Members overwhelmingly elected new leadership in the 14,000-member Teamsters Local 135, where Dustin Roach and the 135 Members First Slate won with 68 percent of the vote.

The election is a triumph for grassroots action and rank-and-file power, after an intense grassroots member-to-member campaign.

Local 135 is one of the biggest locals in the Teamsters, representing members across Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan as well as 2,000 flight attendants nationwide at Republic Airlines.

Until recently, no one could have seen this change coming to a local that was tightly controlled by officers and dominated from the top down.

But Local 135 members organized for change from the bottom up—and now they’re in the driver’s seat.

The Members First movement began with two Teamsters deeply frustrated with their union’s resistance to involving members and standing up to employers.
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In January, a group of trusted friends met privately to discuss what it would take to bring change to the local.

“We knew that members were tired of being kept in the dark and not getting strong representation,” said Roach. “But honestly, we didn’t know if people would be ready to step up. Like any organizing drive, we had to map it out and make realistic assessments.”

For the next several months, a small committee of leaders and activists got to work talking to other Teamsters and building a network of members in beverage, warehousing, freight, construction, and UPS.

“It was all about agitation at the start,” said Bob Axum, a member at Transervice. “We asked a lot of questions and started to figure out that most members felt like we do—it’s time for change.”

Local 135 represents 1,200 members in a chain of related employers in the grocery industry. Members in the “Kroger Triangle” work under separate contracts but share common concerns, including disrespect on the job, weak representation, and a lack of transparency or coordination in contract negotiations.

The 4,500 UPS Teamsters in Local 135 voted to reject the 2018 contract and voted overwhelmingly for new leadership at the international union.

“Our message was that we could elect new leadership in our local too, leaders that would mobilize the members to win the contract we deserve,” said UPS driver Corey Warren.
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Members First held a series of organizing meetings to recruit volunteers at worksites across the local. They set a goal of 100 endorsements by stewards and members from worksites across the local – and they exceeded it.

After six months of small private organizing meetings, 135 Members First launched its campaign with a bang.

Slate members and volunteers fanned out across the local and campaigned at 20 worksites in a week. At every company, they passed out a flyer with their slate’s platform on one side and the photos of dozens of member endorsers on the other.

“It was a very public showing that Local 135 members were done being scared. We were uniting and using our strength in numbers to win change,” said Jesse Mikesell.

Their launch rocked the union hall, sending incumbents into panic mode. Within days, the top two officers, Danny Barton and Jeff Combs, announced they would retire.

Taking a page from the playbook of longtime Teamsters President James P. Hoffa, who endorsed Steve Vairma of Denver Local 455 to succeed him in the union’s 2021 presidential race, the local officers propped up a successor slate to run against the Members First insurgents.

It didn’t work.

Campaign activists stayed focused and continued to hit the streets. Their network grew as they identified workplace leaders and held campaign organizing and fundraising events.

In just four months, they collected 3,000 phone numbers from supporters and prepared to Get Out the Vote.

The ballot count lasted 18 hours. But when the dust settled, Members First had swept the election, 2,434 to 1,156.

Change couldn’t be coming at a better time, with contract negotiations coming up at Sysco, UPS, T-Force, ABF, YRC, Holland, and across the Kroger Triangle.

More than 20 Members First leaders are attending the TDU Convention this weekend.

“The election win was powered by Local 135 members. But it never would have happened without Teamsters for a Democratic Union,” said Sarah Revard, Secretary-Treasurer elect.
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“This is about more than winning an election,” she said. “We can rebuild our union’s power by educating, informing, and mobilizing the members. That’s what Members First is about—and that’s what TDU is about, too.”

Juliana Cardoso is sitting in her office in front of a lavender, orange, and yellow mandala that was made for her. She has been a member of São Paulo’s city council since 2008. On October 2, 2022, as a candidate for the Workers Party (PT), Cardoso won a seat in Brazil’s lower house, the Federal Chamber of Deputies.

She is wearing a t-shirt that bears the powerful slogan: O Brasil é terra indígena (Brazil is Indigenous land). The slogan echoes her brave campaign against the disregard shown by Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s 38th president defeated on October 30, towards the Indigenous populations of his country. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, Bolsonaro vetoed Law no. 14021 which would have provided drinking water and basic medical materials to Indigenous communities. Several organizations took Bolsonaro to the International Criminal Court for this action.
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In April 2022, Cardoso wrote that the rights of the Indigenous “did not come from the kindness of those in power, but from the struggles of Indigenous people over the centuries. Though guaranteed in the [1988] Constitution, these rights are threatened daily.” Her political work has been defined by her commitment to her own Indigenous heritage but also by her deep antipathy to the “savage capitalism” that has cannibalized her country.

Bolsonaro had accelerated a project that Cardoso told us was an “avalanche of savage capitalism. It is a capitalism that kills, that destroys, that makes a lot of money for a few people.” The current beneficiaries of this capitalism refuse to recognize that the days of their unlimited profits are nearly over. These people—most of whom supported Bolsonaro—“live in a bubble of their own, with lots of money, with swimming pools.” Lula’s election victory on October 30 will not immediately halt their “politics of death,” but it has certainly opened a new possibility.
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New studies about poverty in Brazil reveal startling facts. An FGV Social study from July 2022 found that almost 63 million Brazilians—30% of the country’s population—live below the poverty line (10 million Brazilians slipped below that line to join those in poverty between 2019 and 2021). The World Bank documented the spatial and racial divides of Brazil’s poverty: three in ten of Brazil’s poor are Afro-Brazilian women in urban areas, while three-quarters of children in poverty live in rural areas. President Bolsonaro’s policies of upward redistribution of wealth during the pandemic and after contributed to the overall poverty in the country and exacerbated the deep social inequalities of race and region that already existed. This, Cardoso says, is evidence of the “savage capitalism” that has gripped her country and left tens of millions of Brazilians in a “hole, with no hope of living.”

“I was born and raised within the PT,” she tells us, in the Sapopemba area of São Paulo. Surrounded by the struggles against “savage capitalism,” Cardoso was raised by parents who were active in the PT. “As a girl, I walked amongst those who built the PT, such as José Dirceu, José Genoino, President Lula himself,” as well as her mother—Ana Cardoso, who was one of the founders of the PT. Her parents—Ana Cardoso and Jonas “Juruna” Cardoso—were active in the struggles of the metalworkers and for public housing in the Fazenda da Juta area of Sapopemba. A few days after he led a protest in 1985, Juruna was shot to death by mysterious gunmen. Juliana had been sitting in his lap outside their modest home in the COHAB Teotônio Vilela. Her mother was told not to insist on an investigation, since this would “bring more deaths.” This history of struggle defines Juliana.

“We are not bureaucrats,” she told us. “We are militants.” People like her who will be in the Congress will “use the instrument of the mandate to move an agenda” to better the conditions of everyday life. Pointing to the mandala in her office, Juliana says, “I think this lilac part is my shyness.” Her active life in politics, she says, “kind of changed me from being shy to being much firmer.” There is only one reason “why I am here,” she says, and that is “to sow, to have hope for seeds that will fight with me for the working class, for women, during this difficult class struggle.”

Lula will be sworn into office on January 1, 2023. He will face a Chamber of Deputies and a Senate that are in the grip of the right-wing. This is not a new phenomenon, although the centrão (centre), the opportunistic bloc in the parliament that has run things, will now have to work alongside far-right members of Bolsonaro’s movement. Juliana and her left allies will be in a minority. The right, she says, enters politics with no desire to open a dialogue about the future of Brazil. Many right-wing politicians are harsh, formed by fake news and a suffocating attitude to money and religion. “Hate, weapons, death”—these are the words that seem to define the right-wing in Brazil. It is because of them that politics “is very violent.”

