Renters in Berlin demonstrate against landlords. Banner read, “Housing is not a commodity. Enough with the crazy rent!”Renters Demand Breakup of Real Estate Monopolies
You have more in common with your fellow workers around the world than you do with you landlord. Whether in New Orleans, San Francisco, or Berlin, we are all facing a similar housing crisis, with the same causes. Rents are doubling or tripling, gentrification is pushing working class people out, landlords are evicting tenants so they can build more profitable apartments or short term rentals, and evictions are commonplace. Meanwhile, public housing has been replaced by watered down programs that benefit the landlords more than tenants and only increase gentrification. Those hit hardest are women, people of color, and immigrants.
This is as true in New Orleans today as it is in Berlin, and on April 7, tenants in Germany took to the streets to protest. Their demands are not for voucher programs or minor breaks, but for the rental properties owned by the biggest landlords to be taken back and returned to the people.
One group called Expropriate Deutsch Wohnen & Co. is working to enact a law that would ban any rental companies owning more than 3,000 apartments from operating in the city. Companies that would like to stay in Berlin, like Deutsche Wohnen—a company owning 100,000 apartments in the city— would be required to sell their excess housing units to the city for conversion into public housing.
The landlords claim they aren’t responsible for the rise in rents, but the people know who set the rates. People across Germany are organizing. Tens of thousands of people, including 25,000 in Berlin, marched demanding that the German government use Article 15 of the German constitution to acquire hundreds of thousands of units from Deutsche Wohnen & Co. and other major companies and turn them into social housing for the people.
Suddenly the city is concerned that residents are driving safely in school zones, making sure party buses are safe and making space for folks on bikes. But the current campaign to raise fines has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with the city trying yet again to bleed working class New Orleanians dry.
Consider Mayor Cantrell’s decision to reject the idea of an advance notice that school zones ticketing speeds would change. If it was about safety, the city would have publicized it, and educated residents about the change. Her aides suggested that she give a warning, but she rejected it. It’s really about levying another tax on New Orleanians.
When a rich person gets a ticket, the expense is nothing to them. Or they can afford to park in an over-priced lot or take Uber wherever they like. But when a worker gets a ticket, it’s a crisis that can turn into a nightmare.
The attack on party bus operators is another attack on one of the few economic areas still controlled by Black drivers. Is the plan to put them out of business and bring in some white businessman with loads of bank cash to take over? Or just to shut down an aspect of Black life that the white elites don’t like? The move to gentrify the area under the Claiborne bridge is another example of the city taking away a significant gathering spot for Black people just to satisfy real estate developers.
Raising tickets to $300 for parking in a bike lane is horrendous. Did the city study why people park there? Most are just trying to drop off a child or pick someone up, not permanently park. Some streets like N. Galvez have just a bike lane on one side of the street but people live there. Should their kids run across the street to get into a car, or double park to get out their groceries? Did the city consider this problem?
Safety comes from education and support. Every school, library, community center, organization and church would gladly lend a hand to do presentations about traffic safety. But this was never about safety. It’s a money grab at the expense of those least able to pay.
Since April 15 more than 1,000 people have been arrested in London blocking trains, roads and bridges to demand an end to fossil fuels and a plan to save the planet for humans and all species. Activists in 33 countries joined in similar actions across the world. The environmental crisis is upon us now and serious. Extinction Rebellion, a grassroots environmental organization that has led these protests, points out that it is the rich who are responsible for the crisis. Their militant actions should be applauded and repeated everywhere.
This May marks 71 years of displacement and mass murder of the Palestinian people. We call this our ‘nakba’ which means catastrophe in Arabic. The anniversary of Nakba, May 15, 1948 occurred when the United States, the British and the United Nations, gave Palestinian land that does not belong to them, away to Jewish people from Europe and renamed our homeland ‘Isra-el.’
To this day Palestinians are hunted in the streets and continue to have our homes stolen, demol-ished or given away. Children and adults are murdered and imprisoned because just like the poor and working class in New Orleans, we are often only considered “useful” to the rich ruling class if we are dead or are being used to make the rich richer.
Like many New Orleanians post-Katrina, the rich ruling class has made it impossible for us to go home. Similarly to the people of New Orleans, there are now more Palestinians who live outside of Palestine than in our homeland.
If there is a people who have experienced their own nakba, it is the people of New Orleans.
If there is a people who feel the Palestinian struggle for land, dignity and safety, it’s the people of New Orleans.
