The case, which was continued to September 18, referenced a speeding ticket issued to Leanne Cusack on June 5, when she struck and killed Murod Kurdi with her car. Cusack had admitted to drinking before getting in her vehicle, but when Oak Lawn Police Department (OLPD) arrived at the scene, they allowed Cusack to leave without alcohol tests or arrest for the death she caused. The next day she was seen drinking at the same bar.

After the crowd of over 100 supporters raised chants for justice, Murod Kurdi’s mother and brother, Fadia Muhamad and Suphi Kurdi, shared their grief at the loss of their family member with the press.

“I want to see justice,” Muhamad said. “There is no parent that should ever have to go through something like this.” She also connected the case to the larger issue of public safety in Oak Lawn, expressing the urgency of accountability that is needed to prevent another tragedy. “If there is no justice, this can and will happen again,” she said. “It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when and who the next victim will be.”

For Murod Kurdi’s family and the Arab community of Oak Lawn, justice means prosecution — by the Cook County State's Attorney's office — of Kurdi’s killer to the full extent of the law. Kurdi’s community also demands that Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul open an independent investigation into the OLPD for its crimes and neglect toward Arab communities and other oppressed nationalities.

In line with the racist stance of OLPD, the court staff at Bridgeview County showed special treatment for Kurdi’s killer, while denying his family and their supporters adequate room to witness the hearing. Court officers let Cusack enter and exit the courtroom through a backdoor to avoid facing the family of the man she killed.

Kurdi’s case comes less than a year after three Oak Lawn police officers beat 17-year-old Hadi Abuatelah within an inch of his life. One of those three is Mark Hollingsworth, who was also one of the officers assigned to review the footage of Kurdi’s killing, though he wasn't at the scene when it happened. In a meeting with Fadia Muhamad, Hollingsworth claimed he saw enough to know that the killer wasn't drunk.

The organized response from the community in Hadi Abuatelah’s case has resulted in Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx bringing charges against Patrick O'Donell, one of the three offending officers.

“The struggle of the Arab community against police crimes in Oak Lawn shows that justice is not handed down by the system,” said Arab American Action Network organizer Muhammad Sankari. “Justice is won by fighting back and demanding it.”

#ChicagoIL #AsianNationalities #RacismInTheCriminalJusticeSystem #PoliceCrimes #MurodKurdi

San José, CA – Over the last two years, hundreds of thousands of Asian Americans and their supporters have taken to the streets to protest the wave of violence against Asian Americans. From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when a Burmese family was assaulted in Texas; to the Atlanta Spa killing in April 2021, where six of the eight people killed were Asian American women, this wave of violence against Asian Americans inspired protests across the country, even including middle-school students.

These protests were the largest ever to draw together Asian Americans of different nationalities. This was in part because the targets of the hate crimes were Chinese American, Korean American, Burmese American, and others. Although the hate and national chauvinism was mainly driven by anti-Chinese sentiment fanned up by racist politicians such as President Trump, the racists did not know and did not care about their victims’ nationalities. There is also a growing common experience of young Asian Americans who were either born here or grew up in the United States, of their common experiences because of the national oppression as people of Asian descent in the United States.

The fight against violence against Asian Americans also pulled many of the different classes in our communities: workers as well as members of petty-bourgeoisie such as small businesspeople, professionals and managers. However other types of national oppression, such as unjust treatment by ICE and immigration can differ, given that more well-to-do Asian Americans better able to afford legal representation.

The struggle against violence against Asian Americans is part of a larger struggle for full equality and against national oppression. Asian Americans have a long history of struggle against racist and discriminatory government laws and actions, from Foreign Miners tax in California in the 1850s to the witch hunt against Chinese American academics today. Asian Americans have also faced racist discrimination in housing, in the labor force, in marriage, in every facet of life.

The struggle against the national oppression aimed at Asian Americans has always had connections with the oppression of African Americans and other oppressed nationalities. Anti-miscegenation laws originally aimed at African Americans were also applied to Chinese Americans and other Asian Americans. On the other hand, restrictive covenants, which banned non-whites from buying many homes (to keep neighborhoods white), were first found in San Francisco, again aimed at Chinese Americans. But these racist restrictions in housing deeds also spread nationwide to enforce housing segregation against African Americans.

The fight against national oppression has also crossed over between Asian Americans and other oppressed nationalities. In 1894, American-born Kim Ark Wong was denied re-entry to the United States after having traveled to China to see his family. The Chinese American community fought a legal case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and 1898 won a decision that guaranteed citizenship for American born children of non-citizens. This was especially important for Asian Americans, as Asian immigrants could not become U.S. citizens until the 1940s. This case was important to the Chicano community as well as other Latinos who have immigrated to the United States.

At the same time the struggle of other oppressed nationalities, especially African Americans and Chicanos, both benefitted and inspired Asian Americans. 1947 Mendez v. Westminster decision ended legal segregation of Chicano and Asian children in public schools in California. More than anything else, the upsurge of African Americans in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the early 1960s set the stage for the end to the racist 1924 Immigration Act, which imposed quotas in the hundreds on immigrants from Asia. Without this change, Asian American would be much smaller and vastly different today, with only Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipinos as the main nationalities. Many of the young organizers of protests against anti-Asian violence said that this was not their first protests, they first marched after the death of George Floyd.

While Chinese, Japanese and Filipino Americans had fought for their rights since the 1850s, often alongside Chicanos in particular, the first consciously unified Asian American fight didn’t happen until the 1960s. The struggle sparked by Black Students for Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, led to the formation of the first explicit Asian American organization, the Asian American Political Alliance or AAPA, in 1969. AAPA was the major Asian American organization on campus fighting for both a department of Asian American Studies and a College of Ethnic Studies that would include Black, Chicano and Native American Studies departments.

The rise of African American revolutionary organizations in the 1960s also had a large impact on Asian Americans. The Black Panther Party inspired the formation of I Wor Kuen or IWK in the late 1960s. IWK was named after an anti-imperialist uprising in China in 1900, but their political program was based on the Black Panther Party’s Ten-point Program. IWK turned towards Marxism-Leninism in order to better grasp the class struggle within the Chinese American community, and eventually merged with other M-L groups that came out of movements of oppression, such as the largely Chicano August 29th Movement and the largely African American Revolutionary Communist League, formally the Congress of Afrikan People, a pan-Africanist organization.

Revolutionaries and Marxist-Leninists in the African American and Chicano movements revived the understanding that African Americans in the Black Belt South and Chicanos in the Southwest were, in fact, oppressed nations in the United States. As nations – that is a historical community with a common language, culture, economy and territory – they had the right to self-determination, up to and including the right to separate and form their own countries.

While a few voices raised the concept of an Asian American Nation, this had no basis in fact. Asian Americans do not share a common language, with most Asian American nationalities speaking different languages other than English at home. They have many different cultures, although they have some historical ties. In fact, Asian Americans comprise many different nationalities from East, Southeast, South and Central Asia: Chinese American, Filipino Americans, Indian American, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans and Vietnamese Americans just to mention some of the larger nationalities.

