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 Pleading with arsonists to put out the fire they’ve ignited is what it is like to turn to the UNSecurity Council, OAS, and United States government to “stabilize” the crisis in Haiti.Haiti has been under US/ UN occupation for more than 18 years, ever since the US-backed coupd’état in 2004 against the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Thisoccupation has perpetrated gross human rights abuses including rape and other forms of sexualabuse. The occupation has brought cholera to Haiti and has systematically destroyed Haiti’sinstitutions while increasing hunger and misery.Courageously facing police and paramilitary attacks, the population of Haiti has taken to ...
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The administration at City College of San Francisco is planning to lay off over 50 full-time tenured faculty and to replace few, if any, retiring faculty. Even before the pandemic, despite expecting increases in funding, they planned and acted to lay off 250 part-time faculty for the Fall 2020 term. The number of faculty at CCSF have been reduced by over 40% in the last ten years. These actions have come at the expense of CCSF’s predominantly working class and lower middle-class students of color. Their education opportunities have been greatly reduced. Rick Baum has been teaching American Government part-time ...
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The imperative need to develop a Leninist United Front to combat the menace of Fascist and White Supremacist attacks in today’s US Sunday, August 8, 2021: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm Pacific time Speaker: Elazar Friedman The presentation will use two models as diagnostic tools. 1.) The Ernst Meyer led KPD’s model of United WC Front and the lessons of abandoning this powerful model in the third period and then zig zagging to class collaborationist coalition People’s Fronts-betraying Proletarian class independence 2.) The 1984 United Front like action at SF Pier 80 led by Howard Keylor Longshore of the Trotskyist ...
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THE KILLER’S HENCHMAN, Capitalism and the Covid-19 Disaster - Sunday, Feb 6, 2022: 10:30 am to 12:30 pm Pacific Time Stephen Gowans investigates why, when all the tools to avert a catastrophe were available, the world failed to prevent the Covid-19 disaster. He examines the business opportunities and pressures that helped shape the world’s failed response. His conclusion: the novel coronavirus, a killer, had a helper in bringing about the calamity: capitalism, the killer’s henchman.Resources: Stephen Gowans' blog https://gowans.blog/ ...
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The London Revolution 1640-1643 refutes the attacks of revisionist historians who would write the concept of revolution out of history. A defense and restatement of the Marxist view of the English Revolution and Civil War. Chronicles England’s history through the revolution in 1641 – 1642, which toppled the feudal political system, and its aftermath. It explores how London’s growing capitalist economy fundamentally conflicted with its decaying feudal society, causing tensions and dislocations that affected all classes in the early modern period. In contrast with most other works, this book posits that the fundamental driving force of the revolution was the ...
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'The presentation will include clips from a documentary film and current footage from Labor Notes 2022 Conference with commentary. Not pedantic or dogmatic -- more observational with moments of humor (sorely needed). Anne Lewis is an independent documentary-maker and professor of practice at UT-Austin. Her work reveals working class people fighting for social change. Anne was associate director/assistant camera for HARLAN COUNTY, U.S.A. After the strike, she moved to the east Kentucky coalfields where she lived for 25 years. Documentaries she produced, directed, and edited include: ANNE BRADEN: SOUTHERN PATRIOT; MORRISTOWN: IN THE AIR AND SUN, a working class critique ...
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The presentation will be a combination: the overall political-strategic outlook and, of course, the military aspect of the campaign. References will be made to such Soviet era theorists as Mikhail Tuchachevsky, Mikhail Frunze, Alexander Svechen an artillery specialist and Leon Trotsky, and such generals as Georgi Zhukov, Vasili Chuikov, defender at Stalingrad and armored theorist, Pavel Rotmistrov. And, of course, the importance of airpower will be included, with a comparison to the United States. Speaker: Mark Albertson is the historical research editor at Army Aviation magazine in Monroe, Connecticut; and, the historian for the Army Aviation Association of America. He ...
