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5 Important Protests in 10 Days March with Refuse Fascism in mass contingents to say:
NO! In the Name of Humanity – We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!
DRIVE OUT THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME!
Refuse Fascism endorses these protests and calls on you to march with us at:
April 22 March for Science
Oppose the Regime’s attacks on Science
April 24 Holocaust Remembrance Day:
Join Processions from Holocaust Memorials in different cities to present Adolf 'ICE'man* awards to John Kelly, the head of ICE, & local officials. (*Adolf Eichmann was in charge of deporting Jews to the Nazi concentration camps.)
April 27, 7-9 pm EST National Livestream Teach-in:
Fascism in America Could It Happen Here? Is It Happening Here? What Is the Danger that the Trump/Pence Government Poses?
Thursday, April 27, 7-9 pm, New York City United Methodist Church in the Village 201 West 13th Street (at 7th Ave.), New York City
Speakers
GeorgeProchnik,author, New Yorker contributor
Andy Zee,Refuse Fascism co-initiator, Revolution Books NYC spokesperson
Rita Dentino,Exec. Dir., Casa Freehold of National Day Laborers Organizing Network
Kierán Suckling,a founder and Executive Director of Center for Biological Diversity
Humanity faces an extreme emergency with Trump’s rise to power. This nationally live-streamed Teach-In aims to deeply explore, from different perspectives, the essential nature of the Trump/Pence Government, the relevance of the history of fascism, the threat it poses to humanity and the planet itself, and the dangers of normalization.
Donations requested, not required. This event will be livestreamed at RefuseFascism.org.
Fight the Regime’s devastation of the climate and environment
May 1st – Stop the Regime’s Demonization, Attacks and Deportations of Immigrants
JOIN the RefuseFascism contingents under the banner of: NO!
10 DAYS from April 22-May 1, the end of the first 100 Days of the Trump/Pence Regime, must be a big leap in organizing the movement to drive this fascist regime from power. The stakes are nothing less than the future of humanity and the planet.
Make no mistake. The Trump/Pence Regime—the whole thing—every cabinet post, every executive order, every tweet is a link in the chain of a fascist government and worldview under the signboard of a vengeful “America First” being rammed into place. Every immigrant family ripped apart... every refugee turned back to war torn countries... every pipeline approved...every river despoiled... every denial of proven science, of established facts, of truth itself is killing people now and will cost millions more lives. This is poison to air, water, the earth, and to the conscience of the world.
History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it is too late. Fascism is not just a gross combination of horrific reactionary polices. It is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Once consolidated, fascism essentially eliminates democratic rights. This regime will repeatedly launch new highly repressive measures, eventually clamping down on all resistance and remaking the law... IF THEY ARE NOT DRIVEN FROM POWER.
People must see the NO! everywhere and learn that there is an organization working for the time when millions act together, filling the streets of cities and towns day after day and night after night, declaring this whole regime illegitimate—Demanding, and not Stopping, Until the Trump/Pence Regime is Driven from Power.
Millions must stand together with conviction and courage to resist and say NO! We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America, not just for ourselves, but in the name of humanity.
No, This Past Week Was NOT Trump Backtracking and Listening to Cooler Heads.
This Was Fascism Honing in on Key Goals and Fighting to Consolidate Itself
April 17, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
This past week, various media pundits and ruling class spokespeople argued that Trump had begun to listen to his cooler-headed, more experienced advisers. They said this showed that the Trump/Pence regime was becoming a more “normal” administration, and straying from its agenda.
Well, look at what Trump/Pence actually did, just this past week of April 9-15:
Ramped Up Fascistic Assaults on Immigrants, Latinos, Black People and Women:
Immigrants: On Tuesday, Attorney GeneralJeff Sessions traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border at Nogales, Arizona to give a hate-filled, racist rant demonizing immigrants as part of a “tide of evil” boiling up from Mexico, and announced the further escalation of the Trump/Pence war on all immigrants and the undocumented. This week alone, the regime opened bidding for the construction of the border wall. Sessions said he was making persecuting immigrants a Department of Justice (DOJ) focus. He instituted new, much harsher punishments for immigration violations, including criminalizing marrying, housing, or in any way helping the undocumented. (If you drove your undocumented family to the park, you could now be charged with “transporting” aliens.) Sessions has packed the immigration enforcement agencies with rabid white supremacists. The DOJ slashed even minimal, basic protections for detainees, including having access to translators or lawyers, medical care for the sick, watching over suicidal detainees, and limiting solitary confinement. All these moves were part of a program of terrorizing, incarcerating, and deporting millions. Even one long-time federal prosecutor called Sessions’ moves “fucking horrifying.”
Black and Latino Youth: The Trump/Pence DOJ continues to push cops to “take the gloves off” in harassing, brutalizing, arresting, and even murdering Black and Latino youth. This escalation was signaled April 2 when Attorney General Sessions announced the DOJ was no longer enforcing or pursuing consent decrees with local police departments, which imposed minimal reforms and restraints on police terror and mass incarceration. This heralds unprecedented, even more genocidal levels of police brutality and murder to come.
Women: On Thursday, behind closed doors, Trump signed a measure paving the way for states to cut funding to any abortion provider, like Planned Parenthood. This involves funding for essential women’s healthcare including birth control, cancer screenings, and testing for sexually transmitted infections. This hits poor, Black and Latino women hardest—four million now depend on Planned Parenthood and other women’s health clinics and providers that had been getting the funding now being cut. Trump "has delivered a gut punch to the millions of Americans who rely on family planning providers for their basic healthcare needs," the Center for Reproductive Rights said.
Green Light to Attacks on LGBT Rights. On Friday, the DOJ announced it was dropping its lawsuit, filed during the Obama administration, against the state of North Carolina for its hateful, discriminatory “bathroom” law barring transgendered people from using bathrooms according to their gender identity. The DOJ claimed it was doing so because North Carolina replaced this law with a new one. However, the new law is being vehemently condemned by LGBT groups for continuing the same discrimination against trans people in a slightly different form. The Trump/Pence regime had already rescinded federal guidelines upholding transgendered students’ rights to use school bathrooms of their gender identity. Now, by dropping its lawsuit, the regime’s DOJ is signaling loud and clear to states: go ahead, we have no problem with you enacting bigoted, anti-LGBT measures.
Continued the All-Out Assault on the Environment:
» Gutting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): This week Trump’s EPA began gutting programs that offer some basic health and environmental protections, with more drastic cuts to come. The cuts include slashing programs that monitor drinking water for toxins like lead. This equals more Flint, Michigans—more cities or regions whose water supply is poisoned by chemicals like lead, a toxin that causes permanent and irreversible damage to the nervous systems of children! Trump’s budget cuts environmental restoration and “Superfund” programs by a third. This means that toxic waste dumped by business or government—cesspools of death like those portrayed in the movie ErinBrockovich—will not be cleaned up, and the many thousands living nearby will be at risk of suffering or dying from cancer. And these are only a few of the cuts being made to health and environmental programs.
Took Leap in Fascist Restructuring of Government and Society:
» Supreme Court: On Monday Trump swore in Christian fascist-enabler Neil Gorsuch as a justice on the Supreme Court. Gorsuch has consistently ruled in favor of breaking down the separation of church and state, and has voted to protect the “freedom” of anti-abortion and anti-birth control corporations and institutions to obstruct access to these rights for their female employees. His nomination cemented Trump’s alliance with the Christian fascist movement. And Gorsuch is now poised to help pave the way for a vast expansion of executive power and a fascistic assault on the rule of law.
Escalation of U.S. Aggression and Threats of War Across the Globe:
» Dropping the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever. On Thursday, under Trump’s authority, the U.S. military dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat on Afghanistan. Officially called a MOAB, this is a 30-foot long, 21,000 pound weapon of mass murder and terror that, according to one description:
unleashes a devastating fireball that incinerates and vaporizes anything within 30 feet upon detonation...all the oxygen would have been forced out of the tunnels and for hundreds of feet around, literally sucking the life out of [its intended victims], suffocating them as their lungs imploded...in a flash the fiery shockwave would have radiated outwards at the speed of sound for up to a mile, causing huge blunt force trauma injuries to anyone caught in its path, leveling buildings and trees. Ears would have been left bleeding and internal organs battered by the sheer force of the shockwave. The blast would also have caused many within two miles of the blast to lose their hearing. Anyone caught inside the tunnels would have been crushed as the force of 19,000 pounds of highly complex explosives caused them to collapse...
Dropping this bomb, and nicknaming it the “mother of all bombs,” is aimed at getting people used to the U.S. carrying out indiscriminate mass murder with weapons of mass destruction—weapons one step away from using nukes. This sick shit is what “America First” really means!
» Surge in killing civilians. This massive bombing comes on the heels of a surge in civilians murdered by U.S. bombs.In March, according to the website Airwars.com, the number of civilians killed by U.S.-led air strikes in Iraq and Syria rose sharply from the already-high previous total to as many as more than 3,400 people, four times the number from the previous month.Trump’s response? Hailing all this as big “successes.”
» Nuclear roulette in the Korean Peninsula. Trump has flipped from flattering Russia into threatening it and is now playing nuclear roulette with North Korea. On Sunday Trump dispatched an aircraft carrier attack group toward the Korean Peninsula. Later in the week he threatened to solve the North Korean “problem” himself—in other words, he threatened a preemptive U.S. attack on North Korea. Trump’s reckless fascist threats and bluster sent tensions soaring, heightening the danger a confrontation that could get out of control and spiral into nuclear war. North Korea responded to Trump’s threats with warnings of “thermonuclear war” if the U.S. attacked. The Chinese government stated “we’re on the brink of war.” On Friday, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said, “We have the potential for a nuclear war that would take millions of lives.”
All this in one week.
Don’t listen to the rulers’ mouthpieces telling us Trump is becoming a “normal” president because he bombed Syria and is finally “standing up” to Russia. This is not normal. This is fascism.
Join the Refuse Fascism contingents at the upcoming marches.
Spread the message: NO! In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America! Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime!
Congressman Admits That Trump Is a Fascist but Doesn’t Think We Should Say So… Huh?!?
April 16, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Last week, at a Town Hall meeting attended by 1,000 people, New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler admitted that Donald Trump is a fascist. In response to a member of Refuse Fascism, Nadler said, “Donald Trump is the first major candidate in American politics, in recent decades, that I think really deserves to be called a fascist. Trump comes along and says ‘you’ve got some real problems: A, B and C. And it’s the fault of the Mexicans, and the Chinese. And the solution is me. I am the solution. Only I can take care of it.’ That is, that is fascism: blaming it, blaming the problems on scapegoats, and the strongman [as the solution].”
Nadler then said that while it is true that Trump is a fascist, it is not a good idea to say so. “It’s true, there are fascists. Some of them are fascists. I think the president is. But you want to stop what they’re doing. And you want to use the terminology that is most effective for doing it.”
Let’s look at the logic of this. If Trump is fascist, that has implications in terms of the extremity of his program and the “logic of the logic” of where that goes. Do people need to know that? Do they need to make their strategies of struggle and their actions commensurate with the threat that Trump actually represents? Can they go through the normal channels of the system to stop this, or do they have to go outside those channels? These are all questions that come from actually naming the problem you’re facing. But Nadler—and others—don’t want to go there.
Nadler says, “You want to use the terminology that is most effective for doing it.” The question is, doing what? Actually driving out a fascist regime, as soon as possible, before even more dire consequences ensue? Or keeping the anger within the bounds of the system’s safety valve, the electoral arena?
This is the equivalent of a doctor refusing to tell a patient that they have cancer—a practice, by the way, that was standard operating procedure in American medicine for decades in regard to women. You prevent them from coming to grips with their real situation and acting on that. As applied to cancer, it’s now seen to be unconscionable—but what does it mean and what will it mean when people apply that same method today?
Far better to look reality in the face, and fight to change it.
Deadly Enemies of Science and Truth; Champions of Ignorance
April 16, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The Trump/Pence regime is a fascist regime. As such, it bludgeons the truth when it does not serve its interests or program. There is the regime of “alternative facts,” the outright denial of scientific truths, and the undermining and sidestepping of the role of science and scientists in critical areas like global warming and public health. The Christian fascist cohort led by Pence is readying its assault on the science of evolution and in other areas. Only science and engineering serving corporate and military interests are to be encouraged and funded.
Such a regime must not only be resisted, it must be driven out. The March for Science and the Refuse Fascism contingent in it are absolutely needed—and at the same time, must open up a whole new upsurge of struggle, leading to the ending of the regime, as soon as possible.
Capitalism-Imperialism in Its “Normal Workings”
Yet while fascism is indeed monstrous and grotesque, capitalism in its normal workings represents a real horror for humanity. Imperialist wars; the oppression of Black people and other oppressed nationalities, of women and immigrants; and the destruction of the environment are a matter of course and a result of the workings of this system.
And capitalism-imperialism is a real and substantive fetter on the pursuit of science. Just some of the ways include:
Large sections of humanity are locked out of training and working in the realm of ideas. Billions of children around the world are denied the basics of science and the scientific method, of truths that we have come to know, about how the universe and life came to be. This “mental/manual” divide, perpetuated daily by the workings of this system, stands as a fetter on scientific pursuit—by humanity as a whole. The systematic reinforcement of religion by the ruling classes plays no small role in this. All this then creates fertile ground for fascism to whip up its social base for anti-scientific attacks, along with a general know-nothing-ism.
Funding of scientific research—and allocation of social wealth to do so—is fundamentally dictated by the goals of this system and its rulers. These do not correspond to the interests of humanity. Research grants skewed to conform to aims of the defense and energy departments, or corporate entities, are but a symptom of that. These funding levers are now in the grip of the fascists.
Capitalism is driven by competition—between nations, blocs of capital in the form of corporate entities, and even individuals. Scientific findings, instead of being shared with the world and humanity for the common good, are treated as intellectual property, to be monetized and used against competitors, national or corporate.
In imperialist countries like the U.S., basic scientific research and areas like public health and the environment are afforded. But this is only because of wealth resulting from these countries’ position on top of the world imperialist system and its brutal food chain. This is not the case in what is commonly known as the Third World. It is also constricted when fascists in power view this as unnecessary—like now.
Capitalist competitiveness manifests in “me first” ideology, perverting social relations and standing in the way of people truly cooperating and sharing to pursue science and truth. Dominant social relations of this system also pose real obstacles—in different ways—to women and oppressed nationalities pursuing science.
An Invitation to a Radically Different World
All of this is utterly unnecessary and can be overcome through an actual revolution to get rid of this system and bring about a radically different—and far better—society. One that aims to get beyond oppression, exploitation, and antagonistic social divides as part of a worldwide process. It is an economic system not based on exploitation of people or the environment, a political system that aims to eliminate antagonistic social divides, and the radical transformation of social relations and ideas.