But most importantly, there is no common territory for Asian Americans in the United States. The most concentrated population of Asian Americans on the mainland is in the San Jose-San Francisco Bay Area, which over the last 20 years has developed two small cities that are majority Asian American. In contrast, in the Chicano Nation there are large cities such as San Antonio, Texas and Los Angeles, California, more than 70 counties across seven states, and even the entire state of New Mexico that are majority or near majority Chicano.

There are many Chicanos and Mexicanos who live outside the Chicano Nation. Some even live in majority Chicano/Mexicano counties such as Adams and Franklin counties in eastern Washington. Chicanos and Mexicanos in eastern Washington are certainly oppressed nationalities faced with economic, political and social inequality. Many have lived in the Chicano Nation, and/or have family there. But with the northern edge of the Chicano Nation some 800 miles away, how could they act on self-determination and separate in any practical way?

In the same way Asian Americans, while certainly oppressed nationalities, cannot be considered to be a nation with the right to self-determination. As communists, we fight for the full equality of the Asian American nationalities, including language equality, political power, etc. in areas of concentration.

We also fight for working-class leadership of Asian Americans and other oppressed nationalities in their fight against national oppression and for full equality. This includes both struggling against reformism, such as promoting voting as the answer for all issues, and narrow nationalism, which sees other oppressed nationalities as the problem (an example of this is opposing affirmative action).

Our strategy for revolution is a united front against monopoly capitalism – against the rule by the billionaires and massive corporations. At the core of this united front will be an alliance between the working class, on one hand, and oppressed nationalities, on the other. Asian Americans will play a growing role in this, both as the fastest growing oppressed nationality, and as a rapidly growing part of the working class.

Masao Suzuki is chair of the Joint Nationalities Commission of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and a former member of I Wor Kuen.

#SanJoséCA #AsianNationalities #Socialism #MarxismLeninism #AsianAmericans

San José, CA – 40 years ago, on June 23, 1982, Chinese American Vincent Chin died after being beaten by a Chrysler plant supervisor and his stepson. They ended up being sentenced to a $3000 fine, causing an uproar in the Chinese American community. Evidently the killers thought that Chin was Japanese American and blamed him for the success of Japanese carmakers in breaking into the American car market. This racist killing was another of a long history of violence against Chinese and other Asian Americans.

100 years before the death of Vincent Chin, in May of 1882, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act which was signed into law by President Chester Arthur. Racist violence before and after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act – such as the massacre of Chinese Americans at Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885 where at least 28 Chinese Americans were killed and had millions of dollars (at today’s prices) of damage to their property – drove Chinese Americans to urban ghettoes in larger cities.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was the only immigration law that ever explicitly excluded a single nationality. Because of this act, and the racist Page Act of 1875, which basically barred Chinese women from coming to the United States, the Chinese American population went into long-term decline. From a peak population of over 100,000 in the 1880s, the Chinese American population shrank by more than 40% to just over 60,000 in the 1920s.

The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed at a time of reaction against oppressed nationalities in the United States. In the U.S. South, there was the betrayal of Reconstruction and the restoration of planters’ rule backed by the Ku Klux Klan that led to the formation of the African American nation in the Black Belt South. In the Southwest the theft of the Mexican Americans’ land, the violence of the racist Texas Rangers and the formation of what became the U.S. Border Patrol also marked the birth pangs of the Chicano nation, Aztlán.

But for Chinese Americans there was no formation of an oppressed nation within the United States. Stalin defined a nation as “a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological makeup manifested in a common culture.”

Chinese immigrants at that time almost all came from the southern province of Guangdong speaking similar dialects commonly referred to as Cantonese, from the old Western name for Guangzhou, the largest city and capital of Guangdong province. Over time, the American-born second generation began to speak American English, like many other immigrants to America.

While immigrants from Europe were able to move up from the worst jobs that were low-paying, demeaning, and/or dangerous, Chinese Americans, like Chicanos and Mexicanos as well African Americans, did not. Up until World War II, Chinese Americans worked as laborers in western mines, as farm workers and as domestic servants. Chinese American “houseboys” were common among well-to-do white families in the western U.S. Chinese Americans also did industrial work. Chinese workers made up the majority of factory workers in San Francisco as well as a majority of the laborers building the transcontinental railroad. By the 1880s Chinese Americans were spread across the western United States, often making up a majority of workers in many towns and cities as well as in rural areas.

But not all Chinese Americans were workers. A minority of them were businesspeople in ethnic niches, such as businesses serving the Chinese American community, laundries and restaurants. There were also a number of Chinese American professionals such as doctors who served Chinese Americans.

Chinese American culture was not simply a mix of Chinese and American cultures, but one of a new oppressed nationality in the United States. While some aspects of Chinese culture, such as language and clothing, faded rapidly with the second, American-born generation, other aspects, such as food, did not.

Chinese Americans were molded into an oppressed nationality in the United States, with a common language, economic life and culture. As an oppressed nationality in the United States, Chinese Americans fought many battles for equality and against national oppression. All-round equality means equal political rights, equal economic opportunity, equality of languages and cultures.

One of the earliest racist laws was the Foreign Miners Tax in California, aimed at Chinese and Latino miners who were a part of the Gold Rush. Many Chinese went on to work on the railroads, where they were paid much less than white workers for doing the same jobs. Chinese immigrant railroad workers walked off their jobs to protest being paid less than white workers for the same work. Later, restrictive covenants in real estate deeds banned Chinese from buying homes in most urban areas, starting in San Francisco. Even though these racist restrictions were challenged in court, they were upheld as legal. Then this racist practice spread throughout the country, mainly targeting African Americans to maintain legal segregation in housing.

Both Chinese and Latinos were hit by a Foreign Miners Tax. Anti-miscegenation laws, which prevented African Americans from marrying whites, were also applied to Chinese Americans. Chinese American children were segregated into all-Chinese public school in areas with large numbers of Chinese people, such as San Francisco.

The Chinese American community waged a legal struggle for citizenship rights. Chinese immigrants were banned from naturalization, or becoming U.S. citizens, while immigrants from Europe were able to do so. Racists also tried to strip citizenship, which was guaranteed by as the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, from American-born Chinese. The community fought this all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, ultimately winning the case in Wong Kim Ark v. United States in 1875. This decision carried over to Japanese and other Asians, and to Chicanos and other Latinos. Indeed, reactionaries and racists for years have called for overturning this case to try to strip citizenship from American-born Asians and Latinos.

But while Chinese immigrants and their children became an oppressed nationality, they did not have a common territory, unlike African Americans and Chicanos. So Chinese Americans did not become an oppressed nation. This meant that there was no struggle for self-determination – which includes the right to political secession from the United States – among Chinese Americans. How could a number of Chinatowns throughout the West be a separate nation? What Chinese Americans did demand was full equality, in terms of equal pay, desegregation of housing and schools, and immigration and citizenship rights.

