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Not One Dime, Not One U.S. Soldier to Defend Saudi/U.S. Oil Monarchy

Trump and Mohammad bin Salman celebrate $12.5 billion in U.S. weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi monarchy, a long-time ally to the United States under both Republican and Democratic administrations, is a fascist monarchy which is thoroughly based on extreme inherited privilege, racism, and hatred of women and LGBTQ people. The monarchy denies all rights to workers and is based on system of servitude and slavery. They are the gatekeepers and beneficiaries of the criminal oil monopolies that want to rule and destroy the Earth for profit.

The U.S. government does not represent the workers of the U.S. It is a sales agency for military profiteers and other capitalist criminals. The military corporations are private companies that are strangling the economy and looting the federal budget. Trump traveled to Saudi Arabia to close a deal for more weapons.

The U.S.-Saudi alliance is bathed in the blood of the Yemeni people, of the Yemeni children who have been slaughtered and starved by Saudi use of U.S. Weapons.

The US and Saudi monarchy claim that Iran is to blame for the bombing of oil facilities. The Trump administration on behalf of Exxon and BP is sending more weapons and troops. But this is no different than sending troops to support Hitler. The U.S.-Saudi alliance is bathed in the blood of the Yemeni people, of the Yemeni children who have been slaughtered and starved by Saudi use of U.S. Weapons.

The Yemeni people have a right to fight back just as all workers and oppressed people have the right to fight back to defend our rights and our futures. We need to stand together against those who are occupying and colonizing, from the rain forests of Brazil to the mines of Afghanistan, from the gates of the UAW strike against GM to the demand for homes in South Africa and New Orleans.

No More Blood for Oil!

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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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US Senate Resolution Not Enough to Save Millions Of Yemenis From Being Killed by U.S./Saudi War Against the People

TOTAL WITHDRAWAL, IMMEDIATE HUMANITARIAN AID NOW!

Yemen is home to the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. The U.S. Saudi Arabia-led intervention in the civil war between the Yemeni government and the Houthi militia has ravaged the country and has left 80% of the country starving. An estimated 500,000 people along the secondary fronts south of Hudaydah have taken shelter in refugee camps. 1.8 million children in Yemen suffer from malnutrition. Even United Nations projections warn that 14 million people may die if this continues.

The United States has been providing the fascist royal Saudi government with bombs, planes, surveillance, drones, military intelligence and personnel.  This is not secret information but known to all members of Congress who have ignored the genocide.

The deaths of Yemenis mattered nothing to Congress until the Saudi royalty murdered a journalist. Only then was a resolution introduced in the Senate that even mentioned the US role in the war. When the US Senate (but not the House) drafted and passed Senate Joint Resolution 54, the world hoped strong measures would be taken to bring an end to this genocidal war. But the resolution only minimally scales back U.S. involvement leaving loopholes for continued total involvement.

What we need is an act of Congress (not a resolution) that immediately withdraws all U.S. involvement, cancels the sales of military weaponry and military aid to Saudi Arabia, lifts all humanitarian blockades, and allows emergency medical and food aid in without conditions. Anything less and the deaths of millions will be on their hands.

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Genocidal War in Yemen Made in the U.S.

A young survivor of the August 9, 2018 US/Saudi bombing of a school bus, with fragment of U.S. made missile. Photo by Yemeni photographer Ahmad Algohbarya.

By Malcolm Suber

Although most of our readers have very little information about the war in Yemen, we believe it necessary to give a working class perspective on one of the most devastating wars occurring in the world today. The U.S. capitalist press hardly mentions this war. The reason for the lack of coverage is that the U.S. imperialist ruling class bears real responsibility for the crisis. A quote from a Yemeni doctor sums it up this way: “The missiles that kill us – American made. The planes that kill us – American made. The tanks… American-made. You are saying to me where is America? America is the whole thing.” (From a PBS report by Jane Ferguson)

The Yemeni civil war pits Iran-backed Houthi rebels against the fascist Saudi Arabia-backed government forces who receive their weaponry and military advice from the U.S. pentagon.

Leaving aside the complex question of who is right in the conflict, there is no question that masses of innocent civilians have wrongly become targets. Hospitals, schools, mosques and other non-military targets have been hit. The Saudi led forces have dropped cluster bombs on Houthi sites.