A concrete and viable vision of this society is captured in the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian (BA). In the overall context and blueprint for the new society, there are detailed sections on the Environment, Education, and Science and Scientific Endeavor that will be of specific interest to those marching in defense of science and the environment. The Constitution is based on BA’s new synthesis of communism, a whole new framework for human emancipation on a thoroughly scientific foundation, developed over four decades. For more, we encourage you to read the interview of the award-winning scientist and author Ardea Skybreak: Science and Revolution, On the Importance of Science and the Application of Science to Society, the New Synthesis of Communism and the Leadership of Bob Avakian.
Past communist theory was marked by shortcomings that ran counter to its principally scientific character. Previous revolutionary experiences and genuine socialist societies—the Soviet Union and China—were also marked by serious shortcomings and errors that ran counter to their positive achievements and their liberatory goals. BA’s work examines and excavates these, and resolves them in a radically new—and different—synthesis. In the interview, Science and Revolution, Skybreak states,“Look, with BA, you have somebody here who’s really good at applying consistent evidence-based scientific methods to both the analysis of current society and the pathways for change of future society. How can you not want to seriously examine and check this out?”
At a moment when truth, science, the scientific method and their place in public life and policy are under siege—when human society itself is under direct threat from a science-denying, nuclear-roulette-playing regime—isn’t it time to take up Skybreak’s challenge?
Reaching Out, Stepping Up Organizing Efforts, Raising the Demand—Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime!
April 17, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
RefuseFascism.org has been on the move against the Trump/Pence fascist regime, raising the demand that it be driven from power, and organizing people from all walks of life to join in this determined political fight. Refuse Fascism mobilized emergency protests in cities around the country against Trump’s surprise bombing of Syria. It went into packed town hall meetings, sounded the alarm that the Trump/Pence regime is fascist, and called on people to join in driving the regime out. The Refuse Fascism National Organizing Tour has traveled to John Jay College, Columbia University, Cornell, Yale, Bard College, and Middlebury, mobilizing students. At the Tax Day marches on Friday, Refuse Fascism distributed thousands of copies of the Call to Action, hundreds of big NO! signs, and signed people up for the Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime contingents in the upcoming science march, Holocaust Remembrance Day, climate march, and May 1st immigrants rights actions.
Meanwhile, Refuse Fascism has radically transformed its website and is revitalizing its social media organizing efforts. All this—and much more—must be built upon and taken to a higher level. Thousands must be organized to lead millions to drive the Trump/Pence fascist regime from power before it is too late. The key step right now is to mobilize everyone possible into significant Refuse Fascism contingents around the country at the science march (4/22), Holocaust Remembrance Day (4/24), the climate march (4/29), and May 1st for immigrants’ rights. Now is the time for everyone—religious folks and atheists, young and old, people of all nationalities, sexual orientations and genders, people from across the political spectrum—who see the danger of fascism to march together in these contingents and raise the powerful unifying demand: NO! The Fascist Trump/Pence Regime Must Be Driven From Power! In the Name of Humanity—We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America! Sign up to join a Refuse Fascism contingent at one or all of these marches, or to organize your own:
To the Youth Who Are Caught Up in the Violence—
You Are NOT “Too Far Gone,” But You Need to Get into This Revolution or You Will Be.
April 14, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
People are saying there's no way out of the gang shit. They say it’s too far gone because too many people have been killed and “we want them to hurt how we hurt.” It’s too far gone because “I’ve already done too much fucked up shit.” It’s too far gone because the young ones have no hopes and dreams, no structure, and are quick to kill.
Save the date Saturday May 6 for a viewing of
Bullshit. It’s not too far gone. It’s just fucked up as hell. And it’s a system that has put you and millions like you in this situation, trapped you in it, and is using you to keep it going. The ONLY solution is revolution. You need to change what you are living and fighting for and willing to die for.
This system has set everything up against you and called you a criminal before you could even walk. Its police lock you up, beat you down, and kill you off. And it has trained you to think in its dog-eat-dog logic: that the only meaning your life can have is killing other people in the exact same conditions. Now Trump has plans to bring the hammer down on Black people and speed up what is already a slow genocide. Don’t do what they want you to do! GET OUT OF THIS CRAZY SHIT, AND GET INTO THE REVOLUTION!
You think you’re Tough Tony for doing what this system lets you do? Or are you really afraid of change? Afraid to hope we could get to a radically different situation and afraid to take the step of putting yourself out there to fight for something radically different?
This situation is not too far gone. And you are not too far gone. Whatever heartless fucked up shit you have done in the past is past. And we will stand with you if you step forward to do something different now. Bob Avakian, the leader of the revolution, sees something else.
One of the things that I see, something that I haven’t lost sight of, is this: I see all the strength of the ruling class, but I also see all the way through all this shit, all the contradictions in society—I actually see a force in this society that, if it were developed into a revolutionary people, actually could have a go at it, could have a real chance of making a revolution, or being the backbone force of a revolution, when the conditions were ripe. I see a force of millions and millions and millions—youth and others—for whom this system is a horror: It isn’t going to take some cataclysmic crisis for this system to be fucking over them. The ruling class, ironically, sees them too. It is those who once had but have lost—or those who never had—a revolutionary perspective... it is they who can’t see this. (from the essay “The Revolutionary Potential of the Masses and the Responsibility of the Vanguard,” in BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian)
Get with Bob Avakian and join the Revolution Club. We have the strategy, discipline, organization, and science to have a real chance to win—and the heart for humanity to make it a revolution worth fighting and dying for. Come to the Revolution Club office to learn how we can win a real revolution, what we need to do now to prepare for revolution, and how to start living by and fighting for the Points of Attention for the Revolution.
For the people who are not the ones shooting and dying, but are shaking your heads and throwing up your hands: the youth are there, what are YOU going to do? Wash your hands of it? Preach to them? Or be part of or support the only road that can lead out of this madness, revolution?
Get with the Revolution! Get with the Revolution Club!
1857 E 71st Street (in South Shore, Chicago)
Hours: 3–7 pm every day except Monday
312-804-9121 revclub.chi@gmail.com www.Facebook.com/RevComChi
Two Revolution Club Members Arrested at Good Friday Peace March
April 15, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
The Catholic Church’s Cardinal Cupich organized a Good Friday procession through Englewood on Chicago’s south side to pray for an end to the violence among the people.
At the end of the procession, two women from the Revolution Club, Chicago were arrested while Chicago police menaced other members. We demand to know why they were arrested. Did the Catholic Church or sponsors urge the authorities to drag away the revolutionaries on Good Friday? If not, then where is the outrage and the demand that the charges be dropped immediately?
We challenge anyone to tell us what is wrong with what is said in the quote from Bob Avakian (BA) that we carried? Or our other signs challenging people?
Oppressed people who are unable or unwilling, to confront reality as it actually is, are condemned to remain enslaved and oppressed. (BA, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party-RCP)
If praying could stop our youth from killing each other, it would have stopped a long time ago. If you are going to pray—pray for people to get into the revolution—and then support them when they do!
Get out of this insanity of killing each other. Get into the Revolution!
Authorities Say: Praying—OK, Revolution—NO!
In making these highly visible arrests on Good Friday, the state was enforcing the message that you can pray for an end to the violence among the people but you can not call for an end to the system that creates the conditions and the values that is responsible and gives rise to youth killing each other by denying them any future. What does this tell you?
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the Revolution Club Organizing Centers
The Trump/Pence regime has seized on the horror of young Black people killing each other to make Chicago ground zero for an overall offensive against Black people. Trump issued a naked threat, “If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible carnage going on... I will send in the Feds.”
In response the Central Committee of the RCP has issued a statement that is being distributed in the 10's of thousands especially on the south and west sides of Chicago; the Revolution Club is opening an organizing center in South Shore with another office to open soon on the west side; Carl Dix, a founding member of the RCP, has come to Chicago as a spokesperson for the RCP's plan.
A gofundme campaign has been set up to raise money for the offices (rent/utilities/set up) including to open an office on west side, to print up 100's of thousands of the Central Committee statement and to support volunteers coming from different parts of the country to Chicago to organize.
As the procession was ending, the Revolution Club marched up to meet it (without a sound system), and the police immediately vamped on them. The police said that they could not be in the street, even as hundreds filled the blocked off street. One Revolution Club member was grabbed and arrested while others were backed onto the sidewalk. Some people began to chant, “Let her go,” and police grabbed and arrested another club member. Other club members were followed and menaced by police as they tried to leave the area. A priest and a videographer trailed along to protect them. The fact that this was being filmed made the police back off. The two Revolution Club members arrested were held for hours while the police went back and forth about what to charge them with since they had no cause to arrest them in the first place.
Everyone who wants to see our youth get into radically changing the world and becoming emancipators of humanity in the process needs to condemn these arrests and demand that the charges be dropped immediately. Call Edward Siskel, Corporation Counsel at the City of Chicago Law Department 312-744-0220 and tell him to drop the charges.
Come Learn about the Revolution Club
Come to the Revolution Club office in South Shore at 1857 E. 71st Street on Thursday, April 20 at 7pm to meet the Revolution Club and to find out why they were arrested and what the Revolution Club is really all about.
A lot of people ask us if everyone in the Revolution Club doesn’t believe in god. The answer is that people who have religious beliefs can join the Revolution Club as long as they uphold Point #5 of the Club’s Six Points of Attention: “We search for and fight for the truth no matter how unpopular, even as we listen to and learn from the observations, insights and criticisms of others.” The Revolution Club is led by the RCP, which is thoroughly scientific and does not believe in any kind of gods or supernatural beings. The Club and the Party work with many religious people and clergy on the basis of the following principle:
While many people will do positive things in opposing the crimes of this system, we need to approach everything—evaluate every political program and every organized force in society, every kind of culture, values and ways of treating people—according to how it relates to the revolution we need, to end all oppression. We should unite with people whenever we can, and struggle with them whenever we need to, to advance the revolution.
SAVE THE DATE: Saturday, May 6th–Come to a Showing of REVOLUTION AND RELIGION: The Fight For Emancipation and The Role of Religion, A Dialogue Between CORNEL WEST & BOB AVAKIAN
The Revolution Club Office in South Shore is located at: 1857 E. 71st Street
Case #63: April 20, 2010—BP Deepwater Horizon Gulf Oil Disaster
April 17, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Bob Avakian recently wrote that one of three things that has "to happen in order for there to be real and lasting change for the better: People have to fully confront the actual history of this country and its role in the world up to today, and the terrible consequences of this." (See "3 Things that have to happen in order for there to be real and lasting change for the better.")
In that light, and in that spirit, "American Crime" is a regular feature of revcom.us. Each installment focuses on one of the 100 worst crimes committed by the U.S. rulers—out of countless bloody crimes they have carried out against people around the world, from the founding of the U.S. to the present day.
THE CRIME: On April 20, 2010, some 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, methane gas burst from the Macondo well being drilled a mile under the surface of the Gulf of Mexico by the global oil giant BP. The gas surged up the piping into the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform and exploded, creating an inferno of flame and smoke. Eleven of the rig’s 126 workers were killed and 17 more injured. The platform was destroyed, the well’s piping ripped apart, and a toxic gusher let loose from the sea floor. It poured 210 million gallons of crude oil into the waters of the gulf before it was capped 87 days later. Satellite images showed the spill impacted 68,000 square miles of ocean—roughly the size of Oklahoma. Oil washed up on shores and into estuaries and wetlands in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
The BP oil disaster was the largest marine oil spill in history, and perhaps the U.S.’s worst environmental catastrophe ever.
The spill threatened human health and created an economic disaster for the many thousands whose living depended on the gulf’s waters. Tens of thousands of Gulf Coast residents—adults and children—reported a host of physical and mental illnesses, from neurological, muscle-skeletal, and mental trauma to depression, blackouts, migraines, rashes, pneumonia, seizures, and uncontrollable ear and nose bleeds. Cancer rates have spiked. More than 37,500 claims for damages have been filed. A health expert summed up: “There is a core of very sick patients who undoubtedly will be ill for the remainder of their lives as the result of exposure to chemicals involved in the Deepwater Horizon tragedy.”
The oil spill savaged ecosystems from the deep waters of the gulf to its environmentally diverse shores—home to 8,332 species, including fish, birds, mollusks, crustaceans, sea turtles, and marine mammals. Many forms of life were killed, injured, or severely impacted. In 2012, scientists discovered fish with deep skin lesions. They also reported that 50 percent of the shrimp surveyed had no eyes or eye sockets.
In 2013, 4.9 million pounds of oily material were removed from Louisiana beaches. In 2015, a government study of dolphins in the gulf linked Deepwater Horizon oil to lung lesions, diseases, and an “alarming increase in dead bottlenose dolphins along the northern Gulf of Mexico.” Their study found that “one in every three dead dolphins examined across Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama had lesions affecting their adrenal glands….”
The impacts of the Deepwater Horizon disaster continue to be felt to this day.
THE CRIMINALS: BP (formerly British Petroleum). BP leased and operated the oil drilling rig. It deliberately took risks with human lives and the environment to save time and money—including refusing to install a $500,000 acoustic shut-off switch that may have halted the oil blowout. Despite warning signs of trouble with the well, BP chose the less safe of two possible designs for the steel casing for the upper portion of pipe from the well, and refused to install additional “centralizers” to ensure the well was sealed to prevent gas surges. The day of the explosion, BP canceled a recommended test of the cement sealing of the well. Hours before the blowout, key indicators of leaks and building pressure were ignored or dismissed, in part due to time pressure to cap the well.
An investigation by the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper concluded: “E-mail messages and reports by BP engineers in the weeks before the accident make reference to money or time savings as they debated methods for closing the well. In each case, they went the cheaper way.”
(Transocean and Halliburton, two huge global corporations, also contributed to the disaster. Among other things, Transocean, which owned the Deepwater Horizon platform, failed to perform safety checks. Halliburton installed faulty cement in the Macondo wellhead.)
After the Deepwater Horizon blowout, BP systematically covered up its magnitude, lying publicly that only 1,000 barrels per day, and later 5,000 barrels per day, were pouring into the gulf. In its internal emails, the company estimated “the runaway well could be leaking from 62,000 barrels a day to 146,000 barrels a day.” (In fact, 60,000 barrels were fouling the gulf daily.)
BP also tried to hide the enormity of the disaster. They tried to prevent oil from washing up onshore, which was certain to trigger a massive public outcry, by spraying and dumping 1.84 million gallons of chemical dispersant into the gulf. These dispersants broke oil into droplets, so it appeared the spill was gone. It fact, huge amounts of dispersed oil were collecting on the sea floor, severely damaging marine life and poisoning parts of the food chain (in a region responsible for 30 percent of seafood consumed in the U.S.).
BP lied that dispersants were perfectly safe. In reality, the combination of dispersants and oil is extremely toxic and caused an unprecedented number of seafood mutations, declines of up to 80 percent in seafood catch, and massive die-offs of the microscopic life-forms at the base of the marine food chain. A noted chemist said short-term health impacts on humans “include acute respiratory problems, skin rashes, cardiovascular impacts, gastrointestinal impacts, and short-term loss of memory”; and longer-term effects “include cancer, decreased lung function, liver damage, and kidney damage.”