Chinese Americans also had a long history of supporting revolutionary movements in China. In the early 1900's, Chinese Americans supported efforts to overthrow the Ching (Manchu) Empire. A few decades later, Chinese Americans supported the Chinese new-democratic revolution led by the Communist Party of China. The great leader of China’s national democratic revolution, Sun Yat-sen, was educated in the Kingdom of Hawai’i and spent years in the United States and was in the United States when the Ching dynasty finally fell in 1911.

Despite their heroic struggles, Chinese Americans were generally excluded from trade unions and the socialist party of that time. Even worse, many “mis-leaders” such as Denis Kearny in the late 1800s called for the exclusion of Chinese from immigrating to the United States. It was only the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers of the World (the IWW, commonly referred to as Wobblies) who tried to unite workers of all nationalities, including Chinese Americans. But the ideology of the IWW did not see the importance of the struggle for democracy, up to and including full equality, in the larger society outside of the workplace. It was not until the formation of the Communist Party USA in 1919 that Marxism-Leninism begin to fuse with the Chinese American struggle.

Masao Suzuki is the chair of the Joint Nationalities Commission of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. This is the first of a series of articles on Asian Americans.

#SanJoséCA #AsianNationalities #AntiChinese #StopAsianHate

Saint Paul, MN – On the afternoon of April 2, about 50 people gathered for a protest in Saint Paul’s Frogtown area to “Stand up against hate” and demand justice for Asian people who have been targeted in hate crimes, discrimination and violence.

The action was organized by Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC) and Minnesota 8 (MN8) and was called in response to the recent attacks on the Asian community in New York City as well as commemorating the one-year anniversary of the Atlanta spa shootings. The Atlanta Young’s Asian Massage victims include: Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Soon C. Park, Hyun J. Grant, Suncha Kim and Yong A. Yue. One additional victim, Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, was injured in the shooting. Recent New York hate crime victims include Yao Pan Ma, a Chinese immigrant, Michelle Alyssa Go, Christina Yuna Lee and GuiYing Ma.

The group gathered at the corner of the Sun Foods parking lot on University Avenue in Saint Paul to hear speeches, do chants and then set off on a march. Speakers included Brooklyn Park City Councilmember Xp Lee, Reverend Jenny Sung, Rebecca Chang from MN8, and Diana Hernandez and Louie Tran, organizers with MIRAC.

Councilmember Xp Lee spoke first, asking the crowd, “Who wants to see their grandparents beaten up? Who wants to see their family members murdered and harassed? Also, who wants to see their people deported who have been here long and have built a great life here for themselves in this country? I don’t want to see that. You all don’t want to see that. But we are going to continue to see that if we don’t fight for the changes that we need to see happen.”

Between speeches, the emcees read out the names of victims of Atlanta spa shootings and the most recent victims of hate crimes in NYC and the crowd responded with “Presente!” to say that they are still here with us.

Rebecca Chang of MN8 reminded the crowd that violence against Asians in the United States is not new. She said, “This county has been built on a culture of hate and violence since the start. Since the start of Asians Americans arriving in the United States, we’ve been stereotyped as perpetual foreigners, even though our ancestors and families are in the United States in the first place because of economic inequality and war that the U.S. had a direct part in creating around the world.”

MN8 organizes to end detention and deportation in Southeast Asian communities, and Chang informed the crowd that “over 16,000 Southeast Asian community members currently have deportation orders.”

Reverend Jenny Sung spoke next, thanking the crowd for standing up against hate and reminding them: “We have each other’s back.”

Diana Hernandez from MIRAC ended the first set of speakers with the reminder that, “It would be so easy to blame the entirety of the rise of this wave of violence on Trump’s racist handling of the pandemic, but we must confront the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic only aggravated the xenophobia and racism that already existed in this country.” She then highlighted the link between Asian American immigrants and other non-white immigrants who have confronted discrimination and violence and brought attention to the culture of fetishization of Asians in the U.S., exclaiming: “that's not appreciation, that’s exploitation!”

The protesters then set off on a march down a stretch of University Avenue in the Frogtown neighborhood, home to a significant Asian-American community and many shops and restaurants of various Asian nationalities. They chanted slogans such as, “When Asian people are under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back!”

The march ended back at the starting point, where one last speaker, Louie Tran from MIRAC, addressed the crowd, saying, “They’re gonna always try to divide us” he said, and then asked the crowd to remember the link between the Asian community, the Black community and other ethnic groups, reminding them to keep coming out to support each other’s struggles. The action ended with a final, energetic chant of: “The people, united, will never be defeated!”

#SaintPaulMN #ImmigrantRights #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #MIRAc #MN8

San Jose, CA – On Sunday, April 11, at 2 p.m. Pacific / 5 p.m. Eastern, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization is hosting an online program about the wave of violence against Asian Americans; violence which led to the recent massacre of eight people, six of whom were Asian American women near Atlanta, Georgia.

Four community organizers: David Monkawa, Progressive Asian Network for Action, in Los Angeles; Monique Sampson, Freedom Road Socialist Organization in Jacksonville, Florida; Daisy Sim, Tallahassee Community Action Committee, Tallahassee, Florida, and Masao Suzuki, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, San Jose, California, will be speaking on how to fight anti-Asian American violence, understanding its historical roots, and building unity among Asian Americans and solidarity with other oppressed nationalities.

Event details here.

#SanJoseCA #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #MasaoSuzuki

Chicago, IL – The racist March 16 murders of Soon Chung Park, Juncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Paul Andre Michels, Hyun Jung Grant, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng and Delaina Ashley Yaun in Atlanta, Georgia have caused a wave of revulsion and anger among the people, especially in the Asian community. The mainstreaming of extreme right-wing politics in the past decade, as the crisis of monopoly capitalism has continued to unfold, coupled with the bipartisan attacks against socialist China and People’s Korea set the stage for this deadly attack.

The Asian community mobilized quickly to defend itself from racist terrorism. In the Chicago area alone, there have been four mass demonstrations opposing racist violence against Asian women. The first, on March 20, on the northwest side Logan Square neighborhood, drew a militant, multinational crowd of over 300 people, mostly youth. There was a smaller rally of about 100 people the next day, March 21, at Laramie Park in the northern suburb of Skokie. On March 27, a mass rally of over 400 people was held in Chicago's Chinatown on the near South Side. The next day, a smaller rally was held in the North Side neighborhood of Uptown, home to a large Vietnamese and Cambodian community.

At the Chinatown rally, a place was reserved on the speaker's list for the commander of the 1st District police station by politicians who play both sides, saying they help the people with one hand and holding them down with the other by working with the cops. This boss cop tried to pretend that the same police force that murdered LaQuan McDonald and Rekia Boyd would actually protect working-class Asians against attacks. However, Chinese youth kept the mood militant, with signs that read “Fuck your 'bad day'” and “We're not your punching bag.”

