 144 have been found to be innocent.
The U.S. capitalist class uses the death penalty not for justice, not to make communities safer, not to prevent serial killers, rapists, and pedophiles from preying on us, but to terrorize the working class. The death penalty is used selectively. The rich and powerful never suffer the consequences of their actions, and those who hurt the poor and oppressed often get away with it. This benefits the ruling class by keeping us controlled by fear, divided against one another, and allowing the ruling class to get rid of those that oppose them.
The deaths of migrants in concentration camps go unpunished. Police murder black people with impunity. Trans women of color are being murdered and almost none of their killers have been caught. Gay panic and trans panic laws are legal in 45 states. Stand Your Ground laws don’t seem to apply to women defending themselves against abusers. Banks, bosses, and landlords take peoples’ homes, and medical and insurance companies deny poor patients life-saving drugs and procedures. Corporations murder thousands through the destruction of the environment, creating cancer-causing zones like in Gordon Plaza, where 54 Black households are still fighting for relocation. And the U.S. military is destroying whole nations around the world. There is little accountability for those who prey on or divide the working class.
The announcement that the four people chosen to be executed are child murderers is a distraction from the true intent of this policy reversal. They want to be able to deflect criticism of the death penalty by claiming that its opponents support child murder or other horrible actions. This is cruel exploitation of terrible circumstances to justify the use of capital punishment and misdirect from the truth: this is an act of terror against the working class.
We must stand up against their continued war on the working class and the control of the death penalty by the rich. This will be used against innocent people. This will be used against those who organize for liberation. This will be used against immigrants, the homeless, the mentally ill, and others who the current U.S. capitalist regime is targeting. This is part of their preparation for the inevitable economic crisis that will hurt millions of workers and the fascist policies they will enact in its wake. They fear our power, and they want to be able to protect their wealth and power at any cost.
The capitalists cannot have this weapon. We must stand up against it and demand it be abolished.
South African Miners Strike Against Sexual Harassment
In June, South African miners carried out an underground sit-down strike in response to the sexual harassment of a women worker and the subsequent protection of her abuser by human resources and the management of the Lanxess chrome mine outside Rustenburg, South Africa. Led by women, more than 200 miners participated in the 9-day sit-down strike. The following is from a statement by Ruth Ntlokotse of the National Union of Metal Workers of South Africa.
NUMSA HONOURS LANXESS WORKERS ON WOMEN’S DAY
On this Womens’ Day the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) is honouring our members at Lanxess mines, both men and women, who came together to fight against sexual harassment and tyranny in the workplace. From the 19th of June to the 27th of June 2019, two hundred of our members suffered underground, breathing in potentially toxic fumes, sleeping in the biting cold, sacrificing time away from the comfort of their families and their homes, they risked their lives in order to stage a sit-in to protest against a cruel and vicious management. Because of their selfless struggle, they were victorious against their oppressors. The alleged sex pest who was terrorizing a worker has been placed on suspension and is facing criminal charges. The Human Resources manager and the Security Managers who were terrorizing the victim have left the company. These were just some of the achievements they secured by uniting and fighting together against oppression.
Hundreds Join Miners’ Sit-Down Strike on Train Tracks
Word spread fast that Harlan County miners had stood up to the Blackjewel company to demand pay owed to them for digging coal. They have effectively stopped a train attempting to bring coal they dug out to be sold for the profit of the criminal owners of Blackjewel. The company, which declared bankruptcy in June, is attempting to cheat the laid-off miners out of $12 million.
The company is trying to get an injunction to order the removal of the miners, but it’s the owners of Blackjewel who should be ordered to pay the miners. Clearly the owners understand that the capitalist courts work for them. But as one miner said, “we are standing up for what is right.”
The miners train track sit-down has garnered support throughout Harlan County as well as supporters from across the country who have traveled to join them in their tent city. People are bringing food and necessities and support for their families.
20,000 AT&T Southeast Workers Strike
On August 23, 20,000 workers at AT&T Southeast, members of the Communications Workers of America, told the company we’re fed up. 3,500 of the workers who took part in this strike are in Louisiana. These workers do everything from customer service to major infrastructure. It’s from these workers’ labor that AT&T draws its enormous profits. Until the workers carried out the strike, the company had been refusing to negotiate according to the requirements of the law. After four days of work stoppage, AT&T was forced back to the bargaining table.
AT&T is broken up into different regions and the company and union had settled contracts in other regions. In yet another display of discrimination and hatred toward southern workers, AT&T Southeast had arrogantly refused to negotiate with its workers in good faith. The union could have demonstrated its solidarity and commitment to southern workers by postponing settlements in the other regions until AT&T Southeast sat down to negotiate. Fortunately, southern workers showed leadership with this strike.