Juliana entered politics through struggles developed by the Base Ecclesiastical Communities (CEBs) of the Catholic Church, learning her ethics through Liberation Theology through the work of Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns and Paulo Freire. “You have to engage people in their struggles, dialogue with them about their struggles,” she told us. This attitude to building struggles and dialoguing with anyone defines Juliana as she prepares to go to Brasilia and take her seat in the right-wing dominated National Congress.
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Lula, Juliana says, “is an ace.” Few politicians have his capacity to dialogue with and convince others about the correctness of his positions. The left is weak in the National Congress, but it has the advantage of Lula. “President Lula will need to be the big star,” said Juliana. He will have to lead the charge to save Brazil from savage capitalism.

In his address to COP27, the Venezuelan president highlighted that capitalism was responsible for the environmental crisis and urged the body to move forward with climate financing

​The 27th iteration of the Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP27, began on Sunday, November 6 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. The gathering has brought together over 45,000 people from 196 countries, including 120 heads of state. Participants will have until November 18 to build serious, global solutions to address the pressing climate crisis in all of its dimensions.

On November 8, the president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, addressed the gathering. Maduro did not participate in the last several COP summits, and this year’s participation comes amid a moment of warming relations between his government and countries of the Global North and the region of Latin America and the Caribbean. Until recently, many countries recognized the former deputy Juan Guaidó as the legitimate leader of Venezuela. However, in the past year, many of the recently elected progressive governments in Latin America have resumed formal relations with the legitimate government of Venezuela, and Global North countries have resumed relations amid the global energy crisis.

When he arrived at COP27 on Sunday, November 6, Maduro had announced that he would seek to propose a South American summit in defense of the Amazon with Colombian President Gustavo Petro and Brazilian president-elect Lula da Silva. The Venezuelan president’s speech highlighted the importance of recognizing that capitalism and its logic of overproduction and exploitation is the primary root cause behind the environmental crisis. He also called on those present to take urgent action on climate financing in order to support and protect those who are most impacted by climate change and are overwhelmingly those who have contributed the least to carbon emissions and greenhouse gasses. Maduro also highlighted the importance of preserving the Amazon rainforest and the Indigenous peoples who have for centuries inhabited and protected it.

Read the entire address of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to the 27th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change below:

The terrible environmental imbalances that today dramatically affect life throughout the planet seem to indicate that Climate Change -as it’s called with incoherent euphemism- is an irreversible fact.

Feared by many and denied by the elites, the dystopian scenario of which the scientific community, some world leaders and almost all social movements warned early on, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The greatest environmental crisis since life has existed. The climate crisis is an unavoidable reality that can only be confronted with concrete, urgent, and immediate actions.

It is doubly painful to have to admit, moreover, that the dimension of this crisis does not take us by surprise. Since the beginning of environmental diplomacy, there was sufficient data to declare an early emergency and act accordingly. That was three decades ago.

With the signing of the historic Kyoto agreement in 1997, an important consensus was reached on the reduction of the carbon footprint by industrialized and developing countries, which until 2009 yielded significant, albeit insufficient, results.

The Paris Agreement also aimed to improve the mechanisms that oblige developed countries to reduce their impact on global warming and, above all, finally gave a binding character to the contributions of science in this regard. But there were also painful stalemates and ruptures, such as those that occurred in 2009 in Copenhagen, where the unwillingness of the denialist elites to move forward at the right pace and in the right direction, that of life, became evident.

We still remember the police repression in the streets against the environmental movements and the corporate bureaucratic plots that were created since then to avoid us reaching agreements and firm commitments which would allow us all to build a sensible and relevant solution to the climate situation that is already in a critical phase.

President:

We have lost much more than time: every hour, every month, every year of inaction, of hesitation, of indolence, translates today into destroyed ecosystems, extinct species and the deterioration of the conditions of a planet that had given us everything with generosity but that today begins to take a huge toll for the abuses committed.

Recognizing the failures of civilization in this area is the beginning of a radical rectification. Yesterday we were threatened by climate change, but today we are faced with a fatal destiny which is the complete collapse of the ecosystem. The most current projections say it: if we continue at this self-destructive pace, the planet will be uninhabitable in 30 or 40 years.

We know that this climate crisis has and will have definitive consequences on the planet, forcing us to modify our consumerist model of life.

The latest UN report on climate change, in which 14,000 scientists from around the world participated, warned that if greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide, methane, and iron oxide are not reduced by 50%, the damage will be irreversible in just eight years. That is, by 2030 there will be no turning back from what we are experiencing: storms, hurricanes, rains, extreme cold, and heat that unexpectedly change the conditions of life and even more, compromise our existence. Global warming is wiping out species on earth and this seems to be unstoppable.

To mention an example: extreme heat could extinguish bees and if there are no bees the pollination cycle is interrupted, if there is no pollination plants do not reproduce and this would decrease oxygen.

Let’s look at the data:

– The average annual global temperature in the last 100 years rose 0.8°C and is expected to exceed 1.7°C for the next five years.

– Greenhouse gasses are at the highest levels in human history. This level, which had fallen in 2020, when the world was quarantined by the pandemic. In 2021, with the industrial and commercial reactivation, the level surpassed the record of 2019 which was approximately 12% higher than in 2010 and 54% higher than in 1990. In 32 years there was an increase that should have happened over centuries.

– Phenomena such as droughts and extreme rainfall are increasing accordingly and in a disorderly way: about 80% of natural disasters between 2001 and 2021 were related either to droughts or floods.

– According to estimates by climate experts, by 2050 the Arctic Ocean will be virtually free of sea ice for the first time in history and with a temperature rise of 2°C 99% of the world’s corals could be lost.

– Similarly, sea levels have risen about 23 centimeters since 1880, and almost half of that took place in the last 25 years. Each year, the sea rises another 3.4 millimeters.

– That rise is causing freshwater to become salty, compromising the water resources on which millions of people depend.

– Rising temperatures can attract deadly pathogens to freshwater sources and make it unsafe for human consumption.

Without a doubt, human civilization is responsible for the serious consequences that the planet is experiencing today. However, this statement is incomplete and would be hypocritical if it is not detailed that this civilization is profoundly unequal. It is made up of countries that have been indiscriminately exploiting the planet’s natural resources for two centuries, while others barely have enough to feed themselves and persist under a pre-industrial mode of production.

Venezuela is responsible for less than 0.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless, the Venezuelan people must pay the consequences of an imbalance caused by the major Western economies, who have polluted and continue to pollute the planet for the benefit of a few.

Existence as we know it has been forever disrupted to the detriment of all living species on the planet. The rate of extinction of the species that today make up the complex organism of biodiversity is accelerating and extending alarmingly, just as Commander Fidel Castro Ruz warned in that famous call of conscience he made 30 years ago at the Rio Summit in Brazil. I quote: “An important biological species is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive liquidation of its natural conditions of life: man,” and prophetically warning the following: “Tomorrow it will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago”. He also pointed out that savage and predatory capitalism is largely responsible for the threat against nature.

It will be useless, as it has been until today, any effort we undertake to alleviate the consequences of this environmental disaster, if we do not have the courage to recognize that this and this alone is the cause of the coming disaster.