#ChicagoIL #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #AntiAsianViolence #antiasianAtlantaShooting

Tallahassee, FL – On March 27, around 100 activists from across the Tallahassee community gathered in front of the State Capitol building to commemorate the eight victims from the recent Atlanta shooting, and to speak out against Asian American oppression.

The Tallahassee Community Action Committee (TCAC), along with various local organizations such as Asian Coalition of Tallahassee, FSU’s Filipino Student Association, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, Dream Defenders and other community members took a stand for the victims of the shooting in grief and healing.

The event started off with Daisy Sim, a Korean American member of TCAC, stating that she hopes the big takeaway for today is how U.S. imperialism functions with the use of the military, ICE and the police. Sim stated, “I hope to call out the true enemy of our community, which is white supremacy and encourage people to further educate, organize and mobilize.”

Regina Joseph, president of TCAC and one of the Tally19, spoke in solidarity with the Asian community, stating, “There is this idea that if you work hard and keep your head down, then you would be protected and that is not the case.” Joseph continued, “You cannot divide the multinational working class.”

Joseph also explained that it was important for African Americans and Asians to strive for solidarity with each other.

Sharry Solis, president of FSU’s Filipino Student Association, continued this theme, noting, “My home country in Philippines is the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in Asia – aid that led to widespread human rights violations.” She also states that “bombings against environmental activists and indigenous people has contributed to them being displaced all over the country.”

Dr. Portia Campos of the Asian Coalition of Tallahassee wanted to share her earliest experience of racism when she was six years old. She ended her speech by chanting “Raise your voice and scream. Raise your voice and shout. Say no to Asian hate.”

Delilah Pierre, vice president of TCAC and member of Freedom Road Socialist Organization, pointed out “We have to talk about the extreme devastation the U.S. has brought onto Asian people all around the world. What they did to Korea during the Korean War. One-third of Korean housing was destroyed. They came to destroy your country. And in Vietnam they are still digging up bombs. Still fighting Agent Orange. They came to destroy your country. What’s right about that?! And what they are doing to the Philippines! And what they are doing everywhere to Asian countries! It’s fucked up.”

Activist Roman Le, the communication lead with Dream Defenders, touched on the emotional weight of the loss of the eight victims, stating, “The amount of energy I have spent, silently crying or laughing to create any sense of synthetic happiness so that my body to feel anything, has left my body torn. I often wondered how people cannot be stuck in their bed for days, trying to make sense of the lingering grief. That never seems to leave but instead becomes more layered. I hope no one points out how my dull my eyes were because I don’t have the heart to explain how I spent the previous night trying not to think about how many more white people will murder communities of color while having a ‘bad day’?”

Isabel Ruano, a valued member for the Tallahassee Community Action Committee, sang a song dedicated to the Asian community out of a place of solidarity as a Latina. She mentioned that her husband, who is Asian Indian, faced hardship that mirrored the current state.

Aurora Hansen, founder of Asian Coalition of Tallahassee, told the crowd, “I am so happy that the younger generation is speaking up because when I was growing up we couldn’t say anything.” She continued to share her life experiences coming and living in Lakeland, Florida, and experiencing microaggressions.

Speaking next, Dawn Freo, TCAC Communication Director and FRSO member, wondered about the costs of assimilation for the American Dream. She stated “The American Dream is bullshit. You sell this dream to immigrants searching for better but the reality is that, ‘Is it really that much better?’ I sit here and I don’t think that it is.”

The event closed with Trish Brown, co-founder of TCAC, singing ``If I don’t lift them up, I’ll fall down! and shouting “We have nothing to lose but our chains!”

#TallahasseeFL #AsianNationalities #Antiracism #TCAC #Tally19 #antiasianAtlantaShooting

Los Angeles, CA – A candlelight memorial took place on March 20 for 118 Japanese elders who died of COVID-19 at Pacifica Kei-Ai assisted living facility in Lincoln Heights, which is rated the worst in California. The event was organized by Save Our Seniors, a broad coalition of Japanese American groups. The vigil also brought attention to the alarming threat of evictions of these elders from Sakura Gardens which is located in Boyle Heights.

Centro CSO delegation members attended and have been supporting the fight to stop Pacifica Corporation from converting the Sukara Gardens assisted living facilities to market-rate luxury apartments in Boyle Heights. Carlos Montes, along with Tamlyn Tomita, had an editorial published in the San Diego Union-Tribune and attended the protest. The Boyle Heights Neighborhood Council has also passed a Community Impact Statement opposing the Pacifica project and sent it to the LA City Planning Department.

Stop gentrification in Boyle Heights

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the international real estate firm Pacifica Companies plans to turn Sakura Gardens into a 45-unit luxury apartment building, put at risk the lives of 200 of its most vulnerable residents by forced evictions and transfers. Many of the residents are women in their eighties and nineties. As children, they grew up in U.S. concentration camps during WWII, due to the mass round up of Japanese Americans, and lived in some of the harshest terrains in America.

118 seniors have fallen victim to the negligence of Pacifica. The threat of eviction comes in the wake of the pandemic and shortly after a hate crime against Asian American women in the state of Georgia.

California Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi from Torrance sponsored a bill – AB279 – supported by Miguel Santiago, the assemblymember whose district includes Boyle Heights. Plans are to pass the bill which would stop the Pacifica Companies’ development plans. To join these efforts, follow SOS at https://instagram.com/publichealthequality.

#LosAngelesCA #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #CentroCSO #SaveOurSeniors

Grand Rapids, MI – Over 300 people rallied to denounce the racist and woman-hating murders in Georgia of six Asian American women and two other men. Speakers and organizations representing people of Filipino, Chinese, Vietnamese and Pacific Islander descendent spoke at Rosa Parks Circle in downtown Grand Rapids on March 20.

Lily Cheng-Schulting, a progressive Democrat and candidate for Michigan’s 72nd State House District introduced Kent County Commissioner Robert Womack, who criticized the statements by police officials in Georgia. The rally ended with a speech by NAACP President Cle J. Jackson, calling for unity and the need to fuse the various movements in this country to stop racist attacks.

The Grand Rapids Asian-Pacific Foundation asked for solidarity, “as we remember and honor the victims from the mass murder in Atlanta and denounce the rapidly growing hate crimes against Asian Americans.”

About 2% of Grand Rapids population is Asian and Pacific Islander people.

#GrandRapidsMI #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #AntiAsianViolence

San José, CA – For more than a year Asian Americans have seen a rising tide of violence aimed at individuals of Asian descent. Starting with a vicious knife attack on a father and his two sons, aged six and three years in Midland, Texas in March 2020 and now the murders of eight people, six of whom were Asian American women, near Atlanta, Georgia, thousands of attacks have been reported in the last year – and many more have not.

Modern violence against Asians goes back to the 1980s, when Vincent Chin was killed by two white Americans who blamed him for the rise of the Japanese auto industry, despite the fact that he was Chinese American. His killers were sentenced to probation and a $3000 fine. In contrast, African American Michael Vick was sent to jail for 21 months and had to put up $1 million following a conviction for dog fighting, showing that a Chinese American life is worth less than the suffering of dogs.

