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Stonewall Means Fight Back!

Protesters march ahead of the corporate Pride parade to protest attacks on the LGBTQ community. New Orleans, June 9, 2018.

By Gregory William and Sally Jane Black

On June 28, 1969, the cops raided the Stonewall Inn in New York, and the mostly working class queer and trans people there fought back. For three days they fought, forcing the cops to withdraw. This was a small victory over the police, but that victory was won with blood and sacrifice. And it inspired the whole world.

Stonewall was an important moment of resistance because it brought working class LGBTQ people together to fight back, and in the wake of the rebellion, they began to organize. Within a week of Stonewall, a group known as the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) formed, naming themselves after the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. Taking cues from the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the labor movement, the resistance around the world against imperialism, and especially from those who had been fighting for LGBTQ rights before them, the GLF and other organizations like Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) fought for the rights of LGBTQ people with militant action, collective visibility, and radical anti-capitalism.

Without the radical resistance that followed, ACT UP and other groups might never have forced the pharmaceutical corporations, the FDA and other government agencies to respond to the AIDS crisis at all. Without it, homophobic anti-sodomy laws might never have been struck down. Without it, our spaces would be raided more frequently, and our love would still be hidden away. Without it, many more of us would have died in the closet.

The rebellion at Stonewall and the radical organizing that came afterward were the birth of what is now known as Pride, but Pride no longer reflects this legacy. Instead of fighting the police, Pride celebrations often include them despite their role as our oppressors. Instead of being anti-capitalist, they have corporate sponsorships. Instead of taking inspiration from anti-imperialist movements, they celebrate the U.S. military that wages murderous wars for profit around the world.

The current administration has taken away many of our rights. Last year, the Trump regime released a memo instructing federal agencies to define gender strictly based on biology, effectively erasing trans people’s legal rights, and attempting to set up a DNA database to match people to their sex chromosomes. They also instructed them to reinterpret Title VII, the law that protects against employment discrimination, so that no protections would be extended to LGBTQ people at all. Now, three similar cases are going to the Supreme Court to determine if this reinterpretation will be upheld.

At the same time, cases have made it legal for businesses and healthcare professionals to refuse to serve LGBTQ people on religious grounds, and insurance companies and Medicaid have stopped covering trans healthcare needs–if they ever did to begin with. Furthermore, bathroom bills continue to be announced, anti-sex work laws that disproportionately affect LGBTQ people are being passed, murder and suicide rates of LGBTQ people are rising, and more.

This is no time to throw a party. This is a time to fight back.

These attacks are not fueled by religion or morality, but by the capitalist class’s growing fear of a united working class. As the economy continues to head toward crisis, the capitalists know that they are vulnerable. If a crisis occurs while the ruling class is not strong enough to fight back, the capitalist class will fall. Trying to divide us, they pass these laws and policies to scapegoat and criminalize LGBTQ people (just as they do with immigrants, women, prisoners, black people, indigenous people, etc.) They’re terrified that we workers will unite in our understanding that the greedy rich are the real criminals.

We will not be liberated unless we are united. We must stand in solidarity with one another against all of their attacks. There is no race or nation that does not include us. Attacks on immigrants, women, prisoners, and sex workers are attacks on LGBTQ people. Attacks on black, brown, and indigenous people are attacks on LGBTQ people. We must all stand together to protect our rights as workers.

The ruling class wants us to forget that everything we’ve won has been through our own blood and sweat. For this reason, they sometimes pander to us or take our slogans for their own—only as long as we don’t name them as the enemy. But we must fight for ourselves. We must organize and take to the streets if we have any hope of winning true liberation.

We know that it is possible to fight back and make change even in this period of deep reaction. If the wave of teacher strikes since 2018 has shown us anything, it’s that mass, collective organizing still gets the goods.

In 2018, the TransLatin@ Coalition in Los Angeles unfurled a massive banner reading “Trans People Deserve to Live” at the 5th game of the World Series at Dodger Stadium. They did this at personal risk to themselves and were escorted by security out of the stadium. This kind of in-your-face politics is a far cry from the tame corporate Pride events we have become used to.