If there is a people who understand what it’s like to see your own neighborhood, overrun with strangers who want your culture but don’t want you – it’s the people of New Orleans.
If there is a people who understand what it’s like to see your homes gutted, your pain broadcast for the world to see and still not get justice, it’s the people of New Orleans.
If there is a people who understand what it’s like to be scattered and still have a deep sense of who you are and where you come from, it’s the people of New Orleans.
If there is a people who still love life despite facing its cruelty everyday, it’s the people of New Orleans.
This year marks 14 years since Katrina and over 100,000 Black New Orleanians still haven’t come home. From Palestine to New Orleans, we are returning.
We will reclaim our land. We will fight back.
From Palestine to New Orleans the time to unite and recognize our shared struggle is now.
Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church on April 4, 2019. Opelousas, LABy Malcolm Suber and Gavrielle Gemma
The terrible burning of three historic Black Churches in St. Landry Parish was intended to inflict racist terror and trauma throughout the state. This follows the lead of the Trump administration who has welcomed the inclusion of white supremacists in the government and whose sympathies for white supremacist organizations have unleashed a torrent of racist, anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant attacks across the country.
The 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL killed four girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair.
This white supremacist attack fits the historic pattern of attacking Black churches as a way of intimidating and politically controlling Black communities. The Black church represents one of the only social institutions owned and controlled by Black people. The Black church has served not only as a house of worship but as a community meeting space where Black people can discuss and debate their response to their oppressed condition. Many churches have been active in the Black liberation struggle and have produced good leaders in the Black freedom struggle. The white supremacists unleashed by the rich white ruling class are bent on preventing the Black community from organizing to advance the social and political position of Black workers.
Once again, politicians have responded to the church burnings by offering prayers for the terrorist, by trying to cover up the racist purpose of the attack with phony psychiatry and by trying to paint it as an isolated event. Finally, they admitted what the whole world already knew: that this is a hate crime. They have yet to call it terrorism.
All these crocodile tears distract from the real story, which is the ongoing link between white supremacy, the police, the military, corporations and politicians. Although the ruling class mainly fosters racism through “legal” means of mass incarceration and economic and housing segregation, they’ve always relied on the existence of “extra-legal” white supremacist groups to foment division among the multi-national working class and to guard their own fortunes.
DEFENDING CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS, POLITICIANS AID KKK TERRORISTS
These politicians praise monuments to the confederacy and slavery and resist efforts to take them down. Why? Because they—hand in hand with the super-rich—want to maintain the current state of institutional racism that divides the working class of Louisiana. They turn a blind eye to the eight highly armed white supremacist groups functioning in the state. Many of these groups have members and friends in the police as well as links to the U.S. military.
After the civil war, the KKK and its allies, such as the White League, were used to terrorize Black people. Their aim was to prevent Black freedmen from voting and adopting socially progressive policies. During Reconstruction, the Louisiana legislature was majority black and had a Black Governor. The northern bankers and industrialists wanted more than anything to reach a new unity with former slaveholders. Lynchings and church burnings were rampant and voting rights were taken away from the Black population. The new white politicians were secretly or openly in the KKK. Several members of the U.S. Supreme Court were in the KKK. In just one century, 64 Black churches were burned.
Today nearly all white politicians in Baton Rouge are members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) an organization which pays legislators to promote racist ALEC-drafted laws. On behalf of the oil companies and war profiteers, ALEC has been working to disenfranchise Black voters all across the country.
These politicians may distance themselves from openly white supremacist groups, but they share a common ideology. And across the country, they’ve allowed Klan-type groups to proliferate.
WHITE SUPREMACY IS PART OF CAPITALISM
The capitalists—who are few—can only maintain their undemocratic accumulation of huge wealth by dividing the workers, who are many. When the working class is divided, all sectors suffer from lowered wages and benefits, greater poverty, and fewer social programs. This is true for white workers although Black workers suffer much more. This is the legacy of racism and national oppression in the south, where workers are the poorest, the minimum wage lowest, and every indicator from infant mortality to educational quality is at the bottom.
Because the masses are currently quiet—despite ever worsening conditions—the bosses and politicians are moving ahead with even harsher assaults on the social and economic life of workers. They’re ramping up racism, scapegoating immigrants, vilifying other countries—all to distract from their thievery and their war profiteering.