In 2009 in Copenhagen, Commander Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías had the courage to say it plainly and directly. Allow me to bring some of his ideas here today. I quote: “What is the cause of climate change? The cause is the dream of seeking happiness through material accumulation and endless progress, using techniques with which all the earth’s resources can be exploited in an unlimited way” (…) “Let us not change the climate, let us change the system” he declared.

President,

The imbalance and the environmental crisis created in nature are comparable to the conditions of inequality and injustice that capitalism has created against humanity. A system that normalizes exploitation among human beings has no ethical conditions to respect other forms of existence. Capitalism sees resources where other cultures see life and the sacred. It therefore feels entitled to possess and destroy everything in its path.

President, fellow dignitaries: It is necessary to reach real and effective agreements in the face of the structural problem but we must also design today, right now, a concrete agenda of actions to protect the vulnerable populations of the world, who suffer the most from the consequences of this environmental tragedy: famine, the loss of millions of homes, the proliferation of multiple diseases and the human displacements that have been causing desertification and the sinking of entire fertile territories.

Humanity cannot continue to be orphaned. It is necessary to materialize, without delays or bureaucratic obstacles, the fund for climate losses and damages that we have been talking about for some years now in previous summits. We must work on this urgent proposal down to the last detail. Let us fine-tune the mechanisms so that the financial assistance is direct, fair, timely and expeditious, so that compensation for environmental damage reaches the most affected peoples.

Any agreement reached today must attack the root of the problem and give attention above all to the most vulnerable.

It is necessary to take into account the singularities of the countries that make up the globalized world and to assign, according to their responsibility in the destruction of the environment, concrete tasks to save humanity and alleviate the effects of ecological imbalance.

The abysmal inequality between the countries of the so-called first world and the rest has increased and deepened in recent decades at the same pace as environmental destruction. There is a connection between the environmental crisis and global poverty. The indiscriminate exploitation of renewable and non-renewable resources, in addition to producing environmental misery, is responsible for social misery on a planetary scale, since it exacerbates it. This cannot be ignored at the moment of creating drastic measures and effective plans to correct and regulate the activities of civilization for the future.

Finally, we advocate as a sovereign country for the protection of the Amazon: as the last great jungle of this planet where all the biodiversity, water resources and the living memory of the native peoples, who never in their millennia of existence have left an irreparable mark on that sacred soil.

On the contrary, it is the native peoples who teach us that nature is not a separate and inanimate being, separated from human beings, but our totality: we are the physical and spiritual extension of nature and nature is ours.

The ancestral and native cultures of an entire continent, from the Sioux of North America to the Yanomami of the South, conceived the earth as a living being that feels and thinks like us. Let us wake up to this truth and get out of the anthropocentric arrogance that prevents us from seeing the sacredness of the world.

Venezuelan men and women are not known for being pessimists. We have with us a tireless spirit of struggle and an immense love for life that elevates us to think of a new humanity, from a new spirituality. A humanity reconciled with nature, reconciled with itself and reconciled with the future.

As the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan said: “There are no more passengers on this spaceship called Earth: we are all crew members”. I know that there is not a man, nor a woman who is willing to see this beautiful adventure that can be the new humanity eclipsed. Nor will we sit back and watch the end of days.

Let the world count on these hard-working and hopeful people, ready to join forces with everyone to save the planet. The illusion of infinite development is over: let us now put a limit to the damage caused to Mother Nature.

Chairman, brothers and sisters:

The time for speeches is over, as well as the time for lamentations.

There is only one present to act radically and with certainty in favor of another possible world and a true life.

And even if the present is an instant in the eyes of eternity, it will be enough if there is a will to live.
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Thank you very much.

​At the 20th Congress, Xi Jinping reflected on the history of colonialism—including China’s “century of humiliation”—and the implications this would have for China going forward. “In pursuing modernization,” Xi said, “China will not tread the old path of war, colonization, and plunder taken by some countries. That brutal and blood-stained path of enrichment at the expense of others caused great suffering for the people of developing countries. We will stand firmly on the right side of history and on the side of human progress.”

Chinese officials routinely tell us that their country is not interested in seeking dominance in the world. What China would like to do is to collaborate with other countries to try and solve humanity’s dilemmas. The Belt and Road Initiative, for instance, was launched in 2013 with the purpose of “win-win” cooperation and development and has thus far built much-needed infrastructure with investment and construction contracts totaling $1 trillion in almost 150 countries. China’s interest in tackling the climate catastrophe is evidenced by its planting of a quarter of the world’s new forests over the past decade and in becoming a world leader in renewable energy investment and electric vehicle production. On the public health side, China adopted a COVID-19 policy that prioritizes lives over profit, donated 325 million doses of vaccines, and saved millions of lives as a result of this. As a result of its initiatives in the public health sector, the average life expectancy of Chinese people was 77.93 years in 2020 and reached 78.2 years in 2021, and for the first time, surpassed life expectancy in the United States--77 years in 2020 and 76.1 in 2021—making this drop “the biggest two-year decline in life expectancy since 1921-1923.”

China’s communists do not see these events without putting them in the context of the long process undertaken by the government toward achieving and ensuring their social development. In 27 years, China will celebrate the centenary of its revolution. In 1997, then-President of China Jiang Zemin spoke about the two centenary goals—the 100-year markers following the founding of the Communist Party (1921) and the Chinese Revolution (1949)—that “underwrite all China’s long-term economic planning programs and contemporary macroeconomic policy agendas.” At that time, the focus was on growth rates. In 2017, Xi Jinping shifted the emphasis of these goals to the “three tough battles”: to defuse major financial risks, to eradicate poverty, and to control pollution. This new congress has gone beyond those “tough battles” to protect Chinese sovereignty and to expand the dignity of the Chinese people.

The far-right opposition in Bolivia’s Santa Cruz department has been seeking to destabilize the socialist government of President Luis Arce using the Population and Housing Census as pretext

Over one million Bolivians mobilized in support of President Luis Arce’s government on August 25 in the face of attempts by far-right opposition sectors in Santa Cruz to destabilize the national government using the Population and Housing Census as pretext. (Photo: Luis Arce/Twitter)

Since October 20, the conservative opposition sectors in Bolivia’s Santa Cruz department have been organizing different protest actions against progressive President Luis Arce and the government of the ruling Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party. Their primary demand is that the Population and Housing Census be carried out in the first semester of 2023 and not in 2024. Since their protests began, the national government has been repeatedly calling on them to engage in dialogue. Nevertheless, the sectors have been rejecting all attempts of negotiation and insisting that the national government submit to their technically impossible demand.

The far-right opposition leader and governor of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, the president of the Pro Santa Cruz Civic Committee, Rómulo Calvo, and the rector of the Autonomous University Gabriel René Moreno (UAGRM), Vicente Cuéllar, called for an indefinite strike in the department to force the government to give in to their demand. The selective nature of the strike which began on October 22 has however backfired. Since October 27, workers from diverse sectors in the department have been marching and organizing road blockades and factory blockades in rejection of the strike, denouncing the fact that the strike only forced poor workers to stop while rich businessmen and large merchants continued to work and earn profits.
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In the face of widespread rejection from the people, Camacho, who promoted violent and racist demonstrations against the MAS government and then President Evo Morales in October 2019, has once again resorted to violence. Far-right extremist groups and Camacho’s supporters have been attacking those who have opposed the strike.