And the militant spirit and tactics of LGBTQ rights groups like ACT UP are alive and well here in Louisiana. On May 15, activists from the New Orleans Abortion Fund, Women with a Vision, the New Orleans Workers Group and the New Orleans Peoples Assembly staged a “die-in” in the style of ACT UP at the Louisiana State Capitol, protesting the suite of anti-abortion legislation being pushed through by the legislature. These brave demonstrators have been slapped with bogus charges of disturbing the peace and criminal destruction of property, but they are persevering. This is the politics of militant confrontation that we need and can inject into the LGBTQ and other peoples’ struggles today.

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Iran is not the Threat; War-Crazed Trump Is

Who’s threatening who? Map shows locations of the dozens of U.S. military bases surrounding Iran.

No More Wars for Oil!

By Gregory William

Without ceasing their efforts to overthrow the legitimate government of Venezuela, the Trump administration and the U.S. military command have been revving up threats against Iran.

Trump and his gang have already demonstrated through their use of inhumane economic sanctions that they are willing to destroy the lives of thousands of people—all so that their capitalist masters can gain control of Iran and Venezuela’s oil fields.

In early May Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, announced the deployment of a carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the Persian Gulf to “send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attacks on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.” Since then Trump has sent an 1,500 additional troops to the region.

Does Iran pose any threat to the U.S.? No!

Since the beginning of the last century, the United States has carried out more than 100 invasions of countries around the world. In that time, Iran hasn’t invaded a single country. Nor have they started a single war.

Bolton has had a hand in several U.S. invasions and wars—not least in Libya and Iraq, where hundreds of thousands have died as a result. During the lead-up to the Iraq war, Bolton systematically churned out lies about Iraq’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” to convince the public that war was necessary, leading to absolute devastation in that country and massive looting of U.S. taxpayers’ money. Bolton has been advocating for war with Iran for over 20 years and is now trying ratchet up tensions so that an accident or a false-flag attack might provide a pretext for war.

Here’s another claim workers might hear in the U.S. capitalist-owned media. Isn’t the Iranian government a despotic theocracy that curtails the rights of its people, and isn’t that a good reason for the U.S. to intervene?

There’s no reason to believe that this is a concern of Trump and company. One of the U.S.’ closest allies in the region, Saudi Arabia, recently beheaded 37 men and hung one of their bodies upside down on a pole in public. This hasn’t been a topic of discussion in Washington. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to support the Saudi regime’s genocidal war in Yemen and gives the Israeli government billions of our tax dollars to murder innocent Palestinian children.

The Iranian forces that Bolton and Trump are promoting as the possible “liberators” of the country hail from the now-deposed fascist monarchy or alternately, from the so-called ‘National Council of Resistance,’ an organization aligned with the Saudi monarchy and Israel.

U.S. imperialists clearly have no interest in promoting democracy or human rights in Iran or anywhere else in the world. The long history of U.S. interference in Iran proves it.

In U.S. wars for oil, playbook hasn’t changed

In 1953, U.S. and British espionage agencies orchestrated a coup in Iran, ousting the democratically-elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. In 1951, under the leadership of Mosaddegh, the Iranian parliament voted to nationalize Iran’s oil industry which had until then been under the control of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company—later known as British Petroleum (BP), the same company responsible for the horrible Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The Iranian government intended to use their oil resources to benefit the people of Iran rather than British and American shareholders.

Before the coup, the British initiated an international boycott of Iranian oil. They were trying to put an economic stranglehold on the country to make it bend to the wishes of the British and U.S. capitalist classes. In place of the popular government of Mosaddegh, the coup orchestrators installed General Fazlollah Zahedi, who shored up the rule of the Shah (the Iranian prince). The new regime relied heavily on Washington to stay in power. According to the CIA’s own declassified documents, for example, Iranian mobsters were on the U.S. payroll to stage pro-Shah riots as the coup was underway.

Under the Shah’s rule until 1979, thousands of social leaders, trade unionists, workers, students, and peasants were tortured and murdered by the SAVAK, a Gestapo-like agency set up by the CIA. Inequality soared to become almost the worst in the world, according to the International Labor Office. The people of Iran suffered all these hardships to enrich the owners of an imperialist oil cartel. This is really existing “free” market capitalism at work.