While the Vincent Chin killing followed in the wake of the rise of the Japanese economy, U.S. government harassment of Chinese Americans has been tracking with the recent rise of China. Chinese Americans, such as nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, army chaplain Captain James Yee, and hydrologist Sherry Chen were persecuted by the U.S. government, only to have charges dropped.

This latest wave of anti-Asian violence was fanned by the Trump administration, whose toxic mix of anti-immigrant xenophobia, anti-Asian racism, and U.S. imperial foreign policy brought about these tragic results. But violence against Asian Americans has been a feature of the oppression we have faced in the United States. In 1854, just a few years after large scale immigration from China began, the California Supreme Court ruled that courts could not accept the testimony of Chinese people against a white person, in effect legalizing crimes against Chinese Americans.

Chinese American workers were paid less than white workers while building the Transcontinental Railroad, adding to the profits of the early U.S. monopoly capitalists known as ‘robber barons’, such as Leland Stanford. Chinese American miners were subject to a Foreign Miners’ Tax that provided up to 25% of tax revenues for the state government of California.

Hostility towards Chinese Americans peaked in the 1880s. The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 virtually ended immigration from China. A few years later, 28 Chinese American miners were killed and 15 more wounded in Rock Springs, Wyoming in 1885.

Chinese and other Asian Americans have been the target of racist laws first aimed at other oppressed nationalities. For example the anti-miscegenation laws designed to prevent African Americans from marrying white Americans also were applied to Chinese, Japanese and Filipino immigrants up to and through World War II. While California never had the sweeping Jim Crow laws of the U.S. South, local school districts could and did segregate Chinese, Japanese and Chicano children into separate schooling from whites.

Racist laws also flowed the other way. Restrictive covenants that were first used in San Francisco to prevent Chinese Americans from buying homes outside of Chinatown spread across the country to mainly target African Americans and to preserve white-only neighborhoods.

Asian Americans have also suffered from U.S. foreign policy. When the Empire of Japan attacked the U.S. Navy base in the U.S. colony of Hawai’i, the U.S. government immediately began to round up thousands of Japanese immigrants who were in any way prominent, including businesspeople, religious leaders and cultural teachers. This ended up with the mass incarceration of 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent in concentration campus in the western United States for the duration of World War II.

But our history is also one of resistance and struggle for equality. Chinese workers struck for equal wages while building the Transcontinental Railroad. In 1965 Filipino American farm workers joined with Chicanos and Mexicano workers to go on strike in California’s Central Valley, leading to the formation of the United Farm Workers union. And in the 1980s, Japanese Americans with the help of many other Americans, won redress, an official apology and reparations, or monetary compensation, for their World War II incarceration.

Asian American struggles have benefitted other oppressed nationalities, and the struggle of others has helped our communities. When racist immigration authorities tried to exclude Kim Ark Wong, who was an American-born U.S. citizen, the Chinese American community fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The landmark ruling in the 1898 Wong Sun v. United States case affirmed that the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution did apply to all those born in the United States, and established that Asians, Chicanos, Latinos and others born in the United States were U.S. citizens.

In the same way, the biggest advances for Asian Americans came about because of the African American freedom struggle. The Civil Rights Movement against segregation and for voting rights ended up with Congress scrapping the racist immigration quotas, leading to the immigration that has largely shaped Asian America today. In 1970, the largest Asian American nationality were Japanese Americans, but today Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Korean and Vietnamese Americans have larger or almost as large populations. The growth of Asian American communities has been met by fear and hatred of white supremacists, such as the KKK who confronted Vietnamese American fishermen in Texas in 1979.

Even the concept of Asian American is a recent one, born out of the struggle alongside African Americans, Chicanos and Latinos, and Native Americans for ethnic studies courses in the 1960s. This solidarity in struggle goes back more than 100 years to Japanese farmworkers who joined with their Mexicano brothers and sisters to strike in the fields of California. In 2001, Japanese and other Asian Americans were among the first to stand with American Muslims who were being targeted by the government in the wake of September 11. Just last year, Asian Americans from all walks of life joined in the massive protests calling for justice for George Floyd and denounced the history of racist policing from the Southern slave patrols to the present.

While some Asian Americans, especially business organizations, have called for more policing to fight anti-Asian violence, we have to remember that the police are not just infected with anti-Black ideas, but also anti-Asian ones. The police spokesman in Georgia who said that the murderer of six Asian American women was “having a bad day” was exposed as promoting racist views of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many politicians, including President Biden and Vice President Harris, whose mother was Asian American, have voiced opposition to these racist attacks on Asian Americans. But at the same time the Biden administration has not only kept all of the anti-China policies of Trump, but has even stepped up attacks on China. This will only feed the fires of anti-Asian American racism.

Only the people’s struggle, in unity with other oppressed nationalities who face similar issues of racist discrimination, can lead to victory. At the same time we must fight against the growing anti-China policies, propaganda and military confrontation of the Biden administration, which are deepening anti-Asian sentiment in the United States.

Masao Suzuki is the chair of the Joint Nationalities Commission of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization. He became active in the Asian American movement in 1970 after the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.

#SanJoseCA #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #AsianAmericans

As a result of Executive Order 9066, which was both unconstitutional and executed without due process, entire families of Japanese Americans on the West Coast and in Hawaii were rounded up like criminals because of race prejudice, wartime hysteria and failure of political leadership. Their bank accounts and assets were frozen, and many farms, homes and businesses were stolen. These families were forcibly sent to prison camps where they endured nearly four years of living hell solely because of their Japanese heritage. Many had lived in the United States for decades, but were all, by law, denied citizenship. At the closing of these American concentration camps in 1945, most people rebuilt their lives with little to no resources, relying on the resilience of the individuals, family and the community.

Now, the few living survivors are once again being threatened with forced eviction from their homes at the Sakura Gardens in Boyle Heights. This intermediate care and assisted living/memory care facilities were created to provide culturally sensitive services for Japanese American elders and sits on the site of where the Jewish Home for the Aged once stood.

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the international Pacifica Companies plans to turn Sakura Gardens into a 45-unit luxury apartment building, putting at risk the lives of 200 of its most vulnerable residents by forced eviction. Many of the residents are women in their eighties and nineties, and who, as children, grew up in the concentration camps in some of the harshest terrains in America — all behind barbed wire and armed soldiers watching them from military towers with weapons ready and pointed at those inside the camps.

In 2018, when the Trump administration started to cage Central American refugees, families and children at the border, Japanese American concentration camp survivors and their descendants came out to protest this inhumane treatment and remind all Americans that we cannot “let it ever happen again” or repeat these acts that add to the long and shameful history of discrimination against people of color.

By ignoring these and other tragic American stories, we would be complicit in being silent and allowing racist behavior to continue and escalate in policies that treat people of color without any regard to human rights, without kindness, without compassion.

Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans and Latinos have a great deal in common. In America, beside our Native American communities, we are absolutely and undeniably, a nation of immigrants, no matter how many generations have been here. In fact, the first “DREAMer” was a Korean American student. Our respective languages, foods, traditions and cultures are vital to our self-preservation, enrichment and the bonds to where our ancestors came from. We can, and some do, serve as bridges to countries around the world, and are, at the same time, all-American.

Let’s all help protect our seniors at Sakura Gardens and stop this cultural interruption. Sakura Gardens is one of the last traces of the once-large Japanese American community that helped build and that thrived in Boyle Heights. Before 1942, over 35,000 Japanese Americans made the East LA area home due to segregation that prohibited Asian Americans from living in other communities because those communities were deemed white-only.

Displacing our seniors who have long contributed to the rich culture and history of Los Angeles during this time of the COVID -19 pandemic is unconscionable and cruel and would cause harm to residents and families for years. We need to hold Pacifica Companies accountable for its failure to adhere to its agreed-to sales conditions by retaining the bilingual and bicultural character promised to its facilities. We cannot allow profit and gentrification to dictate what goes into our neighborhoods without investigating the impact on our communities. We demand that the Pacifica Companies provide transparency of its plans to the residents of Sakura Gardens/Kei-Ai facilities and their families so they can determine what is best for these seniors who raised us all.

Join us for a Save Our Seniors (SOS) car caravan and media event at the Kei-Ai Los Angeles Healthcare Center on February 25 at 11 a.m. Let us extend the care given at Sakura Gardens so that these resilient residents may enjoy their golden years in comfort, safety and security, with familiar food, and with people who understand them. Let’s all ask ourselves, “How would you feel and what would you do if they were your parents?” Together, can move forward to SOS.

Strength in Unity! Pa’lante

Carlos Montes is co-founder of the Brown Berets, a Chicano self-help organization similar to the Black Panthers from the late 60s and 70s. Montes was one of the leaders of the Chicano Blowouts, a series of high school walkouts at East Los Angeles High School to protest racism and inequality in East LA schools. Montes also helped organize the largest anti-war protest, known as the Chicano Moratorium. Montes lives in Boyle Heights. Tamlyn Tomita is a Japanese-Okinawan-Filipina-American actress. A native of Los Angeles, she can be seen reprising Kumiko in “Cobra Kai” (2021), the Netflix series based on the original “The Karate Kid” films. She is also well known for her role as Waverly in “The Joy Luck Club” (1993) and numerous other movies and TV shows. Her Japanese American father was incarcerated as a child with his family at Manzanar Internment Camp.

#LosAngelesCA #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #DayOfRemembrance #BoyleHeights #ExecutiveOrder9066

New York, NY – On Saturday, June 13, organizers in New York Community Action Project (NYCAP) joined the national day of action to stop police crimes that was called for by the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

NYCAP members began the day at The Hub in the South Bronx, doing outreach for their campaign for community control of the police and the creation of a Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC). Organizers handed out flyers explaining the details of CPAC and were met with very positive community response.

NYCAP later joined a march of around 100 people at Fordham Plaza, which was organized by local community members.

#NewYorkNY #OppressedNationalities #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #PoliceBrutality #Antiracism #civilianPoliceAccountabilityCouncilCPAC #NAARPR #NewYorkCommunityActionProjectNYCAP

Denounce brutal suppression of U.S. protests against racism and fascism! Support and draw inspiration from the American people's mass protest actions!

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) joins the American people in condemning U.S. President Donald Trump for ordering the mobilization of police and national guard forces to “dominate and crush” mass protest actions currently sweeping across the United States. He has denounced the mass actions and organizations and threatened to “designate” them as “terrorists.”

Over the past three days, hundreds of thousands of Americans have risen up in mass protest actions demanding justice for the May 25 murder of black worker George Floyd. “I can't breath,” Floyd’s last words while on the ground and while being knelt on the neck by a police officer, has reverberated across the country and galvanized the American working people of all colors to unite and take collective action.

These demonstrations and various forms of protests manifest the collective outrage of the American people over racism and police brutality against Blacks and other minority groups in the US. The protests are directed against the Trump government which has fomented the worst kind of misogyny against women and racial bigotry against blacks, immigrants and other minorities. The demonstrations have expressed the united sentiment of hundreds of millions of workers and middle-class Americans against the Trump government amid widespread unemployment, worsening social, economic and public health conditions, and its failed response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Large protest demonstrations have been mounted over the past three days and nights in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Kentucky, New York, Washington and scores of other cities. Demonstrators have breached White House barricades and protested inside its premises. Riots, burning down of police cars and other property and incidents of looting have erupted across the nation.

Police, US Marshals and Secret Service have resorted to using tear gas and firing rubber bullets and other projectiles against demonstrators in a vain attempt to push back against the rising protests. At least one person has been killed while scores have been injured in brutal dispersal methods employed by state forces.

Trump has unmasked himself as a fascist brute determined to silence and put down by force the mounting protest actions of the people. The fascist core of the US government is unraveling as trappings of bourgeois democracy are being shed off. Trump wants to openly employ the US fascist machinery because he is gripped by fear that the demonstrations sparked by police violence will inspire even greater protests.

The need to raise their voices and collectively manifest indignation is driving millions of Americans to join street demonstrations even amid the Covid-19 pandemic. In the face of an acute crisis of mass unemployment and worsening desperate straits for millions of American workers and middle-class families, the people's anger has become so many time greater and more urgent than the fear of the virus.

Demonstrations supportive of the American people's mass protests have also been mounted in front of the U.S. embassies in London, Berlin and Denmark, as well as in Rio de Janeiro and Jerusalem. International solidarity has flooded social media.

Just as the American people have long been inspired by the democratic mass movement in the Philippines, the Filipino people today draws inspiration from the protest movement in the United States in this time of pandemic.

On the same day George Floyd was killed, the lifeless body of Carlito Badion, secretary general of the urban poor group Kadamay, was found in a shallow grave in Ormoc City, Leyte. He was abducted two days before by armed men believed to be military agents. Badion earned the ire of the Duterte regime for leading the fight of the urban poor against the demolition of their communities, as well as against the anti-poor drug war killings. His body bore marks of torture.

Like the killing of George Floyd, the murder of Badion is utterly condemnable and rouses indignation. State forces under the Duterte regime are carrying out increasingly abominable crimes with impunity. Brutal fascist attacks against the democratic forces are set to worsen even more with the impending enactment of the Anti-Terrorism Law.

In the same way that Trump is now invoking “anti-terrorism” to quell the protests, the Duterte regime will undoubtedly use this impending law against the democratic forces to terrorize and suppress them and silence all opposition against Duterte's corruption, fascist brutality and subservience to the US and China and remove all hindrances to establishing a fascist dictatorship.

Drawing inspiration from the American people, the Filipino people can carry out their own mass protests actions to express solidarity and amplify the demand for justice for George Floyd and all victims of racial violence, and an end to racism, and Trump-instigated bigotry in the U.S.