The U.S. Government’s Minerals Management Service, or MMS (now renamed the Bureau of Ocean Safety): The MMS had issued multiple citations on the Deepwater Horizon well as it was being drilled and constructed. Yet it hailed the well as a model of industry safety, skipped a number of monthly safety inspections, and just spent two hours or less at the well during each of its last three inspections before the well catastrophically ruptured. A report by the Union of Concerned Scientists documented how the “MMS circumvented science and suppressed the opinions of scientists concerned about environmental impacts of drilling” in three ways: “dodging environmental impact statements, direct manipulation of MMS science, and ignoring endangered species.”
The Obama Administration: The administration covered up the size of the oil gusher, downplayed scientific data on the disaster’s long-term effects, and suppressed press coverage and scientific studies. It also worked to defuse public anger and discouraged initiative from below to repair the destruction. The administration never exposed BP’s lies and cover-up, and continued to allow BP to be in charge of efforts to cap the well and mitigate the damage. A few BP officials were convicted of criminal charges and given a few months of probation. No one went to jail for this crime. BP, Transocean, and Halliburton each paid fines and settlements (running in the billions of dollars for BP), but all remain major global corporations today.
THE ALIBI: BP’s September 2010 report admitted no corporate malfeasance or negligence, instead saying that testing, technical, and maintenance errors caused the catastrophe. “A complex and interlinked series of mechanical failures, human judgments, engineering design, operational implementation and team interfaces” by “multiple companies” were to blame, according to BP.
The U.S. government’s report blamed “human failings” and errors, not criminal intent or activity of the oil companies, or even “a contemptible desire to do dangerous things on the cheap,” as one newspaper editorial put it.
This system and those who rule over it are not capable of carrying out economic development to meet the needs of the people now, while balancing that with the needs of future generations and requirements of safeguarding the environment. They care nothing for the rich diversity of the earth and its species, for the treasures this contains, except when and where they can turn this into profit for themselves... These people are not fit to be the caretakers of the earth.
Bob Avakian, BAsics 1:29
THE ACTUAL MOTIVE: The risk-taking, time-saving, and cost-cutting actions by BP (and Transocean and Halliburton) that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster did not come from “human failures” or “errors” but were “embedded” in BP’s culture, as one expert on industrial disasters found. This culture in turn was embedded in something deeper: the necessities imposed on BP by the workings of the capitalist-imperialist system to expand and outperform competitors in order to survive.
In BP’s case, when the Deepwater Horizon exploded, it was the world’s fourth largest private corporation and one of the most profitable—making $17 billion in 2009. But in the 1980s, BP was much smaller, crippled by the takeover of its Iranian oil reserves by the Islamic fundamentalist regime following the 1979 fall of the U.S.-backed Shah, and weaker than its bigger rivals. In response, it aggressively expanded over the next decades with risky big bets. It acquired other oil corporations. And it became a leader in deepwater oil drilling in places like the Gulf of Mexico, where the greatest untapped energy reserves and profits are to be found, and often the risks are the greatest.
BP became the world’s second largest oil company, but by the 2000s it worried it could be crushed by competitors unless it streamlined its operations and slashed costs. Between 2007 and 2010, BP laid off 7,500 employees and cut costs—$4 billion in 2009 alone. All this contributed directly to accidents in 2004 and 2005, which killed 17 workers and injured nearly 200; to a 2006 spill of 260,000 gallons of crude into the Alaskan wilderness; and finally to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Control over oil is a crucial source of U.S. economic, geopolitical, and military power. (The U.S. military is the world’s single largest purchaser of oil.) This is why, among other things, the Obama administration whitewashed BP’s crimes and cover-up. And it is why, by October 2012, Obama had issued 90 new drilling permits for wells over 500 feet, more than were issued in 2010 and 2011 combined. And this is why even after the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, the Obama administration continued to push for more oil and natural gas production. Under Obama, oil and natural gas production rose so sharply that the U.S. has now overtaken Russia and Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest producer of both natural gas and oil—the fossil fuels which devastated vast swaths of the Gulf of Mexico, and whose burning is a main driver of global warming.
NCAA and NBA Backtrack on LGBTQ Equal Rights and Discrimination
April 16, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In March 2016, North Carolina passed House Bill 2 (HB2), saying people can only use bathrooms according to the sex on their birth certificates. In response to this anti-LGBTQ law, the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) pulled their championships out of the state and the NBA pulled their all-star game out of Charlotte.
Now North Carolina has passed a new law, HB142, that gets rid of HB2 but says that until 2020, no legislation can be passed that provides equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people with regards to private employment or use of public accommodations.
This new law has prompted outrage from the LGBTQ community and those who support equal rights for LGBTQ people. But both the NCAA and NBA have backed off in their protest against North Carolina’s discrimination of the LGBTQ community.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver says Charlotte will now be eligible to host the 2019 All-Star Game. And the NCAA Board of Governors has voted to now allow consideration of championship bids in North Carolina.
HB142 still puts transgender people in jeopardy. Sports journalist Katie Barnes said, “If you are at UNC [University of North Carolina] and are out as trans, what bathroom do you use? No one is telling you, and it puts LGBTQ people and particularly trans people in a precarious position....” (on espnW radio show TheTrifecta). Barnes pointed out that Arkansas is considering 14 anti-LGBTQ laws—and that this is a legislative trend across the country.
A statement signed by 166 current and former collegiate athletes in opposition to North Carolina’s new anti-LGBTQ law called on the NCAA “to uphold its values of inclusion—full inclusion—and stay out of North Carolina until HB2 and HB142 are fully repealed and all of the NCAA’s athletes, coaches, and fans are safe.” The statement also says:
North Carolina’s House Bill 2 (HB2) and House Bill 142 (HB142) put athletes at risk for discrimination, harassment, and exclusion. These laws single out transgender people both sending the message that transgender people are unworthy of legal protection and worse still, that they should be excluded from public life.
HB2 and its mirror image HB142 create unsafe environments for people who are or who are perceived to be LGBTQ, with a particular focus on and particular harms to transgender people. They authorize discrimination and dangerously situate transgender people as a threat to the safety and privacy of others—which we are not.
The NCAA says, “NCAA championships and events must promote an inclusive atmosphere for all college athletes, coaches, administrators and fans.” But it has failed to take a stand against horrific anti-LGBTQ practices at Brigham Young University (BYU) and Christian schools that isolate and target gay people.
An article on Outsports.com, demanding that the NCAA “kick out BYU and anti-gay members,” says, “Married same-sex couples cannot live together at BYU. Their children are considered bastards by the school. Gay students are afraid to show simple affection on campus.... BYU has maintained these anti-LGBT policies for decades, openly discriminating against gay, lesbian and bisexual student-athletes in the name of God, Jesus, religion and the Mormon Church.... There are dozens, if not hundreds, of NCAA member institutions with policies that specifically target LGBT people. LeTourneau University in Texas makes it against the rules—punishable by expulsion—for two people of the same sex to hold hands. Erskine College has tried to ban gay student-athletes. Azusa Pacific University in Division 2 created a hostile environment for a newly out transgender professor, asking him to leave the school (which he reluctantly did). Pepperdine Univ. refuses to recognize an LGBT student group on campus.”
The NCAA should not allow championships and the NBA should not allow all-star games in states that continue to discriminate against anyone. And the NCAA should kick out schools that discriminate against the LGBTQ students and community.
I encourage everyone to get into the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, written by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party. This is a concrete plan for the kind of world we need, where “No one shall be subjected to denial or abridgement of rights or liberty, or to discrimination, on the basis of nationality, gender, sexual orientation, or religious or other belief.”
Carl Dix is a courageous freedom fighter from the 1960s who went on to become a revolutionary fighter and a communist. Dix spent two years in military prison for refusing to fight in the unjust Vietnam War. He emerged unrepentant and went on to become a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), USA, dedicating his life to the emancipation of all humanity. Today, Carl is a follower of and advocate for Bob Avakian, his leadership and his visionary new synthesis of communism. Carl is a co-initiator of Refuse Fascism. Carl Dix and Cornel West co-founded the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN), and Rise Up October that brought thousands into the streets in New York City demanding a stop to police terror.
Black People Killing Each Other in Chicago
Carl Dix says:
Get Out of This Insanity and Get Into the Revolution
March 31, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
In South Shore in 12 hours, seven people shot to death within four blocks of each other. Chicago goddamn! This is fucking crazy. Stop doing what the enemy wants you to do! This system that has created the conditions and the values that have our people destroying each other. Trump is planning to bring down the hammer on Black people in a way far worse than you can imagine. You are helping that happen.
You need to get out of this and start living and dying for something really worth fighting for. There’s something far better your life needs to be about—making revolution and getting rid of the REAL enemy.
We have a leadership like no other for this revolution in Bob Avakian. You need to get into the vision and plan he has charted for how the revolution could win and bring into being a world without all this nightmare of oppression here and around the world.
What’s your life going to be about? Getting respect in a fucked up situation, or ending that fucked up situation, not only for yourself but for all of humanity, in the only way possible—thru revolution? This is what is really worth living and fighting and yes even dying for.
Get with the Revolution Club office in South Shore:
Chicago: They Are Destroying Public Schools, and Preparing to Turn Our Youth Into Mindless Robots & Killing Machines
Updated July 5, 2017, first posted April 10, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Update July 5, 2017: Since we first posted this article, the city of Chicago at the end of May officially approved the outrageous proposal by Mayor Emanuel—requiring that high school students have proof of acceptance into college or vocational school, have a job, or enlist in the military before they can graduate. This is on top of a situation in this city where more than 1,000 teachers and school staff were laid off last year and the chance of male Black high school freshman eventually getting a college degree is only six percent, while the unemployment rate among 20- to 24-year-old Black men is at 43 percent.
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Editors’ note: From Day One in this country, when enslaved Black people were killed for learning how to read, up to today, when students in predominantly Black and Latino schools are treated as if they are in prison and subjected to terrible mis-education, and young Black people are discriminated against every step of the way if they pursue an education—this system has worked to keep the people it most oppresses in the deepest ignorance.
Now, in Chicago in particular, this is poised to take a whole leap. The Trump regime plans to funnel Black and Latino youth into Christian fundamentalist charter schools. They intend to mold these students into mindless, religiously fanatic robots. This article shows how the Democratic mayor, Rahm Emanuel, is greasing the skids for this.
In Chicago, one big way youths are told they’re worth nothing over and over is through their experience in the schools. In the cruelest of jokes, young people are told that getting an education is the only path out of grinding poverty, yet the educational system is a bitter insult in spite of the best efforts of many teachers.
After closing down 50 schools just three years ago—it is now very possible that Chicago public schools will also end the current school year almost three whole weeks early due to “lack of funds” to keep schools open.
For students, this is devastating in terms of their education. In Chicago, it literally means more likelihood of getting shot, or sitting indoors while the sun is shining to keep safe. For teachers, it means a 10 percent cut in pay as well. For everyone―parents, teachers, students—it means scrambling, since closures may be decided just days ahead of time.
As if all this weren’t happening, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a proposal that in order to graduate from high school, students will have to meet a huge new requirement—a plan for what they are doing after high school. If the Chicago Board of Education approves Emanuel’s proposal, starting with next year’s sophomores, in order to graduate, students will need proof of a college or vocational school acceptance letter, a job offer, or enlistment papers for the military! So, it’s not enough to just complete school—now you have to have proof of where you’re gonna be, or else—and if you can’t get a job offer, in a city where unemployment for Black teenagers remains sky-high, and you can’t afford to go to college, then you don’t even get the diploma that you earned. Unless, that is, you agree to go fight and kill for the country and system that put you in this situation in the first place!!
The U.S. military already preys like vultures on inner city students. Branches of the U.S. military literally run entire public schools in Chicago, as well as major ROTC programs and surprise recruitment assemblies. The recruiters lie like pimps... listening to them, you would think the military was the biggest college assistance program in the country. You would have no idea that you are being enlisted to be part of the U.S. killing machine, massacring other oppressed people in countries across the globe.
Now Rahm Emanuel wants to shovel students into the military; that is the option that many students will be forced to choose in order to graduate from high school under his new plan! Trump should thank him for his service.
Currently, fewer than one in four CPS students will graduate from a four-year college. Among young Black men, a little over half will graduate from high school at all. This is a school system where 200-plus students had a sit in at their high school to demand that the one librarian not be laid off and to demand that their school’s library be kept open in 2016. And it was one of the few schools with a library! What kind of educational system is it where students have to fight just to have a library? At a single high school in the wealthy North Shore suburbs, there are 10 librarians.
A system which offers millions and millions of youths no future—that alone is reason enough to sweep this system from the face of the earth!
After the revolution, the educational system will be one where students actually want to go to school!!! It will really enable students to learn about the world and to pursue the truth wherever it leads, with a spirit of critical thinking and scientific curiosity. It will play a critical role in breaking down the oppressive relations in society in the world as a whole.
Sparks of Outrage and Protest Against the Fascist Trump-Pence Regime
Updated January 10, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
A fascist regime that represents an unprecedented danger to humanity has assumed the reins of power in the U.S. Starting right from the inaugural speech and every day since then, the Trump-Pence regime has carried through new outrages—and they surely have more to come. Right now, the different forces in the ruling class are either supporting this enthusiastically or going along with at most a few petty amendments.
As Carl Dix, Sunsara Taylor, and Andy Zee—three people who kicked off refusefascism.org—said in their January 25 letter: “That does NOT mean that the possibility of ousting this regime through truly massive action is over, and that all people can do is work on local projects or hope for some pendulum swing somewhere down the road—while Trump-Pence carry out truly monstrous things and put the whole planet in jeopardy. Far from it. Precisely because this regime is fascist and a qualitative change from the ‘normal workings’ of this system, and because millions of people—correctly—view this regime as utterly illegitimate, the possibility of crisis erupting at any time is great....”
And they also noted: “So we stand at a new juncture. The regime is in power, and moving quickly. At the same time, millions have registered their opposition and many are looking for a way to fight. Over these next few weeks, revcom.us will be covering the regime and the resistance to it with the same intensity and level of analysis that we have since the election.”
There are millions who hate what is represented by this fascist regime, and some of this outrage continues to surface in different kinds of resistance, as seen here on this page. There are also many in different spheres—academia, sciences, arts and entertainment, journalism, and others—who are raising their voices against Trump-Pence and their fascist outrages. See these voices here. It’s crucial to grasp that these sparks and voices represent a much bigger and broader anger and opposition to the fascist regime.
We encourage Revolution/revcom.us readers to send us news and reports, pictures, and videos of the ways people are resisting (send to: revolution.reports@yahoo.com).