In 1979, the Iranian masses rose up to overthrow the imperialist-backed Shah. Although many of the demands of the revolution have not been met by the government of the Islamic Republic that replaced the monarchy, national independence remains a victory that the masses of Iranians are intent on defending. Any progressive Iranian knows that a U.S. war would be a terrible setback to their own struggle for political power within the country.

Why we must say no to intervention today

Nearly four times the size of Iraq, Iran is a country of 80 million people. A war with Iran would condemn an entire region of the earth to years of death and insecurity. This terrible cost to humanity would be paid by U.S. workers too. For every dollar of our taxes that’s wasted on death machines, that’s one less dollar spent on education or healthcare or all the things necessary to give us real national security.

We— the workers of the world— must stand up and declare that we will not pay for their oil with our blood.

U.S. Hands off Iran!
End U.S. sanctions against Iran!
Bring the troops home!
Close the U.S./NATO bases!
End U.S. aid to  Saudi Arabia and Israel!

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After Border Patrol Arrests Classmate, 200 High School Students Walk Out in Arizona

Around 200 students at Tuscon Arizona’s Desert View High School staged a walkout after fellow student Thomas Torres-Maytorena was detained by Border Patrol. Torres-Maytorena is facing possible deportation just weeks ahead of his graduation date. The students marched four miles from their school to the local sheriff’s office to demand that sheriffs immediately end their collaboration with immigration authorities. The students demand Torres-Maytorena’s immediate release back to his family and friends.

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Students Protest ICE, Police, Border Patrol

Students Stage 36-day Sit-in at Johns Hopkins University

Until they were arrested on May 8, students at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD had staged a 36 day sit-in to protest the school’s contracts with Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the formation of JHU’s own private police force. Over this time, hundreds of fellow students and faculty and community members came to the occupied building for screenings, panels, and community meetings.

The students also took up the cause of Tawanda Jones, who for 300 straight weeks, has held a weekly “West Wednesday” march to protest the Baltimore Police’s murder of her brother, Tyrone West. “Tawanda has been working for 300 weeks, she has been struggling to demand accountability—we also will not stop and these are the kinds of actions we are willing to take to be listened to,” Jilene Chua said. “We’ve tried so many ways to be listened to and nothing has really been working. This is the extent to which right now we are willing to go to be heard.”

“We demand the cancellation of the private police force. We demand the end of the contracts with ICE. We demand justice for Tyrone West.”

After chaining themselves to the building, they issued a statement: ”we hope we have shifted the path of this campus. We hope to have changed the history of Johns Hopkins and its relationship with Baltimore and the broader world. We will remain here until President Ronald Daniels negotiates,” a statement from the sit-in read. “We demand the cancellation of the private police force. We demand the end of the contracts with ICE. We demand justice for Tyrone West.”

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Teachers Organizing in Higher Ed

By Jennifer Lin

Contingent workers—temporary and part-time workers and independent contractors—have been steadily replacing full-time workers at colleges throughout the country. This trend reflects how the core mission of higher ed has shifted away from education. Most of tuition is spent on an excess of administrators and amenities (like luxury dining halls and shiny new squash courts) designed to convince students that a college education is a worthwhile ‘consumer experience.’ Colleges are run like businesses in which professors are being exploited and education has become a commodity stripped of value.

Businesses thrive off contingent labor. By classifying workers as independent contractors, businesses can avoid having to pay a minimum wage or provide any benefits. College administrators perpetrate this form of exploitation by hiring adjuncts. Adjuncts are part-time professors with semester-long contracts. They are constantly working to secure jobs for the next term, and classes often disappear without notice, meaning they have absolutely no job security. Most have to teach at multiple colleges just to make ends meet.

Adjuncts make less than half the salary that full-time faculty do, and they are denied health insurance and pension contributions. 31% of part-time faculty are living at or near the federal poverty line, and one in four families of part-time faculty qualify for Medicaid and food stamps. This is the purgatory of contingent life, in which adjuncts toil incessantly but are denied the rights that their full-time coworkers previously struggled to win.

Students also suffer from the exploitation of adjuncts’ labor. Adjuncts are often hired a few days prior to the beginning of the semester, so they have less time to prepare for their classes. They are often assigned lower-level and introductory courses, which mostly include students who need the most assistance. The time adjuncts need to spend updating their courses, commuting between classes, and working extra jobs—just so they can pay rent and health insurance—takes a massive toll on their psychological and physical well-being, placing serious constraints on their ability to give students the intensive mentoring they might need.

