Houston, TX – On July 8, activists with Malaya-Texas and Bayan, U.S.-based Filipino organizations, held events across the state of Texas against the repressive legislation enacted in the Philippines – the Republic Act 1147, also called Anti-Terrorism Act of 2020.

In Houston, activists publicly spoke against the measure and handed out flyers condemning Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte’s July 3 signing of the law. The organizers, along with allies of the Philippine struggle for social and national liberation, including from the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO), then dropped a banner from Montrose bridge over US Highway 59, which read “Junk Philippine terror law.”

Malaya’s flyer stated the organization’s reasons for opposing the law. “What is now the ‘Anti-Terrorism Law’ (ATL) is the latest advancement of Duterte’s brutal security policy,” their statement said. “This new law grants the Philippine government unchecked power to define terrorism and extrajudicially punish its citizenry. Under the ATL, Philippine law enforcement is authorized to execute unwarranted arrests, a strategy intended to brutalize and silence political opposition.”

The Malaya statement also demanded that the “U.S. representatives in Texas champion and pass the Philippine Human Rights Act (PHRA) and release an official condemnation of the Anti-Terror Law,” and that they work to “halt all United States weapons and military equipment sales to the Philippines which are used against Filipino people.”

#HoustonTX #Philippines #Texas #JunkTerrorBill

Houston, TX – The police murder of George Floyd, the catalyst of a national and now global wave of mass demonstrations against anti-Black racism and police brutality, took place in Minneapolis. But Floyd was a son of Houston, Texas, a longtime and much beloved neighborhood personality of the Third Ward, one of the city’s historic centers of African-American life. Judging by the sheer size of the recent protests in Houston, Floyd’s home city will never forget him.

The largest demonstration in Floyd’s honor in Houston occurred on Tuesday, June 2, when an estimated 60,000 people came downtown for a march and rally between the Discovery Green plaza and City Hall some ten blocks away. The massive march rendered the streets between those two locales overflowing with mourners from all quarters of Houston.

Hometown rappers Trae tha Truth and Bun B led the official remembrance ceremony. Their presence was appropriate given Floyd’s background in Houston hip-hop. In the 1990s, Lloyd rapped as “Big Floyd,” on several DJ Screw mixtapes. “Screwtapes,” as the mixtapes are called, remain a central fixture of Houston’s music history. Originally pressed in cassette form, they constitute a special (and quite extensive) collection from the legendary DJ Screw of slowed, remixes of hip-hop and R&B classics.

Those tapes also functioned as Screw-curated freestyle marathons showcasing local talent, especially in the Third Ward. Big Floyd shined memorably on his Screwtape appearances, rhapsodizing on Third Ward life on tapes such as “So Tired of Ballin” and “Sittin On Top of the World.”

Members of Floyd’s family were present. Also in attendance were organizations representing Black Houston life in all of its diversity, including the Lil Nas X-endorsed horsemen and women of the Nonstop Riders, an urban trail riding club out of the Third and Fifth Ward neighborhoods.

Although the event was city-endorsed and organized on terms friendly with the Houston Police Department, at several city intersections on the walk back to Discovery Green, cops clad in riot gear clashed with mostly Black protesters.

On both June 2 and earlier during a protest on Friday, May 29th, riot police surrounded for several hours, attacked using tear gas, and then, after the official events and out of media’s view, arrested hundreds of protestors, including passersby’s – jailing some for up to 36 hours without notifying arrestees’ family and friends of the nature of the charges.

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo has pulled off a tremendous PR stunt this past week, earning national plaudits as a “model police chief” for several viral videos in which he professes to be on the side of protestors. Conveniently, he lies by blaming clashes between his department and protestors on outsider agitators from Austin.

Moreover, Acevedo is hiding from anger around his officers’ recent killings of six people over the past six weeks. The footage of one killing to which the public does have access—that of 27-year-old Nicolas Chavez—contradicts Acevedo’s testimony that Chavez was a dangerous aggressor. In fact, the man was shot surrounded and on his knees, executed in the manner of a death squad.

Perhaps an appropriate way for Houstonians to honor the late George Floyd is to demand justice locally for similar victims of police murders at the hands of the HPD. And, of course, to invoke the Floyd’s memory wherever and whenever possible. Such efforts are already underway. At his old stomping grounds at Cuney Homes and in Montrose off Westheimer, his nickname has been graffiti-pasted to walls in broad letters and bright paint: “RIP Big Floyd.”

#HoustonTX #PeoplesStruggles #AfricanAmerican #PoliceBrutality #GeorgeFloyd

Houston, TX – July 4 saw union educators push for freedom for refugees and undocumented families. After a daylong meeting of the annual National Education Association’s annual Representative Assembly, a massive group of educators demonstrated their anger at Trump’s concentration camps for children and families.

Rank-and-file education workers organized the protest within less than 48 hours of arriving at the convention. The group marched around a detention center located in downtown Houston, holding signs reading “Free the children!” and “Close the camps!” As they marched, they chanted “Up up with education! Down, down with deportation!”