Protesters—and T. Rex Dinos—Denounce Rex Tillerson for "Declaring War on Our Planet"
Joined by 15 T. Rex dinosaurs, 200 environmental activists marched through Washington, D.C. Wednesday, January 11, denouncing Rex Tillerson. May Boeve, executive director of 350.org, said in a statement: "By tapping Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, Donald Trump is essentially declaring war on our planet and betting against a livable future." See video here
Hundreds of A&M students with homemade placards and banners joined thousands of people to protest neo-Nazi (aka "alt-right") Richard Spencer, December 6. (AP photo)
December 7—Japanese American community groups led a protest in the Little Tokyo neighborhood of Los Angeles to oppose Trump's threats against Muslims and immigrants. Photo: Twitter/@josie_huang
On Saturday, December 10, in San Francisco, 500 people marched in the rain to deliver the message “This Is Not Normal!” The action was initiated by people who had never organized a protest before. The march involved a broad range: people from the LGBT community, tech workers, students, artists, feminists, and others. The Revolution Club led many chants taken up by the march, like “We will not conciliate! We will not accommodate! We will not collaborate!” and read the statement “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America” from the rally stage. Joey Johnson, revolutionary communist and notorious flag burner, spoke to the huge stakes for humanity in stopping the fascists, and pointed to Trump’s threat to jail and strip citizenship from people burning the American flag as one concentration of the fascist program.
On the same day, in Los Angeles, thousands of people from many walks of life converged downtown to demand the complete stop of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The DAPL threatens the water source for the Standing Rock Sioux people and sites that are important to their culture, and if completed will add significantly to the the global climate change endangering the planet. More than 600 copies of Revolution newspaper were distributed along the march, and hundreds of people carried posters declaring “In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America.”
On Monday, December 5, hundreds of Boston high school and college students walked out of classes and rallied at Boston Commons. According to the Boston Globe, the students delivered a list of demands to the Massachusetts governor and the Boston mayor, “to protect minorities and immigrants, support public education, and denounce white nationalists who have been energized by a Trump victory.”
Trump has threatened to immediately deport millions of immigrants and cancel Obama’s temporary deferrals of deportations of young undocumented people. In response, students across the country are organizing and acting—through walkouts, rallies, and petition campaigns—to demand that their schools become “sanctuary campuses” that protect undocumented immigrants, as well as LGBT people and other who may come under attack from the government as well as fascist mobs. (See “Students Across the County Demand Sanctuary Campuses: Schools Should Be Safe Zones from Fascist Attacks—No Matter What”)
On December 6, at Texas A&M University, neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer’s appearance on the campus was met with righteous protest by hundreds of students and hundreds of others from Houston, Austin, and other cities and towns in Texas. This school is known as one of the most conservative state universities in the country—so this raucous protest of thousands was very significant. (See “Thousands Protest Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer at Texas A&M”)
On December 7, on the anniversary of the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor that began the war between U.S. and Japan, a number of Japanese American community organizations in Los Angeles led a protest in the Little Tokyo neighborhood against Trump’s attack on immigrants and Muslims. They compared what Trump is saying and threatening to the U.S. government’s vilification, mass round-ups, and imprisonment in concentration camps of people of Japanese ancestry during World War 2. There were calls for Little Tokyo to become a sanctuary for those singled out by Trump, and for people to “put their bodies” between those targeted and the authorities.
The Jewish group IfNotNow, which came together in 2014 to opposes the horrific U.S.-backed Israeli war on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, has been protesting Richard Bannon, the white-supremacist, anti-Semitic neo-Nazi who is Trump’s “chief strategist.” On December 8, IfNotNow in New York City posted on their Facebook page: “This morning, we delivered white roses to the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, and demanded that they join our call to #FireBannon. The white rose was used by students from The University of Munich as a symbol of nonviolent resistance to the Nazi regime, and now we claim it as our own—to demonstrate our resistance to state-sponsored hate as the #JewishResistance.”
On December 10, 200 people marched around the M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore to protest Trump who was attending the Army-Navy football game. The Baltimore Sun said that the protesters chanted “No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here” and “We reject the president-elect” and held up signs like “Resist” and “Make fascists hide again.”
On Friday, December 9, at the annual awards ceremony of the International Documentary Association (IDA) held at the Paramount Theater in Los Angeles, TV writer and producer Norman Lear said from the stage that the country is entering “a very dangerous time” with the election of Trump, which poses “serious obligations”: “If, for example, he or his administration in any way threatens the free speech rights of our documentary filmmakers, the IDA and every supporter in this room must—will, I am sure—hunker down together and fight our asses off.” According to Hollywood Reporter, “Feelings on this topic were clearly running high all around, as an audience member yelled, ‘He’s a fascist!’ during Lear’s speech.”
Spurred by the rise of Trump, a website called “Professors Watchlist” has been posting names professors they accuse of “leftist propaganda”—more than 200 names so far. This kind of fascist witch-hunt on campuses will only become more extreme if the Trump regime is allowed to firm up its grip on power. When two professors at Notre Dame university appeared on the list, more than 100 faculty members at the campus took a stand against the witch-hunt with an open letter saying the watch list should add their names in order to reaffirm “our values and recommitting ourselves to the work of teaching students to think clearly, independently and fearlessly.” See the “Other Voices Against Trump” page at www.revcom.us for this statement and other voices of resistance, including MIT professors, Cornel West, New York Times columnist Charles Blow, and others.
There are various calls for protests in Washington, DC, as the date for Trump inauguration approaches. On December 10, Shaun King—New York Daily News writer and widely followed social media commentator—sent out a tweet saying: “Many people asking me if people should clog the streets of DC to prevent the inauguration ceremony. On general principle alone, YES.” A few days earlier, filmmaker Michael Moore tweeted: “Disrupt the Inauguration. The Majority have spoken—by nearly 2.7 million votes &counting! Silence is not an option.”
Update: On December 12, there were protests in a number of cities around the country in response to a "Women and Allies" call to "deliver the message in a unified voice that we are ready to stand against any government action that would serve to erode the rights of women and other vulnerable groups." See "'Women and Allies' Actions Oppose Trump-Pence Attacks."
Los Angeles: 35 Clergy Members and others Arrested in Civil Disobedience vs. ICE Raids
April 16, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
On April 13, at least 200 clergy members and civil rights activists from a number of organizations marched in downtown LA to call attention to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, detentions, and deportations of immigrants by the Trump/Pence regime. In an act of civil disobedience, 35 were arrested when they blocked the entry to the Metropolitan Detention Center—a refusal to accept the inhumane treatment of immigrants by ICE and Homeland Security. This protest was an “Interfaith Day of Prophetic Action.” Rabbi-in-Residence Aryeh Cohen of Bend-the-Arc, a Jewish Partnership for Justice, explained that the action “says to ICE, the institution, that we are intending to put our bodies in between them and ... deportations and detentions of people who have been in this country for a long time.”
As the protest started Jewish, Muslim, and Christian faith leaders chanted “Exodus from detention!” as they marched toward the Metropolitan Detention Center, which houses ICE jail cells and where ICE vans leave to round up immigrants, take them to detention centers, or deport them south of the border. Rabbi Sarah Bassin of Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills said, “I’m standing with my brothers and sisters in faith ... on behalf of the undocumented and the refugee and immigrant communities that are being targeted now.” Rabbi Jonathan Klein, Executive Director of CLUE (Clergy United for Economic Justice), held up bitter herbs “to call out the bitterness of ICE sweeps, of fathers detained in front of their children, of the bitterness of imprisonment for no crime.” Shakeel Syed, an imam associated with the Shura Council of Southern California, said, “Today, I am a full human being standing in solidarity with all my Jewish brothers and sisters.”
This civil disobedience is righteous and right on time and should spread to ICE headquarters throughout the country! And let’s connect these actions with the urgent need to drive out the fascist Trump/Pence regime!
NO! To Trump’s War Moves and Aggression—Drive Out This Fascist Regime!
April 13, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On Wednesday, Trump ordered the dropping of the biggest bomb short of a nuclear weapon on Afghanistan. In March, the number of civilians killed by U.S.-led air strikes in Iraq and Syria rose sharply from the already-high previous total to as many as more than 3,400 people, four times the number from the previous month. Trump has flipped from flattering into threatening Russia and is now playing nuclear roulette with North Korea.
On a very basic level, this is U.S. imperialism at work: using military aggression, and the threat of aggression, in its drive to ever more deeply exploit and plunder the planet and to dominate its chief rivals in that horrific endeavor. These imperialists kill people, wholesale, all the time. Some crow about it, some express regret, and some do both out of either side of their mouth. But they all do it. That is not new and whoever sits in the White House—be it Obama or Clinton, Trump or Bush—bathes in the blood that flows in Syria, Yemen, Somalia or dozens of other places every night.
On another level, the current burst of aggression takes place in the context of a fascist regime attempting to consolidate power—one that is both fighting with other sections of the power structure and fighting within its ranks. The Trump/Pence regime came to power as one answer to the stubborn and difficult problems the U.S. confronts in enforcing that dominance. The logic of fascist regimes—regimes whose legitimacy rest on a hyper-nationalistic chauvinism and the presence of an invincible “strong-man” who virtually never admits defeat but always doubles down—drives very powerfully toward aggression and war. When you have a fascist strongman who has repeatedly raised the question of using nuclear weapons and of heightening the nuclear arms race... whose military budget is a war-fighting budget... who speaks only of American dominance and openly glories in and unleashes his followers around “America First”... this is extraordinarily ominous. Anyone who is telling you that we should aim at anything short of driving out this fascist regime is simply not coming to grips with how directly and dangerously the fate of the planet now hangs in the balance.
Such aggression also mutes the opposition within the country—as this has been doing. It would be truly disastrous should Trump/Pence succeed in that. It is urgent that people take up the call from Refuse Fascism to make the ten days from the April 22 March for Science through May 1 days in which the demonstrations that have already been called are as strong as possible... and that this is marked by large and growing contingents coming together around the slogan: “NO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America! Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime!”
Why the Democrats Cheer Trump When He Wages War…and Why We Must Not Join Them
April 10, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
All it took was Trump firing off 59 cruise missiles against Syria for most leading Democrats, who had been posing as staunch Trump opponents, to start singing his praises.
Senator Chuck Schumer said it was “the right thing to do.” The “militant” Senator Elizabeth Warren said the “Syrian regime must be held accountable.” The “radical” Bernie Sanders condemned Assad as a “war criminal” while mildly criticizing the war criminal Trump for not consulting Congress first.
Right before the Syria attack, Democratic Party standard-bearer Hillary Clinton called for going further than Trump did and “taking out Syria’s airfields”—something which would require hundreds of major strikes, with the potential for unpredictable escalation.
Liberal commentators applauded Trump for acting and sounding “presidential.” MSNBC anchor Brian Williams called the strikes “beautiful”—three times in one sentence. The liberal New York Times: “It was hard not to feel some sense of emotional satisfaction, and justice done.” The Times also tried to normalize Trump via the notion he gives a fuck about children: “Anguish Sways the Isolationist.” Their subhead went: “In truth, it was an emotional act by a man suddenly aware that the world’s problems were now his—and that turning away, to him, was not an option.”
Life is a horror in Syria, because of the murderous Assad regime and its allies—and Assad’s reactionary opponents and their backers, including the United States and its allies.
But was Trump emotionally moved to strike by pictures of dying children? If so, why hasn’t he been moved to stop the U.S. bombing strikes he’s ordered, which killed 70 Syrian children last month alone? And what about pictures of the 1,500 children in Yemen, most of whom have been killed by American bombs dropped by U.S.-backed Saudi Arabia? Or the 462,000 in Yemen suffering from severe, acute malnutrition—starving to death—right now? Trump and his regime have reportedly been moved to action in Yemen—to increase their support for the child-killing Saudi bombing campaign and its child-starving air and naval blockade!
In attacking Syria, Trump saw the need and opportunity to act the “strong man” and show the world and the Middle East region that there’s a new, more ruthless “sheriff in town”—and he may have possibly wanted to shift America’s domestic political terrain in his favor. This was fascism flexing its muscles...and attempting to rapidly consolidate its power!
The Democrats: Spinning Imperialist War as a Humanitarian Exercise
The Democrats are spinning Trump’s illegal, immoral, imperialist air assault as an act of humanitarian concern for children. And they aim to rope the oppressed and the more enlightened, progressive-minded segments of U.S. society into supporting U.S. aggression. (Generally speaking, the Republicans’ hard-core “America right or wrong” social base doesn’t require such justifications for murdering people around the world.) America may not be perfect, the Democrat leaders say—we make mistakes, but “our” intentions are noble, and America and its military are overall a force for good in the world.
The Democrats May Oppose Trump…But NOT For Humanity
Many people—grassroots Democrats, activists, and people who have generally looked to the top Democrats to stop Trump—were shocked and angry that these same leading Democrats are now cheering Trump’s military action. Some denounce top Democrats as “cowards” and demand they unalterably oppose Trump. Many others are repulsed, confused or demoralized by leading Democrats’ salute to the fascist-in-chief.
But the reason the leading Democrats act as they do doesn’t have to do with their spines or lack thereof. It flows from the reality that the Democratic Party isn’t the “people’s party” and never has been. They’re a ruling class party that represents American capitalist-imperialism, the same system the Republicans represent.
That’s why the day after the election, Obama said of himself and Trump, “We’re all on the same team… We’re not Democrats first, we’re not Republicans first. We’re Americans first, patriots first.” He’s right; they are on the same team—the imperialist ruling class team!
Bombing Syria? Turns out these top Democrats can mostly all get behind that! Why? Because Republicans and Democrats understand—and agree—that the survival of their capitalist system rests on and demands global dominance, including over regions like the Middle East, and the Democrats thought Trump’s action was in line with that.
At the same time, right now there’s a fierce battle between the different wings of the ruling class. It’s not over whether to maintain their white-supremacist, patriarchal system of global exploitation and oppression. They’re fighting over how to maintain it in the face of profound challenges, problems and discontent in today’s rapidly changing world. The Trump/Pence regime has seized control and is embarking pell-mell on the fascist restructuring of government and society.
The Democrats feel that maintaining the traditional bourgeois democratic form of the rule—dictatorship—of their class is their system’s best hope. For the masses of people, fascism is a matter of life and death. For these rulers, it’s a matter of how to best preserve their rule.
The Democrats may be genuinely alarmed by the Trump/Pence regime, but they are even more fearful that the millions and millions of Trump-haters will lose their faith in the Democratic Party—and the whole system—and start acting politically outside its confines and channels. So the Democrats have been fighting hard to keep people’s angst and anger within the system’s channels (pressuring Congress, etc.). And they’ve been framing the issue as whether or not Trump is a fit “commander-in-chief” who’s able to keep America “strong” and “safe” and protect U.S. “allies” and “interests.” In other words, they’ve been battling Trump in some ways, and at the same time working to channel anti-Trump anger and opposition into the framework of “what’s best for America”—that is, this imperialist system.
A Crucial Month to Stop Trump
Trump and this system aren’t all powerful—they don’t have it all wrapped up. The U.S. faces crises, difficulties and contradictions all across the world. This is what propelled a faction of the ruling class to take the radical and risky step of empowering someone like Trump and moving toward a fascist remaking of the U.S.
Millions and millions hate the leader of this effort—Donald Trump—and they represent a force with the potential to drive out the Trump/Pence regime.