The humanitarian disaster in Yemen is unthinkable. The UN puts the number of displaced at over 2 million, with 22 million Yemenis in danger of a cholera outbreak and starvation because of disruption of international aid shipments. Yet the civil war in Yemen has received very little attention in the US bourgeois press because it does not fit in their hierarchy of important news.

For one thing, Yemenis are poor, non-white people from a distant third world country. Secondly, both Democratic and Republican party politicians support US intervention on the side of the Saudis. Thirdly, covering the story in depth would require digging into US imperialist business leaders as merchants of death with sales of the most advance weapons to the reactionary Saudi regime.

News coverage of the Yemeni civil war would also reveal the double-dealing of the US government which pretends to be waging a war against Al-Qaeda and ISIS terrorist organizations yet is supplying them with funds and weapons as part of the Saudi-led forces. The Saudis are also allying themselves with the Zionist Israeli regime as partners in conflict with Iran.

Under the Obama regime, the US carried out drone warfare against the Houthis which resulted in some of its main leaders being assassinated, including anti-terrorist Imam, Salem bin ali Jaber. Those US drones bombed school buses and wedding receptions killing many civilians that the Obama administration labeled as mistakes and collateral damage.

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US Bomb Kills Children on Yemen School Bus

On August 9, the United States and their puppets in Saudi Arabia bombed a school bus full of children. Fifty civilians, mostly children, died and over 60 were injured in this airstrike. While the world cried in disgust at this massacre of children, the Saudi “royalty” and the US imperialists coldly either denied their responsibility or attempted to justify it as a “legitimate target”. The US military and profit making corporations who sold the bombs are just as responsible for the massacre as the Saudis who dropped them, especially because the US provides the intelligence and coordinates for such airstrikes. U.S. workers pay for this as money for needed social programs is stolen by Congress and the Trump administration and turned over to the war profiteers.

This is just the latest episode in the bloody war on the Yemeni people, especially children. The attacks are almost all directed at civilians, either through direct violence or by destroying their access to necessities like food, water and medicine. In Yemen, the imperialists and their puppets in the Middle East are responsible for the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. We cannot become complacent and we must expose all the politicians, generals, and war profiteering capitalists who are responsible for this war.

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New Orleans Disgrace: Statue Venerates Andrew Jackson, Slaveholder and Mass Murderer of Native Americans


On March 15, 2017, Trump laid a wreath on an Andrew Jackson monument in Nashville, giving a ten-minute speech in which he declared himself a “big fan“ of Jackson. Previously, he had hung a portrait of Jackson, his “hero“, in the Oval Office.

Ten Reasons to Tear Down the Jackson Statue:

1. Using his position as a colonel in the Tennessee militia, Jackson seized land by force from poor farmers to benefit slave holding plantation owners. He personally acquired over 640 acres and set up the Hermitage Plantation and owned over 300 slaves.

2. Jackson acquired land reserved for Cherokee and Chickasaw, in violation of law, to found Memphis Tennessee.

3. Jackson whipped slaves and sent troops out to capture runaway slaves.

4. To acquire more land for slave owners, Jackson stole land from Indian nations across the Southeast. As President, Jackson enacted the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Although the Supreme Court ruled against this policy, Jackson defied the court and ordered the removal.

5. Jackson represented the slave states that voted to enact the removal policy. The southern state governments destroyed Indigenous governments, banned assemblies, denied Indians the right to sue or testify in court, or dig gold on their own land.

6. Jackson drove 17,000 Cherokees from their farms and force-marched them to Oklahoma in winter, which came to be known as the Trail of Tears.

7. Jackson’s Trail of Tears caused the death of 8,000 Cherokee and Chickasaw and 4,000 Choctaws. They died from brutality, hunger, exposure, and disease in prison camps.

8. In 1816 Jackson ordered the horrific massacre of 330 free Blacks, men women and children at “Fort Negro” in Florida. This was a thriving farming/herding community of free Blacks. Jackson wrote “it ought to be blown up…destroy it and return the stolen negroes to their owners.”

9. While in the military, Jackson invaded Florida in 1818. He carried out wars against the Seminole, Creek and Muscogee Indians. Jackson’s purpose was to acquire Florida for slave owners and prevent runaway slaves from joining the Seminoles. Jackson burned the homes and crops of the Seminole and others.

10. Jackson was opposed to treaties calling them “an absurdity” and said, “the government should simply impose its will on them.”