There must also be mass protest actions to give expression to the Filipino people's indignation over the regime's military lockdown purportedly to contain the virus, but merely used as a brutal instrument to force the people to their knees and require compliance with the dictates of the Duterte-Año-Lorenzana-Esperon junta.

Just like the American people, the Filipino people demand the right to express themselves outside social media and come together in various forms to vent their protest over the regime's corruption, incompetence and failure to manage the pandemic and address the socio-economic needs of the Filipino people resulting in widespread hunger and poverty during the lockdown. They also seek to vent out their protests over the worsening militarism and the anti-people and debt-driven neoliberal policies that the regime is imposing under its oppressive “new normal” order.

#UnitedStates #International #OppressedNationalities #Philippines #US #Asia #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #AfricanAmerican #PoliceBrutality #CommunistPartyOfThePhilippines #Antiracism #Socialism #Antifascism #DonaldTrump #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd #MinneapolisUprising

Support the American people's demand: Justice for George Floyd!

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) supports the demand of the American people for justice for George Floyd, a 46-year old resident of Minneapolis, Minnesota, who was killed last May 25 by four police officers after he was taken into custody.

The killing of Floyd was caught on video with a policeman kneeling on his neck for nine minutes while pressed down on the ground and handcuffed. Floyd last words, “I can't breath,” has reverberated across the United States, capturing the black community's disgust and frustrations over the problem of racism in the country. His killing has again set ablaze widespread mass protests and riots which has spread around 30 cities across the US.

Protest actions were mounted in Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oklahoma, Seattle and Washington. Protesters also gathered in front of the White House where they were violently put down by Secret Service agents.

The widespread mass protests and riots reflects widespread indignation over fascism, racism, misogyny and anti-immigrant policies of the Trump government. These protests also reflect the growing restlessness of the American working class over the acute problem of unemployment and deepening socio-economic crisis resulting from capitalist economic recession.

The Party denounces US President Trump for fomenting fascist violence against the people when he declared “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” virtually giving the police and military forces the go signal to fire at demonstrators.

#UnitedStates #International #OppressedNationalities #Philippines #Asia #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #AfricanAmerican #PoliceBrutality #CommunistPartyOfThePhilippines #Antiracism #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd #MinneapolisUprising

The people of Minneapolis have taken to the streets the past 72 hours, demanding the arrest of the killer cops who murdered 46-year-old African American George Floyd on Monday night, May 25. Eyewitness video was released Tuesday morning showing now former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin pinning Floyd to the ground, with Chauvin’s knee directly on the back of his neck – the video shows Floyd’s last gasps for air. You can hear him telling the killer cop that he can’t breathe and calling for his mother before you see his body going limp. Three other cops on the scene stand by, with two other cops actively helping to restrain Floyd on the ground, all ignoring the pleas of bystanders to let him breathe. Since then, tens of thousands in Minneapolis and have taken to the streets, demanding justice and retribution, which prompted the Minneapolis police to immediately terminate the four officers involved with Floyd’s murder and finally to charge and jail Chauvin May 29.

We can’t forget that Twin Cities area police have been the target of recent high-profile struggles involving police murders, including the murder in 2015 of African American man Jamar Clark by two killer Minneapolis killer cops, which prompted a wave of protests; the murder of Philando Castile in the suburbs of Minneapolis on video, as well Justine Damond in 2017, which also prompted mass protests.

The question of killer cops targeting African Americans isn’t just a story of Black people being more oppressed workers, it’s also the result of the system of national oppression, a system that chains down African Americans and subjects them to the most intense methods of brutality at the hands of the ruling class and its police force. From Minneapolis to Louisville, we see a disregard for Black life at the hands of the police, with the Minneapolis rebellion becoming a breaking point for the Black liberation movement, sparking nationwide protests.

As Martin Luther King Jr, once said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

We must continue the call to demand community control of the police as well as the indictment and convictions of all killer cops, especially those who murdered George Floyd. We must also, as what we’ve seen in Chicago with the LaQuan McDonald cover-up, fight to kick out government attorneys and prosecutors who refuse to prosecute killer cops and racist vigilantes, as they did initially in the case of Ahmaud Arbery’s lynching in Brunswick, Georgia.

On May 30, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression is calling for a day of nationwide protests against the murderous policies of police departments nationwide as well as demand the mass release of inmates in prisons due to COVID-19. We unite with this call and know that the more people that hit the streets, the shakier the foundations of national oppression in this country becomes. Protests have already started taking place in cities like Memphis and Los Angeles, with many cities planning protests through the week leading into the weekend.

Our job is to organize, agitate and connect the struggle for Justice for George Floyd, Justice for Ahmaud Arbery, Justice for Breonna Taylor to our own local struggles for justice and community control of the police. We need to build organization on both local and national levels to consolidate the power of the people into a fighting force against national oppression and the criminal injustice system.

The streets are on fire for action and our job is to continue to fan the flames.

Justice for George Floyd! Indict and convict the killer cops! Community control of the police now! All power to the people!

#UnitedStates #OppressedNationalities #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #AfricanAmerican #ChicanoLatino #HawaiianNation #IndigenousPeoples #PuertoRico #PoliceBrutality #Antiracism #Socialism #FRSOJointNationalitiesCommission #civilianPoliceAccountabilityCouncilCPAC #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd

San José, CA – On May 14, Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom laid out his plan to deal with a projected $54 billion budget deficit for the state of California. Included in the plan was to save almost $3 billion by cutting state workers’ pay by 10%.

Eleven years ago, California state workers were furloughed for one to two days a month as part of the effort to cut spending after a large budget deficit developed with the deep recession and financial crisis. While the unions tried to fight this, the courts ultimately sided with the state government. The furloughs continued for five years, even though the recession ended in 2009.

Ultimately, this is another attempt to put the costs of today’s pandemic and economic crisis on the backs of workers. This is being done directly, through pay cuts and/or furloughs of state workers. There are even larger indirect cuts, through cuts in education, health care and other state services. These cuts will fall on teachers and medical workers. They will also fall on the children of working people who rely on public school, and the lower-paid workers, the unemployed, and the poor who rely on public services.

These cuts will have a heavy impact on oppressed nationalities – Chicanos and Latinos, Asian Americans, and African Americans who are both state workers and whose communities will be hit by the cuts in services. Already, as in many states, Chicano, Mexicano, Central Americans and other oppressed nationalities are most heavily hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis. Cuts to state workers and education and healthcare just add even more pain to our communities from government austerity.

#SanJoséCA #Labor #OppressedNationalities #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #ChicanoLatino #SEIU #publicSectorUnions #California #GovernorGavinNewsom

FRSO Joint Nationalities Commission chair Masao Suzuki condemned the thousands of attacks on Asian Americans in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Thousands of incidents of harassment, physical attacks and even attempted murder have been aimed at Asian Americans,” said Suzuki. “This is unacceptable and another way the United States has turned the pandemic into a human made disaster.”