But for that potential power to be fully unleashed, people need to confront what the Democratic Party and its leadership are really about, and break with the mindset of putting America and American lives above other people’s lives. Otherwise, people will be constantly led back into supporting this system’s crimes, and accommodating to fascism—in the name of “protecting America” or “saving American lives.” We must instead put the world first, not America, and squarely confront the monumental danger to all of humanity and the planet of having a nuclear-armed, climate-crisis-denying fascist running this most deadly country on earth. And rise to our responsibility to move heaven and earth to oust this criminal regime.
In short, it’s on us—the millions—to drive out the Trump/Pence fascist regime. As the Democrats’ response to Trump’s Syria bombing shows, waiting and counting on them to stop the danger posed by this fascist regime would be delusional, and devastating to the lives of billions and possibly the fate of the planet.
10 DAYS, April 22-May 1, the end of the first 100 Days of the Trump/Pence Regime, can—and must—become a big leap in a movement to drive this fascist regime from office. The stakes are nothing less than the future of humanity and the planet.
Over the course of 10 DAYS, hundreds of thousands of people will pour into the streets in important and righteous protests in Washington DC and cities across the country aimed at three key fronts of the Trump/Pence Regime’s reactionary program. RefuseFascism.org endorses these protests and calls on people to attend and build for them. Join a National Organizers Task Force to help build for these events with the message of Drive Out Trump/Pence and their Fascist Regime….
Thousands of people must be organized, their creativity and determination unleashed so that this April marks a decisive advance in the struggle to put a stop to this fascist regime by driving it out.
These are meaningful ways you can act. Where will you be? What will you do?
April 27, 2017. A World to Win News Service. U.S. President Trump’s cruise missile attack on a Syrian airbase can only ratchet up the horrors being inflicted on the Syrian people by multiple rival enemies. It is part of a stepped-up U.S.-led intervention in Syria and Iraq that has already killed about 3,000 civilians, according to Airwars.org. Further, it threatens wider wars in the region and the whole world.
Although Trump claimed to be motivated by the sight of pictures of children choking and dying due to chemical weapons allegedly used by Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime, his attack came in the wake of U.S. airstrikes that killed many hundreds of adults and children in Iraq and Syria, not with chemical weapons but high explosive Hellfire missiles and huge bombs. In March the U.S.-led coalition bombed a mosque, school and bakery in Syria and then levelled apartment buildings in western Mosul in Iraq, killing as many as 230 people in that attack alone. It is very clear that Washington wants to defeat Daesh (ISIS) not to do anything good for the people of Iraq and Syria, who have been Islamic fundamentalism’s main victims, but to impose its own domination and beat back other rivals. The same applies to the U.S. strike on Syria’s Shayrat airbase. It had nothing to do with protecting people in Syria and everything to do with the U.S.’s strategic interests in the region and globally.
Mosul, Iraq, March 24, the area that was hit with a U.S. airstrike on March 17 that killed 230 people. Photo: AP
One of the many children killed in the U.S. air strikes on Mosul, Iraq.
If you want to know what kind of regime the U.S. would welcome in Syria, look at Egypt. Nothing better illustrates what U.S. domination means in this region than Trump’s meeting with Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi a few days before this attack. Trump told Sisi he was doing a “fantastic job in a very difficult situation” and publicly declared, “You have a great friend and ally in the United States and me.” Sisi’s rule began with a military coup in 2013. Its opening act was the massacre of more than 800 Islamic Brotherhood supporters demonstrating against the toppling of its elected government. After attacking a protest camp, troops moved through a hospital systematically exterminating patients and staff. Since then, Egypt’s prisons have been engorged with as many as 60,000 political prisoners, including not only Islamists but members of the secular youth organizations that spearheaded the 2011 Tahrir Square uprising and dissenters of all stripes. Sisi now presides over a country where young people are called “the jail generation”. The main difference between Sisi and Assad is that Sisi is in the U.S.’s pocket and Assad is not.
It is hard to imagine anything more hypocritical than Trump’s claim to have undergone a “change of heart” about the Assad regime because of the suffering of Syrian children. The “heart” of Trump and the imperialist power he heads beats with the blood of hundreds of millions of its victims. From the nuclear bombs that murdered hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of World War 2 to the carpet bombing of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, the extensive spraying of poisonous Agent Orange during the U.S. war to dominate Southeast Asia and the use of depleted uranium shells in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the deployment of weapons of mass destruction against civilians has been a hallmark of American warfighting.
Bringing Foward Another Way is an edited version of a talk by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, to a group of Party supporters, in 2006. It is must reading for a serious understanding of what the U.S. "war on terror" is really about and how to bring forward a positive force in the world in opposition to both Western imperialism and Islamic Jihad.
The U.S. had no objection when the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, back when it considered Saddam an ally, used poison gas to inflict some 100,000 casualties during the Iran-Iraq war. The U.S. enabled both sides and, along with Germany, the UK and France, knowingly supplied the chemicals. The U.S. even blocked UN action against Saddam after his forces gassed the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja, killing 5-8,000 people, including a very high proportion of women, children and elderly.
Further, as many people have pointed out, a man and a regime that ordered that not a single refugee be accepted from the war the U.S. has been fuelling in Syria, even keeping out children scheduled to undergo life-saving medical procedures, cannot claim to act in the name of Syrian children and other victims. The same can be said of UK Prime Minister Theresa May, who claimed to be “appalled” by the “barbarism of the Syrian regime”, when she herself has long been at the forefront of European Union policies that amount to deliberately letting Syrian and other refugees drown while fleeing crossing the Mediterranean. May shut down the British government programme to accept child refugees from the Mideast, which was originally slated to take in 3,500 children—itself a paltry number—after accepting only 350, on the grounds that there was “no more room”.
This demonstration of the U.S.’s murderous power was meant to signal that it does not intend to let Arabs, Iranians, Kurds or anyone else but the U.S. run the region. It was also a threat to North Korea and elsewhere. Right now it is hard to predict Trump’s next act, or how the consequences of this one will unfold, internationally and within the U.S. But some of those who are already sure that this will be a “one-off” U.S. action were—until today—arguing that Trump is all bluster. He has repeatedly said about nuclear weapons, “I don’t want to rule out anything.” The gravity of this situation should not be underestimated.
On March 17, 2017, A World to Win News Service (AWTWNS) announced its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian’s new synthesis of communism. Read its “Editorial: Introducing a transformed AWTWNS” here.
Films: How to Survive a Plague and Larry Kramer in Love & Anger
April 12, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
I want to strongly recommend to all readers of revcom.us, and especially all people building for the 10 Days of Resistance in late April and early May, the films How to Survive a Plague and Larry Kramer in Love & Anger. Both films can be seen on YouTube, and the Larry Kramer film can be seen on HBO on Demand as well.
Both films give you a feel for what ACT UP— the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power— was like in the 1980s and 1990s. (ACT UP continues to exist and remains a militant organization.). Both films give a feel for the kind of urgency and relentlessness, audacity, determination, and irreverence that Larry Kramer and ACT UP brought into the AIDS crisis. How to Survive a Plague also shows how, on the basis of this uncompromising foundation and urgent edge, ACT UP combined this with reaching very broadly to many different people and undertaking many different activities.
Also available on HBO is a film of Larry Kramer’s great play, The Normal Heart, which shows how Kramer had to go outside the bounds of what was deemed respectable and acceptable. How he had to fight against people's deadly illusions and force people out of their comfort zone to confront the actual dangers they were facing.
There are things here to learn and apply to the struggles of today—not THE ANSWER in toto, but certainly a big part of the answer.
Refuse Fascism in the Mix at Angry Tax Day Protests
From a correspondent in NYC
April 15, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Many thousands of people marched in “Tax Day” protests in over a hundred cities Saturday. Organizers called these actions to protest Trump’s refusal to release his tax reports, and this was a focus of their speeches and the signs they handed out as well as many homemade signs. Thousands rallied and marched in New York alone. A Refuse Fascism contingent was in the mix.
Large numbers of people were drawn into the streets behind the “release your taxes” demand. Among the crowd there were many who felt that the problem is “Putin is really pulling the strings,” and this is what Trump is hiding by not releasing his tax forms. At the same time, there were people in the crowd, which was mainly middle class and middle aged, for whom this was not their starting point. They expressed a lot of contempt for and anger at Trump and everything he represents. One woman said “It’s not about what he’s hiding. Not for me anyway. It’s about what he’s doing that we know. Like the way he hates everyone who’s not like he is. I’m a woman, I’m a Mexican, so I got two strikes against me right there. It’s about not wanting to see who can build the biggest bomb.”
Another man said, “I really don’t give a shit about his taxes. I mean, I do, when it pays for things like that bomb he just dropped. But I’m here to say, New York City hates you, Mr. Trump. I’m here to say, fuck you, Mr. Trump, and everything you stand for. Everyone is focused on taxes, but this problem goes way beyond that. Here’s what I think. This guy has got to go.” And with that, he started chanting “hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go”, and was joined by pretty much everyone around him.
A youth who hooked up and marched with Refuse Fascism said “when we talk about Donald Trump’s tax returns, it gets at things that are a problem, like corruption, wealth and poverty. But why I want him out of power, him releasing his tax returns are not at the top of my list. It’s about the things, the substantive things that are affecting the whole planet, and people everywhere. It’s like the people who organized this protest organized it around New York Times headlines. It’s a bit surreal to see people addressing his taxes, but not things that really matter. I mean, if he released his taxes tomorrow, I’d still want him out of power”.
People with Refuse Fascism struggled with people to understand the urgency of acting NOW to drive out the regime. That what makes the Trump/Pence Regime illegitimate is its FASCIST character! There is an opening, and what masses of people do or don’t do in the next two weeks will contribute greatly, one way or the other, to what the future looks like.
This Book Shows How It Was A War All Right—On the Poor
April 16, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
April 17, Monday, 7pm
Author event with Elizabeth Hinton
Revolution Books, New York
Phone 212-691-3345
437 Malcolm X Blvd./Lenox Avenue @ 132nd Street,
New York City, NY 10037. Email: revbooksnyc@yahoo.com
“One of the things that I really wanted to show in the book is that, essentially, policymakers even in the 1960s in the midst of civil rights revolution decided that a generation of African American youth were criminals, that they were potential delinquents, that they were social dynamite. They were pre-criminals. They labeled them criminals before they’ve actually committed a crime… It’s another kind of blame-the-victim approach to domestic policy that we’ve seen again and again over the past half-century.”
Elizabeth Hinton, The Tavis Smiley Show, September 12, 2016
If you want some deep truths about how the “war on drugs” began and how the U.S. became the world leader in mass incarceration, read Elizabeth Hinton’s book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Hinton takes us through the 1970s and 1980s, showing how the government’s “War on Poverty” became a war on the poor. She reveals the racist thinking used to justify this. And we see how Democrats and Republicans united to carry this out.
In 1964, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson launched the federal War on Poverty—which included things like food stamps, Head Start, Medicare, and Medicaid. Johnson touted this as part of a “Great Society” that was going to solve poverty and other problems. But at the very same time he began to launch some very repressive measures. In 1965, after a summer of uprisings in a number of cities, Johnson introduced the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which signaled a new “War on Crime.” Hinton writes, “The punitive legislation offered a response to the threat of future disorder by establishing a direct role for the federal government in local police operations, court systems, and state prisons for the first time in American history.”
Soon, any thinking among policymakers that crime stemmed from racism, discrimination, and poverty was basically replaced with the view that what was needed was not social programs but more “law and order.”
Racists argued that no amount of economic and social changes would work because crime and violence were “hereditary” in Black people. There was a “progressive” version of this that said Black families had to “break the pathologies” perpetuated by poverty, which only led to further poverty and crime.
Hinton writes, “The notion that a self-perpetuating ‘tangle of pathology’ characterized black families nevertheless emerged as a powerful, and malleable, explanation of persisting racial inequality after the passage of the Civil Rights Act [1964] and other egalitarian measures.” So even those who had said that poverty contributed to crime ended up putting the blame on the people. Some argued that a “culture of poverty” made it impossible for poor Black people to even benefit from social programs.
What evolved was a War on Crime that targeted Black people as a people—not the economic and social institutions (real estate, government, hiring, education, etc.) that kept the oppression of Black people going.
We saw the police occupation of Black neighborhoods, racial profiling and arrests—sometimes for minor drug crimes, loitering or curfew violations. Hinton describes, for example, the work of the Los Angeles Police Department’s CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) unit beginning in the 1970s: “The series of police sweeps the force conducted reached their height in the spring of 1988, when 1,000 officers swept through South Central in a caravan of patrol cars on a Friday night and made another round of sweeps the next day. More than 1,400 predominantly black residents faced arrest for traffic citations, parking fines, curfew violations, outstanding warrants, ‘gang-related behaviors,’ and drunk driving in the largest mass arrest in the city since the Watts uprising of 1965.”
Higher Black crime rates were then used as supposed “proof” that Black people were “inherently” criminal. Research and policy shifted from tying crime to discrimination, unemployment, and poverty to putting forward things like divorce rates, single parent households, and teenage pregnancy as the cause of crime.
Policymakers developed repressive measures based on the anticipation of FUTURE crime and criminals. In their view, Black youth were in a “pre-crime stage” so they needed to be targeted and criminalized—to be removed from society before they became criminals.
Hinton shows how through all this, the police were increasingly inserted into the lives of people—in schools, neighborhoods, housing projects. Teachers, social workers, and community activists were drawn into cooperating and participating in repressive measures—like identifying “troublemakers” to be monitored and arrested. And “anti-poverty” programs themselves increasingly cooperated with and became entangled with policing—which facilitated the normalization of police occupation in the community.
One lesson to draw from Hinton’s book is that those who try to draw a distinction between “good” War on Poverty programs and the straight-out fascistic repression of the Republicans are missing and covering over a very important point: WHOEVER is in power will enforce the oppression of Black people, in one way or another. The problem is the SYSTEM which must be gotten rid of and replaced with a whole new economic, political, and social system.
A Letter to Prisoners on the Situation in Chicago:
"There Is a Role for You To Play in Turning This Shit Around"
April 17, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
To Prisoners:
The Revolution Club is in Chicago taking the leadership and the science the people need to get free to the masses who are currently shooting and murdering each other. They are out on the front lines fighting relentlessly to get the youth to stop killing each other and get into the revolution.
There is an important role for you to play to be part of turning all this shit around. Every prisoner or former prisoner who has been caught up in the gang life themselves, and has any sense that our youth are capable of so much more than running around killing each other, has an obligation to speak to these youth. Get at your young homies in the streets, tell them that there are revolutionaries out there that they have to get with. There are offices on the Southside and soon on the West Side that they could walk into to get with the Revolution Club. Tell them to get with this revolution and leave that shit behind. Nobody else has to die before we can recognize that we’re getting played and get organized for an actual revolution, a revolution that aims to overthrow this system—the real enemy of the people.