One Latina educator shared her thoughts on why this issue is important to educators, “We know that children need to feel safe in order to learn. We know that families need to be reunited to have a solid foundation for learning. And these families need a just pathway to citizenship.”

The protest was part of a wave of national protests aimed at ending the Trump administration’s concentration camps and family separation policy.

#HoustonTX #PeoplesStruggles #concentrationCamps #NationalEducationAssociation

As Haley began to remark on her “very busy few weeks in American foreign policy,” Mohamad Fattouh, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine at UH, stood up and called out Haley’s complicity in the murder of Palestinian protesters: “Nikki Haley, the blood is on your hands! You continue to sign off on the genocide of a native people!” Visibly shaken, Haley stammered and muttered “geez!” under her breath as Fattouh continued: “You are an accomplice to terrorists and colonizers!”

Moments after Fattouh’s statement, students began chanting pro-Palestinian slogans. “Haley, Haley, you can’t hide, you sign off on genocide!” “Nikki, Nikki, can’t you see, you are on a killing spree!” went another, proclaimed by students holding up Palestinian flags.

After the protesters brought the event to a halt for over two minutes, security personnel escorted them out of the building. The students had taken up the bulk of the center aisles in the spacious auditorium, their absence thus leaving a huge empty space in the auditorium seating area for the remainder of Haley’s talk. The students then continued their protest in front of the building in which Haley was speaking.

“As a Palestinian living in the belly of the beast, the action was an outlet to directly confront someone so complicit in the ongoing genocide of my own people and find a bridge between the disconnect that exists when organizing within the U.S.,” said SJP UH member Sarah Abdulmooti, one of the organizers of the disruption. “In that moment, every name and picture of those killed in Gaza over the past months crossed my mind.”

The blood on Nikki Haley’s hands

The immediate impetus for the disruption was Haley’s recent remarks before the UN Security Council that Israel, which is financially and military backed by the U.S., showed “restraint” after snipers from the Israeli Defense Force massacred more than 100 Palestinian protesters and wounded thousands of others in the Gaza Strip between late March and mid-May.

The Palestinian protests from the besieged Gaza Strip occurred between March 30 and May 15, the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, Arabic for “the catastrophe,” when armed Zionist militias carried out ethnic cleansing campaigns against Palestinians to establish the state of Israel in historic Palestine in 1948. Named the “Great March of Return,” the protests marked a major effort by Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return by foot to their homeland.

After her May 15 remarks at the UN praising Israel’s aggression, Haley walked out of the room once the Palestinian envoy to the UN, Riyad Mansour, began to speak. Haley’s contemptuous gesture denied the Palestinian people even the pretense of having their voices heard. On May 22, students at the University of Houston, many of whom were Palestinian, got to walk out on Haley.

“For every ‘Free free, free Palestine’ we chanted, there’s real people behind it suffering under the oppression and occupation Israel imposes,” Sarah Abdulmooti remarked. “For every ‘Nikki Haley you will see, Palestine will be free’ there was assurance for everyone listening that we will never let our martyrs die in vain and a liberated Palestine will undoubtedly happen in our lifetime.”

No war propagandists on campus

The day before the disruption, on May 21, SJP at UH released a statement condemning the university’s decision to host Haley. “Nikki Haley embodies the racism inherent in the U.S.’s anti-Palestinian position,” the statement read. “In inviting Nikki Haley to its campus, the University of Houston demonstrates how little it cares about the safety and concerns of its students, including the large community of Palestinians that attend and contribute to UH’s diversity.”

A total of 12 other student organizations signed onto the statement, including Students for a Democratic Society at UH, members of which also participated in the disruption.

On the day of the disruption, SDS at UH likewise released a statement condemning Haley’s presence on campus for her warmongering against Syria, Venezuela and North Korea, in addition to Palestine. “We see our future and our stability conjoined to the cause of peace – not the endless military expansion that Haley clearly represents,” the SDS statement made clear. The statement also said that war propagandists “are not welcome at our university.”

Video footage and photographs of the disruption of Haley has since gone viral across a number of media outlets across the globe, including a number of Arabic-language media based in the Arab world such as Al Hadaf and Al Mayadeen. The popularity of the video across Palestinian media demonstrates the importance of confronting the powerful for their crimes in whatever ways possible.

A Palestinian community member in Houston known as Dr. Rezak emphasized that the youth-organized protest was very moving to witness for older generations of Palestinians. Dr. Rezak said the protest “showed that our new generation of Palestinians, even when they are living far away, are not going to give up their rights to Palestine, to Jerusalem, and the Right of Return.” Rezak added, “For me, it shows that we’ve been successful in passing the torch. My daughter was protesting Nikki Haley right at the front, and I was very proud, for although she was born in Houston, she understands.”

#HoustonTX #AntiwarMovement #US #PeoplesStruggles #Trump #DonaldTrump #NikkiHaley

Houston, TX – In late August, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston and it caused untold destruction upon the city. Entire neighborhoods were submerged in water, hundreds of people lost their cars to flooding, and there were over three dozen deaths. The city's response was not very good; the well-off middle-class communities received immediate aid, but the working class and predominantly Black and Chicano/Mexicano neighborhoods received little assistance. In Houston's Sunnyside, for example, a predominantly Black neighborhood, there were nearly no FEMA responders and large rescue teams.

