ILPS Condemns Coordinated US Police Attacks, Urges Intensification of Occupy Movement

THE Office of the Chairperson of the International Coordinating Committee (ICC) of the International League of Peoples' Struggle endorses the statement below which has been issued by ICC members in the US on November 17, 2011. We call on all ILPS national chapters and member-organizations throughout the world to circulate this statement and undertake further statements and actions to support the Occupy Movement in the US. Thank you.


KEEP IT IN THE STREETS! INTENSIFY THE FIGHT!

Dismantled Occupy Oakland Camp (RT.com photo)

TO OCCUPY IS THE PEOPLE’S RIGHT!

In Oakland and New York City, in Denver and Portland and Chapel Hill, N.C., the 1 percent sent their gun thugs to destroy the Occupy Movement. They want to scare us off the streets and back into the ballot box, beat us back into the good-cop, bad-cop game of the corporate-run Republican and Democratic parties. But behind the façade of electoral politics, the unelected tyrants on Wall Street continue to rule the country. It is they, not the people, who tell the politicians what to do.

The cowardly attacks by Wall Street’s mercenaries in blue were coordinated with the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That’s the same FBI whose COINTELPRO program murdered dozens of Black, Latino and Native activists in the ‘60s and ‘70s.


WHEN THE ENEMY ATTACKS YOU, YOU’RE DONG SOMETHING RIGHT

Along with their cops, the 1 percent have unleashed their media. “Enough,” say the billionaire-owned papers and TV stations. “You’ve made your point. Now go home and leave things to the politicians. You’re only the people. What do you think this is, a democracy?” But when the enemy attacks you, you know you’re doing the right thing.


HAS CORPORATE AMERICA STOPPED ATTACKING THE WORKING CLASS

Have the 1 percent stopped laying us off and attacking our wages and benefits? Have they stopped evicting us and foreclosing on our homes? Have they stopped firing teachers and bus drivers and hospital workers while they hoard trillions of dollars that we produced? Have they stopped plotting to gut our Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, our Postal Service, our schools and hospitals?

Have they stopped denying 30 million people the right to a decent job? Have they stopped denying millions the right to medical care. Have they stopped the mass incarceration of youth of color whose communities the banks and corporations have destroyed. Have they stopped waging bloody and unjust imperialist wars all over the world?


RT.com video on the first Occupy Wall Street fatality (she later had a miscarriage)



 

IF THERE IS NO STRUGGLE, THERE IS NO PROGRESS

The immortal words of Frederick Douglas are as true today as they were in 1857. Real change has never been made at the ballot box.

Look at the 1930s. How did we win Social Security and Medicare, the 8-hour day, unemployment insurance and the minimum wage, the right to retire and the right to organize, all the things they want to take away from us. Workers won these things by marching and striking, by occupying factories and physically blocking evictions, by shutting entire cities down.

Look at the 1960s. How did Black people win basic civil rights and overthrow the regime of legal segregation. By marches and boycotts, by sit-ins and rebellions in the streets. The right to vote was not won by voting.

These struggles were also victorious because they were part of a worldwide struggle against the power of monopoly capital.


POWER IS THE ONLY LANGUAGE THE 1 PERCENT UNDERSTAND

And we have power, the power to shut this country down! Oakland dockworkers, members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, showed the way when they shut the port down the port on Oct. 25 to protest the police assault on Occupy Oakland.


NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER!

The 1 percent want to take everything we have left. They won’t stop unless we stop them!

Now is not the time to retreat! It is time to intensify the fight! To occupy streets and parks-and factories and schools and shopping malls and banks and stock exchanges! Workers created the wealth of this country! Bankers didn’t! CEOs didn’t! Cops didn’t!


THEY DENY US THE RIGHT TO A SECURE JOB, TO A HOME, TO HEALTH CARE, TO EDUCATION AND TO LIVE IN PEACE AND EQUALITY! WE HAVE A RIGHT TO TAKE WHAT IS OURS!