Recently in the streets of Chicago, seven people were shot dead in the span of twelve hours and within four blocks. (“Black People Killing Each Other in Chicago Carl Dix says: Get Out of This Insanity and Get Into the Revolution”) People, whose only hope for any kind of a future depends on whether or not they’re able to come together, are shooting and murdering each other. All this while the grand wizard Trump, the modern-day Hitler, is at the head of the system that rules over them, the very system that created the conditions and shaped the choices that has got us seeing and treating each other as our own worst enemy.
But there is a way out! We don’t have to lay down and accept the shit that’s going to come down on us. There is a way to fight back that can lead all the way out of all this oppression. We can make an actual revolution that will get us to a whole radically different world. We have the strategy, the program and the leadership that we need for this revolution.
Revolutionaries who are fighting to get to a situation where we can overthrow and bury this whole goddamn system have mobilized and are out on the front lines of Chicago. They are taking the leadership of Bob Avakian (BA) and the Revolutionary Communist Party to the masses, struggling with them to unite to fight for the people against their real enemy and to get organized into the revolution.
You can make important contributions—right now. This life is not over. Talk to these youth, fight to change the mentality of these youth. There is a different future to fight for that will require more daring and sacrifice, more courage and commitment than fighting for small plots of territory that we don’t even fuckin own or control. We’ve been played for far too long and it’s brought us to the brink of extinction. Too many of us are dead or locked inside prisons who have come to realize how senseless killing each other really is and we have a role to play.
You may be inside a small cell surrounded by nothing but concrete but you are not helpless. If you’re holding Revolution newspaper in your hands, you’ve come across the way out. You’ve come across the most scientific and advanced understanding of the problem and the solution. You’ve come across the leadership of Bob Avakian (BA), who’s developed the science, the method and approach, that can and must be wielded to make an actual revolution. You can learn and deepen what you may already understand and fight to change the situation on these streets from behind those walls.
Write to your homies, write to this paper and reach out to every one who needs to know that their life could have real meaning and purpose by fighting and dying for a whole new world.
We have learned that Donald Trump is visiting the Snap-On Tools facility in Kenosha, WI, tomorrow, Tuesday, April 18! He will be accompanied by several of his top enablers: Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus, and Scott Walker. This is a rare step outside the circle of his “alt-right” (Nazi) co-conspirators and their fanatic followers.
What: Protest Trump Visit!
When: 12 pm - 3 pm, Tuesday, April 18
Where: Snap-On Tools, 2801 80th St., Kenosha, WI
Please join and share the Facebook event by Forward Kenosha.
This is the Donald Trump who is playing nuclear chicken with North Korea, whose generals dropped the largest bomb since Hiroshima on one of the poorest countries in the world last week. This is the Donald Trump who is slashing budgets at the EPA, the National Institutes of Health, NASA and other critical scientific and research facilities the whole world depends upon. Escalating deportations, demonization of immigrants, defunding of Planned Parenthood—the list of the assaults on humanity and our planet launched by these fascist is practically endless. And don’t think Trump is backing down! Charles Blow wrote in the NYTimes April 17 about the “rolling litany of daily horrors that Trump has inflicted.”
We must give Trump the welcome all of this deserves! Join us in bringing the message: “NO! In the name of humanity, we REFUSE to accept a fascist USA!” This must be an excellent lead-in to the 10 Days of Resistance that bring hundreds of thousands into the streets, with a growing understanding that STOPPING this litany of horrors is on us, through our determination to drive them out! (Read more about how here.)
Arrive early and look for Refuse Fascism posters and banners. We will try to gather as close to the plant entrance as possible. Congregations United to Serve Humanity will meet at 9:30 am at St. Mary’s Lutheran Church, 2001 80th St., Kenosha, and march together to Snap-On Tools to protest in solidarity with undocumented immigrants.
If you need a ride or you can give others a ride, send us an email with your name and telephone number or call us at 312 933 9586. We’ll do our best to match folks up.
There is a lot of talk on the March for Science being “non-partisan” and above “politics.” Three points on this:
* When science is under attack by the powers-that-be, the defense of science is a political act, and we should not shy away from this.
What this regime has unleashed is potentially catastrophic in its consequences for humanity. Humanity confronts a warming planet, with rising sea levels, melting glaciers and extreme weather events causing droughts and famine; it is nothing short of a crime against humanity to accelerate this by denial of global warming, by muzzling of climate scientists, by de-funding this research, approving fossil fuels and oil pipelines, and effectively undermining any global response to this crisis. Humanity confronts increased incidence of global pandemics; it is nothing short of a crime against humanity to de-fund public health research.
Let’s not forget Trump’s inhumane, mean-spirited and chauvinistic response to the doctors and nurses who went to Africa to deal with the Ebola crisis, tweeting, “The “US cannot allow EBOLA infected people back” and they “must suffer the consequences.” Imagine what his policies and response will be to the next pandemic outbreak!
* The March for Scienceshouldbe non-partisan, if that means Not favoring Democrats over the Republicans.
Let’s not forget that not a single prominent Democrat has come out and boldly proclaimed that evolution is a fact – all life on planet Earth evolved from common ancestors over nearly 3.5 Billion years. Democrats have constantly conciliated with Christian fascists and Biblical literalists who have waged well-funded and deceptive campaigns to undermine the teaching of evolution in schools. They did not oppose Betsy DeVos, the Christian Fascist Secretary of Education, on this front despite her well-known and historic efforts to impose this worldview on society, denying generations of children the science of evolution and the scientific method. To rely on the Democrats to “save” and “defend” science is a fool-hardy enterprise.
* But the March for Scienceshouldbe Partisan – In the Name of, and For Humanity!
The March for Science has a wonderful celebratory spirit in sharing science with the world.
At the same time, let’s recognize that this regime – the Trump/Pence regime – is a fascist regime, posing existential threats to humanity, including with nuclear brinksmanship. Some say it may be true but it’s not useful or too scary or too polarizing. Imagine if some didn’t raise the alarm about AIDS, when the powers-that-be refused to even acknowledge it – because it’s not useful or too scary or too polarizing. Imagine if they knew in 1933 what we know now about Hitler and the Nazis. Let’s call scientific reality for what it is, let’s not make this mistake – for the sake of humanity.
The terror unleashed on millions of immigrants in this country by this regime is very real, and is happening – right now! The world’s most devastating bomb short of nuclear was dropped – last week. Today they threaten an unbelievably catastrophic war against Korea. Imagine what harm this regime can do over the next few days, weeks and months with its levers of power, bludgeoning truth and repressing dissent as it carries out its horrors.
We need to drive out this regime – at thesoonestpossible moment.
A U.S. War Against North Korea Would Be an Utterly UNJUST IMPERIALIST WAR—And Threaten the Whole World!
Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime BEFORE They Incinerate Humanity!
April 19, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
There is a very real threat right now of aggressive U.S. threats against North Korea turning into a horrific U.S. war, including use of nuclear weapons.
In Washington, DC, Trump threatened North Korea in godfather fashion, “They gotta behave.” Meanwhile, in a visit to the “demilitarized” zone between North and South Korea, Mike Pence declared that the “era of strategic patience is over.”
What the fuck does that mean!?!
The U.S. invaded Korea in 1950 and waged a war of mass murder that killed three million people and razed to the ground almost every building in the north. Since then the U.S. has stationed 30,000 troops in South Korea. Trump openly talks about making North Korean leader Kim Jong-un “disappear.” And this fascist imperialist is now warning a small country to “behave”?
The U.S. already has severe sanctions on North Korea and is threatening to tighten the noose. They’ve implied that they’re waging “cyberwarfare” against North Korea, including targeting their missile program. They’re setting up anti-missile “defenses” in South Korea that are provocatively aimed at North Korea and their main backer, China. All this has been fucking “patience”?
And now the U.S., under the fascist Trump/Pence regime, intends to break with its past behavior and “patience” with something more hyper-aggressive, with “all options on the table”? What do threats of “all options” mean from a regime headed by a man who has asked, “If we have them [nuclear weapons], why can’t we use them?”
A sign of how serious all this is: the government of Japan said it is working on plans to “evacuate” 60,000 Japanese now in South Korea in the event the crisis escalates. And China’s foreign minister raised the possibility of “war break[ing] out on the peninsula.”
While exactly where all this is headed can’t be predicted, there is a certain “logic” that is driving things in an extremely dangerous direction. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” call concentrates the aim of those heading the U.S. now to dramatically enforce and strengthen American domination over other powers and the world as a whole. They are moving to profoundly and violently recast the way things have been for decades. They are rewriting the rules on use of military force, including nuclear war—not whether to threaten the use of nukes but how overtly to do so.
This is a regime that cannot allow even a perception of “weakness” and “lack of resolve.” In the face of North Korea’s refusal to cave in to U.S. demands, Trump/Pence may decide on a “preemptive” attack or use a manufactured incident—like the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident justifying U.S. escalation in the Vietnam War.
While Kim Jong-un heads an oppressive regime, as a source of oppression, repression and violence in the world, including as a nuclear threat to humanity, North Korea’s impact is microscopic compared to what the U.S. imperialists have done for decades—and now in a greatly heightened way with the Trump/Pence regime. Given the history of the Korean War and what the U.S. has done up to today, it’s not irrational for the North Korean regime to think the U.S. would initiate an enormously destructive war of aggression. And as they have pointed out, Libya’s Qaddafi made a “deal” with the U.S. and other powers to shut down “weapons of mass destruction” programs, thinking that would keep his power intact—and they still massively bombed the country, overthrew his regime, and had him killed.
In this intense situation, some intended move—or even a miscalculation—by the U.S. or North Korea could quickly spiral out of control and engulf the whole Korean Peninsula in war. The U.S. not only has tens of thousands of troops in South Korea but huge nuclear-armed naval forces in the area and tens of thousands more troops in Japan. North Korea reportedly has some missiles that can reach South Korea and Japan, as well as vast array of artillery trained on the South. In addition, it claims it is close to developing missiles capable of hitting the U.S. mainland. A U.S. war against North Korea could lead to millions of lives lost in the region, and it could spread beyond that. And if the nuclear “genie” is pulled out of the bottle in Korea, what is to prevent its use elsewhere by the U.S., and other nuclear powers?
Whatever the justification claimed by the U.S., such a war would be an utterly unjust IMPERIALIST WAR. And it would threaten all of humanity with nuclear incineration.
As communists, we are working for a world without nuclear weapons. And when the revolution comes to power in the U.S., the new socialist state would dismantle the nukes in the imperialist arsenal and refuse to produce or use such weapons. (For a visionary and concrete blueprint for this socialist society, get into the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian and adopted by the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party.) But in the world today—where the U.S. is armed to the teeth with nukes, has used them, has consistently refused to pledge not to use such weapons first, and now has a president who openly hankers to use them—the U.S. is absolutely in the wrong to demand of anyone else that they must disarm.
The situation is extremely urgent. People everywhere must oppose the U.S. imperialist aggression in Korea. But there is an especially big, historical responsibility for people living in the U.S. A military attack by the U.S. would be a horrible war crime committed in the name of the people in the U.S. The people must begin right now to not just refuse to go along with the Trump/Pence threats but to actively and militantly oppose them. The best possible outcome for humanity would be the prevention of such a war and, in any case, the defeat of the U.S.’s unjust bullying and threats.
The fascists in power cannot be allowed to consolidate their hold on power. DRIVE OUT THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME BEFORE THEY EXTERMINATE HUMANITY!
New England Patriots Refuse to Attend the White House Event in Greater Numbers Than Expected
April 19, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a Reader:
On Wednesday, only 34 New England Patriots showed up at the White House where Donald Trump hosted the team that won the Super Bowl. Several of the players had been saying for weeks that they would not attend the gathering, but this low turnout included more not attending than expected. The team includes 53 roster players and 18 coaches.
In early February, right after the Patriots won the Super Bowl, six players—Martellus Bennett, Devin McCourty, LeGarrette Blount, Alan Branch, Dont’a Hightower, and Chris Long—all stated their intention to not go. When asked for reasons for not attending, some of the players would not give a reason. But McCourty told Time magazine, “I don’t feel accepted in the White House. With the President having so many strong opinions and prejudices, I believe certain people might feel accepted there while others won’t.” Blount echoed McCourty when he told Rich Eisen on sports talk radio, “I will NOT be going to the White House. I don’t feel welcome in that house. I’ll leave it at that.”
During the season, McCourty and Bennett raised their clenched fists during the national anthem, at a time when other players around the National Football League were refusing to stand for the national anthem to protest police brutality and police murders. (See “Cheers to Colin Kaepernick—For Not Standing for National Anthem”) At that time, Bennett said, “We want everybody to be treated fairly and just and for everyone to be tolerant for everything that’s going on.”
The New York Times reported that “Bennett told reporters after the Super Bowl: ‘It is what it is. People know how I feel about it. Just follow me on Twitter.’ The outspoken Bennett had joked that he might move to outer space after Donald J. Trump was elected.”
The Boston Globe reported that Alan Branch had told them that “he was skipping the event because he was disturbed by Trump’s sexist comments captured in an ‘Access Hollywood’ video.”
Even the Super Bowl MVP quarterback Tom Brady did not show up at the White House event, saying he had family matters to attend to. Trump previously claimed that Brady supported him. Brady has been telling the press that his wife, supermodel Gisele Bündchen, has told him to keep quiet about politics. Around the time the Patriots showed up at the White House, Bündchen tweeted, “On April 29th in Washington- D.C.—March for climate, jobs, and justice. To change everything, we need everyone. http://ow.ly/bTqD30aZmTm — Gisele Bündchen (@giseleofficial) April 19, 2017”
Hundreds at Town Hall Slam Democratic Senator for Conciliation with Fascism
April 19, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader:
California senator Diane Feinstein got an earful from a raucous crowd at a rare town hall meeting in San Francisco on Monday, April 17. Nearly a thousand people showed up to let her know how angry and outraged they are by her conciliation with the Trump regime.
Outside the hall, as people were lining up to get in, Refuse Fascism gave everyone a few questions to ask Feinstein and challenged people to raise them to her: Why doesn’t she call out Trump as a FASCIST? Why does she conciliate with fascism?
Inside, Feinstein was heckled from the start about her approval of a number of Trump appointees and her support for the bombing of Syria. She tried to shut down the criticism by insinuating she knew much more about the situation than her critics. The audience, largely people affiliated with Indivisible, responded with loud boos.
Then the audience really became electrified when someone from Indivisible, whose mother was a Holocaust survivor, asked why Feinstein wasn’t speaking out against the fascists in the White House. “Is there a red line that the Democrats ... are going to draw where you say we’re not going to work with these fascists in the White House? We can’t normalize it, we can’t have business as usual!” According to RawStory, “When Feinstein failed to lay out a clear plan for dealing with ‘fascists’ like Bannon, the audience grew increasingly agitated. ‘What are you doing about it?’ members of the audience demanded.”
