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Biden Installed Fascists in Ukraine in 2014

Trump’s Gone – Good.
Don’t Count on Biden to Fight Fascism.

December 7, 2015, Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko welcomes Joe Biden to Kiev, Ukraine.

On January 6, hours after the fascist storming of the Capitol, Biden was delivering a speech about this “unprecedented assault” on democracy. But Biden’s actions the day before make a mockery of this statement. On January 5, Biden announced his pick of Victoria Nuland for the position of undersecretary of political affairs. Nuland was Asst. Secretary of State in the Obama/Biden/Clinton regime. In this role she was tasked with toppling the elected government of Ukraine because they refused to cut ties with Russia and because Ukraine had resisted the building up of NATO military bases in their country.

In 2014, the U.S. got the coup they were hoping for and Nuland along with Senator John McCain could be seen at right wing rallies, standing shoulder to shoulder with openly neo-Nazi groups celebrating the overturning of the Ukrainian government. A leaked 2014 phone conversation between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt revealed that they’d planned the coup and had even hand-picked leaders who would serve U.S. business interests.

In order to carry out the coup, Nuland and her co-conspirators relied on fascist militias who took over government buildings and drove out the elected government by force. These were the same fascist forces that months later burned 39 people alive when they besieged and set fire to a union building in Odessa. THey hoped this act of terrorism would crush workers’ resistance to their newly installed regime. For more than 7 years they’ve waged a brutal war against antifascists in Eastern Ukraine. This war has been supported by U.S. military personnel and funded with more than $1 billion worth of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

December 6, 2018. Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko poses for a picture with the members of the Ukrainian military who openly display the “Totenkopf” insignia of the Nazi SS.

Biden and the wealthy capitalists that he serves took advantage of the “business friendly” environment that the fascist government enforced. Formerly state companies were scooped up at fire-sale prices and Ukraine’s rich farmland was raided by Monsanto. Biden’s son was put on the board of a formerly public owned gas company and paid $50,000 a month, just like a member of the Trump Klan.

Mass layoffs followed the privatizing of state industries. Pensioners were cheated out of their retirements on the orders of the U.S. controlled International Monetary Fund (IMF). IN a speech to the Ukrainian parliament Biden urged lawmakers to make the “difficult reforms” that the IMF demanded. Now fascist gangs patrol the streets of Ukraine to repress any resistance to these anti-worker attacks.

Last month a United Nations resolution to “combat the glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance.” 130 countries voted in favor of the resolution. The U.S. and Ukraine were the sole votes against. The Democratic Party did not object.

Jan 6, 2021. Fascist inside the Capitol building wears a shirt that reads “Camp Auschwitz,” a reference to the Nazi death camp where 1.1. million people were exterminated.
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Haiti, Ecuador Revolt Against their Capitalist Governments

Workers are rising up against the super rich in countries around the world, including Haiti. It’s our turn, New Orleans! Let’s take to the streets!

On Oct 13, thousands of Haitians marched into Port-au-Prince demanding the resignation of U.S.-backed right-wing President Jovenel Moïse. The terms of a 2018 IMF loan that stipulated reduced oil subsidies has led to massive fuel shortages and higher fuel prices. Moïse has also been accused of stealing money from Venezuela’s fuel assistance program, PetroCaribe. But the protests are about more than just fuel shortages. Centuries of colonial violence and imperialist repression—including nearly two decades of U.S. military occupation and multiple U.S. sponsored coups—have made the Republic of Haiti the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

The protests include workers, peasants, students and teachers—all yearning for a life of dignity, for access to education, housing, food, and healthcare but also for national independence, free from the clutches of U.S., French, and Canadian imperialists. As the first Black nation to have achieved liberation from colonial control, the people of Haiti bear a history not only of extreme oppression, but also revolutionary struggle.

A woman protests in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Jun. 10, 2019. Protesters continue to fill the streets, demanding the resignation of President Jovenel Moise.

In Ecuador, similar mass protests have forced the government to concede to some of the people’s demands. After President Lenin Moreno announced that he would eliminate oil subsidies per the terms of an IMF loan, hundreds of transit workers went on strike. Thousands of other people from diverse sectors of society—women’s groups, Indigenous peoples, trade unions, social organizations, and Marxist groups—took to the streets to protest not just the latest IMF deal, but all of Moreno’s reactionary policies. Indigenous peoples lead this movement. Moreno deployed riot police and the army to repress the protesters.

The U.S. government supports the Moreno government, which is unsurprising, given its record of backing reactionary rulers in other countries to maintain its own political and economic supremacy.

Moreno has increased poverty and inequality by slashing funding for energy, public infrastructure, healthcare, and education. The IMF loan also mandated 20% cuts to public employees’ salaries, the elimination of workplace safety regulations, privatization of pensions, cuts to wages, and layoffs of up to 140,000 public employees. But the people of Ecuador are rising up against this program of austerity. After weeks of militant protests, Moreno announced that he would restore fuel subsidies.

Tens of thousands of Ecuadorians protest the austerity government of President Moreno in Quito, Oct. 9.

The mass movement in Ecuador continues, just as in Haiti. Both nations are ruled by reactionary presidents with ties to the imperialist U.S. government, which has only one mission: to make the poor poorer and the rich richer. As workers, we have an invaluable lesson to learn from the people of Haiti and Ecuador, who show us the power that lies in working class unity. We must come together and build our own militant workers movement from the ground up. Our oppressors will never hand us our own liberation; we must seize it for ourselves.

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The World Bank and the IMF: Weapons of Economic Warfare

By Jennifer Lin

The World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are the financial arms of U.S. imperialism. Just as the Pentagon pursues the aims of U.S. imperialism with war and occupation, the WB and the IMF achieve those ends through extortion.

These institutions were set up to keep colonized countries from developing by undermining their domestic industries and making them economically dependent on the U.S. Debtor nations are forced to export mainly plantation crops and to rely on the U.S. for grain and food imports. The U.S. government wields this dependency as an economic weapon, imposing sanctions against any nation (like Venezuela, Cuba, Iran) it perceives as a threat to its dominance in the global capitalist world order. Sanctions are an act of economic warfare that starve and impoverish workers.

IMF loans have obscenely high interest rates and include ‘structural adjustment programs’ that force debtor nations to privatize major industries and services and impose austerity measures on working and oppressed people. These include regressive taxes on the poor, cuts to wages, layoffs, and the destruction of labor unions.

The IMF is as anti-democratic as it’s anti-labor. The U.S. has sole veto power in both institutions and loans disproportionately to countries with repressive governments. The U.S. did not loan to Chile when it was governed by democratically-elected President Allende—that is, until he was overthrown by a U.S. backed military coup and the authoritarian Pinochet regime came to power. Under the military dictatorship of Somoza, Nicaragua received generous loans, but when the revolutionary Sandinista government rose to power, the U.S. imposed a trade embargo against the country.
The WB and IMF perpetuate the legacy of colonialism

So called “developing nations” suffer from poverty because they have been purposefully underdeveloped by centuries of colonial control. U.S. financial elites use the WB and the IMF to trap these nations in a vicious cycle of unsustainable debt. But the workers of the world have always been opposed to these heinous institutions. Since 2018 alone, the people of Argentina, the Czech Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Haiti, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Sudan, Tunisia, and other countries have taken to the streets in protest. They refuse to be repressed by institutions designed only to protect the rich.

Working class people, who are most directly impacted by the IMF and WB, do not currently have a say regarding their policies. Until the IMF and the WB are collectively controlled by workers, they will continue to be weaponized by the rich to further oppress the global working class.