SAVE THE DATE! BUILDING A BRIGHT FUTURE FOR THE GLOBAL 99%! MON 12/5/11 6:30 PM

INTERNATIONAL ACTION CENTER - SOLIDARITY CENTER -55 W. 17 St., Suite 5C -

New York, NY 10011 - Suggested Donation: $5-10


 (Reprinted with permission from Prof. Joma Sison)

____


Source:

ILPS CONDEMNS COORDINATED US POLICE ATTACKS, URGES THE PEOPLE TO INTENSIFY THE FIGHT. Joma Sison;'s wall. https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150541180623066

Photo credit:

 http://rt.com/usa/news/occupy-oakland-camp-dismantled-305/


Reposts are licensed to the respective authors. Otherwise, posts by Jesusa Bernardo are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Philippines.

WALKING HISTORY: We Did NOT Come from the Ita, Indones, nor Malay!

WE were taught in school that the Filipinos came from the Aetas, Indonesians and Malays who came here in different “waves of migrations” as hypothesized by archaeologist H. Otley Beyer.  The aetas came first from Borneo to Palawan through land bridges that appeared in Southeast Asia during the Ice Age.  Then, through boats, the Indonesians, then the Malays.  When this was first taught to me by my teacher in Grade 1, my beloved Ma’am Luz, I imagined aetas bringing sacks of land and were putting soil on their way as they walked on the sea to form the “land bridges.”  Far out.

Right photo - MT3 from Callao Cave,  oldest human remain from the Philippines to date  (Courtesy of Dr. Armand Mijares)

Left photo - Xiao Chua looks at skullcap of  the Tabon Cave Woman

Only when I went to the University of the Philippines Diliman and took my first history class under Prof. Carlos Tatel that I learned that as early as the 1970s, the Beyer theory was already challenged and most in the academe does not believe it anymore!  Although the aetas came here using land bridges, that’s the only verifiable thing from the theory. Shock.

The Austronesian-Speaking World (Courtesy of Dr. Peter Bellwood)

According to F. Landa Jocano, there were already people who evolved from here.  According to archaeologists, evidence can be found from stone tools left by the so-called Homo erectus philippinensis in a Cagayan Valley cave (500,000/250,000 BC) and the Homo sapiens in Novaliches (150,000 - 100,000 BC) as well as the human remains of a woman (skullcap and jaw) found in Tabon Cave of a homo sapiens sapiens (28,000 - 7,000/5,000 BC).  Dr. Armand Mijares and his team recently found what is now believed to be the oldest human remains in the country, a third metatarsal bone of a foot found in Callao Cave in Cagayan, that predates the Tabon Man, 67,000 years ago.

Xiao Chua with Wilhelm Solheim & Peter Bellwood

The 18th Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association (IPPA) Congress, NISMED Auditorium, UP Diliman, March 2006

But the group of ancestors who can culturally explain our race are what social scientists call the Austronesians.  Originally it is a term ascribed for the southern (from the Latin auster, south winds) island (from the Greek nêsos) language family that spread across Southeast Asia.  There are two competing hypothesis on the origin of the group of people that spoke these languages.  Wilhelm Solheim II, the father of Southeast Asian Archaeology believed that these people he called “Nusantao” came from the Sulu-Celebes area.  This is island origin hypothesis that theorizes that the peoples of Southeast Asia spread from the islands through networks of trade, intermarriages and migrations.

This was challenged by a younger archaeologist Peter Bellwood, who found different jade lingling-os or earrings across Southeast Asia with almost the same design, hinting that the Austronesians came “out of Taiwan” some 5,000 to 1,500 BC to the Philippine Islands.  In whatever case, the two theories can agree that the Filipinos were one of the first Austronesians and that, as I was told by Bellwood himself, a sophisticated maritime culture developed in these islands and with the use of outrigger canoes, the spread of people became possible in Southeast Asia, Oceania, New Zealand, Hawaii and as far as Easter Island in South America and Madagascar in Africa!

Caracoa, warship of the Austronesians, was the basis of ship shown in AMAYA.

Therefore, despite the 171 languages and culture in the Philippines, we can have a basis of unity through our base culture of our Austronesian speaking ancestors.