​On Tuesday, November 1, President Arce warned that the conservative opposition is seeking to repeat the 2019 coup d’état by fomenting violence in the general strike in Santa Cruz. Under the circumstances, he called on the country’s armed forces to safeguard the stability of the country and defend the constitution.

“Today, Bolivia is once again threatened by those who, unable to contribute to democracy, use confrontation and violence, endangering democratic coexistence among Bolivians. They are only making it clear that only the People have an authentic democratic conviction because they know that they are the majority. The loyalty of the Armed Forces lies with the people, who have expressed their will to live together in peace and democracy. It is their obligation to defend the legally constituted government,” said President Arce during the inauguration ceremony of the new military commanders.

The head of state stressed that these actors who threaten Bolivia have “a particular way of seeing democracy where it only exists if the majority of Bolivians give in to their interests.” He added that under this logic now “they set in motion a strategy to repeat the 2019 coup d’état,” when the constitutional order was broken with the illegal self-proclamation by then second vice president of the Senate, Jeanine Áñez, as president in November 2019.

President Arce warned that “there are talks of marches to federalization and other de-facto processes and not as a result of a social pact process to change our State for another, this is why it is an attack against national integrity.”
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In this regard, Arce recalled that “the constitutional mission of the Armed Forces is to guarantee and defend the independence, unity and integrity of our territory.” He then reminded the Military High Command that their “first objective is the protection of political stability and the uncompromising defense of the Political Constitution of the State.”

Acts of violence and intimidation have increased significantly in recent days in Santa Cruz. 

On Wednesday, November 2, members of the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (UJC), a Santa Cruz-based shock group, along with Camacho’s supporters, attacked the residents of the La Guardia municipality with firecrackers, clubs with nails, and sharp and cutting instruments. The group attacked them with the intention of forcibly lifting the blockade that the residents had set up on an entrance road to Santa Cruz in rejection of the strike. Initially, they succeeded in expelling whom they called supporters of the MAS party. However, shortly after, the residents regrouped and forced out Camacho’s goons. Confrontations between both sides lasted for hours.
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The paramilitary group also attacked the local police with firearms, projectiles, stones and homemade explosives. Reportedly, they also temporarily took over the La Guardia police command, looted the headquarters, and caused damage to six patrol cars. One police officer received bullet injuries during the attack. Government Minister Eduardo del Castillo later reported that nine people were arrested for being involved in the armed attack.

Earlier, on Sunday, October 30, members of the UJC group tried to illegally take over the Palmasola refinery and storage plant of Bolivian Fiscal Oil Fields (YPFB) in Santa Cruz, attacking the security guards with firecrackers and stones. The takeover was prevented by the residents of the area, who confronted the invaders in order to protect the plant, leading to clashes between the two sides. Local police reportedly had to intervene to restore law and order.

Additionally, the same day, members of the civic committee and Camacho’s supporters attacked social, political, and Indigenous activists who had been organizing roadblocks against the strike in the Concepción municipality. Rocio Picanere, the spokeswoman for the Ayoreo Indigenous Central of the Eastern Bolivia (CANOB), denounced that paramilitaries burned houses and beat residents in five communes in Concepción.

At the same time, at least 50 people took garbage bags and threw them at the door of the headquarters of the Bartolina Sisa National Confederation of Native, Indigenous, and Peasant Women.
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Last week, on October 25, Felipa Montenegro, the leader of the Bartolina Sisa Confederation, denounced that she and her family had received death threats from far-right groups that operate in Santa Cruz. Montenegro reported that there were drones flying over her house. She deemed the act as a form of intimidation. Montenegro is one of the social leaders who have opposed the strike. The Bartolina Sisa Confederation is a constituent organization in the ruling MAS party.

The residents and workers of the Santa Cruz department have also been increasingly condemning the strike, stating that it has been severely affecting their livelihood.

On Wednesday, November 2, workers from diverse sectors staged demonstrations in different parts of Santa Cruz to reject the indefinite strike. The protesters demanded that Camacho agree to enter into talks with the national government to find a way to end the strike. They demanded Camacho’s resignation, arguing that if he cannot fulfill his official duties towards the people, he should step down.
On Monday, October 31, thousands of people from various social and Indigenous organizations marched to the capital of Santa Cruz from four different points, demanding that Camacho lift the strike and respect the right to work.

Additionally, since October 27, under the banner of “Let’s all stop,” thousands of workers have been organizing roadblocks across the department against the discriminatory character of the strike.

On October 27, the Federation of Two-wheeled Transport Workers seized control of eight factories in Santa Cruz as part of this countermeasure. Groups of motorcycle taxi drivers, along with workers from other sectors, gathered outside the factories of companies including Cemento Warnes, Aceite Fino, Empresa Pil, Sobolma, Cuba Libre, Industrias Venado, Procesabol and Totalpec in the town of Warnes. They parked their bikes outside the factories and blocked the entrances and exits of the factories to prevent them from operating.

The leader of the Federation stated that the vigil installed at the doors of the companies will continue until Camacho suspends the strike. He also said that they plan to demand that the vice governor assume the governorship if the strike persists.
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The measure was organized a day after Economic Minister Marcelo Montenegro accused Camacho and Calvo of issuing special permits to their friends to continue producing.

Since August, the Acre government has been calling on the opposition in Santa Cruz to engage in dialogue and technically explain their proposal. On October 20, the government reiterated this call.

On October 21, a round table was installed to discuss the proposal and seek consensus on the date of the census, however the representatives of the Inter-institutional Committee of Santa Cruz broke up the dialogue table and called for an indefinite strike in the department.

On October 22, Minister of the Presidency María Nela Prada reported that during the first part of the talks, the representative agreed based on technical considerations to set a date for the census in 2024, but following the recess they abandoned that position and insisted without any technical basis that the census be brought forward to 2023 and its results published in 180 days.

On October 23, the government reiterated its willingness to dialogue.

On October 25, amid escalation of tensions in the department, the government presented a new proposal to carry out the census. It proposed to delegate the mission of establishing the definitive date of the census to experts of the country’s public universities and international organizations.

Vice Minister of Communication Gabriela Alcón said the objective of this proposal was “to guarantee a responsible census process, with quality, with technical rigor, adjusted to international standards,” and that allows “the entire population to be taken into account.”
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The same day, President Arce called on all sectors of the plurinational state to discuss the issue of the census in a national forum to find a consensual solution to the closure of the civic strike in Santa Cruz.
“Reaffirming our democratic vocation in search of solutions, we summon Governors, Mayors, Authorities of Native Indigenous Peasant Autonomies, Autonomous Region of Chaco and Rectors of the public system, to the Plurinational Meeting for a census with consensus. The meeting will be this Friday, October 28 in Cochabamba, collecting the proposal of the unions, social organizations, economic and productive sectors, native Indigenous nations, professionals, university students and people with disabilities, gathered in SantaCruz,” he wrote in a thread on twitter.

On October 28, the Plurinational Meeting for the Census began in Cochabamba. It was joined by President Arce, his ministers, representatives of Indigenous autonomies, nine mayors and eight of the nine governors, except Camacho. Only rector Vicente Cuellar attended the meeting on behalf of the Inter-institutional Committee.

During the meeting, it was unanimously decided that the census be strictly technical, inclusive and widely participatory, where the date will be determined on a technical basis.

Following the meeting, Minister Prada reported that the date for the consultation will be decided by a technical commission within 30 days. She added that the representatives of the Santa Cruz region would respond within 24 hours if they agree to participate in the commission.