On August 30, CWA announced the settlement of a new 5 year contract which includes wage increases of 13.25 percent and improvements to pensions and health insurance plans. Workers at AT&T Southeast show that the power of a union comes from its members and their determination to strike when the bosses try to cheat them.
Right-Wing Indian Government Attacks Kashmiri People
Since becoming Prime Minister of India in 2014, Narendra Modi has carried out brutal assaults on workers on behalf of big business, while undermining democratic norms, and whipping up ethnic and religious tensions. Modi belongs to the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party, which espouses Hindu supremacy. As one example of Modi’s effect on Indian politics, violence against “Dalits,” or “lower caste” people, dramatically increased since he came to power, just as hate crimes spiked in the aftermath of Trump’s election. As with Trump and other right-wing nationalists who have come to power in the past few years, their racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., has served to divide workers and oppressed people so that big business can loot government treasuries and accumulate more wealth. Modi’s government has tried to push through anti-union policies and it has forced cuts to healthcare and education.
In short, they have implemented a regime of privatization and austerity.
The flipside is that masses of people are actively battling this government. The workers, farmers, and oppressed people of India are some of the most class conscious and militant fighters in the world. In January of this year, upwards of 150 million people went on strike for two days in response to government policies. This is thought to be the biggest strike in human history.
Similarly, as Modi’s government has increased attacks on the autonomous regions of Kashmir and Jammu, progressive and revolutionary people across India have come out in support of those under attack. On August 5, opposition parties, including the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), staged protests in the capital, New Delhi. Protests were held again on August 22 in New Delhi. Meanwhile, the struggles have continued in the regions of Kashmir and Jammu themselves, despite the military crackdown.
By Guest Writer Amman
Kashmir is a semi-autonomous state with sovereignty over its internal affairs under the Indian Constitution. Kashmir has suffered a military occupation by the Indian government since 1947. Before this, the entire region of what we know as the South Asian Subcontinent was under extractive British imperialism. On August 6th, 2019, both houses of Indian Parliament passed the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganization Act. The constitutional agreement until recently designated Kashmir as semi-autonomous. Under Hindu Nationalist, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Kashmir is now being dissolved into a series of union territories to be administered by the central government in New Delhi. This had been a campaign promise of Modi whose political career has been founded on Islamophobia, sexism and Hindu Nationalism. Hindu Nationalism is an ideology that upholds the oppression social and economic of non-Hindus in India.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, also known as the RSS, a right-wing Hindu-extremist group has its own paramilitary organization inspired by Mussolini’s Black Shirts. It is widely considered the parent of the Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, a right-wing Hindu Nationalist outfit also regarded as the world’s largest political party. Its current leader is the Prime Minister, a man who can trace his own political genealogy back to his own induction into the RSS at the tender age of 8. During his campaign for re-election earlier this May, Modi made promises of revoking Kashmir’s special status and opening its economy to encourage the flow of capital. But for his critics and supporters alike, dislocating Kashmir’s little autonomy and dissolving the union’s only Muslim-majority state is hugely symbolic of the broader project of Hindu Nationalism.
The latest episode bares all the hallmarks of a kind of state-terrorism Kashmiris are routinely subject to. After months of escalating tensions between India and Pakistan leading up to Modi’s reelection— including Indian threats of a nuclear offensive— tens of thousands of security troops were deployed to Kashmir under a variety of guises in late July. Days later, the Indian army was said to have located a land mine with Pakistani markings along a sacred Hindu pilgrimage route, and on August 2nd, the government subsequently issued a statement advising all pilgrims and tourists to evacuate immediately. By midnight the next day, the entire state was under lockdown (often euphemistically referred to as “curfew”) and a few days later the resolution passed through government. Almost all activity was stifled: mobility was severely limited, businesses closed, hospitals were understaffed and under-resourced, families struggled to access basic necessities of food and medicine. Eventually, all communication in the state was shut down and Kashmiri Muslims were forced to forgo the boisterous celebrations of Eid Al Adha without word from their family and relatives outside. The thousands of Kashmiri civilians who took to the streets in protest were met with gunfire and rubber pellets.
The Kashmiri people’s claims to rights and dignity and sovereignty, in the meanwhile, have been entirely subsumed by a competing narrative of ongoing hostility between Hindus and Muslims across the entire subcontinent. Since a resurgence of political unrest during the 90’s, some 70,000 people have been killed in the armed occupation. Thousands of civilians have turned up buried in unmarked graves and many more have been (gang)-raped at the hands of Indian security personnel. All the while state’s infrastructure and economy have steadily crumbled.