Two weeks later, students at UH sent a group of volunteers to donate goods to vital community mobilization and services organized in the wake of Harvey's devastation. This initiative was organized and led by Black organizations, to serve Black communities. Working together, these organizations have gathered and distributed food, water, clothes, and other essential items. They have assisted with overhauling homes destroyed by flood waters.

Patrick Higgins, an organizer with SDS says, “We in SDS are proud to do our part to assist in serving the poorest of Houston. It was poor communities of color hit the hardest by Harvey's rainwaters, much the same as it was in New Orleans before us, much as it has been the past decade all across the U.S. Gulf coast.”

Higgins continued, “While both city and federal government apparently have the military resources to impose a ‘curfew’ of one of the largest cities in the country in order to police poor people more aggressively, state services and brand name aid NGOs are nowhere to be found in Northeast Houston to meet human need. This truly is yet another Katrina, another racist barbarity of the capitalist system, where countless families are left to pick up the pieces of their lives from a manmade disaster only for the system's cheap salesmen to insist on calling these events ‘natural.’”

Students for a Democratic Society is continuing to organize students at the University of Houston to help with the relief effort. Please see their Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/houstonsds/) for updates.

#HoustonTX #StudentsForADemocraticSociety #EnvironmentalJustice #HurricaneHarvey

Fight Back!: It is Friday at 11 p.m. in Houston. How is the weather? What is likely to happen? Lilli Ana Castrillon:“It is raining hard and the wind is very, very strong. It has been this way for four hours now. I believe flooding is going to be all over this part of Texas for the next few days.”

Fight Back!: Harvey is a category 4 hurricane that just reached land in Texas. What are you and other people doing to prepare for this?

Castrillon: “We have supplies; lots of water, candles, food, etc. Enough for the next few days. The place I'm staying is relatively safe. Lots of people have evacuated. We lost power around 8:30 p.m. We can see the floods already.”

Fight Back!: Do you remember when hurricane Katrina refugees were forced to live in the Astrodome?

Castrillon:“Yes it was awful. People went thru a lot. I have a friend that was a reporter for Univision. He said that it was like a refugee camp in a war zone. My friend said it was really, really bad and he could not believe what he was seeing there. Then Barbara Bush, President George W. Bush's mother, said that after all, the people from New Orleans were much better off there because they didn't have much anyway.

#HoustonTX #EnvironmentalJustice #HurricaneHarvey

Houston, TX – During the last elections, Hillary Clinton, who used a sort of bourgeois ‘feminism’ to sell reactionary ideas to the public. Since then, there have been a number of films, such as Wonder Woman, that use images of powerful women to promote a pro-war capitalist agenda. Atomic Blonde is the latest of this genre, which stars Charlize Theron as a kind of female James Bond, who fights communist leaders in the German Democratic Republic, aka East Germany to help the British Intelligence and the CIA stage their famous 1989 coup d’état.

The film is set in 1989 in Berlin right before the counter-revolutionary coup against the socialist government of East Germany. The film reproduces a common theme of Cold War anti-communist propaganda, which makes communists look like impersonal monsters, while portraying the imperialists as heroic. Each communist in the film is portrayed as violent, monstrous and lacking in subjectivity, while the hero of the film, British intelligence agent Lorraine Broughton, is portrayed as clever and intelligent. The plot of the film is extremely simplistic, and is centered around her mission to retrieve a list, the details of which are never revealed. The film mobilizes some very aesthetically pleasant imagery and music to deaden our senses to anti-communist ideas that this film is promoting.

Throughout the film, we see agent Lorraine murdering communists, who are depicted as dangerous and beast-like. The film creates a one dimensional good guy/bad guy framework, where the imperialists are the good guys who help save Germany from communists, who are depicted as the bad people.

Atomic Blonde is full of stereotypes about socialism, and particularly East Germany. Although West and East Germany are geographically in the same climate, the West is always depicted as full of light and having a nice climate, while East Germany is depicted as dark and depressing. They don't show the homeless people in West Germany who died during cold winters as a result of capitalism, nor the well-fed people in East Germany who had free healthcare and universal education. Instead, the film depicts the socialist German Democratic Republic as a kind of hell, while depicting West Germany as 'free' and 'democratic.' We don't learn about the heroic anti-fascists in East Germany, and the post-socialist persecution of them. In short, there is no context that would allow the spectator to make a critical analysis of socialism in the German Democratic Republic, which was not a perfect society but most certainly not the type of hell depicted in Atomic Blonde.

The film is interlaced with bourgeois newsreels from that period, which show anti-communist protesters in both West and East Germany, with the commentators celebrating their 'resistance.' In Atomic Blonde, the British Intelligence agent Lorraine Broughton helps counter-revolutionaries to overthrow the socialist government of the German Democratic Republic. Having not grown up in that period, I was amazed at how similar this is with our current times, in which the capitalist-controlled media con