April | May 2012
Volume 39, Number 2
In this latest issue...
G8, Poverty, & Immigration
The G8 meets to keep the global economy firmly in the hands of the capitalist elite The watchdogs of the biggest world economies will hold a summit at Camp David May 18-19, meeting as the Group of Eight (G8). The heads of state are faced with the task of restructuring the system of corporate private [...]
Murder of 17 Year-Old Shows Face of Fascism
Outrage is growing across the country over the February 26 killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. Throughout American history, the capitalists have kept control by dividing the common people along lines of color and nationality and pitting people against each other. Trayvon Martin’s murder must be seen in this context and in the [...]
Drones within borders
New weapon against workers The US government has used drones (small unmanned airplanes) against rebels in countries like Pakistan and against immigrants trying to cross the Canadian and Mexican borders into the US. Now, not only is the government beginning to use drones against American citizens, but also, Congress passed a law signed by the [...]
What Does It Mean to Take Over the Corporations?
Article first printed in our sister publication, People’s Tribune. Since the advent of the Occupy Wall Street movement, our readers have been asking us, “What does it mean to take over the corporations?” In any far-reaching political struggle, slogans anticipate or precede political demands. They are meant to point the way towards an indispensable goal [...]
Workers of the World, Unite
Since the early 1970’s, the capitalist oligarchs at the head of the world’s largest corporations have significantly changed the character of the world’s economy. After two world wars that pitted one nation’s capitalists against another’s, they scuttled their system of protected national and colonial markets (as in the British Empire). Leaving their colonies in the [...]
Border brutality
Video: Need to Know, April 20, 2012: Crossing the line | Need to Know | PBS Fifteen years ago on May 20, Esequiel Hernandez, a young goat herder tending to his family’s livestock, was shot and killed by a platoon of U.S. Marines on a drug interdiction covert operation along the Redford, Texas border with [...]
Immigrant rights activists rally to block a ‘Guantanamo in the cornfields’
CRETE, ILLINOIS — More than 200 supporters of immigrant rights marched on Palm Sunday to the site of a proposed for-profit immigrant detention center in the small village south of Chicago. Local activists and area residents were joined by a coalition of Chicago-based organizations who set out on foot Friday, March 30, from Our Lady [...]
‘Beyond Borders’
Hanging on the hated wall between Mexico and the U.S., David Bacon’s photographs may help bring it down. Eighteen big blowups of migration photographs by California photographer David Bacon now hang on the border wall next to the gate between Mexicali, in Mexico, and Calexico, in the United States. They hang next to the traffic [...]
‘The Vision of the Artist Should Be to Change the World’
David Bacon’s migrant-worker photos on the border wall are part of a long tradition of documentary photography as a tool in social struggle. “They’re a call to action; they’re not just documenting reality,” he told the Tribuno del Pueblo. He cites an iconic 1930s photograph taken on the San Francisco waterfront showing longshoremen in the [...]
Moving Forward! May Day 2012
Our struggles can no longer be contained by national boundaries, fighting one another in the interests of capital and the corporations. Our fight is for a new world, where the people own and control the technology of production and use it to cooperatively produce food, housing, health care, and everything else we need for a [...]
Detroit: To the streets!
To our immigrant community here in Detroit, I think it’s important to get out into the streets to fight for better living conditions for all, to stop the deportations and raids that separate our families. As immigrants, regardless of legal status, we have the right to be treated like human beings, with all of our [...]
Yakima, WA: Do more than march–fight!
If there is something about which all agree regardless of nationality or political direction or social stratum is that we the Latinos in our state are increasing; the census does not lie, nor do the churches or dance halls, where we see so many of us attending in large numbers. New electoral districts in Yakima [...]
Alabama: Unity for Voting and Immigrant Rights
Thousands of people held a reenactment walk during March to commemorate the historic 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery that culminated with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Participants came from all parts of the country for this 2012 commemoration and marched in a show of unity under banners that called for [...]