In response to this crisis, adjuncts have been organizing across the nation. Recently, members of the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), a student union, went on strike. Many of them are international grad students working as part-time teaching assistants. They demanded that the administration pay them fair wages, cover health care costs, and reduce exorbitant student fees. Prior to striking, the union increased membership, invited students to participate in bargaining sessions, and organized informational pickets. Undergraduate students boycotted classes and organized a rally in solidarity with the strikers. Through their organizing, students managed to freeze enrollment fees, reduce health care costs, and secure a 14% wage increase. Despite the fact that many students didn’t have any experience organizing, the GEO won a significant victory that inspired the professor union, the UIC United Faculty, to hold their own strike less than a week later.

For some of us, college remains a bastion of higher learning. However, we must not forget that colleges are capitalist institutions; they are just as likely to exploit workers as any other business. Tuition is skyrocketing, and less and less of that money is being used to pay workers. Contrary to what administrators might have you believe, colleges have more than enough money to employ full-time faculty and to provide quality education at a low cost, but they will not do so unless we students and professors collectively organize to demand what is justly ours: fair pay and quality education. The future of higher ed is in our hands.

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Italian Port Workers Block Weapons Shipment in Solidarity with the People of Yemen

Workers struck to prevent a Saudi ship from loading a weapons cargo at the Italian port of Genoa in protest of their intended use in the war on Yemen. Signs read, “Ports are closed to arms” and “Disobey Salvini (the Italian prime minister).”

Dockworkers at the Italian port of Genoa went on strike on May 20 to protest the Italian government’s decision to harbor a cargo ship carrying weapons to the Saudi government. The workers refused to load shipment onto the ship ‘Bahri Yanbu’ which was set to further arm the Saudi monarchy in their genocidal war on the people of Yemen. In solidarity with refugees fleeing the wreckage of imperialist wars, they demanded that the Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Salvini “open the ports to people and close them to arms.”

Earlier, on May 9, peace activists had prevented the loading of an arms shipment at the Le Havre port in France.

“We will not become complicit in the deaths of Yemeni civilians.”
In a joint statement with Potero al Popolo, a coalition of anti-fascist political organizations, the dock workers and transport workers from the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL) in Genoa stated, “we believe this resistance is our small contribution to resolve a big problem for a population that is killed daily in wars…We will not become complicit in the deaths of Yemeni civilians.”

The U.S./Saudi war on Yemen, which started in March 2016, has caused at least 50,000 deaths and has pushed 13 million Yemenis to the brink of starvation, according to the United Nations. The relentless airstrikes by Saudi Arabia—with arms and support supplied by the U.S., Britain and France—have targeted and destroyed vital civilian infrastructure like hospitals and sewage treatment systems.

Worldwide, dockworkers have played a historic role in defending the international working class. Here in the U.S., the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has shown what it means for union workers to take seriously the slogan that “an injury to one is an injury to all.” As part of the international struggle against apartheid South Africa, for 10 days in 1984 they carried out a strike, refusing to unload cargo from a South African ship—an act of solidarity recognized by Nelson Mandela. In 2014, in support of the Palestinian fight against apartheid Israel, members of the ILWU Local 10 prevented the docking of an Israeli ship at the Port of Oakland.

The leadership of organized, class-conscious dock and transport workers shows the awesome potential of workers’ power: without us, the world stops. We can stop their wars.

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McDonalds Workers Fight Back in Houston, Dallas, and Other Cities

On May 21, a group of 25 women McDonald’s workers in 20 different cities filed sexual harassment complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In filing these claims, they are helping to expose the rotten culture of sexual exploitation that exists in the food service industry, as well as other industries. McDonald’s top leadership is trying to shirk responsibility by arguing that they are not liable for what goes on in supposedly “independent” McDonald’s franchises, even though franchise holders are little more than glorified sub-contractors. No matter who is the owner of a McDonald’s location, it is still McDonald’s.