In the midst of the barrage of “coverage” of Korea in the mainstream imperialist media, one thing to take note of is that many of the “military analysts and experts” who have been featured say that Kim Jong-un and others in the North Korean leadership are not going to launch a “first strike” nuclear attack against the forces of the U.S., South Korea, or Japan. They note that Kim and others know such a strike would certainly lead to the devastation of North Korea and the end of the regime. For instance, William Perry, who was defense secretary under Bill Clinton, said on CNN, “I do not believe that the North Korean regime is suicidal. Therefore I don’t believe they’re going to launch an unprovoked nuclear attack on anyone.” These “experts” say that North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons—and missiles capable of delivering them, including over long distances—is essentially for deterrent purposes. They are for deterring (in other words, discouraging or preventing) others from attacking North Korea.
Now, let’s be clear—these U.S. “military analysts and experts” are no “peace advocates” and opponents of American dominance over the world. Their arguments are based on what is best for the interests of U.S. imperialism.
So let’s follow the logic here. If North Korea is not going to launch a “first strike,” then why does it pose such a “threat” and why are its actions “dangerous” or “provocative”? The only logical answer is that the development of nuclear weapons and missiles could serve precisely as a deterrent, and render North Korea less vulnerable to bullying, and possible aggressive military actions, by the U.S. and its allies.So, in reality, the Trump/Pence regime, now at the helm of U.S. imperialism, is threatening and taking actions that could lead to a major—possibly nuclear—war, because an adversary is doing things that might make it less vulnerable to bullying and aggression by these imperialists!!
"The interests, objectives, and grand designs of the imperialists are not our interests—they are not the interests of the great majority of people in the U.S. nor of the overwhelming majority of people in the world as a whole. And the difficulties the imperialists have gotten themselves into in pursuit of these interests must be seen, and responded to, not from the point of view of the imperialists and their interests, but from the point of view of the great majority of humanity and the basic and urgent need of humanity for a different and better world, for another way."
Bob Avakian, BAsics 3:8
Let’s proceed further according to logical, rational thinking: While the North Korean regime is in fact oppressive and not at all a genuine “socialist” or “communist” state, or a force for progress in the world, it is the U.S., ruled now by the Trump/Pence fascist regime, which poses the real, and very dangerous, threat in this situation, and indeed is the greatest oppressor in the world and threat to the future, and very existence, of humanity. This is underlined by the “tour of bellicosity” that Pence just took in the region, even going right to the demilitarized zone in Korea to threaten war.
And, speaking of the danger of a fanatic who’s threatening war—you have it, right there in Mike Pence, a religious fundamentalist lunatic threatening war while representing a system and a fascist regime with its hands on weapons of mass destruction, in fact the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons!
Auburn University, Alabama: Hundreds Protest White Supremacist Richard Spencer
April 20, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On Tuesday night, April 18, hundreds of people protested white nationalist Richard Spencer who was speaking at Auburn University in Alabama. Inside, people repeatedly interrupted his talk, while protesters outside chanted, "No fascists, no KKK, no fascist USA."
Spencer spouted blatantly racist shit, like describing the university’s Black football players as perpetrating the “sexual abuse of white women on campus” and denouncing affirmative action as victimizing white people. This was met with outrage as people yelled back, challenging him repeatedly throughout his speech.
The university initially cancelled the event, saying it would create unsafe conditions. After a U.S. district judge ruled Auburn had to allow Spencer to speak, the university issued a statement saying it “deplored [Spencer’s] views” but then went on to let the program go ahead as scheduled.
Spencer is president of National Policy Institute—a white supremacist/nationalist think tank that proclaims it is “dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.” Spencer has advocated a "peaceful ethnic cleansing," where people who are not of European descent voluntarily leave the United States. After Trump’s election, Spencer addressed a gathering of the alt-right movement, at which he outright acted like a Nazi, greeting the new Trump/Pence fascist regime—shouting, "Hail Trump!" His talk at Auburn was sponsored by AltRight.com, a white nationalist site and served to rally hundreds of white racists who came to hear Spencer speak.
According to news reports, there were some clashes with police after the cops demanded that people remove bandannas and masks, and three people were arrested for disorderly conduct.
Scientists Speak Out on Why They Are Marching on April 22
April 21, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
These statements from three scientists were originally posted at RefuseFascism.org:
Why I Am Marching with the Refuse Fascism Contingent at the March for Science
by Michael G. Hadfield
Because it is clear in my mind and the minds of most scientists that the Trump/Pence administration has launched a war against the use of scientifically supported empirical data on nearly every relevant issue (climate change, clean environment, clean water, and many more), the March for Science must recognize and loudly proclaim that the very reason it is taking place is the fascist regime that came to office with the last U.S. election.
Michael G. Hadfield is Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Hawaii
***
For All Humanity, the Need to Act Outside the Institutional Framework
by Phillip Rice MD, Emergency Physician, Harvard Medical School (organizational affiliation for identification purposes only)
On April 22, I will be marching in the Refuse Fascism contingent in Boston, not because it was the first to recognize the ascent to power of a fascist regime, although indeed it was the first, but because it led in the recognition, in such a clear-eyed blunt manner, of what humanity needed to do in this part of the world to put an end to this regime. It is because they not only have fought for the need to drive this regime from power as the solution, but explained, in an ongoing way, why this is necessary, as most difficult as this may be, and why it is also possible. Through their website and television appearances, I have learned a great deal about a subject that I thought that I had known quite a bit about only to realize that in this day and age it has slipped through to the fore in a different manner. It looks different but is essentially the same in content. The ugliness of the hatred could have been mistaken for simple white supremacist banter that suddenly has the reins of power in the White House, as true as that most definitely is, but Refuse Fascism has raised the alarm that this is not just that but something much more sinister, the rise to fascism.
The calling out of the regime as fascist has alarmed many and caused many to confront the moral issue of the generation specifically “what am I going to do about it?” Refuse Fascism has put forward the plan and realization that we all have to act and act outside of the normal institutional framework if we are to have a chance at driving them out and preventing the consolidation of fascism.
This organization has brought out the nature of “normalization” that occurs during fascist consolidation of power, what this “normalization” looks like, what the effects of “normalization” are, and what are the consequences if we allow “normalization” to take hold and bring our guard down. More than anything it has approached this whole problem from a scientifically correct position, and that is that it is helping us all to realize we should, correctly, be operating from the vantage point of all of humanity. Because that is what is at stake. All of humanity. Please join with me and others as part of this contingent as we demonstrate our determination to defend science against this fascist regime that has truth, scientific inquiry, and critical thinking in its crosshairs.
from Dr. Bruce Price Harvard Medical School (for identification purposes only)
Because science is under attack. Because science is the most important development in human history. Because we need to drive out trump/pence and all they stand for. Because we need to move forward in history, by the tens of millions, and not backwards.
“Everybody in this country illegally is subject to being deported.” This is what Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Southern white supremacist and now the Trump/Pence regime’s top law enforcer—said on Fox News on Tuesday, April 18. He made clear that if you’re undocumented it doesn’t matter how long you have been in this country, or how young you were when you were brought here—in the eyes of this regime, you’re still a “criminal alien,” at risk at any time of being stopped, locked up, and thrown out of the country. And this includes the estimated 750,000 mostly young immigrants, brought to the U.S. without documents when they were children, who had been accepted into the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and are known as “DREAMers.”
DACA was a 2012 executive order issued by Obama. It granted a two-year, renewable protection from deportation, a permit to work legally, and more for undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children. No more.
Sessions made his statement in response to questions about people with DACA status—in particular, the case of 23-year-old Juan Manuel Montes. Juan Manuel says he was stopped by Border Patrol agents in Southern California on February 18 and, within hours, forced across the border into Mexico. He was brought to this country when he was nine years old and, according to his lawyer, has DACA status until 2018, which should have protected him from deportation.
After declaring that all undocumented immigrants are “subject to being deported,” Sessions went on, clearly referring to people in the DACA program: “... so people come here and they stay here a few years and somehow they think they are not subject to being deported—well, they are.”
Up until this point, Trump had been speaking out of both sides of his mouth on this subject. He bragged during his campaign he was going to abolish DACA on day one; telling a Phoenix audience he “will immediately terminate President Obama’s two illegal executive amnesties," [referring to DACA and DAPA, for parents of children born in this country]. Recently, Trump has given the impression he might be reconsidering this small part of his extreme, fascist agenda: “We’re going to show great heart. DACA is a very, very difficult subject for me, I will tell you.” Many people were taken in by this con artist—wanting to believe that things might not get worse, that maybe this fascist could “grow a heart.”
But the massive war on immigrants is a cornerstone of this regime. For millions of his most rabid supporters, when Trump says “Make America Great Again,” they equate that with “make America white again.” As we wrote before Trump’s nomination:
He is organizing those who feel left out and “disrespected,” who have been taught that their white skin and American identity make them special but who don’t “feel special” anymore, and who blame it on those they have been taught to despise as being “beneath them” in society. This sense of frustrated “white male entitlement” runs deep in the marrow of white America; it is openly played on by the Republicans and “politely respected” (while being played on its own way) by the Democrats—and now Trump has taken it to a whole other level. He is aiming these angry people at immigrants, at Black people—against, in short, the most oppressed; he is aiming them against “foreigners” and “the different,” and in particular against all Muslims: and he is aiming them against anyone who would refuse to go along with the crimes of this system or who even dares differ with Trump.
This is the wind behind this fascist regime’s outrageous assault on immigrants already unleashed, with much more in the works. They plan to hire another 10,000 ICE and 5,000 Border Patrol agents. They are making immigrant enforcement a priority for U.S. attorneys everywhere, and hiring more of them, as well as more judges, so they can round up and prosecute more and more immigrants, at a faster rate. They are moving ahead on plans to integrate police on every level into a national immigrant police force. And they have just warned seven sanctuary cities that beginning July 1, federal funds will be withheld if they don’t cooperate with the crackdown on immigrants. It is not a heart these fascists are growing—it’s fangs.
We cannot let the Trump/Pence regime continue consolidating their violent, racist, patriarchic, xenophobic, hyper-militarist, life-threatening norms. The upcoming 10 days of protests, from April 22 to May 1st, the end of the first 100 Days of the Trump/Pence Regime, must be a big leap in organizing the movement to drive this fascist regime from power.
Trump in Kenosha, Wisconsin:
Fascist "America First" Message Inside—Polarization and Resistance on the Streets Outside
April 21, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From readers:
Donald Trump traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, on April 18 to the headquarters of tool manufacturer Snap-On Tools. This was the backdrop for issuing a vicious America über alles executive order. It also became a vivid scene of intense social divide and resistance.
Kenosha, Wisconsin, April 18. Photo: Special to revcom.us
Hundreds of pro-Trump people and anti-Trump protesters lined both sides of the street in front of the Snap-On headquarters. While some people came from Chicago and other parts of Wisconsin, it was mainly a hometown Kenosha crowd. The confrontation in the streets gave a sense of the polarization in what is sometimes called “middle America” and the struggle to transform that.
On one side of the street across from Snap-On were mainly pro-Trump supporters waving American flags, holding Trump/Pence signs and yelling “USA, USA,USA,” “Trump, Trump, Trump” and “Build the Wall!” Other signs were “Get Over It, He’s our president.” This was mainly, although not exclusively, an older white crowd.
On the side of the street in front of Snap-On, anti-Trump protesters had signs and chants indicting Trump—”Investigate Trump” and “Lock Him Up,” focusing on Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. Signs opposing his plan to build a border wall and his proposed travel ban against Muslims and refugees. A 98-year-old woman who protested the Vietnam war in the 1960s said she had to come out again now. Another woman said she was there to stand in solidarity with women in Syria. A number of people targeted Trump’s hatred toward women, with “No to Pussy Grabbing” signs and a chant of “orange hair sexual predator!” by a group of men. A man wore Wisconsin’s iconic “cheese head” head gear with a “NO!” sign in his hand. One bold young person stood with Trump supporters with a re-purposed “Support Trump” sign with “Fuck Trump” in bright yellow. A number of protesters “re-purposed” pro-Trump signs mixed in with the pro- and anti-Trump crowds.
The Power of NO! in the Name of Humanity
When Refuse Fascism arrived, the crowd was mainly pro-Trump supporters. The “NO! DRIVE OUT THE FASCIST TRUMP/PENCE REGIME” banner went up. The crowd of protesters grew as a religious immigration rights group and others joined in. We started chanting “No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA” and “No Hate, No Fear, Immigrants Are Welcome Here,” and these chants continued throughout the day. Some people changed the chant to “Everyone Is Welcomed Here.” Many NO! signs were snatched up over the course of the protest. Stickers with NO! were everywhere as young people took stacks of them and got them out through the crowd. The Call to join the Refuse Fascism March for Science contingent, as well as the flyers for the 10 Days of Resistance, also got out. Some planned to take the flyers back to school. Asked what drew them to Refuse Fascism, a young woman student summed it up this way: “You guys hate everything I hate, and you say it with passion, I want to be part of that.”
There were people of all ages, including many youths from local high and middle schools, with homemade signs. One high schooler told us about organizing a protest against Westboro Baptist Church when they brought their anti-gay marriage pickets to their school. But for many, it was their first protest. Trump’s visit and the rallying of his ugly social base became a political awakening point. For some young people especially, their understanding and boldness grew through the course of the day—through the experience of acting in the streets to go up against the fascist president, feeling empowered by joining with others who stood together, and also connecting with Refuse Fascism and the Revolution Club.
A group from a Kenosha high school talked about the atmosphere in school, where racist and sexist taunting had increased since Trump’s election. All this contention was up close and personal, as students were facing classmates on the other side of the street who stood with the pro-Trump crowd. This included a teacher they knew. Some of the young people expressed dismay at the sharp divide in their town and tried to bridge the divide with calls for “love” and, at one point, singing of the American anthem. Refuse Fascism activists wrangled with them that the problem is not the sharp divisions. We don’t need conciliation. We need to act, including to sharply call out the pro-Trump values and thinking because, without that, the only unity would be on the basis of us accepting the fascist social order and values. We saluted the protesters for their initiative and determination but also said that this is something that needs to be spread and deepened in order to do what is needed—to drive the Trump/Pence regime out.
At one point, a group of youths boldly took off and went across the street into the lion’s den of pro-Trump supporters. They came back even angrier and talked about being taunted with, “Go Back to Africa,” the N-word, and some young Latinas with “how much do you charge?”
In the midst of all this, the Revolution Club Chicago marched in chanting “1, 2, 3, 4, Slavery, Genocide and War—5, 6, 7, 8, America Was NEVER Great.” The Revolution Club’s presence and chant were controversial among some anti-Trump protesters, including ones who wrongly equated communism with fascist dictatorships. Among others, the chant captured and forged advanced sentiments of many of the youth and some immigrant protesters. It also powerfully countered Trump’s core message inside. Some protesters were initially wary of the Revolution Club, but as they spoke to the nature and dangers of the fascist Trump/Pence regime, many warmed up and some ended up following the Revolution Club as they marched into the Trump crowd on the other side of the street. The Trumpites made threatening remarks and at times tried to get physical with people. People were undeterred, including standing around a Revolution Club agitator as she called out to the pro-Trump crowd, “White people, It’s not in your DNA to be backward, racist, and sexist. You can redeem yourself. If not, Fuck You.”