President Arce celebrated the “democratic conviction” of the people of Bolivia and their commitment “to dialogue to decide the future of the Census and continue advancing in the economic reconstruction of the country.” He reported that “we put forward two proposals for the Census to the Inter-institutional Committee and we are awaiting their response to resolve the conflict.”

On October 29, the Santa Cruz governor rejected both proposals and decided to maintain the strike. Over the weekend, Camacho gave an interview to local newspaper El Deber and said that federalism is the only solution to the “fissure that comes from the founding of the Republic.”

However, as per reports, he has been losing support every day. Vicente Cuellar and Rómulo Calvo have also publicly agreed to discuss the date of the census at a technical table.

On Wednesday, November 3, President Arce ordered the creation of a technical commission to define the definitive date for carrying out the population census. He reported that this commission will include international representatives and will begin work this week.

The head of state called on the opposition “to put down any pressure measure that threatens the reconstruction of Santa Cruz,” adding that “the invitation for dialogue remains open, because we trust that it is the best mechanism for conflict resolution. It’s time to give peace to the people of Santa Cruz.”

The last Population and Housing Census in Bolivia was carried out in 2012, when more than 11 million inhabitants were counted in the country. It is an important process that allows redistributing national resources and planning public policies according to population growth.
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Earlier this year, on August 25, over one million Bolivians mobilized in support of President Arce’s government in the face of previous attempts by far-right opposition sectors in Santa Cruz to destabilize the national government using the Population and Housing Census as pretext.

This article was republished from People's Dispatch. 

A highly regarded Russia specialist in Canada, Professor Michael Carley at the University of Montreal, has refused to support the NATO narrative on the Ukraine conflict and has since been subjected to a vicious smear campaign.

Canada’s role in the Ukraine conflict and the power of the right-wing Ukrainian diaspora in Canada may be underestimated, according to the vitriol we have seen directed at Professor Carley. He is among the first in Canada to feel the wrath of the country’s mainstream media, after Russia’s special military operation (SMO) in Ukraine began on February 24, 2022.
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To grasp why the gripes of this diaspora have received such attention and consideration from Canadian media, it is first necessary to understand how the right-wing element of Ukrainian-Canadians gained dominance over the diaspora. While the experience is similar in the U.S., Canada has been a haven par excellence for Ukrainian fascists. Thus, the “Carley Affair” can act as a warning of what to expect as the U.S. harbors more Ukrainian refugees.

​Canada’s parliamentarians have been united in condemnation of Russia and support for Ukraine.

This intensified following Russia’s recognition on February 21, 2022, of the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. The next day, the Liberal government imposed “new prohibitions on direct and indirect dealings in Russian sovereign debt” and promised to send “up to an additional 460 personnel” to join Canadian military forces participating in NATO’s Operation Reassurance in Europe.
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The government has “authorized approximately 3,400 Canadian Armed Forces personnel across all branches of the service to deploy to the NATO Response Force should they be required by NATO.” After Russia’s SMO began, on the same day, the Liberal government sanctioned additional Russian government officials and further restricted exports to Russia.

On April 27, MP Heather McPherson of the New Democratic Party (Canada’s social democratic party, the third largest in Parliament and currently in a governing agreement with the Liberal Party of Canada) succeeded in passing a motion in Parliament with unanimous support declaring that Russia was committing a “genocide” in the midst of its SMO in Ukraine.

International lawyer Chris Black noted in an article for The Canada Files: “McPherson is always ready to assist the Americans in their attempt to dominate the world. She made similar allegations against China regarding the Uighurs based on ‘evidence’ produced by CIA-front, National Endowment for Democracy-funded groups and other U.S. government funded organizations.”

Black went further, noting the farcical nature of McPherson’s claims and demands:

“There is no point in discussing the examples the Canadian MP referred to in presenting her motion; it was just a litany of false claims, most already disproved, and none of which could amount to genocide under any legal definition.  She even (at 2:27 in the clip) admitted this when a reporter for one of the mass media pointed out that the American government has refused to condemn Russia for genocide as there is not sufficient and reliable evidence of such actions and none of intent which is required to found such a charge.  But, she stated, again displaying her motion was meant as a propaganda exercise against Russia, that she knew that but that “someone had to take action.” In other words, the Americans know they could not make such a claim and have any credibility, so they got their flunkies in Canada to do it along with their flunkies in Latvia, who soon followed suit.

She then added that Canada should send more money to the International Criminal Court so that the prosecutor there would take action, not seeming to blush at the fact she was really calling for offering a bribe to the ICC prosecutor for his cooperation. But then again, Canada’s government and parliamentarians are used to trying to control prosecutions and trials at tribunals as they did at the ICTY and ICTR, both of which were essentially NATO tribunals designed to fix blame on scapegoats for the crimes of the western nations involved in those wars.”

The Canadian mainstream media joined in the parliamentary obedience, refusing to challenge NATO narratives on Russia’s SMO. This obedience from both Parliament and the mainstream media set the table for the Canadian government to go heavy on sanctions against Russia and provision of military aid to Ukraine.

The Canadian government drove the coalition-building process necessary to have the West cut Russia off from the SWIFT international banking payment system. Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland personally reached out to the U.S. government on the day Russia’s SMO began, to propose cutting off Russia from foreign reserves worth $640 billion USD. On the same day, Prime Minister Trudeau pitched the idea to other G7 leaders, and the day after to European leaders.
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As of September 25, 2022, the Canadian state-run Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) News noted that Canada has “committed or delivered $626 million in military aid to Ukraine” since the beginning of Russia’s SMO. It further noted that “Canadian forces have been responsible for delivering four million pounds of cargo since March,” which includes Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) Turrets, Infantry Mobility Vehicles (IMVs), assault weapons, ammunition and more. Canada is promising to boost its capacity at a Scotland-based shipping hub that was once the site of a CIA rendition way-station, to speed up arms deliveries to Ukraine, to include 39 armored troop carriers.

The Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC) is the prime right-wing Ukrainian diaspora group in Canada and has had significant influence on Canadian policy toward Ukraine for decades.

The UCC is mainly the product of right-wing Ukrainian ex-Nazi battalion members and their families, who were welcomed into Canada after World War II.

Richard Sanders, founder of the Coalition Against the Arms Trade magazine, has explained that the Canadian government orchestrated the founding of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (originally called Ukrainian Canadian Committee) in 1940. Its purpose was “to rally all anti-Communist Ukrainians into one body in order to squash the then-powerful influence of left-wing Ukrainians whose forebears had come to Canada during earlier waves of migration.”
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The UCC’s website reveals that its founding was ensured by the support of Canada’s National War Services body, which Sanders explains “was anxious that young Ukrainians enlist in military services.”
After World War II, in opposition to the UCC, the Association of United Ukrainian Canadians (AUUC), “a progressive organisation which includes social democrats, socialists and communists,” opposed the Canadian government’s desire, supported by the UCC, to allow the immigration into Canada of thousands of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators into Canada.

As Sanders explained, the AUUC was viciously punished due to its left-wing politics: “Tons of books from AUUC libraries were literally burned, its leaders arrested, and its printing presses and Labour Temples (meeting halls) were seized [via the War Measures Act]. In some cases, these were even turned over to ultranationalists associated with Ukrainian Canadian Congress.”In addition to an initial welcoming in 1950 of between 1,200 to 2,000 Ukrainian Waffen SS members in 1950 (the SS was the “elite” guard of Nazi Germany’s military), the Canadian government “had released thousands of Ukrainian SS veterans from UK internment camps by granting them Canadian citizenship.”Over the following decades, the Canadian government would continue to support the Nazi-collaborator sympathizing and -collaborator Ukrainian right in Canada while secretly plotting (via Operation PROFUNC) to round up thousands of left-wing Canadians, including citizens who were active in the AUUC.