On May 23rd, several hundred McDonald’s workers went on strike in 13 cities, including Houston, Dallas, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, Milwaukee, Orlando, St. Louis, and Tampa. The workers, who were demanding the right to form a union, a $15 minimum wage, and protections from sexual harassment, timed the walkout for maximum impact: they stopped working during breakfast and lunch rushes (hitting the bosses where it hurts—in the pockets), on the day that the company was having its annual shareholder meeting in Dallas. The actions were coordinated by the Fight for $15 campaign, unions, and other labor advocacy groups.

Rita Blalock, a nine-year McDonald’s employee in Raleigh, North Carolina, makes only $8.50 an hour and decided to join the strike. She told a reporter with the Wall Street Journal that, “the best way for us to make our jobs better is by joining together.”

Both the lawsuit and the coordinated strike are promising signs for workers ready to organize in the food service industry.

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In North Carolina, Over 20,000 Education Workers Strike

May 1 is International Workers’ Day. This past May Day, over 20,000 education workers in South Carolina took a “personal day” and converged on the state legislature in Raleigh. Strikers included not only teachers, but bus drivers, custodians, counselors, and nurses. Student supporters from across the state also turned out. In total, they shut down 35 school districts for the day, showing that when workers get organized, they can shut down whole systems and even industries. Workers really do hold the cards, if only we lean how to play them!

The work stoppage was organized by the North Carolina Association of Educators. Like teachers striking in other states since 2018, the union and its supporters are demanding better pay and conditions for school workers, as well as a better education for students. For example, they want the schools to be adequately staffed with psychologists, librarians, nurses and counselors. They are also demanding $15-an-hour minimum for all school personnel.

In South Carolina, over 10,000 educator workers and supporters amassed outside the Department of Education in Columbia, the state capital. The action was organized by a Facebook group called SC for Ed. Like their counterparts in North Carolina, demonstrators called for improvements for both workers and students. This was one of the biggest gatherings ever to take place at the state capital, matched only by the crowds that gathered in 2015 to see the Confederate flag finally removed from the statehouse.

Kathy Maness, with the Palmetto State Teachers Association, said, “For many years, I have said that teachers in South Carolina have been sleeping giants. They would go in their classroom, they would do their job and would not speak up for their profession. I think that sleeping giant is waking up.”

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The Pentagon and the Internet

The U.S. military operates 5,000 websites through its Defense Media Activity branch. Nafeez Ahmed reported in Motherboard on October 30, 2018, that “a series of research projects, patent filings, and policy changes indicate that the Pentagon wants to use social media surveillance to quell domestic insurrection and rebellion….The United States government is accelerating efforts to monitor social media to preempt major anti-government protests in the US, according to scientific research, official government documents, and patent filings reviewed by Motherboard. The social media posts of American citizens who don’t like President Donald Trump are the focus of the latest US military-funded research. The research, funded by the US Army and co-authored by a researcher based at the West Point Military Academy, is part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to consolidate the US military’s role and influence on domestic intelligence.”

The Pentagon has spent millions of dollars finding patterns in posts across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and beyond to enable the prediction of major events. Ahmed further reports that “a Pentagon-funded report titled ‘Social Network Structure as a Predictor of Social Behavior: The Case of Protest in the 2016 US Presidential Election’ was funded by the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), which is part of the US Army’s Research Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM).”

Ahmed continues: “The tool was originally developed under the Obama administration back in 2011 by the US Army Research Laboratory and US Defense Threat Reduction Agency, in partnership with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Illinois, IBM, and Caterva (a social marketing company that in 2013 was folded into a subsidiary of giant US government IT contractor CSC). Past papers associated with the project show that the tool has been largely tested in foreign theaters like Haiti, Egypt, and Syria.

“The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is part of the ARL Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance (NS CTA), a consortium of three industrial research labs and 14 universities which receives multi-million-dollar support from the US Army Research Laboratory. Much of that research has been funded by the US government’s spy research organization, IARPA—the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Government National Business Center.”

To show the extent of the collaboration between the Pentagon, universities and corporations, HRL, a main company involved in this domestic spying, is jointly owned by General Motors and Boeing.

The same technology being used against people in the U.S. was developed to interfere in the use of social media during the lead-up to and during elections of other countries, which the U.S. has been doing for decades.