Drone of Military Helicopters and Trump’s Hitler-like Message
In the early afternoon came Trump’s arrival. Flying slowly overhead was Trump’s convoy of military helicopters, three Ospreys and two Black Hawks, which landed out of view on the Snap-On parking lot. Trump’s entourage of fascist ghouls included Reince Priebus (Trump’s chief of staff, who is from Kenosha), Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.
The ominous drone of the helicopter convoy matched the ultra-chauvinist speech inside. Trump spoke to an audience of Snap-On employees, whose attendance was mandatory. Trump announced a new executive order dubbed “Buy America, Hire America.” This order will restrict technology companies from bringing in highly skilled, foreign workers through the H-1B visa program. His order also enforces an existing policy that American-made goods and labor must be used in federally funded projects. Trump also called for taking “a tool you all know very well. It’s called the sledgehammer” to “job-killing regulations,” which is code for any regulation to protect the environment of protect health and safety of workers.
Trump’s storyline was both an extraordinarily upside-down “alternative truth” version of U.S. history and a vicious, Hitler-like message to his social base. It was about restoring unchallenged American supremacy over the world. Trump railed about how America’s “real workers” have been cheated and ripped off by just about everyone from Mexican immigrants, to European allies in NATO, to Canada getting over on Wisconsin dairy farmers. Trump invoked the supposed good old days of America and American superiority: “We are a nation of builders” that “honors work and craftsmanship.”
The backdrop that Trump chose for his speech was not accidental. Kenosha was at one time a thriving manufacturing center with a mainly white population of 100,000 people; it sits between Chicago and Milwaukee. Kenosha, like many cities across the country, has been rocked for decades by changes in the U.S. position in the global economy and changes in society. In the pro-Trump crowd, it was not hard to feel the sense of resentment and entitlement that Trump has been unleashing with his xenophobic, American-First message. His message is the promised return to unchallenged American military and economic power, and a society where Black people, immigrants, and women “know their place,” if they have a place at all. There was particular venom among Trumpites directed at the defiant young Black and Latino protesters (a small grouping in the crowd that was overwhelmingly white on both sides), as well as to the Revolution Club’s uncompromising “America Was Never Great!” message.
Kenosha, Wisconsin, April 18. Photo: Special to revcom.us
Organize Teams to Get Revolution Newspaper Into the Hands of Thousands of People!
April 21, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Get this issue of Revolution out during the 10 Days of Resistance, and walk through with people the pages of this paper. The Call from Refuse Fascism is featured on the cover and inside. Each of the “5 Stops” is spoken to from the perspective of making revolution. There is a piece from BA (“The Fascists and the Destruction of the ‘Weimar Republic’... And What Will Replace It”), an excerpt from the interview with Ardea Skybreak, and a page on what people can do right now to get involved. There is a letter to prisoners and a statement from Carl Dix on Black people killing each other in Chicago. And more.
People all over the country need to get Revolution at this critical juncture in history. It speaks to the burning questions of the day, brings forward a revolutionary analysis of and solution to the crimes of this system—the revolution we need, and most of all promotes the leadership we have to make this revolution. It promotes the New Communism forged by BA.
On this basis and to accomplish the goal of getting the paper out broadly, the newspaper distribution team should aim to get out hundreds and even thousands of papers at the protests. Form up a team and set a realistic but ambitious goal for distribution. (On a practical level, this will mean orienting people ahead of time, and solving logistical problems in advance—for example, making sure the papers get to the protest, having the means to carry lots of papers in shopping carts or hand trucks, people showing up on time, prepared, and so forth.)
If possible, people on the team should take on different tasks. One person can agitate with prepared agitation of about two minutes. Some people can pass out the paper and others should collect money. Have large signs or a banner which promote BA and The New Communism.
The team should work together, with the agitator and the banner attracting people while the distributors broadly pass out the paper and those collecting funds actively raise funds. Right up front, call on people to “Give as much as you can! Be generous!” And as the team circulates throughout the crowd, be sure to encourage people to get e-subs, promoting the links to social media and have contact cards to pass out to people and collect from them.
The team will not be able to get into in-depth discussions when getting out large number of papers, but again, the paper speaks for itself. Utilize it. Let people look through it and experience the scope of what it speaks to, from the Call for Refuse Fascism to Bob Avakian and The New Communism.
A Tribute to Lynne Stewart from the NY Branch of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, April 22, 2017
April 22, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Lynne Stewart.
Photo: Andy Zee, 2005
The following statement was prepared for the memorial for Lynne Stewart.
The New York Branch of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA, extends our deep condolences to Ralph Poynter and the family of Lynne Stewart.
Lynne was truly sui generis. Yet, we need more like her... more people who put their lives at the service of the people... more who are fearless in the face of the enemy... more who know how and why to unite and how to struggle and debate—so as to be able to tackle the biggest problems humanity faces... more people who put “serving the people” before self... more who act on what is right and who do so with courage.
Lynne Stewart was a woman who could walk into a room and light it up with infectious energy. And at the same time, we remember Lynne sitting quietly with Ralph without attracting any attention to herself—outside more than one court hearing for a case that wasn’t even hers—but being there just offering her support. Because she knew what that meant—for the case and for the defendant.
Losing Lynne hurts. Especially so now. Lynne faced down fascists in the courts and in the streets. Today we face the emergence of a regime that is consolidating fascism, threatening the people of the world and the survival of the planet.
Lynne’s spirit is presente. And, in her memory, now is the time for a new generation of people’s lawyers and fighters for the people to step forward with the revolutionary spirit and determination of Lynne Stewart. Honor her legacy: stand and struggle for a radically new world.
Hundreds of Thousands Around the World Step Out Against Ignorance and for Science and Truth
April 24, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
These are times when science and the very notions of truth and reason are under furious assault from fascists in power in the U.S. In the face of this, on April 22 in over 600 places all across the United States and around the world, hundreds of thousands of scientists and others from all walks of life rallied, marched and spoke out. From tens of thousands at the main march in Washington, DC, and large protests in other major cities to smaller gatherings—including at the North Pole—people came out with passion, determination and humor in defense of science. Something like this has never been seen before: scientists and people in the sciences, including many who work in laboratories and scientific institutions, stepping out into the public sphere to stand up for science. And joined by others who are not scientists but see how crucial science is for humanity—and for many of these people, this was also their first protest.
The wide variety of creative home-made signs carried by the marchers reflected the mood: buoyant and witty, at the same time serious and angry about the threats to science and truth. A few examples among many: “Oceans are rising—and so are we”; “No science—No beer”; “Trump is like atoms—They make up everything”; “Make America think again”; “Got a plague? Me either. Thank a scientist”; “Empirical data Trumps imperial alt-facts”; “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe it (Neil deGrasse Tyson)”; “I’m not a mad scientist, I’m absolutely FURIOUS”; “Nerds yes! Nazis no!”; “So serious, even the nerds are here”; “Just like experiments, one protest doesn’t work”; and the simple but clear “Fuck you, asshole.”
Among the speakers at the rally in DC, there were inspiring stories from people who have devoted their lives to the increase and spread of knowledge, in the service of humanity. One speaker recalled how as a kid in India, he used his brother’s eyeglasses to make his first microscope—and told about how he is now heading an initiative to donate 50,000 microscopes a year to children around the world who can’t afford them and to provide affordable medical equipment to community health workers in poor countries fighting diseases like malaria. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a pediatrician who played a big role in bringing to light the lead contamination of water in Flint, Michigan, and the serious dangers this posed, especially to children, said, “Flint is what happens when we dismiss science.”
With all the celebration and spirited promotion of science by broad numbers of people, April 22 would have been a great day for science—were it not for the reality that science and search for truth itself faces a threat not seen in the world in the 80 years since Hitler! The fact that, at this day and age, people face the need to stand up for something so basic and simple as reason and science points to the seriousness and urgency of the situation. There really is a worldwide march of anti-scientific ignorance and reactionary religious fundamentalism trying to drag humanity backward. A group of Christian fascists in Seattle even marched backwards in an attempt to disrupt the Science March there.
And at the “vanguard” of this hellish process is the braying fascist jackass Donald Trump and his fascist regime. A regime of “alternative facts” and the outright denial of scientific truths. A regime that only promotes science and technology in the interests of “America First” imperialist war and hyper-aggression around the world while undermining science and attacking scientists in critical areas like climate change and public health. A regime that not only brazenly celebrates ignorance but creates a situation where scientists have real cause to fear that their research on climate change and other questions of vital interest to humanity will be destroyed and are scrambling to preserve data. This raises the specter of a modern-day burning of the Library of Alexandria—a center of learning in ancient Egypt, which had preserved much of the existing human knowledge at the time, and which was destroyed at the beginning of the Christian era.
In this situation, the call for the March for Science was right on time and much needed. And it is very positive that hundreds of thousands across the country and around the planet came out in response. Like the Women’s March right after Trump’s inauguration, the crowds at the April 22 marches point to the even larger reservoir of people, in their millions and millions, who deeply fear and hate what the fascist regime stands for and the horrendous actions they are taking.
And it was very good that among those who threw into this were some who gave expression to the sense of anger and urgency that are called for in the situation the world faces now. Musician Questlove started things off at the DC rally by pointing toward the White House and “that guy over there” and blasting Trump’s “alternative facts or whatever that shit is.” Albert Yu-Min Lin, chief science officer for National Geographic Explorer, said about standing up for science: “It won’t be easy—it won’t be for the faint of heart. From Galileo to Jane Goodall, scientists have put their lives on the line. They’ve been risk takers, rebels, adventurers. An explorer who discovered the Titanic, Bob Ballard, once said, ‘science is a full-contact sport.’ And at this juncture in our history, the gloves must come off.”
At a number of Science Marches in the U.S., people with Refuse Fascism were in the mix, including dozens of marchers in Los Angeles—getting out the message: “NO! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America! Drive Out the Trump/Pence Regime!”
There is an urgent need for this fight to be continued—to draw in many more people, become even more determined, and more sharply target the Trump/Pence fascist regime. Stay tuned.
The Trump/Pence regime is a fascist regime. As such, it bludgeons the truth when it does not serve its interests or program. There is the regime of “alternative facts,” the outright denial of scientific truths, and the undermining and sidestepping of the role of science and scientists in critical areas like global warming and public health. The Christian fascist cohort led by Pence is readying its assault on the science of evolution and in other areas. Only science and engineering serving corporate and military interests are to be encouraged and funded.
Such a regime must not only be resisted, it must be driven out. The March for Science and the Refuse Fascism contingent in it are absolutely needed—and at the same time, must open up a whole new upsurge of struggle, leading to the ending of the regime, as soon as possible.
The March for Science went underwater, thanks to this group of scientists at Wake Atoll, in the Western Pacific Ocean. (Photo:Twitter/@ScienceMarchHI.jpg)
Students in Iraqi Kurdistan take part in March for Science. (Photo: Facebook/AlexPoppe)
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada (AP photo)
Greenland (Photo:Twitter/@TashaSnow)
Tokyo, Japan (Photo:@ScienceMarchTOK)
Edinburgh, Scotland (Photo:Twitter/@douglasfinch)
A contingent of students from Cal Tech marched in the Los Angeles March for Science carrying a banner signed by hundreds from their campus. (Photo: Special to revcom.us)
Scientists on the continent of Antarctica, which is melting faster than previously thought, add their message to the March for Science. (Photo: Twitter/@DrRenukaBadhe)
Tens of thousands rally across from the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
(Photo: Special to revcom.us)
In Los Angeles, tens of thousands of scientists, students, science enthusiasts, and opponents of the Trump/Pence fascist regime’s attack on science marched from downtown Pershing Square to City Hall and then back to where a science fair and speakers were featured. The mood of the protesters was upbeat, buoyant, full of humor on the one hand and deadly serious on the other. People’s thinking and their signs tended to put the earth and the people of the planet foremost. Speakers talked about the great contributions of science to human beings and the earth itself, but now science is under attack in an unprecedented way by Trump, which has dangerous implications for all of life on this planet. Refuse Fascism, Los Angeles kicked off its 10 Days of Resistance at this march. Hundreds of NO! posters calling for driving out the Trump/Pence regime were held by marchers, and together with its large banners and T-shirts Refuse Fascism was an attractive force and made a significant impact. (Photo: Twitter/@Fightfor15LA)
As thousands marched toward the Zócalo, Mexico City’s main square, a student yelled through a megaphone: "Alert! Alert! The fight for science in Latin America is passing through!" (Photo: Twitter/@corazon_verde7)
Los Angeles. In city after city, the marches were filled with homemade signs standing up for the importance of a scientific approach to all of reality. (Photo: Special to revcom.us)
Carl Dix and the Revolution Club at the March for Science in Chicago. (Photo:@Carl_Dix)
Chicago. Tens of thousands march for science up Columbus Avenue near Lake Michigan. (Photo: Twitter/@SUEtheTrex)
Refuse Fascism at the March for Science in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Special to revcom.us)
Madrid (AP photo)
Seattle
In the San Francisco March for Science, Refuse Fascism powerfully brought out to many thousands of people the basic message of “No! In the Name of Humanity, We REFUSE to Accept a Fascist America!” through drums, chants, signs, banners, and some powerful agitation. The San Francisco Chronicle said of the march itself: “The roiling crowd, tens of thousands strong, blocked San Francisco’s main thoroughfare for at least two hours as families, children, immigrants and lab-coat-wearing protesters enthusiastically demonstrated their enthusiasm for science.”
(Photo: Special to revcom.us)
A revcom.us correspondent from Eugene, Oregon, said about 1,000 came out to the March for Science there. Twenty Revolution papers were distributed, and Refuse Fascism was there with a banner: “No! Drive Out Trump-Pence!” (Photo: Twitter/@Qalmana)
Uganda (Photo:Twitter/@luckytran)
Bangladesh (Photo:Twitter/@luckytran)
San Diego (Photo: @NeiDalBem)
March for Science at Norwegian research village of Ny-Ålesund, on the island of Svalbard in the Arctic Ocean. (Photo: Rodolphe Merceron)
Young people who were introduced to Revolution newspaper.
Thousands march for science in Madison, WI. (Photo: Twitter/@JosephBrusky)
» Refuse Fascism—made up of people coming from a diversity of perspectives who recognize that the Trump/Pence regime is fascist, that it poses a catastrophic danger to all of humanity, and that it is our responsibility to mobilize millions to drive it from power.
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Bob Avakian (BA) is the architect for a whole new framework for human emancipation, the new synthesis of communism. This new synthesis is based on more than 40 years of revolutionary work critically analyzing and drawing from past revolutionary experience and theory, and a broad range of human activity and thought. It is a continuation of, but also represents a qualitative leap beyond, and in some important ways a break with, communist theory as it had been previously developed. Bob Avakian has been the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA since its founding in 1975. Find out more.
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This system and those who rule over it are not capable of carrying out economic development to meet the needs of the people now, while balancing that with the needs of future generations and requirements of safeguarding the environment. They care nothing for the rich diversity of the earth and its species, for the treasures this contains, except when and where they can turn this into profit for themselves... These people are not fit to be the caretakers of the earth.
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