Thanks to Canadian government support, the UCC and its member organizations were able to gain hegemony over the Ukrainian-Canadian diaspora. With its hegemony, the UCC and right-wing Ukrainian Canadians have been able to ensure that Canadian media coverage of Ukraine-related stories is to its liking.

Michael J. Carley is a professor in the University of Montreal’s Department of History. He is a specialist in the history of the USSR and Russia. Carley’s politics are expressly progressive. He was born in the United States and was involved in protests against the Vietnam war and for civil rights of Black people during the 1960s, before he came to Canada in 1967.

The Canada Files Contributing Editor, Arnold August, explained Carley’s work extensively in a May 2022 article for TCF titled “Ukraine-Russia: Sanctions against a ‘pro-Russian’ professor from the University of Montreal, or freedom of speech?”

August writes, “Professor Carley is a specialist in international relations in the 20th century and on the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. His research interests focus on relations of the Soviet Union with Western Europe and the United States between 1917 and 1945. He is the author of three books (two of which have been translated into several languages) and about 100 articles and essays on French intervention in the Russian Civil War (1917-1921), on Soviet relations with the Great Powers between the two world wars, on questions of ‘appeasement,’ on the origins and conduct of the Second World War, and on topical issues. He is the author of over 115 book chapters, and his articles has been the recipient of some 15 awards. His works have been published in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, Russia and elsewhere, and translated into a dozen languages.”

Before Carley came under attack, he was a member of the Centre d’études et de recherches internationales de l’Université de Montréal (CERIUM, the Centre for International Studies and Research at the University of Montreal).

August’s article—whose conclusions were endorsed by Alfred de Zayas and Holocaust survivor Suzanne Weiss,–continued: “Professor Carley has recently worked on two major book projects. The first deals with the confrontation between Soviet Russia/USSR and the West from 1917 to 1930. This work, entitled Silent Conflict: A Hidden History of Early Soviet-Western Relations, was published in 2014 by the American publisher, Rowman & Littlefield. The French translation, Une guerre sourde : L’émergence de l’Union soviétique et les puissances occidentales was published by PUM (Presses de l’Université de Montréal) in 2016. A Russian translation was published in 2019.

The second project, supported by a major research grant from the Canadian government think tank, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, focuses on the origins and creation of the ‘Grand Alliance’ against Nazi Germany during World War II. Writing of this second work is now complete in three volumes (1930-1941). Vol. 1 of his trilogy has been accepted for publication. The working title of the trilogy is ‘A Near-Run Thing: The Improbable Grand Alliance of World War II.’ He speaks, reads, and writes English and French, and he reads Russian.”

Carley did not come under fire until Russia began its Special Military Operation in Ukraine. The furor against him began via journalist Romain Schué Radio-Canada (RDI), the French language, state-funded CBC radio and television outlet in Canada. Schué’s hit-job article (translated from French here) on Carley was published on March 23.

The anger against Carley came because he refused to back away from the facts on the true nature of the Ukrainian Maidan regime that came to power in the violent coup of 2014 in Ukraine. He had stated that neo-Nazi militias, including the “Azov Battalion,” were blocking civilian evacuations and that Russia’s SMO involved clearing out the Azovstal factory and both the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics of neo-Nazis.

Carley also stated that the Maidan regime is extremely reliant on neo-Nazi militias to maintain control and fight Russia and allows the targeting of dissident Ukrainians by neo-Nazi militias. He says the narrative of a Russian “massacre” in the small city of Bucha in March 2022 was false, since all Russian troops were gone three days before Ukraine claims a massacre of civilians took place.

Facts indicate that the anti-Carley offensive was the result of collaboration of the state-funded media outlet with vigorous promoter of the Nazi-infested Ukrainian government, Ukrainian-Canadian University of Montreal student Katia Sviderskaya.

She was favorably quoted in Schué’s original article and has co-sponsored a petition (English version attached here) against Carley based on that same article, and in its turn promoted by Schué in a later update to the article, implicitly suggesting that Carley be removed from CERIUM and be suspended or fired from the university proper.
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This entanglement, with a common objective, consists of open collaboration of the state-funded media with a Ukrainian Nazi-promoter in Canada, bringing into question the “journalism” of Schué, and thus the state-funded outlet.

In a Facebook post by Sviderskaya, she exposes herself as a right-wing nationalist and apologist of the Nazi-infested Zelensky regime. She states “Ukraine was, is, and always will be the center of the free world.”

Her petition included another line of attack against Carley: that he is willing to engage with, and share or utilize where valuable, information from Russian media such as Sputnik and RT and Russian government institutions. Comically, Sviderskaya’s petition claims that it does not ask the University of Montreal to take a political position and is in line with the values of academic freedom.

Carley’s lawyer noted that, in Canada, the Cloutier Commission report of 2021 (a commission set up to focus on questions around academic freedom in Quebec) defined “academic freedom as the freedom to teach and discuss, but also as the freedom to express one’s opinion.”

Sviderskaya’s petition and the coordinated efforts with Schué were the perfect excuse for other Canadian mainstream media outlets to join the campaign against Professor Carley (all referenced articles viewable in English). Soon the most important French language daily in Quebec, the online La Presse, would cover this petition, followed by The Globe and Mail (the largest national-circulation newspaper and one of the two main English-language outlets in Canada), the daily Journal de Montreal and then the Montreal Gazette (the city’s English-language print daily). The case would even reach the attention of U.S.-based news outlet Newsweek.

Sviderskaya and all the news outlets that ganged up on Carley had a unified implicit goal: to get him fired from the University of Montreal and ruin his professional career for daring to reject the NATO narrative on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. This would serve as a warning for academics in Canada and also in the U.S.

While Carley has managed to fight off any attempts to suspend or fire him, he was removed from CERIUM by its director as a result of the pressure campaign against him. Needless to say, many dozens of Russia “experts” (and not even experts) from Canada and the U.S. are regularly paraded by the Canadian media. They all have in common the promotion of the U.S.-Canada-NATO narrative. On the other hand, we never see one of the real top experts—if not the top one—in Canada and the U.S. and that speaks English and French: Professor Carley.
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After more then five months of resistance by Carley and his supporters at the university and elsewhere, a significant breakthrough finally took place. On September 7, 2022, the second most important French-language daily in Quebec, Le Devoir, published an op-ed that courageously challenged the NATO/U.S./Canada airtight narrative on Ukraine. Titled “From endless wars to permanent war” (PDF English version here), the authors are Samir Saul (Professor of History, Université de Montréal) and Michel Seymour (Retired Professor of Philosophy, Université de Montréal).It is important to note that Carley has been vocal in writing about the Maidan regime for alternative media outlets such as Strategic Culture Foundation, which has been targeted and intimidated by the U.S. government itself. Canada, and the far-right Ukrainian diaspora here, has a less well-known role in getting the Maidan regime in power.