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The midterm congressional elections will soon be upon us. We will again be told, as we are every two years, that the most important election of our lifetimes is impending.  Meanwhile the super-rich take recreational flights into outer space, and neoliberalism – the contemporary form of capitalism – is not meeting working people’s needs.  Was Biden’s primetime lecture from Liberty Hall on September 1 a democracy speech or a demonization speech against half of our fellow citizens?  Was it a needed prop to “our democracy” or another slide down the path of a heightened security state lurching in the direction ...
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The economic depression ongoing since 2008 has put the dangers of fascism and imperialist world war, but also popular revolts and revolutions, back on the agenda. While the working class and oppressed communities around the world have been rising in revolt for more than a decade, no revolutionary organization adequate to face up to the task of bringing down the bourgeois order has crystallized. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic and the danger of fascism have been ravaging humanity. In this presentation, we will consider the tactic of Workers’ United Front as a way out of the dilemma facing the revolutionaries today ...
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Sun, Feb 27, 2022: 10:30am-12:30pm PT The US Covid Catastrophe: Pathology of a Failed System On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. Almost two years have passed, and we in the US are now approaching 80,000,000 cases and close to 1,000,000 Covid deaths - the largest number of any country in the world - with no clear end in sight. The pandemic has swept through US society, leaving a path of disease, suffering, death, political and social upheaval, and economic destruction in its wake. The response by the US  government and capitalist politicians has been ...
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As the imperialist warmongering by the US, NATO and the EU against Russia has recently escalated into a proxy war in Ukraine, a revolutionary party, "The Revolutionary Workers’ Party (DIP, Devrimci İşçi Partisi in Turkish), has taken an unflinching anti-imperialist stance that distinguished it from most organizations and groupings on the Left. In this session, we will discuss the role of Turkey as a NATO ally in this war, and the strategy revolutionaries in the NATO countries should take towards the war. We will talk about Turkey’s involvement not only in Ukraine as a NATO country but also its involvement ...
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Sun, Feb 13, 2022; 10:30am-12:30pm Bourgeois ideologists have been successful in obscuring the class basis of various international conflicts. Too few on the Left actively counter those narratives.  We will discuss the consequences of this failure for the struggle for working-class power, using Ukraine as a kind of case study.  Attendees are invited and urged to bring their insights and knowledge to the discussion.  Richard Fallenbaum, a member of ICSS will make a brief introduction. Resources: ...
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On Feb 4, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with China's President Xi Jinping at tthe opening of the Winter Olympics in Beijing  They released a 5000-word document, "Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China on the International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development." This document expresses the views of two of the world's largest nuclear powers, both permanent members of the UN Security Council. As such, it merits full discussion and we are inviting a panel to lead our discussion ...
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Just back from Ukraine, where he is reporting for Moscow-based RT and making a documentary on Donbass, correspondent Don Courter will give an update on recent events in the Russian Federation and the situation in Ukraine ...
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US sanctions are not new and have been applied by the US in both recent history (Venezuela, Iran) and well prior (Japan 1937-45, Latin America, Africa). However, the scope & magnitude of US sanctions against Russia today represent a quantitative, as well as qualitative, higher stage and escalation of sanctions as a tool of US imperialism. The presentation will describe what's in the US six packages of sanctions announced to date, distinguish between financial sanctions from goods & trade sanctions and individuals' sanctions, and estimate their current stage of implementation of each. How US capitalists are enormously benefiting from the ...
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Sun, Dec 5, 2021: 10:30 AM Pacific Time Venezuela’s Mega-elections The Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela has provided international leadership to the anti-imperialist struggle and a promise that a better world is possible. Consequently, it has been targeted for regime change by the US, which has illegally blockaded the country causing immense human suffering. The extreme right opposition will be participating in the November 21 mega-elections, rather than boycotting, for the first time in years ...
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