(as written)


(Reprinted with permission from Prof. Michael Charleston Briones Chua)

_____

Source:


Chua, Xiao. WALKING HISTORY: WE DID NOT COME FROM THE ITA, INDONES & MALAY,  
Good Morning Philippines. 9 November 2011




Reposts are licensed to the respective authors. Otherwise, posts by Jesusa Bernardo are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Philippines.

In Support of the Egyptians vs. the US-backed Military Regime

by Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
11 November 2011

THE International League of People’s Struggle (ILPS), with over 300 member- organizations from all regions of the world, conveys most militant greetings of solidarity and support to the Egyptian people on the occasion of the International Day to Defend their struggle for freedom, human rights and social justice on 12 November 2011.

We join the Egyptian people in condemning and fighting the gross and systematic violations of human rights rights by the US-backed military regime that has hijacked the victory of the Egyptian people in overthrowing the corrupt and authoritarian regime of Mohammed Hosni Mubarak who ruled Egypt for 30 years.

We support the people’s movement to stop the killings of activists and protesters, the incarceration of those who dare expose the repression and exploitation of the Egyptian people, the violence committed against Egyptian women, and the climate of fear and terror that the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) is spreading to snuff out the burning desire of the Egyptian people for fundamental changes.

The continuing stranglehold of the military on the Egyptian political system is directed by US imperialism to suppress the people’s movement that has surged in Egypt since January. The US is hell-bent on maintaining its neocolonial control of Egypt and preventing the uprising of the Egyptian people from turning into an anti-imperialist struggle.

Egypt has long been dominated by the US economically and militarily. It has been under a US puppet regime that plays a crucial role in the US-Zionist offensives against the Arab and Palestinian people. Since 1975, the US has poured in more than US$50 billion in the country to prop up and use the Mubarak regime as a despotic tool of US interests.

In this period when the people of Middle East and North Africa are rising up to assert national independence and democratic rights, the US is frantically trying to retain a new set of puppets in order to perpetuate control over the vast energy resources of the Middle East and Africa. Egypt is a strategically important US neocolonial base in the region.

The SCAF is dependent on US military support that runs at US $ 1.8 billion in the current year. It is directed by the US to conduct a campaign of suppression against the Egyptian people’s resistance. Both US imperialism and the persistent fascist Egyptian military regime are responsible for the bloody crimes against the people.





We are inspired by the courage of the Egyptian people in continuing the struggle for fundamental economic, social and political changes despite the tremendous odds. We urge them to persevere and intensify their struggle. Only through revolutionary struggle do they have a chance to overcome the escalating oppression and exploitation brought about by the worsening crisis of the world capitalist system.

It is necessary for the Egyptian people to link up their resistance with that of other peoples in the Middle East, Africa and the entire world. Through their concerted struggles, the peoples of the world can inflict powerful blows on the imperialist powers and the puppet regimes and aim for the realization of greater freedom, democracy, social justice, development and world peace.

We in the ILPS salute the heroic people of Egypt. We stand with you in your fight against the brutality of the US-directed military regime and for your national and social liberation from the scourge of imperialism and the local reactionary classes. You struggle is our struggle and your revolutionary advance is ours.###


(Reprinted with permission from Prof. Joma Sison)

_________



Sison, Joma. IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE EGYPTIAN PEOPLE AGAINST THE US-BACKED MILITARY REGIME. 11 Nov. 2011. http://www.josemariasison.org/?p=8913#more-8913


Photo credits: 

 https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBAo4unwHwW4fR2_SiiAz54AFd5T-LXajp4PhTxQhNS1T7CEtdzv9N5WtEJBEEmzYtXqS7Kh2bE59ikrXLUVbs2w6LGmmTYEVukOe-XrKnnpqDikVh4jnxLTDG4d3VQlZxqCwokCMGYrg/s1600/egjypt_i.jpg

http://gaza.haimbresheeth.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Obama-and-Mubarak.gif

 
Video from RT.com

-



Reposts are licensed to the respective authors. Otherwise, posts by Jesusa Bernardo are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Philippines.