When Mikhail Gorbachev betrayed socialism in the USSR and implemented his “Perestroika” policies seeking peace and accommodation with the rapacious Western powers during the mid-1980s, the right-wing Ukrainian-Canadian organizations took advantage of the opportunity in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic to insert spies and Ukrainian nationalists there. They would go on to lead protest movements against the Soviet Union and cheer with joy when the USSR was dissolved.
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When an independent Ukraine still retained close trade and relations with the Russian Federation, the right-wing extremists in the UCC chose to collaborate yet again with Canada’s government with a view to getting Viktor Yuschenko elected in the highly contested 2004 Ukrainian election. He was brought to power on the back of the Western-backed and financed “Orange Revolution,” which the Canadian government and the UCC backed. The “Orange” protests sought to block the election of Viktor Yanukovych, who was supported by those opposing the militant, anti-Russia politics of the far right.

A 2007 article from The Globe and Mail revealed the extent of Canadian interference in Ukraine’s 2004 elections. Canada’s ambassador to Ukraine collaborated with 28 other countries for donor coordination sessions. Canada’s embassy raised funds to help veterans of Otpor (Serbia) and Kmara (Georgia), color revolution specialists, to train Ukrainian groups that planned to protest if Yuschenko did not win the upcoming election. Pora, the civic youth organization which was a key organizer of the Orange Revolution, received its first donation of $30,000 USD via Canada’s embassy in Ukraine.

Canadian election observers were also extremely partisan in favor of Yuschenko. An election re-run came after the first round of Ukrainian election results had neither candidate hitting the required 50%-plus-one percentage to win. For that re-run, which culminated on December 26, Canada sent 500 observers to oversee it at a cost of $3 million CAD. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress sent another 500 observers on its own dime. Canadian election observers were openly cheering on the Orange Revolution, and one even spoke at a Yuschenko rally.

In the aforementioned Globe and Mail article, Mychailo Wynnyckyj, who served as an election observer, admitted that “we were told not to arrive wearing orange, but there was no doubt who everybody was supporting. Of the 500 observers supported by the Canadian government, maybe 100 were, in their hearts, truly impartial.” Many observers showed up in Ukraine in orange, the opposition’s signature color.

The Globe and Mail article notes that one election observer, former Canadian MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj, “also invested some of his own fortune, funding election observation missions to Ukraine through the University of Alberta with $250,000 from his family foundation. He opened his spacious apartment in central Kyiv so those sleeping in tents could get an occasional shower.”

Wrzesnewskyj acted as “a conduit between Mr. Martin and Mr. Yushchenko, whom he had introduced in Canada several years earlier, and persuaded the prime minister to read a dramatic statement in the House of Commons” that condemned Russia’s alleged meddling in Ukraine. Election observers such as Wrzesnewskyj would be praised by Prime Minister Paul Martin at the opening of a Ukrainian Canadian Congress office in Winnipeg.

On January 23, 2005, after months in the street, the Orange Revolution won out, and Viktor Yuschenko was declared president of Ukraine. Still, by 2006, the “pro-Russian” politician Viktor Yanukovych’s party got a parliamentary majority, and in 2010 he was elected as president of Ukraine. In 2013, Yanukovych’s government chose to accept a condition-free $15 billion bailout deal from Russia, where Russia cut gas prices by one-third. The EU had offered a far worse deal for further trade integration into the bloc, which would have forced Ukraine to hike prices of fuel and other key goods. The Canadian government and the UCC found this unacceptable.

Then came the U.S.-orchestrated Euromaidan protests in favor of the EU trade deal. These protests, which called for Yanukovych’s resignation, began in November 2013. These protests turned into a violent right-wing coup whose force was mainly provided by neo-Nazi militias, which even tried to assassinate former President Yanukovych. They installed the Maidan regime into power in February 2014.

Ken Stone, treasurer of the Canada-based Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War, explained Canada’s open support for the Maidan coup in an article for The Canada Files:
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The Canadian government spent $1 billion CAD promoting the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and the Maidan coup of 2014. During the Maidan insurrection, the Harper Government strongly supported the Nazi-ridden insurrection in the Maidan square:

Stone notes that “Following the coup, successive governments of Canada recognized the junta and proceeded to pour Canadian taxpayers’ dollars, to the tune of at least $700 million. CAD, plus arms, into Ukraine from 2014 to the present. It also sent over 200 trainers for the Ukrainian army, dispatched Canadian special forces to Ukraine, and supported Ukraine with Canadian warships in the Black Sea.”

Though Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president in 2019 on the promise of peace with breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, formerly oblasts (provinces) in eastern Ukraine before the 2014 coup, the authoritarian Maidan regime remained in place and his policy and military decisions soon closely mirrored his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko.
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The Ukrainian Canadian Congress has remained steadfast in its support of Zelensky, after he quickly broke his vague election promises of peace. It has lobbied the Canadian government and met with Canadian government officials consistently since 2020 to urge them to increase aid and cooperation with Ukraine.

Moss Robeson, an activist and writer who opposes the influence of extreme right-wing Ukrainians, has written extensively about this element of the Ukrainian diaspora in the United States. The difference is that the U.S.-based diaspora does not have as direct an influence on the government in the way that Canada’s right-wing Ukrainian diaspora does.

As uncritical NATO narratives are parroted across the U.S. mainstream media and even some left media bows to the pressure to condemn Russia, this is an opportunity for right-wing Ukrainian diaspora organizations to seek direct connections and funding from the U.S. government.
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Grave danger is already faced by the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) in the U.S. for rejecting the NATO narrative on Ukraine. APSP was targeted by multiple FBI raids on July 29, 2022, with the Biden administration enabling assaults on anti-imperialist organizations in the U.S., a stance condemned by the Black Alliance for Peace. As of September 22, a delegation of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion was visiting the USA.

With entire anti-imperialist organizations under attack, individual academics in the U.S. could very easily face similar waves of attack as Carley did, but even worse because of a xenophobic FBI on the prowl for “Russian interference.”

Professor Michael Carley has faced serious attacks on his reputation and career and was even dropped from the University of Montreal’s research institute (CERIUM) for standing strong on his principles and condemning the Nazi-infested Maidan regime, as even many left writers and organizations bow to the pressure to condemn Russia.

Attacks on Carley come in the context of a right-wing Ukrainian diaspora in Canada that has been backed by the government since its head organization, the UCC, was founded in 1940.

Originally used as a battering ram against communism and left-wing Ukrainians in Canada, the UCC has grown to significantly influence Canadian politics and the two major Canadian political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, with Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland being a direct UCC connection to the very height of Canadian political power.

There is no guarantee that Carley will not face further attacks. The hysteria that will accompany Ukrainian military failures may get directed against those who reject the NATO narrative on Russia’s Special Military Operation. Carley is among those who can face ire yet again. If Carley isn’t defended, the door swings open for similar campaigns against any North American academic who speaks up.

At a time when there is so much discussion and confusion in North America and elsewhere on the spurious so-called equivalence of “communism and fascism,” supposedly as a result of the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov Non-Aggression Pact, the University of Toronto just announced the publication of Carley’s latest book: “Stalin’s Gamble: The Search for Allies against Hitler, 1930–1936.”

People may justly wonder: What kind of a world are we living in when a Nazi collaborator and a U.S. State Department stenographer such as Schué is allowed to predominate over an expert such as Professor Carley?

All this comes amid a shift toward a multipolar world, regardless of the delusions of NATO countries and their puppets who claim otherwise. Anti-imperialist countries, including China, Russia, Iran, Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, Vietnam, the DPRK, Syria, Yemen and more are seeking to de-dollarize and ignore U.S. sanctions that could previously cripple nations.

