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Open Letter: Demand for Relief to Evacuees of Hurricane Laura

An Open Letter to Governor John Bel Edwards & State Representatives

Governor John Bel Edwards 
Speaker of the House Clay Schexnayder 
Senate President Page Cortez 
Senator John Kennedy 
Senator Bill Cassidy 

Dear Governor Edwards, Speaker of the House Schexnayder, Senate President Cortez, Senator  Kennedy, Senator Cassidy: 

The Louisiana Movement for Workers Councils condemns members of the Louisiana  State Legislature and U.S. Congress who, at this moment of crisis, are playing political games.  The special session is clearly more about expanding your power and privileges than it is about  expanding the unemployment fund or providing genuine hurricane relief to the tens of thousands  of Louisianans adversely affected by Hurricane Laura. 

You continue to ignore dire conditions of Hurricane Laura evacuees who need urgent  assistance with income, housing, jobs, mortgages, transportation, and food. The only relief that  has come through was announced for the sake of a photo op. Most aid has been delayed or  bogged down in bureaucratic red tape. Thousands have still not received SNAP, unemployment,  housing alternatives, or cash income.   

While you are renewing or issuing new tax exemptions to profitable corporations and  wealthy individuals, the working people of the affected parishes—on whose backs this state runs —have been left in the dust. 

We call for representatives of the Workforce Commission, SNAP, FEMA, and HUD to  station on-the-ground personnel and equipment. Representatives of these agencies must undo the  bureaucratic holdups by ensuring that: (1) FEMA pay out emergency money every day, all day;  (2) families have homes to stay in temporarily or permanently; (3) a housing repair fund is  provided for the thousands without insurance (because you have allowed insurance rates in  Louisiana to become the most unaffordable in the country); (4) children have computers and  reliable internet to attend classes.   

Every day we are reminded that the rich are getting richer while you ignore the workers’  needs in favor of your own narrow interests. Hurricane Laura has scattered people, leaving  thousands desperate. But folks are organizing. Your inaction and callous disregard will be  remembered.   

Sincerely, 

Louisiana Movement for Workers Councils

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Letter from a Veteran: Trump is a War Criminal

Trump thinks he has the final say on a lot of things. Executive orders, tweets, etc. His recent pardoning of three convicted war criminals is just another instance of abuse of power. Not surprising for a fascist.

Trump claims to be the best friend the military could have. What could he possibly know about serving? I served for 8 years, both under Bush and Obama. I entered combat zones under both regimes, which drove us into “forever wars” that destroyed the Middle East and gave trillions of our tax dollars to war profiteering corporations.

While I was in, I was required to abide by the UCMJ, or Uniform Code of Military Justice, which regulates the conduct of service members at home and while deployed. Violations of several of these articles can lead to Court Martial, which is where committing war crimes will land you. You’ll either be sentenced to death or get time in the brig. During times of war, which we are always in, you can be summarily executed for simply refusing to obey an order. This has happened as recently as 2013.

The military is largely a fraternity, for lack of a better word, run by corrupt generals. There are the UCMJ’s rules and then there are the “real” rules. Crimes are routinely covered up, obfuscated, or flat out lied about. That’s how it works, and it will not change until workers (including rank and file soldiers) rise up to dismantle this thing.

For someone to get convicted of these types of crimes, they would have to have been particularly heinous.

Trump claims he wants to “take care” of veterans. If he were serious about supporting active duty troops, he would bring Washington’s wars and occupations to an end. He would champion more funding for the VA. But he has as much concern for the troops as do the oil company executives who ought to be tried for war crimes themselves, along with the politicians and generals who orchestrate these wars.

Think about what fascists want and see if this fits in with their agenda. Trump is signaling that he has the final say in terms of justice. The criminals he pardoned are now emboldened, as are other service members who have done or aspire to commit similar acts. At the same time, the military refuses to address the problem of white supremacy among the ranks and will no longer screen for white nationalist views as a condition of enlistment.

Murdering civilians, posing with corpses, white nationalism, what else is Trump ok with?

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Indict the System, Not the Youth!

Children and youth lead a march organized by Take ‘Em Down NOLA in 2018.

Letter To My Young Brothers and Sisters:

By Enigma E

First off, much love and respect to you, my young brothers and sisters. Secondly f*ck this white supremacist/capitalist system we live under. I know you’re frustrated. I know what it means to not feel accepted in mainstream society. What it means to not be given the benefit of the doubt, what it means to constantly be judged, constantly be thought of as the one that did something wrong and whatnot. This system is set up for us to fail: look at it historically from us being declared 3/5ths of a human being, to chattel slavery, to the convict-leasing system, to Jim Crow, to the mass incarceration state presently.

We have and always will be the biggest threat to overthrowing this system. We have to turn the justifiable rage within us into a mass organized movement. Imagine if we had all the youth from every ward and part of the city clicked up on one page, united under one cause. That’s thousands of us in the street demanding what we deserve from a city that makes over $8 billion dollars annually off the culture and labor of the people that suffer the most. It shouldn’t be that way, where the rich live comfortably, and the large majority of Black and Brown people have to live check to check and never have time to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

We outnumber the police, the wealthy and all the crooked ass politicians. I know we look at those people as having power, but they have a false system-based power. But we the people have a REAL POWER. The power to shut down all factors of production of the system by not participating in it. Once organized, we can decide what we want from the schools rather than these multi-million-dollar charter networks that steal money from us. We can decide what we deserve to be paid for our labor rather than shareholders dictating what we get. We can decide what we want our neighborhoods to look like rather than letting gentrifiers and land consultants decide. Every aspect of life can be radically changed with us being on the same page and exerting our power.

Some ways we can accomplish that is: 1) Reading, writing, distributing this newspaper and joining the New Orleans Workers Group, which organizes to uplift the working class and youth in and around the city; 2) Listening to audiobooks and YouTube speeches of Malcolm X and The Black Panthers as you’re playing video games or simply walking somewhere. You can pay homage and learn from the powerful speeches of the revolutionaries that came before you; 3) Organize people you know already: people around your house, at school and family members. We have to shift conversations into radical political thinking, slowly but surely; And lastly 4) stay committed to the cause. We are in a battle for our livelihood every day. We must stay committed to fighting for the freedom of all poor and oppressed peoples. We are the ones that make up everything around us, so we should be the ones enjoying it, too.

All Power my Peoples! The ancestors live through US!