The capitalist rulers’ insatiable drive to amass more wealth is the basis for the renewed growth of white supremacist and other racist groups. The more that wealth is concentrated in their hands, the more the capitalist system is endangered from below. That’s why they lean on extra-legal repression to maintain control.
This is true not only in the U.S. One has only to look to the outright fascist governments with whom the U.S. government is allied, including Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the Philippines, Israel and others.
COPS & KLAN WORK HAND IN HAND
Charles Sims of the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Bogalusa stands defiantly on courthouse steps, displaying Klan hoods.
It is for this reason that one cannot rely on the capitalist state to stop racist terrorism. To combat white supremacist terrorism, workers and oppressed people must organize their own self-defense. When various Nazi and white supremacist groups announced they were coming to New Orleans to defend confederate monuments, the government headed by liberal democrat Mitch Landrieu allowed them total freedom—even to brandish arms in so-called “safe zones.” Take Em Down NOLA confronted the NOPD, asking why they weren’t enforcing the legal restrictions. The answer from former Police Chief Harrison was, “we don’t have the police able to do it.”
WORKERS & OPPRESSED PEOPLE MUST ORGANIZE THEIR SELF DEFENSE
Robert and Mabel Williams
It was the emergence of armed Black groups in the south that pushed the KKK back, including here in Louisiana. In 1964 the KKK burned down five churches in Jonesboro and carried out horrific assaults. This led to the formation of the Deacons for Defense and Justice which soon had 20 chapters in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Many were workers with combat experience.
Even Dr. King employed armed body guards and had guns in his house during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party armed herself.
In North Carolina, Robert Williams led the arming of the NAACP chapter in Monroe to combat Klan terror. While the KKK and others were never—not even to this day—labeled domestic terrorists, the FBI and local police targeted Black civil rights and armed self-defense groups, labeling them terrorists for protesting their oppression and for defending their community.
We need to continue mass organizing and we need to increase our efforts to defend our communities, individuals, churches and unions from the instruments of capitalist terror.
Take Em Down NOLA demands the removal of a monument to E.D. White, U.S. Supreme Court Justice and member of the white supremacist terror organization, the White League.
President Donald Trump has called on Venezuelan soldiers to disobey orders and join coup perpetrators headed by U.S.-backed opposition leader, Juan Guaidó. If they do not do this, President Trump threatened: “You will find no safe harbor, no easy exit and no way out. You will lose everything.”
While President Trump speaks of supporting democracy in Venezuela and Latin America, the real purpose of the U.S. assault on the Venezuelan government is to fully open the vast Venezuelan oil reserves to U.S. and other Western oil corporations as well as to destroy progressive governments in Latin America that put their own peoples’ needs above the profits of foreign corporations.
The Veterans For Peace Statement of Purpose states that, “we will work, with others both nationally and internationally:
To increase public awareness of the causes and costs of war
To restrain our governments from intervening, overtly and covertly, in the internal affairs of other nations
To end the arms race and to reduce and eventually eliminate nuclear weapons
To seek justice for veterans and victims of war
To abolish war as an instrument of national policy.”
In this spirit, Veterans For Peace (VFP) calls on all members of the U.S. military to refuse illegal orders to intervene in Venezuela. Furthermore, VFP urges all U.S. military leaders to inform the president that they will order their units to stand down from preparations to invade Venezuela.
Illegal, immoral and irresponsible U.S. actions, including “sanctions” (economic war) have already taken a great toll on the people Venezuela. Nonetheless, the vast majority of Venezuelan people and military are standing firm against foreign intervention. Now there is a very real possibility that President Trump will order U.S. troops to intervene in Venezuela, whether through a direct invasion and occupation, or through support for irregular counter-revolutionary forces. This would likely lead to a widening war that could spread to other Latin American countries and the Caribbean, bringing increasing suffering to the peoples of Latin America and the U.S.
It is illegal under both U.S. and international law to launch a military attack against another nation unless it is clearly in self-defense, and is approved by the United Nations. There are a number of options for GI’s who do not wish to follow illegal orders. Veterans For Peace wants service-members to be fully informed as they make profound choices with possibly serious consequences. We urge GI’s facing possible deployment to contact the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force at (619) 463-2369 and/or help@militarylawhelp.com for referral to a civilian attorney to discuss your options. Many of their member lawyers are willing to do an initial pro-bono (free) consultation.
Refuse to be used in an illegal war. Follow your conscience and be on the right side of history.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