The ability of maintaining U.S. hegemony, prized by Washington, is slowly slipping away, a clear example being how China ramped up trade with Russia as Western sanctions piled up, and succeeded in significantly softening the impact of Western sanctions. Meanwhile, Iran, in 2020, joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, after striking a 25-year, $400 billion economic cooperation deal with China.
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The multipolar world is coming; the people in the imperial core such as Professor Michael Carley, who genuinely support this goal for the future, should be firmly supported.
Act now or live in regret later.

For the 30th consecutive United Nations vote, the US again lost. A landslide margin of 185 to 2 condemned its blockade of Cuba on November 3. Only the apartheid state of Israel voted with the US, while Brazil and Ukraine abstained.

Since 1960, the bipartisan policy of the US has been to overthrow the Cuban Revolution by fomenting “disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship.” According to the US State Department, punitive economic measures are imposed to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of [the] government.”

The US blockade daily costs Cuba $15 million; $6.3 billion since Biden took office. Cuba’s income for the first quarter of 2022 exceeded $493 million, but imports of goods amounted to more than $2 billion. A report from Cuba admonishes: “It is a dilemma for Cubans to make ends meet. Wages are not enough to face the very high prices that the lack of offers, real inflation, and speculation bequeath to us.”

Most recently on September 26, Hurricane Ian battered Cuba temporarily shorting electricity island-wide. In August, a lightening fire incinerated 40% of the island’s fuel reserves, exacerbating an existing energy crisis. Covid had already impacted domestic commerce and international tourism. For Cuba these were natural disasters; for the imperial hegemon these were opportunities as Biden continued Trump’s maximum pressure regime-change campaign.
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Given advances in technology, Joe Biden’s ability to tighten the screws makes sanctions much more effective and lethal than they were when John Kennedy first imposed an “embargo on all trade with Cuba” over sixty years ago. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez commented that the current US administration “has escalated the siege around our country, taking it to an even crueler and more inhumane dimension, with the purpose of deliberately inflicting the biggest possible damage on Cuban families.”

Onetime trenchant critic of US imperialism, the social-democratic NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America) has been “reporting on the Americas since 1967.” Though in recent years, it has increasingly degenerated into cheerleading for US-instigated regime change in Nicaragua and other countries striving to socialism.

NACLA commented on the US blockade just before the UN vote in an article by academic Louis A. Pérez. He made 22 references to “sanctions,” but never once acknowledged that these unilateral coercive measures were illegal or, because secondary measures target third parties, that they constituted a “blockade.”

Along with NACLA, author Pérez is a longtime and sincere critic of the US blockade. His article has good information, recognizing that US humanitarian aid is intended to “relieve the very conditions to which sanctions have been dedicated to creating.” But with morally bankrupt ivory-tower equanimity, he criticizes both US imperialism and the Cuban Revolution for not achieving some liberal democratic ideal.

Pérez comments: “To recognize the baneful consequences of US sanctions is not to disregard or otherwise dismiss the failures of the Cuban government [emphasis added].” He continues: “But much of what is not well in Cuba can also be attributed to official policies and practices…with ill-conceived economic policies that fail to remedy want and need.” That is, the victim bears responsibility for the economic effects of the blockade.

According to Pérez, the fundamental failure of US policy is that the Cuban people are so consumed with the daily struggle for survival that they don’t have the time (that the more enlightened souls in academia have) to address “political freedom.” He quotes the angst of a Cuban colleague: “First necessities, later democracy.”  For such elevated minds, the tragedy of US imperialist domination is that the higher pursuits for democracy are sacrificed on the altar of banal survival.
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This recalls the counsel of the African revolutionary Amílcar Cabral: “Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas, nor for what is in men’s minds. The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children.”

Pérez repeatedly laments the “tragically ironic” US blockade; irony being a favorite word of the intelligentsia. He explains, the “irony” of the current record surge of Cuban migration is “not lost on informed observers,” such as himself: “Those sectors of the population most likely to constitute themselves as a political opposition [emphasis added] are often the very people most inclined to emigrate.”

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel provides context: “…we are the only country in the world for which a law was written, called the Cuban Adjustment Act, which guarantees the automatic entry into the US anyone who declares himself politically persecuted; this psychologically conditions an attitude of denial of the real causes for emigration, fundamentally economic and conditioned by the iron blockade of the same country that forces the emigrant to declare himself persecuted.”
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Pérez continues: “Ironic too…US policy serves to add to the woes of a people for whom emigration to the US offers the most immediate remedy to hardship.” However, the US policy of encouraging illegal immigration and preventing legal is not just ironic, it is deadly.

For Pérez, the “most egregious failure of sanctions” is that they “encumber…legitimate political change” to some imagined liberal Shangri-La.

So, what state in this hemisphere meets his lofty liberal litmus test? Could it be that “exceptional” land of the free where he resides? There’s no free lunch in the land of free where nearly one in four households experience food insecurity. Unlike Cuba, besieged by the blockade creating genuine shortages, the US has obscene wastage of massive food surpluses; an estimated 30-40 percent of the entire US food supply.

Nor is there free higher education or medical care in the land of the free, which experienced an estimated 500,000 excess deaths during Biden’s first year in office. Despite the blockade, Cuba has not only provided these social benefits gratis, but has sent 42 medical brigades to 35 countries since the start of the pandemic. Meanwhile The Wall Street Journal carps: “Most poor countries put all hands on deck in this crisis. Havana exports its doctors.” The Cuban view of internationalism is that “we share what we have and not just what we have leftover.”

Nor are politicians free in the land of the free, where every candidate comes with a price tag and running for office necessitates vast sums of money. Here, buying political influence is constitutionally protected as free speech and corporations are legally considered “people.” In contrast, Cuba stands out for its experiments to eliminate access to wealth as the determining success factor in running for political office.
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With its board chaired by the program director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, NACLA has a different ideological bias on what constitutes political democracy than Cuba, where housing, health care, and education are constitutionally considered human rights.

After over six decades of imperialist siege against Cuba, only the elderly know life without sanctions. The agonizing material deprivation caused by the blockade, the endless shortages, the interminable standing in line for basic necessities of life, all have a corrosive effect on the moral fiber of the Cuban people subverting the spirit of socialist solidarity.

Leftists worry about cascading effects to the entire region of the precarious situation in Cuba.

Cuba solidarity activist W. T. Whitney warns: “Thanks to the US blockade, Cuba’s economic situation is more desperate than ever.” TeleSUR reports, “The Cuban economy continues to be gripped by rising tensions amid the tightened US embargo.”

Political unrest is undeniably mounting as conditions deteriorate. For the first time, Cuba is facing social media penetration from the US, which has managed to mobilize certain sectors of the Cuban population against the revolution.

As the US Peace Council cautioned: “No matter how heroic a people may be, socialism must provide for their material needs. The US blockade of Cuba is designed precisely to thwart that and to discredit socialism in Cuba and anywhere else where oppressed people try to better their lot…. Cuba is being attacked precisely because that small island nation promises a humane alternative to the decaying neoliberal order of present-day capitalism and its pending crisis of legitimacy. If a critical spotlight is needed, it is not on how the Cubans with so little should have done better, but on how the imperialists with so much must be defeated.”
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That Cuba has successfully not only persisted but has been an international model for the accomplishments of socialism does not mean that it will always be so. Cuba is a small resource poor island, defending socialism against a very powerful foe. The Cubans can resist, but socialist internationalist solidarity must support Cuba and compel the US to end the siege. This is not a time for complacency.

​-Roger D. Harris is with the human rights group Task Force on the Americas, founded in 1985.​