The JNC chair laid the blame at the feet of the Trump administration, saying ,“Trump’s attempts to label the COVID-19 as a ‘Chinese virus’ has tried to cover over his administration’s cuts to pandemic prevention programs and refusal to acknowledge it is a real public health crisis until it was too late to be proactive. Now that more than 12,000 Americans have died, Trump is trying to shift the blame to China.”

“From the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 to the incarceration of Japanese Americans into concentration camps during World War II, there is a long history of national oppression of Chinese and other Asian Americans that portrays us as being perpetual foreigners,” said Suzuki.

Suzuki called upon Asian Americans to unite with others who are bearing the heaviest burdens of the pandemic. “African Americans are being hit the hardest in the South and in cities across the country by COVID-19. Workers in transport, food production and other essential jobs have to go to work, often for low pay and without adequate protection. Prisoners and immigration detainees, disproportionately African American, Chicano and Latino, and other oppressed nationalities are being held in dangerous and potentially disastrous conditions.”

While a few prominent Asian Americans, such as former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, attempt to blame the victims, saying that Asian American need to show more American-ness, Suzuki praised those who are publicizing and resisting these attacks. “The pandemic is intensifying national oppression and class antagonisms,” said Suzuki. “We need to fight back.”

#UnitedStates #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #FreedomRoadSocialistOrganizationFRSO

San José, CA – The headline news that the unemployment rate for March jumped by almost a full percentage point, to 4.4%, was bad enough. The actual unemployment rate was much higher by the end of March, given that the more 10 million people who lost their jobs and filed for unemployment insurance benefits in the last two weeks of March were not counted. Adding in these workers would have increased the unemployment rate by more than 6%, raising the total rate at the end of March to about 10.5%.

The official government unemployment rate also understates the number of jobless workers, as you have to be out of work and looking for work. With so many businesses shutting down and schools closing, many workers who were laid off didn’t look for work. According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment report released on Friday, April 3, more than 1.5 million people stopped looking for work. If these workers were counted, the actual unemployment rate at the end of the month would have been another percentage point higher, at 11.5%.

The employment report also showed a big jump in workers who are working part time because they can’t find a full-time job. This group of workers increased by almost 1.5 million just in the first half of the month. The rise in part-time workers also dragged down the average number of weeks worked in March. While they are still counted as employed by the Labor Department, they and their families are feeling the economic stress of the economic crisis.

Latinos and Asian Americans saw their unemployment rates jump by 1.6%, more than twice the increase of white Americans. This reflected the high concentration of these oppressed nationality workers in food services, the hardest hit industry in the beginning of the month. Latino workers have the highest percentage going without health insurance, putting them at greater risk during a pandemic. Latinos and Asian Americans also have the highest percentages of immigrants and undocumented – many of whom are restricted from getting any aid from the federal relief money going out to individuals starting next week.

#SanJoséCA #PoorPeoplesMovements #OppressedNationalities #Unemployment #US #Healthcare #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #ChicanoLatino #stockMarket #DonaldTrump #COVID19

San José, CA – On February 16, the San Jose Day of Remembrance held its 40th annual event with the second-highest attendance ever – more than 550 people. The event started in 1981 as part of the nationwide movement of Japanese Americans demanded redress (an official apology) and reparations (monetary compensation) for their incarceration during World War II.

The San Jose Day of Remembrance is held on the Sunday of Presidents Day weekend, which is near the date of February 19, 1942 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which laid the legal basis for the incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Organized by the San Jose Nihonmachi Outreach Committee (NOC), the Day of Remembrance events have grown under the Trump administration as the community protests the incarceration and separation of families at the U.S. border with Mexico.

The theme of the 2020 event was “No Camps, No Cages,” linking the World War II concentration camps to the detention centers holding Central American refugees today. Amy Iwasaki Mass was the event’s Remembrance speaker. She told her story of how her family lived in fear that the FBI would take her father away from them as they did to thousands of Japanese immigrants in the days following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Empire of Japan. Mass ended her talk by denouncing the “shocking treatment of immigrants by the government” and condemning the “administration’s policy of separating families.” She called on the community to join the Tsuru for Solidarity protest in Washington, D.C June 5 – 7, saying “No camps no cages!” “Tsuru” is Japanese for “crane,” a traditional sign of peace, compassion, hope and healing.

The youth speaker, Joseph Tsuboi of the Japanese Community Youth Council (JCYC) of San Francisco, also told his family’s story of the concentration camps and the importance of speaking out for other communities today. He demanded the government “End the ICE raids and close the detention camps” on the U.S. border with Mexico. The intergenerational representation at the event was also seen in the co-emcees, Melanie Shojinaga and Madison Yamaichi, who helped to organize the first Bay Area pilgrimage to the site of Manzanar concentration camp near Los Angeles.

The evening’s guest speaker was the Honorable Norman Mineta, former congressperson from San Jose. Mineta was one of the Japanese American congresspeople who supported the movement for redress and reparations and co-sponsor of HR440, which later became law. Besides recounting his own family’s experiences with the World War II concentration camps, he spoke of the congressional effort to pass the redress and reparations bill, and how the original bill for a commission to study the issue was based on an early bill to set up a commission to study Native Hawai’ian land claims.

Among the night’s speakers was Bekki Shibayama of the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee and the Campaign For Justice. She gave an update on the struggle of Japanese Latin Americans who were kidnapped from their homes in Peru and other countries to be held as hostages by the U.S. government to be used to exchange for American soldiers held as prisoners of war during World War II. They have been denied equal redress and reparations with other Japanese American on the grounds that they did not enter the country legally.

Leading off the night’s event was San Jose Taiko, which performed a short version of their 1940s-themed “Swingposium” show. Their performance was a fusion of the big band swing music popular during the 1940s in the Japanese American concentration camps and the taiko drumming from Japan. Also performing during the event was an interfaith choir which sang Love is Breaking Down the Wall.

#SanJoséCA #InJusticeSystem #Remembrances #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #JapaneseAmericanInternment #PoliticalRepression #SanJoseDayOfRemembrance #NoCampsNoCages

According to a report from the Korean Central News Agency, “Kim Jong Un, chairman of the Workers' Party of Korea, chairman of the State Affairs Commission of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and supreme commander of the armed forces of the DPRK, inspected the test-fire of the super-large multiple launch rocket system conducted by the Academy of Defense Science.”

In a related development, Kim Kye Gwan, advisor to the Foreign Ministry of the DPRK, commented on past meetings with the Trump administration, stating, “Three rounds of DPRK-U.S. summit meetings and talks were held since June last year, but no particular improvement has been achieved in the DPRK-U.S. relations. And the U.S. only seeks to earn time, pretending it has made progress in settling the issue of the Korean peninsula.”

Kim Kye Gwan continued, “We are no longer interested in such talks that bring nothing to us.”

#WashingtonDC #AntiwarMovement #OppressedNationalities #Korea #US #Asia #PeoplesStruggles #AsianNationalities #NorthKorea #DemocraticPeoplesRepublicOfKorea #Socialism #DonaldTrump #DPRKUSSummitMeetings